Aside

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…

Yep, someone’s taken up the task yet again. Seriously guys, didn’t we settle this, I don’t know, three times in the last 22 months?

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.…

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,…