Cyrus Farivar

Unfortunately I haven’t found many places that have WiFi, but just by chance, today I found that Katia has WiFi. Katia is a pizza place that has a great outdoor patio on the Route de l’aéroport in Ngor (near the USAID office and a Shell station) that Naomi took me to my first week in Dakar. I’m not sure if they have power outlets inside, but that would be my only request to improve the patio. Still, with cheap shwarma,…

* In 2002, I wrote my name in chalk on the wall outside my dorm room door at the Université Gaston Berger. In 2007, I confirmed that it’s still there. * Saint-Louis is basically the same as I remember it. There are some minor changes, as in walls where they didn’t used to be. The gas station where we used to buy cheap Spanish wine-in-a-box is now totally gone, as are many of the fruit sellers on the mainland side…

Well, my trip is basically half over. In two and a half weeks, I’ll be on a plane bound for the US. Next Saturday morning, local time, I’ll be on a plane bound for Paris, with a stopover in Casablanca airport, the beginning of the last leg of this journey. I’ll spend 10 days bouncing between Paris, London, Tallinn, Berlin, Geneva and then back to Paris on Feb. 14. How’s it been going so far? To be honest, pretty rough.…

Slate: Scratch a KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski enthusiast and he’ll insist that everybody who reads the master’s books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how…

There’s a walk that I’ve taken in three different places, in three different cities at three different times in my life. In 1997-1998 it was at Bossey, just outside Geneva. In 2002-2003 it was at UGB just outside Saint-Louis. In 2007, it’s been here, in Yoff, on the edge of Dakar. This is a walk that I take alone, completely alone. I don’t talk to anyone. The walk takes me from my comfort zone of being on the Internet, to…

BBC: Poland’s most celebrated journalist and non-fiction writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has died in Warsaw, aged 74, after a heart operation. I first discovered Kapuscinski after being given a copy of The Shadow of the Sun by my good friends Alan Wiig and Brynna Jacobson shortly before I embarked on my first voyage to Senegal in 2002. His depictions of West Africa resonated with me and my experience 50 years after he wrote them. While I’m hardly an expert on Africa,…

Today, someone tried to scam me. It was more amusing than anything else, honestly. I was trying to catch a cab in tourist central of Dakar — someone please tell me why the Place de l’Indépendance is where tourists seem to congregate here? It’s probably the most boring place in the entire city. The only reason I was there was for an interview. The Place de l’Indépendance is a big rectangular square, that commemorates, you guessed it, Senegal’s independence from…

January 19, 2007 I’ve been in Senegal for about a week now and most things are sort of how they were when I was last here four years ago. Jeez, I can’t even believe that it’s been four years already. Four years? That’s the length of time between presidential elections, the Olympics and the World Cup. That’s how long I was an undergraduate. Four years? And yet here I am, ready to negotiate with taxi drivers in Wolof of a…

LA Times: But Southern California’s six-day cold snap took a surreal turn Wednesday as a rare snowstorm brought snowplows to the canyons above Malibu, left parts of the San Fernando Valley with a white dusting and shut down Interstate 5. The snow levels plunged well below 1,000 feet in some areas, blanketing the Santa Monica Mountains with snow and leaving streets and lawns in Venice, Westwood and elsewhere on the Westside covered with ice from pea-sized hail.

Rabat, Morocco January 11, 2007 Despite what all northern Europeans say, I’ve never really been a fan of saunas. I went to my first one when my parents took me to Finland at the age of six. While it sounds romantic, perched on the edge of a lakeside cabin somewhere in northern Finland, honestly, I just found the whole idea of soaking oneself in heavy steam and then jumping in a freezing cold lake to be just downright crazy. It…