A couple of weeks ago I went up to Fada N'Gourma with a whole group of other volunteers. Fada is a pretty chill city in the east of the country. We went up to do a "chicken crawl," which was like a pub crawl but with fried chicken. I repeat: fried chicken. This is not a common thing in Burkina- the fanciest we usually get here is grilled, more often boiled (most often we just get dried fish or boiled goat meat.) But Fada is full of geniuses who realize the magic of frying, so we went and ate a whole lot of deliciousness.
While I was there my friend Ebben took me to the cattle market- the largest cattle market in West Africa, I believe. I'm going to try to get back up there during the rainy season- apparently the market is packed with cattle at that time of the year. Also, you can get your fortune read in the sand, but turns out the sand reader can't live just off of tourists so he was busy working at his real job to do it this time. So I'll definitely need to go back for that.
While there we also stumbled across a snake charmer and a dude selling "medicaments" (medicines.) His wares included: alligator skull and skin, bird heads, ostrich feet, dried hedgehogs, cow feet, snake skin, and so much more! My personal favorite was the basket of dried chameleons. Only a dollar apiece: what a steal! I bought one so the dude would let me take pictures. He wouldn't tell me what the chameleon did, per se, just that it wasn't mal and it was "medicament." I'll give you fifty dollars to eat it and find out.
i'd probably eat some dried chameleon for $50... though it looks pretty mal.
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