like the street loves slang

There are two kinds of taxis. Well, clearly that's a lie because there are many more than that, but the only two I'm concerned with are the kind that are cheap, and the kind that are cheaper.

Every day now (except weekends, which, because we are so Muslim, means Friday and Saturday) I go to our bureau (I'm sorry, is that even a word in English? it means office) to work, which is in the tallest building in the country, all of nine storeys, and which, with its glass, automatic! doors and shiny, snazzy steel, and three, count them, three elevators, one of which lights up at night, is quite unmistakably Mauritania's version of a (pretty, but needless) chunk of glittering, national diamond in the sky, known otherwise as bling.

The building is called 'el khayme' which can translate literally as 'the tent', and is located just far enough away so that I can take a cab without feeling very guilty, but not far enough away so that I must. I live one street over from Chinguitel (as in Chinguit(ti) tel(ephone)) the company who, with their bright blue signs depicting a starburst, and their air of both new-mystery, and an urbane Arab-ness which no one can resist, started moving in on Mauritel's virtual monopoly over phone service sometime last year-ish, and has, ever since, been scaring their pants off. They also happen to be a subsidiary of Sudatel, which is owned by the Sudanese government, so it's like " watch out....".

On the other side, in a diagonal shot from my doorstep, is the restaurant slash English-school-with-creepily-subversive-Christian-undertones, "Equinox". It's housed in a gorgeously restored home with Arabesque filligree work, and plaster moldings on the ceiling, and tiles, more suitably located in some country with actual culture, like Morocco, (ooops!). The sign out front, in green and black, the "o" made into a half moon, looks more like that for an insurance agency than an eatery, but the food's good, so all is forgiven.

It's the only restaurant that I know of in the city (read: country) which is owned and run by an American- a middle-aged, white ex development worker- and there are three things which would tell you this even if you didn't already know: their french-fries are crunchy, like something out of someone's ideal of a mid-western diner, smoking is prohibited, and when you sit down, they bring you ice-water (as in, "water with ice in it") which is, if you didn't know, notoriously American to everyone except Americans themselves. They also have white pepper (wtf?) on the table, and meatball sandwiches, so I just ignore the Christian reading material, and stuff my face.

The thing about walking to work is not the distance, but the heat - I'm sorry, it's hot here. Did you know?- but more than that, it's the humidity. This might seem like a joke, because Nouakchott's humidity, as a desert city, is doubtless extremely low compared to the rest of the world, but it's on the coast, and I just came from living two years on top of a sand dune, so anything wetter than, say, 'deathly parched' makes me feel like I'm swimming. Shneeks.

I feel as though modern living, and houses, and mores are not compatible with this place on the earth. There is a reason people live in in tents in the rest of the country. In the village I had one little room with two doors, six feet apart, who exchanged the breeze with one another, and everything I owned was practically within arm's reach, and I had my white howlie to protect me from the sun. Here, walking down the almost tree-less streets, I feel self-conscious, and like a grotesque, "mitbaadi" (hick-like) Frenchman if I wear my howlie, and I feel like the sun hates people, literally hates them, pouring down distaste, instead of light. Why else is it so HOT? Why else would the heat get trapped in my labrinthine, over room-ed house each night instead of escaping up into the stars.

But this is all a lie, because in Nouakchott I have (sporadically) running water, and bananas, and the other day I made a green salad with cucumbers and golden raisins. Fuck the village.

If I walk to work I am a soaked, overheated disaster by the time I walk in the lobby, with its snooty (S)watch kiosk, and international time clocks, and even my newly bought, painfully distressed, Chinese-made jeans, and faux Armani black T-shirt with rivets can not disguise it. Meanwhile, there is Cheikh G. -the tall Wolof angel of graceful goodness, who smells, always, distinctly of heaven (I'm not kidding) and whose skin is perpetually cool to the touch, as though internally air-conditioned underneath his flowing robes- who works regular miracles in the transparent office next to my little "fly-by-night" dictionary-making station, so what's one to do?

Anway, the taxis- it's one of those things where after you notice something, it's hard to believe you never noticed it before, but virtually all the cabs in the city are the same kind of late-model mercedes (that name doesn't mean the same thing here) painted in either green and yellow, or not, and occasionally pimped-out, complete with hub-caps, and driven by what invariably turns out to be a young Senagalese cutie in a tanktop listening to Mbalax. These taxis will, without fail, charge me 200 ougiyas to get from here to there; the extra 100 is added because, and only because, there is a 90 degree turn involved.

That much I knew- the part I didn't notice was about the taxi "tout-droites" (meaning "straight (ahead)", ironically) which are all decrepit Renaults -skelatally bare-metal, and looking like the French contemporary of the Model-T- and since someone pointed them out to me, they are now as easy to spot as shining, rusting, belching beacons in the proverbial dark. These are shared, fixed-route cabs, which cost 80 ougiyas, look something like a hatch-back, and exist to ferry low-budget commuters, everyday, between capitale market and somewhere else I could care less about. The important thing is that I catch them, with almost reverent devotion, on the main route, 30 seconds from my house, and I can disdainfully ignore all the futile honking of the Mercedes, thinking, "200 ougs, my eye", until one of these perilous relics rolls slowly by. I hiss them down, and point for good measure, and try to act nonchalant as I hop chic-ly into what is, to all appearances, a vehicle made for not-me, smelling (for the moment) faintly like imitation Hugo and clean-ness, dressed in black pinstripe and scrubbed converse all stars, and pondering, just briefly, the fact that I may be cheap, and even poorer, I may be a fault-riddled, neurotic, catastrophe, but damn, sometimes, I've got style.