Fann

Fann means the university and the hospital, and the whole district runs to their rhythm. The Cheikh Anta Diop campus is just across the boulevard: eighty thousand students, lecture halls full at seven in the morning, photocopiers on the pavement, and canteens where a full plate costs a thousand francs. The Fann teaching hospital has a history of its own — from the 1960s it hosted the school of ethnopsychiatry that treated patients together with their families, and families still camp in the courtyard during a stay.

Walk three hundred metres west and the world changes: Fann Résidence, streets lined with flame trees, ambassadors' villas behind clipped hedges, foreign cultural institutes. Lower still, Fann Hock, older and more working-class, runs down to the Corniche Ouest.

That corniche makes the neighbourhood. At six in the evening it belongs to runners, to improvised gym clubs on the esplanades, to couples sitting facing the sea and to café Touba sellers. The Soumbédioune craft village and its fish landing are at the southern end; the stadium and the Olympic pool are on the way.

For a stay, Fann holds a rare position: ten minutes from the Plateau and its offices, five from the sea, with taxis at any hour and pharmacies open late. What you give up is quiet — between the horns on the boulevard, the white minibuses that replaced the old cars rapides, and the hospital's comings and goings, Fann never entirely sleeps.

Eating in Fann has a very clear geography. Around the campus, student canteens serve a full plate from a thousand francs, standing or on a bench. On the corniche, restaurants charge double for the same sea. In between, a dozen women set up on the pavements in the evening with egg sandwiches, café Touba and bread and butter until midnight — that is what the night guards, the nurses and the revising students eat, and it is probably the best value in the district.