I Deliver

Hey all,

Wow where to start. Morocco was great, Madrid was great.

I think the best part about Morocco was just how different it was; people have asked me what I liked most and I can never put my finger on one thing I did that stood out from everything else. Stars, green grass, and red dirt come to mind: not the answer people are looking for when they ask about vacation.

We left Bordeaux pretty early on a Saturday morning, taking a train to Toulouse, a town just southeast of Bordeaux. We spent the day in the young, energetic city of red brick, visiting a really cool old church. We flew out that evening from Toulouse to Casablanca, a flight that took merely two hours!

Landing in Casablanca wasn't anything special; the airport, however, had a completely different feel. I remember being in the SF airport seeing all kinds of people, but the population being predominantly Western/European folks. Here, however, we were the minority, which is always a strange experience.

We also didn't have any solid ideas of how to get from the airport to the hostel, having faith in our French to get us by. It wasn't long until we realized that Arabic is truly the first language of Morocco, and that French and English are distant seconds.

My five friends and I climbed into a taxi that smelled strongly of curried meat and cheap gasoline; I sat on Stephen's lap in the front seat, awkwardly jostling about for what I hoped would allow him to keep circulation in his legs. We were the lucky ones, however, as the four others that piled in the back found that the door didn't exactly close. No, scratch that; it didn't close whatsoever. So Paul, the silent martyr, quietly held the door closed the 45-minute drive from the airport to the medina. I remind you it was pitch black by then, and drivers in Morocco are slightly insane; our taxi, going about 100mph on a highway, could have easily gotten into 5 accidents before getting into town. All this while I'm giving Steve the lapdance of his life in the front seat and Paul is holding on for dear life, quiet as ever (no seatbelts, by the way).

We arrive at the hostel without too much trouble, paying the cab driver approximately twice as much as we should have and crawling into our rooms, exhausted. We were hungry though, and thus started an adventure that would last pretty much the entire night. Asking for directions at the front desk, the fellow told us to head out the front door and go right, as we'd be sure to find a restaurant right around the corner. Four corners later, quickly getting lost among buildings of chalk dimly lit by a hanging bulb every 100m, as well as alleys inciting nightmarish thoughts and piles of trash heaped left and right, I head back to the hostel, discouraged, hungry, and a little freaked out. I say 'little' relative to what was to follow.

Asking the owner once again, and getting the same inept response, I decided we were better off heading out of the medina (old city) and taking our chances on the wild streets of Casablanca, where we had nearly ended what must have been an interesting life led by a man pushing a rickety wooden cart at midnight on the equivalent of a Richmond freeway.

As I was heading out of the Medina (a long driveway dips down to street-level), I was hit by the smell of urine and seawater: not a pleasant combination. I was just starting to walk down the badly lit, but cleaner and more modern street, when I heard the voices of my friends, accompanied by a stranger's, calling me back. I looked up and sighed at the sight of my friend Sherry being hit on by a skinny, greasy guy. He saw me approach and warned me, saying that things are dangerous outside of the medina; better to stay in if we wanted to get something to eat. He assured us that the medina was his, and insisted that we go to his place to prove his integrity, which none of us had challenged. We all watched, confused and a little worried as he scampered over to a nearby apartment, unlocking the door, opening it, and beckoning us in. Satisfied with his proof, he rejoined us, telling us to follow him to find some food. I walked up front with the fellow, named Said, down some of the shadiest streets I've ever seen; everyone out at this hour of night clung to the walls as if there were some invisible chain running from the gutters to their ankles. Scared, I found myself in a bad cartoon where shapeless red-eyed creatures are spotted lurking in the shadows, rejoicing in our naive unease. Said was not helping; talking to me of what it is to be a man and a leader, gushing phony philosophy that reeked of condescension.

