Through the business grapevine we got word from a mysterious Czech-Australian that the Senegalese Ministry of Education was looking for a partner to build a data centre. It looked pretty credible, and besides, who wouldn't want to have a look at West Africa, right :-)
We got a fantastic ticket via Lisbon, a huge discount on business class. The advantage of business class is that you can go to the lounge at the airport. The disadvantage of the lounge is that it's easy to get carried away chatting there. Add to that the fact that you then wait at gate 14a while the plane departs from gate 14b, and you've got a remake of Remarque's novel "The Night in Lisbon".
Our guide turned out to be a lovely, pretty Uber driver, and a night spent doing the restaurants and bars really told us a lot about the Portuguese mentality, because it happened to be a Friday :-). One piece of information to sum it all up – the clubs don't open until midnight, because until then you're of course feasting and boozing in the pubs! And at one in the morning there was still nobody there, because it's simply not done to show up that early :-).
So we only landed in Dakar on Saturday afternoon, full of experiences from Portugal.
An envoy from the Ministry was already waiting for us at the airport, and he pulled us through customs and the gauntlet of vendors selling everything imaginable, straight into an air-conditioned minibus.
Then followed several days of prearranged formal meetings at various ministries with officials of various ranks. It was interesting mainly from a traveller's point of view, business-wise it all looked rather fishy.
Dakar is an interesting and very lively city full of contrasts, but mostly poor, of course. The only things that look rich are some state buildings, like the ministries and the foreign hotels.
One day we also went out of the city to the northeast, to have a look at the construction of a university. A motorway built by the Chinese, in exchange for fishing rights in Senegal's territorial waters. The half-built university was such a botched job that we were afraid to walk around the site...
Business-wise it came to sweet nothing, of course, but the Senegalese kept stringing us along for another two years and came to Prague twice because of it...
