There are countries where just as many speak Icelandic as speak English. Iceland is such a country, and so is Mali. Albeit they’ve just discovered that French isn’t lingua franca anymore, and thus they all want to learn English, they’re not quite there yet. I’m lucky I grabbed a French computer to learn from, so I can at least tell the Malinese that the ping timed out, or ask them to copy’n'paste stuff and other useful words such as “wireless”, “start”, “search”, “accept”, “cancel” and “next”.
Back home it is freezing cold, and a week before we left Sweden, the cold, wet, refuckingpulsive snow began falling from the sky. Snow in mountains is good. It might be cold, but it stays snowy, it’s not that wet, and you can dress accordingly. Then you can put long plastic thingies on your feet, and glide down the hills. That’s fun. When you get bored you can get drunk. That’s fun too.
Snow in Stockholm is just refuckingpulsive. It doesn’t stay snowy. It becomes a cold, wet, muddy slush that gets into everywhere. And if you dress for the cold, you have to dress/undress frequently as you go in and out of buildings. I hate snow. Malinese have never seen snow. I like the Malinese.
Bada Lodge
A couple of days ago, we went to “Bada Lodge“. It’s a resort at the Niger river, about an hour away with a slow boat. I liked the boat trip, and Bada Lodge might be a very nice place, but it’s not what I would call Africa. Such places are everywhere around the world, and as long as the climate is good where they are, they’re certainly nice. But I want to experience Africa and Mali, the people, the culture and the atmosphere, including the poverty, the dust and the emissions. You don’t do that at places like Bada Lodge, but I guess my brother’s kids got more out of it than downtown Bamako.
Phoneshop
In downtown Bamako there are “boutiques” called names like “Riyadh Electronics”, “New York Shop” and “Paris Boutique de Luxe”. They are built with four tree branches with a roof of corrugated metal or straw (or a combination). The electronics include 486 computers, bakelite phones and huge calculators. The range of clothing is a bit better, at least if your into domestic traditional stuff (with velcro). They also sell traditional music instruments (with strings of nylon), traditional art (cars made of used coke cans) and all kind of Chinese second class stuff. But if you go beyond the crap, you can find the nice stuff. Today, we bought 40 metres of high quality fabric for less than €40.
I was at a Bamako football derby between Le Stade Malien de Bamako and Jeanne D’Arc. Le Stade won the African Confederation Cup this year, promising a good game, but apparently it was Le Stade 2 playing, in some other division. The level of football was comparable to juniors back home, four drummers (playing african rhythms for 105 minutes), two cow bells, a boat horn and no singing on the stands. Not the culture I’m used to with AIK, but it was fun anyway. Le Stade was the better team, but Jeanne D’Arc (looking like and playing like Trelleborgs FF) won by 1-0 (a counterattack, of course). The sold all kinds f stuff on the stands, including eggs.
Malian football supporter drummers video
Boudin
Ever since I was a little kid, my father always told me that Boudin is a blood sausage, and that the French Foreign Legion sings a song about making Boudin out of their enemies. But I’ve never seen any Boudin in real life. Until yesterday. The place where we celebrated new year’s eve had Boudin with mustard sauce on the menu! It didn’t take more than 37 years. I tasted surprisingly good.
I had a meeting with the Malinese police, since one of them stole the key for the moped I borrowed from one of my mother’s guards. Someone had told them that a traffic light high up in the sky was valid on the street, six meters below. Like if anyone would ever have the time to look up in the sky in the Malinese traffic chaos, full of people, goats (they call them sheep, but they also call crocodiles “caïmans”, even though there are no caymans outside South America, USA and China, so I’m pretty sure they’re goats), donkeys, carts, mopeds, cars and minibuses. I explained that traffic lights at that level could only be valid for flying vehicles. It took 20 minutes of French-pidgin-English negotiations before they agreed, and gave me the moped key back. Half the time I was trying to figure out what freaking fire he was talking about, since he yelled “The fire! No see? The fire!” over and over again.
If it taught me anything? Yup. I learned that “red light” and “fire” is the same word in French.
