Merigoesaround

Your bespectacled smiley soul wanders around the Westgate mall on this Monday morning. Laughing, cracking jokes and intellectual remarks all at the same time, looking at girls, despite your love for the one who broke your heart and moved to the other side of Africa. Perhaps she did not love you enough. Maybe you deserved better. We will never know. Our friendship was about coincidences and short intense moments. Too short. About the coincidence of being at the same place for the same purpose in Kigali, where we met 2 years ago. About the coincidence that your name, Ravi, means happy in French, and that is what your presence or correspondence made me feel. About you being from Port of Spain and me from Spain. About the moment we enjoyed Maia's music together in that bar in Nairobi few months back. She sang the song of that little girl who was looking for her mum during the 98 bombings of the US Embassy. Today I am that...

So much water in the streets, so little water in the taps. Half of Dakar has been dry for the last 5 days. Lucky us live by the President's Palace, so probably just like him we barely realize what others are going through down there. YouTube Video - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Development is also time saved to accomplish a given task. Dakar is an even better place to be since the motorway to the Petite Cote opened a couple of months ago. Trips to Saly, Popenguine and other wonderful little fishing towns around the coast are now less than an hour away (before = 3 hours). Going out of Dakar gives me peace. I suddenly feel the air that I breath gets thinner, cleaner and lung-purifing. Life outside the capital suddenly unveils color, smiles and a festive mood. Genuine and simple. Like a good grilled fish by the lagoon. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

We are in September and when it is not raining, Dakar is at its best. The air is clean, the streets less dusty and the very rare green spaces, much greener. From the window of my office I realize that the rain is not as benign as it looks. It destroys shacks, floods streets, and literally stops the economic and already very hard lives of poor people. It cleans the dust, but it brings tonnes of mud. But rain does not last long, like in many other African capitals. And when it clears up, the pleasures of Dakar, such as jumping into the sea from the old pontoon of the Club de l'Union, are back. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I write these lines stranded at the Ziguinchor airport being eaten by Casamance mosquitos having a zumba class around my legs. I am going to play a little bit the Nostradamus role announcing that Senegal Airlines is going to go bankrupt as soon as I finish this blog. This company is a mess. There is not a single flight on time or arriving at its final destination. Senegal airlines could capture lots of business if they could manage things properly. There are very few flights connecting Dakar to the capitals of the Gulf of Benin. Today my concern is not about the company, but about Aminata, the customer service representative dealing with delayed flights in Ziguinchor. She has been stoically bearing 50 uber tanned screaming Parisian and Dakar tourist (including us) for 5 hours. She just called to Senegal Airlines HQ and asked whether she could provide drink vouchers to uber thirsty delayed passengers...and the answer was no. No money. Wet-eyed Aminata looked at me and said, I want ...

Gregoire, our guide on Carabane island, said it was the "Special School" (Ecole Speciale) and forever boyfriend husband (FBH) and I looked at the building with curiosity. What was special about the school? We assumed it was maybe for special kids with special needs. We were wrong. It was there where in the old times, as Gregoire told us, subversive slaves with no manners were punished. By now we have visited a few slavery landmarks in Benin, Togo or Ghana but my heart shrinks and freezes every time with the same intensity of shame. In our way to Carabane we were told that there was a church that monks from Brittany had built in the old times. My daydreaming device was on. I imagined a community of smiley, chubby, palm-tree wine drinking monks still inhabiting the island. I pictured their garden of onions, their Brittany sweet-salty just-baked cookies and heard the sound of their bells calling Catholic Carabanians to mass. The islanders were behaving and misbehaving and th...

Today we could have killed 4 people. 3 trying to cross the motorway and 1 annoying driver trying to overtake from the right. Senegalese people risk their lives in a way that is difficult to understand for the Toubab (read, white).Maybe the African definition of risk is different, as if there was no tomorrow. And few meters away that grey bridge crying lonely, desperate to feel people marching on its back, touching its metal and counting cars pass by. That lonely bridge Posted using BlogPress from my iPad Location: Back from Touba Diallaow

He is an engineer, from his oeufs a la coque till the work he does. Perfection and maximization. Forever Boyfriend Husband makes breakfast exciting. Bullfighting two eggs with style, my brunch torero...Ole! - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad Location: Avenue Du PR. L. Sedar Senghor,Dakar,Senegal

I was talking to my friend the eternal dreamer, ED, about the degrees of infidelity. ED is married but loves the game of seduction. The degrees' conversation sparked after we discussed something intellectually solid. But then, discussing love affairs can be as interesting as public affairs. Often both are intertwined. So we settled for 5 degrees of infidelity. Number 1 is characteristic of (recently) married women/men. Starts in a club, in a school reunion or during a weekend with friends and no wife/hubby. Suddenly you see somebody and "oh, you like that person platonically, you would never ever had anything with him/her, but oh gosh, how gorgeous would that be". So, pure imagination. Number 2 is common in women/men married for few years: yes, that third person is so attractive, and you are lost trying to escape that thought for the whole night, exchanging looks with him/her, having few too many drinks, kissing and feeling guilty for few days. So, pure alcohol. Number 3 ...

