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Once A Bedouine
The Mauritanian tent has found its way to contemporary architecture in Nouakchott. If you stroll the streets of Ksar, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, you will not miss the tent shape in practically every other house. It’s a symbol of a lifestyle in which the movable home is now built in cement…
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On The Road
You can consider yourself lucky if you get a seat in these small and often crowded Tata city buses. Packed they may be but they are a very cost effective way of transport and often fairly fast too. In some parts of the town they are my favorite choice, simply because I like people watching…
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Live Your Dream
You may know that Dakar is a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean in the north, west and south, which gives the city much needed winds from the sea. The winds bring advantages: they keep the air clean for breathing and they also keep the mosquitoes at bay outside of the rainy season, or at…
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It’s All About Sand
Varess is a small oasis village close to Mhairith (أمحيرث) and hardly available for a virtual visit on Google Maps. As a prelude to the urban Nouakchott, where you see signs of nomadic lifestyle even in contemporary housing, I wanted to share a couple of photographs from this region where dates are produced and where…
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Dubai Fever
When I see cityscapes with the silhouettes of skyscrapers, I often wonder: how do these massive buildings make you feel in a city? Urban? Contemporary? Modern? Proud? Chic? Rich? Poor? Small? Addis downtown area and some other parts of the city are growing fast into the skies creating striking contrasts with older buildings that are…