pause

This will be the last entry for a little. We found a swanky little music bar in Thiès - which is not so much a lucky find as an inevitable one. (New bar, small town). The more euphemistic of travelers call Thiès quaint, but really it falls somewhere between the giant, westernized Dakar and la petite ville africaine, but doesn’t much share the perks of one or the other. It’s quiet and easy, it’s a good place for R&R, for putting your head back together and on straight. It’s a good place to come home to, but a good place to leave. So hopefully the new Palais des Arts will add a new dimension to the nightlife thièsoise. The girl that sings there on Saturdays is unbelievable, her voice is like honey! So thick and sweet and golden.

Well leaving Thiès I am, and heading for Mali. Mali so deep in my Africa. I am traveling with a friend and possibly another friend, snaking our way along the Niger as far east as time lets us, and then retracing our tracks with the river then tumbling toward us. Bouncing from Ségou, Djénné, Mopti and Sevaré, the Bandiagara hills of the Dogon, and Timbuktu, tracing the centuries-old paths of travelers, dromedaries, and other beasts of burden who’ve gone that way before … it’s a little ambitious but dizzyingly romantic.

So farewell for a couple weeks, when I will return with a heart full of memories and a suitcase full of infinitely cooler if not kitschy treasures, insh’alla.

in the meantime, I'll leave you with: www.freerice.com, and

This picture has nothing to do with my journeys in Africa but everything to do with my amazingly intelligent and talented friend Natalia who took this picture during a flamenco-rendition of Carmen at the Theatre Champs-Elysées in Paris. Nevermind that it's black and white and not brilliantly pastel, something about dancers so absorbed in their own movements, so completely disinterested in the hyper-attentive eye of the artist capturing frozen snips of those very same motions, reminds me nostalgically (why? I don't know ....maybe it's that art history is - regretfully - so much a thing of my past) of Degas.
aaaaaah, Paris.