THE MARKET IN NOUAKCHOTT

The market in Nouakchott is as much colourful as you may imagine. There is not much to visit, indeed, apart from two big mosques donated by Saudi Arabia and Morocco and a catholic church near the French Embassy. I may also mention the Presidencial Palace, but this one is not really easy to visit.
For the sake of the truth it has to be mentionned that the city is meerely 59 years old: it was found in order to give the new country, a partition of the French West-Africa, a place were the new leaders could get empowered and meet and the new Embassies have their premises. The French would have preferred to keep the unity of the colony, but the arabic nomads in the North did not favour to become part of an independent black Senegal.
So, if you have one day or two in Nouakchott and have already been at the not-so-far beach where the waves are not that keen you will naturally finish having your time in every market in town. Buyer or not buyer, you will not escape the feeling of popular enjoyment and probably even less the extraordinary colourfulness of the garments and the scents of the food and drink makers. If in doubt see the pictures for the colours; sorry, for the smells the internet does not allow, yet, for them to be felt.

I HAVE BEEN IN BAGHDAD

Yes, in 2007. But not the one you surely are thinking of: there are more Baghdads than the media tells you! The one I visited is a small village in Mauritania, poor, quite and peaceful.
My almost 4 weeks stay in Mauritania was for an election observation mission by the European Union, at the time of the 2007 Presidential election there, after some years of military rule. As a short term observer I was assigned to the region of Kiffa, some 600 kilometers east of Nouakchott, the capital. The EU observers work always in teams of two and this time my team mate was a hungarian diplomat, now posted in Saigon as he wrote me recently.We observed the first round in Barkéol, some 150 kilometers away from the nearest tarred road, a very dry area indeed, and the second one, two weeks later, in Guérou, which lies some 60 kilometers before Kiffa, when one comes from the capital along the only tarred road of the region.
Baghdad 2 (the "2" because there are more than one...) is a little bit outside Guérou, but may still be considered as a suburb of the town. We visited it twice: on our standard fact-finding and locations-finding activities before e-day (we drove hundreds of kilometers and as much polling stations as possible, in order to decide the route plan for e-day, only known to the two of us, not the interpreter nor the driver, both mauritanian citizens) and again on e-day as one of the polling stations we decide to observe.