As we passed sandwich stand after sandwich stand (not all that many were open at this hour), the streets got ever darker, ever narrower, as if they were closing in about us. Those on the side of the street grew ever older, and more ruthless-looking; these were people whose eyes had seen death first-hand, perhaps even induced it. I began to think about how to get back to the hostel; not only had I lost my way following Said down unnamed, directionless streets; I felt my instinct (paranoia?) creeping up on me, reminding me that if we got jumped, whoever did the mugging would be very rich and we could end up very dead. Legs quivering in anticipation of the unknown, I stopped and told Said that we were going back to the hostel. Chuckling, he told me we were only five minutes away from the restaurant; the same thing he had said 30 minutes ago when I asked him how far away this restaurant was. I confronted him with this, to which he replied "You don't trust me?" "No," I said, "why would I?" Imploring me to stop being scared and continue following him, he tried to turn around and keep walking, but I wasn't buying.

I started retracing our steps the best I could, Said quickly catching up to me, sniggering under his breath and trying to resume the most disgusting conversation I've ever had.

Eventually, we ate. Eventually, we returned to the hostel, appetities sated and insecurities put to rest as we settled into beds temporarily ours. We slept well. I woke up at about 9:30 to a beautiful day in a medina completely different from what we had known the night before; the sun had swept the cobweb-clinging lurkers from the walls, uncovering a fresh layer of pale white. A port appeared across the street from the medina, brimming with sailboats and merchant ships threatening to pave the way to Spain, and explaining the smell of saltwater and urine I had picked up on the night before.

No one else was awake, and I had no interest in going back to sleep, so I took my book and leapt up a floor or two, stepping outside the windows onto wrought-iron fenced balconies not made for sitting, where I passed the next hour enjoying the sea air, blue sky, and timeless poetry.

Once everyone had woken up and Jasmine had escaped from her bathroom, we began to wander around the medina, which was suddenly thriving with merchants and tourists. We spent the day buying scarves and listening to Cynthia get marriage proposals from every man we bumped into. Weaving through crowds was actually a lot of fun; my feet did the thinking for me, I simply kept my head up for posture as I squeezed in between two people that were right next to each other not ten seconds ago, dodging heaps of garbage and wooden carts by fractions of an inch without any hesitation.

Looking back to Sherry, I felt compelled to vocalize what had been going through my head for the past twelve hours: we're not in Kansas anymore.

Our next stop was Essouira, a city to the west of Casablanca, also on the coast. We hopped on a bus heading that way; leaving at 7pm, we ended up getting to Essouira at about 2am the next morning. It was a long and interesting bus ride; before leaving, people walked up and down the aisles selling candy and snacks, some more aggressive than others. On the long bus ride, we occupied our time doing various things: listening to music on our iPods, snacking on provisions we had bought before leaving Casablanca, sleeping, and chatting.

From the windows of the shaky bus, I could make out a beautiful starry sky on a pitch-black night. The bus made many random stops, picking up a few people every two hours or so. These stops were always anxiety-inducing for me, and I felt like I had to remain vigilant, not knowing who was coming on to the bus.

We spent a lot of our time in Essouira with a couple of locals, Khalifa the poet and Youssef the sleaze. They introduced themselves as drum players, hitting on Sherry and offering us to come into their shop for tea. What I took as an intimate invitation was actually just business; it was Youssef, the businessman that proposed a trip into the Sahara for the first time. Later that night we went to their apartment and made chicken tajine (a typical Moroccan dish; basically a stew with everything good cooked for forever) and talked a lot of business, negotiating the kind of trip we would take into the desert, and what we were willing to pay.

Though all this was great fun, and we ended up doing some great bargaining, things turned sour when we arrived to Marrakech on the Tuesday night, February 24th and saw that our sumptuous hostel offered a far more interesting, legitimate trip to the Sahara at a much more reasonable price.

