I have been here for 2 months and a little bit more and I have now a decent feeling of the city that hosts me: Khartoum is vast, dusty, hot and confusing.

The temperature has been giving me such a feeling that I finally came to understand what it is like being in a ventilated oven turned on to bake bread.

My skin is suffering a little, as not only I am losing the tan earned working in the sun in Haiti first and sleeping on the beach in Zanzibar then, but also it is so dry here that I had to buy various moisturizing lotions according to the moment of the day and the part of the body to use them for.

There are a couple of pools worth going with friends, for a few hours in a day: impossible to endure the whole day as I would do in Europe.

There are no street addresses that are really worth for directions, mainly because there are no street signs: I live again behind the orange house, past the third speed bump on the left.

I got used to navigate google earth and I spotted the house on the map within 48 hours.

Still, I get lost in Amarat, hopelessly.

Apart from that, there is the language barrier: most of the Sudanese actually speak English, except for the vast majority of tuk tuk drivers, which whom I communicate as Italians do best: with my arms, pointing straight, right or left, when I know where I am going and mentioning the name of restaurants and countries with embassies nearby, hoping I will get to destination… without losing my life in some indescribable accident, seen on the lawless roads around here.

In this rapid analysis of life in Khartoum, I couldn’t avoid but mention the substantial lack of friends and acquaintances as the ones I used to have in Kabul.

It is clearly noticeable the fact that the emergency junkies are missing, because of the forced absence of a number of NGOs –mainly French-, combined with the different age, ethnicity and language groups (40s to 50s, Africans and Arab speakers), finding people who are Relax-compliant is the major challenge.

I am sure it’s only a matter of time and we are getting better at living here, it’s just not as fast as we were used to.