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February 2005

Two weeks (in Bamako)

A ni sogoma!

Well, two weeks of no blog writing. That means I’ve either been working hard, or I’ve been having a lot of fun... Or... it simply means both! I’ve been having a great time here in Bamako. And I’ve gotten some work done as well.

"There’s plenty of evidence that time is running backwards"

You know, I really love this place! It’s dusty all the time, the food is crap most of the time, mosquitos are having me for dinner, and I hate aircos in cars. They’ve made me sick before, and I just don’t get why people need to get this ice cold air into their face. I even prefer the leaded dust right into my eyes. But maybe that’s because it was my first time on a scooter, in Bamako today. Yesterday night we went out to the Blabla Club, at the other side of the Niger. Way too expensive.

Dust dust dust... and spaghetti with mayonnaise

Some morning last week, Slashdot: prostoalex wrote "MSNBC points to the court cases spawned by virtual worlds. Recently, Tom Loftus notes, a virtual island in one of the MMORPGs sold for $30,000, enough to attract commercial attention. Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable. ’One such business, Blacksnow Interactive, actually sued a virtual world’s creator in 2002 for attempting to crack down on the practice.

And then there was Kunnafonix

I expected that, as a white guy from the west, you would also pay accordingly. It happens to be, however, that in Mali people actually don’t try to rip you off all the time. In India anyone would try to get some extra cash from us poor westerners. But here, up to now I only paid too much to a cab driver. I actually knew that I was way overcharged for my cab ride to the Hellen Keller Institute, but what the heck. 2000 CFA instead of the 750 CFA we paid to get back. It was hot, and I didn’t feel like stressing myself. I just told the guy that I knew he was bullshitting me.

Learning another language

It is interesting to be in a country with 11 national languages besides the official language, and these are only the biggest language groups. So many languages makes French actually much more neutral than one would think at first regard. I haven’t been studying Bambara as much as I wanted. Bambara is, surprise suprise, the language of the Bambara, comprising 30% of the population, and Mali’s lingua franca spoken by about 80%. Many think learning languages is difficult. I think it isn’t.