I had a) never ridden any two-wheeled motorized vehicle b) had seen scooters weaving dangerously between taxis, sotrama, and trucks on the crowded streets, and c) was wearing a skirt. Dante shot a  look at his brother, said  "Don’t kill our American," and off we went. I couldn’t believe that I had only been a week in Mali and already I was going to die. He drove fairly carefully, I suppose, compared to many of the scooters we saw, but there were too many times that we just barely slipped through spaces in traffic, and I grabbed him tighter. He pointed out the place I would catch my sotrama to school. We finally arrived safely, and as I got off the scooter, shaking, Cherif’s 6 year old son Walid ran up to me, saying "You’re so lucky!! You’re so lucky!"

Classes didn’t start until the following Monday, so we had several rendez-vous at the Post Office so that we could explore the city a little. Friday was Ramadan: perhaps the biggest celebration in the Muslim calendar, it falls at the end of the month of fasting, and involves visiting friends and relatives and neighbors, buying new outfits for each member of the family, and giving money to children. I went with my host mother, Rokia, to visit all her older siblings and in-laws. We brought them food and stayed a little bit to chat. Everyone asked me questions, and greeted me in Bambara. The conversations all went like this:

Host: Aw ni wula! (Good evening!)
Me: Nse, aw ni wula (Thank you, good evening.)
Host: I ka kene? (How are you?)
Me: Tooro si te. (There is nothing wrong with me.)
Host: Somogo be di? (How is your family? - literally, the people of your house.)
Me: Tooro si t’u la (There is nothing wrong with them.)
Host: I be bo min? (Where are you from?)
Me: Ne be bo Ameriki (I am from America)

At this point we usually switched to French, or I was ignored as rapid-fire Bambara passed between my host mother and her relatives. When it was time to leave, there were more scripted goodbyes.

Rokia: An taara (We are going)
Host: K’an ben! (See you soon!)
Us: K’an ben!
Host: Ka m’u fo! (Salute them for us!)
Us: U na me (They will hear you)

I hit all of them, which made everyone chuckle.

The Sunday after Ramadan I met Andy at the Post Office, and we explored downtown Bamako together. Unlike the past week, the center of town was deserted. Everyone was at home with family, or resting from the hectic weekend, so we had the streets to ourselves. It was the best way to get my bearings: we just walked for a few hours in a large circle, stopping at all the major landmarks. That was the only time I saw the streets empty. From 8:00am until 6:00pm the markets, legal and illegal, were bustling. Women sold fruit on plates atop their heads, fabric by the yard from stacks three feet high, vegetables, kola nuts, water, hibiscus and ginger popsicles in little plastic bags, bracelets, rings; men sold cigarettes, phone cards, pills, eggs, clothing, fans, car parts, stickers, weapons, plastic buckets, grilled meat, batteries — you could buy just about anything in the area that stretched from the mosque to the Shell Station near the river, about a square mile. There were three levels of merchants: those that had their own booths; those that sold their produce/wares on tables, sometimes shaded, sometimes not; and those that wandered the streets or simply plunked down next to traffic and displayed their items on plastic sheeting.

The largest single area was at Rail-da (Rye-da), a large open area just before the train station where sotrama converge. Rail-da means "Rail-place" in Bambara, named thus because the railroad line that links Bamako and Dakar, Senegal, runs right through it. The train station itself is only a few hundred meters away, but Rail-da is the center of the city's activity. It’s something like the Grand Central Station of Bamako, only it’s open air, and situated on a giant trash heap. Roughly 90% of the trash on the ground consists of empty plastic bags: a half-liter bag costs 10 CFA, or two cents. The police often come to chase vendors away, sometimes using tear-gas; it only works for a few minutes, and then everyone lays their merchandise back down on the ground and gets on with business. There are no markings, no signs: the sotrama that serve a particular neighborhood all return to one area, like sea turtles coming home to breed. They squeeze through impossibly tight spaces, which is only natural for a mode of transportation that regularly fits twenty people into the back of a gutted minibus. To find a sotrama you have to ask for the neighborhood you wish to go to, and people will show you.

Once you know the names of the neighborhoods, you can listen to the prend-tickets (pron-tikay). They're the young men and boys who collect fares and signal stops, and they usually hang halfway out of the sotrama, yelling destinations to potential passengers. Eventually I understand that the long list of syllables they were rattling off were the neighborhoods the sotrama served. Badalasabalidjikoroni meant the route went through Badalabougou, near the old bridge; Sabalilabougou, the neighborhood next to it, and finished in Djikoroni, past the new bridge.

Like the rest of the city, Rail-da is crowded. Amid all the buses, drivers, prend-tickets, and dispatchers are the water sellers, the biscuit sellers, the gateau sellers, the cigarette sellers, the lepers, the beggars, and the boys from the Islamic schools, who have to beg for money to pay for supplies. Cries of "Dji-be! Gateau-be! Biskee-be! Dji-S’ma-be!" (Water is here! Cakes are here! Biscuits are here! Frozen water is here!) permeate the dusty air and echo between the sotrama. Should you walk by the taxi stand just across the street, you are asked very politely, "Madame, taxi?" The drivers were always surprised to learn that we preferred the sotrama, because they were cheaper. Foreign visitors to Bamako, unless they are Peace Corps Volunteers (for which we were often mistaken) usually have cars provided, or avoid the sotrama at all costs.