Negotiating ended up being a lot of fun; we learned how to get competitive prices for simple things we bought in the market, whether it was dates, scarves, or camel-leather purses. We even got to see a chicken killed before our very eyes, only to be dumped into a bucket to be bled so we could eat it later that night in our tajine (it was delicious). I also hand-picked (literally) some delicious, fresh fish and the best squid I've ever had, and got to watch it skinned and cleaned: something I had never seen done and wanted to know how to do. Life seemed to take a timeless tone in Morocco; away from 'organic' and 'green' commerce, we were eating and consuming in ways very typical to what I would imagine people have done for centuries.

Naturally, being the lead negotiator for the Sahara trip (Steve actually being the more effective businessman), I was the one who had to make the call, canceling on the people we had slipped into considering friends. Long story short, the call got quite ugly and vulgar on one end of the line, but I remained curt and grateful and ended it on the best note I could. This didn't keep me from being apprehensive: after all, the people that spent the past two days with us, driving us from Essouira to Marrakech, were staying in the same city and could definitely find our hostel if they tried.

Apaprently Jimi Hendrix stayed in Essouira for two years; on a camel ride our first afternoon there, we got to see his place, which was surprisingly large, yet flat. It is so far removed from everything it made me wonder how he was able to tune his electric guitar so far removed from society and so close to the beach. On our last afternoon in the city, I made some remark about Britney Spears, an artist unknown to the locals we were hanging out with. The fact that the names of Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix are better known than that of Britney Spears gave me hope in the human race.

The night of February 25th was spent in the Sahara Desert, under the stars. I had been really looking forward to this trip and seeing the stars the days preceding it, but on the way to the camp, on the back of my camel, my stomach started feeling really uncomfortable, which was to become a full-fledged stomach flu as the night went on. Though it certainly was beautiful under the stars, my memories of the experience are slighted by the suffering induced by whatever it is that I ate/drank the days before. Though I was sorely disappointed (and pretty miserable!), I made a serious effort to make the best of the situation and soak up as much of the desert as I could. To this day, the daylong trek into the desert still holds fonder memories than the doubtlessly beautiful night spent under the stars.

The landscape that we passed by in the van was surreal; we went from Marrakech, a huge, modern city, into the Atlas mountains where patches of snow capped the green and brown mountains at the foot of which pink almond trees grew amongst mud huts that seemed like they could have risen from the ground of their own accord. The strangest part about these beautiful, simple structures were the satellite dishes that sat on top of them. Our tour guide, from the mountains himself, pointed out one of the villages where he said the women did all the work cultivating what they needed to survive (with little to no extra) while the men stayed at home, watching TV. This hit me as the most familiar thing in this alien land.

After the Atlas mountains, things got very flat and very red; I felt like I could have been in an Western, with the Arizona mesas dotting the horizon. Never have I seen such red dirt; I had imagined it, never thinking I'd see it with my own eyes. This deep, primeval red contrasted fiercely with the long spreads of lush green grass, as if the Garden of Eden was crumbled into a few dozen mouthfuls and scattered across the Moroccan landscape at random. The green, like the red, was of a constant, full, vivid brilliance I had previously known only in dreams; appearing and disappearing, I convinced myself I was hallucinating, like a thirsty traveller falling victim to the cruellest of mirages in the savagest of terrain. To contribute to the surreal, unbelieveable aspect of this eyeful, the green had an abundance of palm/date trees: wild, Robinson Crusoe, Malibu Rum palm trees.

These were not the carefully landscaped palm trees that spread cramped roots in a tiny delegation of LA strip: no, these were real, furry, beastly palm trees. As if all this wasn't enough to take in at once, the arid landscape would be cleaved here and there by wide, clear rivers leaving the most exquisite paradise in their wake. We even passed a forest of palm trees. An enormous clawed footprint would not have felt out of place in this arid, prehistoric landscape.

