This summer I spend three weeks doing political science research in Dakar, where I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me. When someone asks, I confess, Yes, this is my first time in Senegal. (I visited Mexico, once, when I was eleven years old.)

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him. [...]

In the very heart of Moscow sits the 72-year old Russian Academic Youth Theater, the current home of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy “Coast of Utopia.” Since October 2007, the curtain has gone up on a production of the play, penned by the author of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” and focused on several 19th century Russian [...]