In few hours I will embark in a trip Dakar-DC-Panama-Lima-Piura-Quito-Panama-DC-Dakar. The pleasure of flying is a little bit less these weeks...since I have lower back issues and the economy seats are full of annoying unmovable plasticky things that stick right there where I have most pain. The pain is overly compensated by the joy of going to marry a friend and a trip with my ladies through Ecuador for a week. We almost convinced the bride to postpone her honeymoon so she would join us. I always wanted to discover new places and I am grateful for all the opportunities I have been given in the last 14 years to see the world. I just started feeling distance to your loved ones matters. And then, we bought an ipad to my parents, and suddenly distance shrank again. Boyfriend Husband is always right. We should have bought it before. Technology, long flights and worldwide networks, how was (my) world just 15 years ago? My lower back was certainly doing better ;-0.

...and everything was disturbed. Kids impatiently waited for their flooded soccer fields to dry, women cleaned their basements with plastic buckets and men woke up from siesta to blame everybody and his brother for the lack of sanitation in peri-urban Dakar.

For your doses of Nespresso caffeine, the tenderness of your croissants and the Europeaness of your sandwiches. Can't believe you have chouquettes (a fluffy little sugary French cake) . Dakar is also Eric Kayser , the French bakery chain that sells delicious baguettes at local prices (200 CFA = 30 EUR cents).  A pretty democratic baguette. What else could we ask for? A local Apple store? Guess what! There is an authorized Apple reseller at the Sea Plaza, the toubab shopping empire you'll soon read me writing about.

Believe it or not I will soon have 3 equally useless driving licenses. First, I got an Albanian, then a US one that expires this month and soon I'll get a Senegalese bit of plastic that will allow me to drive these bumpy roads. The process of getting each of them has allowed me to interact with the locals in quite a deep fashion. To me, getting a new license does not mean driving...but making new friends. In Albania I passed the written test with an Italian translator sitting by my side (since I do not speak Albanian), in Boston I learned how to drive automatic 1 day before the test, magnificently taught by my friend Ursula. Here in Dakar, Fatou from autoecole Sarraut is finally teaching me the driving code and Mr. Whispers (still haven't understood his name since his voice is too feeble) makes me drive an old sweaty Nissan Sentra every morning at 9am. The car per se deserves some lines: I thought Mr. Whispers had built it himself. It is so old, patched and beaten that so...

I haven't seen fat men around this city. Not that I look at them...but sometimes it is difficult not to do so. The secret for their athletic bodies is simple: sports. No need of fancy shoes, expensive equipment or synchronized power music in your shiny ipod. Draw a circle and run, steady and energetically. As if you were repeating Koranic prayers. Senegalese men exercise all the time, almost daily. They do push ups in the middle of the roads, at the beach, anywhere and everywhere. I believe people here likes to be fit and look good even if many (toubab*) voices tell me that the reason behind the sports' obsession is no other than attracting (often old) single ladies from Europe. (*) gentle reminder, toubab=whites here.

means sharing...so I asked boyfriend husband for his last chocapic cereal spoon this morning. He offered it to me. Reluctantly. I then thought that living together also means keeping with your own life, two does not become one and sharing chocapics is not a proof of true love. BH seems to agree. Location: Dakar

said the German diplomat. I instantly loved the sentence and the many thoughts it brought to my brain: "is it?", I thought. I don't know. Nowhere in Europe could we eat what we eat here for 15 EUR, could we drive the rally-way we are obliged to here or feel so toubab (=how whites are gently called in Senegal) and ridiculous as we feel here oftentimes. I can't yet judge whether Dakar is Europe or not, it has a Mediterranean touch that reminds me of Barcelona, that, and that I feel at home (even without having one yet!), is all I know by now.

We are in the midst of Ramadan here in Dakar and I've learned to eat a piece of banana hiding from the midday look of the taxi driver. He looks exhausted. I do too. I can drink water and recharge energy with a banana. He can't. Imagine fasting and having a foreigner in front of you munching a sandwich or drinking a bottle of iced water. I would hate them. Well, in order to avoid this I've decided to eat and drink hiding. I have also decided with less success to hide my legs and wear loose clothing that dissimulate my Spanish bum. Boobs are fine, I don't need to hide them too much as, apparently, they are associated with maternity so no provocation for locals....but leeeegs, legs are sinful.

I landed in Dakar with a summer storm, the rain was so hard that we had to stop and try to clean the mix of sand and rain (=mud) stuck in the front window of the car on our way home. BH looked tense, he wanted to arrive home before the real storm, he said. I brought the rain and given how hot it is here, locals told me that I brought happiness with me. Dakar is the perfect place to live, to work and to learn. This is my general impression. Hundreds of surprises await me. Today I discovered prayer mats with compasses. And this is just the beginning!

Today is one of those days when I remind myself how important it is to appreciate small things in life. Like a simple unexpected smile. A new lady moved to the studio upstairs some weeks ago. She is typically French. Beautiful, slim, smokey-eyed, blue marine cape-wearing a la Kooples. She wears high heels ALL the time in her 20sqm studio, but other than that she seems very sweet. Others seem to think the same, specially whoever left this rose in her mailbox. From afar, I thought it was mine. Yes! But it was not. Smile 1. I left our building thinking that sometimes a rose might be more important than a diamond. Only sometimes Boyfriend Husband (BH). Smile 2. Here, live from the building of love, another neighbor spreads happiness in the building with balloons in his front-door. A part of me will miss the 108 of Rue Amelot but the excitement of moving to Dakar just provoked Smile 3 in this rainy Parisian Saturday afternoon.