At one point in the ride, our guide pointed out date trees; news to naive Californians who thought dates grew in styrofoam packages and cultivated shrink-wrapped in the aisles of Ranch 99. Naturally, we stopped to see a tree that had a few dates left hanging from its leafy branches (the season was over and the good ones had already been cultivated). Acting on my timid fantasies, Stephen scampered up the tree without warning and spent a good half an hour cracking up the tour guides, amazing the Californians, and thoroughly surprising the locals as he scanned the tree, shaking dates down on his minions and earning the title of Monkey King. As we left, we realized the locals had gathered on the other side of the street to watch a crazy Californian in sunglasses and Converse All-Stars do what very few likely dared to do. The leader of the village invited us in for tea, which our tour guide was quick to refuse, saying we had to hurry if we were going to make it to the desert before sundown. This cast a pallor over Stephen and myself, both tempted to leap out the van and join these people, sitting down and connecting with Morocco in what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Like all good stories, this one has a sad ending: we continued our trek through prehistoric paradise with the stubbornness of tourists who wanted to get what they had paid for.

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Madrid was cool; it was so different to be back in Europe after spending a week in Morocco! The air smelled different, the buildings were much taller, the roads were paved, and people were speaking Spanish instead of Arabic or Berber. We had returned to the West after a week-long stay in a world a part. Hearing Spanish was a big deal for me; I hadn't really heard it spoken since high school, some four years ago, and I had forgotten how much I loved hearing and speaking the language. It certainly has a way of relaxing me that French never really did. Exhausted and smelly, I was basking in the Spanish language, my happiness betrayed by a grin that spread across my face before I could hide it, and like a flow of water couldn't be stopped once it had started.We got to the hostel at about 5pm on Friday, February 27th. We checked into the hostel (I had booked us a 14-bed room, the cheapest they had available. About 10 euros more expensive per night than our hostels in Morocco) and then gave my friend Vic a call to go get some dinner. I hadn't eaten for a little over two days by now in an effort to work the stomach something out of my system, and I was looking forward to tasting again. We went to a greasy restaurant not far from where we were staying, just off Gran Via, Madrid's equivalent of Market Street in San Francisco.

Later that night we went wandering around the area a bit, where we stumbled upon a statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which was really cool. I gave in to the shameless tourist in myself and took a picture with the statue.

The next day we slept in a bit and went out for a free tour, offered by New Europe, a new company that sponsors free tours of major cities in Europe, as well as paid pub crawls and other touristy stuff. Apparently, things are a bit controversial, as the free tours they give are inevitably one less paid tour led by professional tour guides. So, after a brief setback with the police and angry unemployed tour guides, we set off on what was to be a relatively informative, though a bit vulgar and unsatisfying tour of Madrid. I peeled off from the group early to do some laundry, and ended up playing a few rounds of dominoes on the laundromat floor with my buddy Vic while all the blue from my brand new Moroccan scarf generously made its way into every white piece of clothing I had packed with me on the trip. So, with fresh, baby-blue clothes, I returned to the hostel, where plans were being made for the night.

On the flight from Casablanca to Madrid, I had been surprised by the desire to do some research on the city; where we could eat, what's fun to do at night, so on and so forth. I had found a good Flamenco club, which we then went to see on Saturday night. It was really interesting; I'd like to go again, on the condition that I get a seat in advance.

Sunday I had decided I wanted to see the museums, so we set off for the Reina Sofia and then went to the Prado. Though the Prado certainly had some cool stuff on the first floor, such as the "Gods and Men" exhibit featuring ancient Greek sculpture, it didn't make much of an impression on me after having seen the Paul Thek exhibit at the Reina Sofia, which pretty much satisfied me for the next week or so.

Overall, Madrid was a really nice city, to which I'd like to return: clean, has a wealth of history and culture, along with some very interesting architecture (the Moors controlled Spain for 800 years) and decent food (though a bit heavy in ham).

I suppose that wraps up my trip to Africa (not a country!) and Spain... I could certainly embellish here and there, the extent to which will be entirely determined by the questions asked by you in the 'comments' section of this post. All apologies for the delay!

Ben