It probably doesn’t sound like I could have a more eventful day in Dakar than the day I spent going around with Malick…but things only got more, er, exciting (I use that term euphemistically!). A couple of days later I was invited to Baye Fall’s mother’s house in Medina—which is like the main banlieue in Dakar—for lunch. She is the first of Baye Fall’s father’s three wives, and runs a three-story house full of kids and grandkids. After greeting countless relatives Baye Fall’s older sister took me into her room to dress me in pr [View Full Entry]

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As some of you know by now I ended up spending a lot more time in Senegal than anticipated :) I was planning to be in Dakar only for a few days but I loved it too much. The third day I awoke to a thin layer of dust over EVERYTHING in my room; I opened the French doors and everything was yellow--the air, the street, the sky. As the manager downstairs explained, "Dakar a été envahie par le désert"--Dakar was invaded by the desert. Apparently the dust storm is something that happens every summer, in June and July, when the [View Full Entry]

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It's starting to crystallize, now that I am in Africa the second time, what exactly it is that I enjoy so much about being here, and it's that I am more reflective here than I am in my day-to-day life at home. For example, tonight the Swiss woman and I were in Badou's taxi heading to some place she read about in her guidebook to have dinner at, and along the way we went through a really poor suburb of Dakar (the poverty of which is nothing in comparison to what you would find in rural areas, but in contrast to [View Full Entry]

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I had the most amazing first day in Dakar...I knew immediately upon arriving at the hotel downtown in the middle of the night that I was going to love it once it came alive in the morning, and I wasn't wrong. I opened the french doors (which I have on two sides of my room, one set facing the courtyard, the other the street) to your "usual" (African usual, anyway) city hustle and bustle and the most perfect weather ever. Warm but breezy. I had a bunch of errands to run like buying a SIM card so my parents could finally [View Full Entry]

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Not mere moments after taking off from Milan for Dakar and already I was greeted, once again, by that name familiar to millions (of women, in Africa, that is): sistah! I love it. Anyway one of the ten passengers on my late night flight came over to my row to ask me to fill in his carte d'embarquement (customs form) for him. Imagine that happening on your typical LGA-LAX :) Oh wait, you don't go through customs...anyway you dig. I told him I wouldn't know what to put on it--as most of you know I am super gullible so my immediate [View Full Entry]

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I don't have time to do much but write something quick...I can say that Senegal is AWESOME and I know I'm going to love it. It's beautiful here and the weather is perfect. It's expensive (my hotel is over 50 bucks a night and that's apparently as cheap as you can get unless you want to stay in a place that charges by the hour) but the vibe here is very laid back. It's a really green capital, there are billowy trees everywhere and of course it's right on the ocean so even in the heart of the city there is [View Full Entry]

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I really loved Florence after having visited Rome and Venice only over the last few years (and you all know how fun my last trip to Rome was!). I just found the locals so much more hopsitable to tourists. In Venice even if you try to speak Italian, even if you frequent the same spots over and over over the span of several weeks (ahem!) they treat you like a born yesterdayer. In Florence people were SO nice, they would always indulge my poor Italian and a couple of them actually even thought I WAS Italian--well, at least until after the [View Full Entry]

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