Travels

Once again, I find myself sitting on Veljo‘s couch, using the plentiful WiFi. London was fine, albeit brief (and expensive! Good Lord that place is expensive. Basically one pound has the same purchasing power as a dollar, but it’s actually two dollars.) I had lunch with Tom Standage, my editor at The Economist, at a place near the office (25 St. James’ St. — Tube: Green Park), and we discussed tech sorts of things and my book that I’m working…

Well, I’m in Paris (again), while transiting from one part of the world to another. My return trip from Dakar was uneventful, save four boring hours in the Casablanca airport, and being frustrated that their WiFi didn’t work. More accurately, it did work, but for some reason their portal page where they wanted me to pay 100 dirhams ($12 — which I was willing to pay) for one hour’s worth of internet access, told me that Mozilla doesn’t have SSL…

Dan says: Sometimes I get so caught up in Rosso that I start to think Rosso is Mauritania. What I’m trying to say is, sometimes I think the rest of Mauritania is just like Rosso. That, of course, is completely false. Rosso is the San Diego/Tijuana of West Africa. Unlike the rest of Arab Mauritania, the population here is predominantly black (Pulaar, Wolof). No matter what happens in Rosso, authority always comes from an Arab guy in Nouakchott. Therefore, somethings…

I just uploaded a bunch more pictures to my Flickr account. Go check ’em out. This one here is my name written in chalk on the wall next to my old bedroom door at UGB. I’m amazed that it’s survived five years.

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.…

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…

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…