Le Maroc, pt. Deux - Encroaching Horses and Prickly Pears

            We walked around Tangiers for a long, long time. With heavy backpacks on. I think I mentioned that already. We had long since exited the tourist-y part of town and the only European/non-Moroccan looking people we had seen in a long time looked more like professional expatriates than wayward Swedish backpackers (of which there had been many only some minutes before). 

Needless to say, we four pasty, ingenuous looking yanquís did not exactly blend in seamlessly with the locals, what with North Face backpacks threatening to break our clavicles and brochure-sized maps dangling constantly in front of our faces.

No, we did not give off the vibe neither of wayward Berbers nor wandering Bedouins, but like a bunch of lost Americans saying “fuck” a lot. There was some mild debate about how to get back to the train station from wherever “here” was, and so naturally there were also a lot of crackpot theories being thrown around about how to tell the cardinal directions by looking at the sky. I was the propagator of several different, at times conflicting, theories, based on things I had “read on the internet”.

            Finally, after many a Moroccan child had yelled “¡Hola!” or “Bonjour!” at us from many a weathered-looking playground – they’re used to seeing a lot more Spanish and French people around than estadounidenses – we again found the Mediterranean Sea. Once seeing the beach and the dying light of the day, there was a resounding collective “Screw it” thought and subsequently exasperated by our traveling party. Then we made the strategic decision to sit on the beach for an indeterminate period of time.

            Once on the beach, a princely looking character riding a horse decided it would be funny to keep circling us, missing us by a few feet every time. He looked more like a young British earl returning from a foxhunt than someone you would see on the beach in Northern Morocco. We then dug a few holes in the sand to leave behind so as to perhaps make him reconsider circling future backpackers on his grand steed.

            After a few hours of intermittent silence and pseudo-profound philosophical posturing about “the Earth, bro, and like, the sky” (and no we did not buy any hash from the ubiquitous “good deal for you my friends” who proffered it to us everywhere), we decided to try to find a grocery store so we could pack some vittles for the upcoming overnight train ride, which we still had several hours to wait for. We did not find a supermarket but instead a pretty sketchy part of town where a lot of unintelligible homeless folks asked us for money. I think. I think we also walked into a brothel. I don’t know who thought there was the possibility that they would be selling snack foods in there, but I can assure you that it was not me. From the outside, the building looked like a bordello, but I guess they come in all shapes and sizes.

            We ended up finding a strange-smelling market and I bought some insanely addictive pita chips, which we all still have a craving for to this day. They must contain some kind of garlic-based opioid. I wish I had taken a picture of the bag. Maybe they didn’t even really exist…maybe these pita chips were just in our imagination…

            Finally, we again uttered a collective exasperated sigh of “screw this” as we had now been officially killing time for the past seven hours waiting for our goddamn train. We went to the goddamn train station to continue waiting for the goddamn train, but at least a little closer to the goddamn place from whence it was to leave. After being mesmerized by the Arabic-LED “Arrivals / Departures” board for an hour or so, we were granted access to our lovely sleeping quarters on the train. Though by no means the sketchiest place I have ever slept (that story is for another blog!), our train compartment would not have shown up in the Lonely Planet guide as a suggested lodging choice for those who make more than $15,000 a year. It reminded me of Boy Scout camp, complete with vinyl covered “mattresses” and bunkbeds, but it was cozy and awesome in its own kind of way. I actually really liked it a lot and I slept like a log, albeit one cramped into a too-small bed (and I was the shortest person between the four of us) that was about as soft as an exercise mat at a gym.

            The light creeping in past the tattered curtain on the window woke me up at about 6 AM. I pulled the blinds back a tiny bit to take a look out at the Moroccan countryside without waking up my comrades. It was a beautiful sight – the desert sand was an ochre-red, and bathed in the dawn light it looked like Martian landscape; unearthly. Every couple miles or so, there were small towns ringed by what looked like goat and sheep farms whose exterior fencing consisted of purposefully arranged rows of Prickly pear cactus to keep their ruminant subjects confined. 

Also, every little town was clustered around an immaculate central mosque. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the small towns I saw in the countryside in Mexico. There, the church was always the most cared-for and important-looking building. However, here in North Africa, those churches were simply replaced with mosques. I think, though, that these societies have more in common than their far-flung distances would suggest. More than just cacti and the pious faithful.

            At about 7:45 AM we arrived in Marrakech. I could already tell that this was a nicer place than Tangiers, at least in terms of what they wanted outsiders to see. Even the train station, complete with Moroccan KFC, was immaculate and beautiful.    

We took a cab to our hotel, and our cab driver was strangely friendly, as opposed to the ubiquitous grumpiness we encountered in Tangiers. However, this was to be a portent of soon-to-unfold events in Marrakech. 

As an unfortunately general rule, we discovered that, at least in during our stay in Morocco, when someone is overly friendly, they are usually trying to get something from you. That something is usually money, but sometimes it seems to be something more sinister.

To be continued.   

  

Le Maroc

            I tried a few times to write something profound about Morocco, but I ended up shelving everything I wrote. It was too complicated, too convoluted; I tried too hard to make a point. There was flowery language describing non-flowery things, there were myriad lamentations of sociological phenomena and philosophical problems that I felt like we were encountering. However, a couple good friends of mine gave me some advice that I can more or less paraphrase in the following words:

            “Dude, I think you’re taking your blog too seriously.”

            Dude, they’re totally right.

           Now, I don’t want to do a disservice to Spain’s nearest African neighbor and say too little about the country, but I’m going to do the best I can to do Morocco justice in fewer words than Absalom, Absalom!

((()))

            Morocco is a place of contrasts. First of all, the flight from Madrid to Tangiers (“Tánger” – “tahn-herr”, with a nice, guttual ‘h’ thrown in there for full Spanish effect) takes only one hour, but as far as I know, I’m not aware of another flight that short that will take you somewhere so different.

            One huge difference is that there was Arabic writing everywhere. I know this sounds obvious being that Morocco is an Arabic speaking country, but I have never been to a country that does not use the Latin alphabet before, so to see words that contain characters that looking more like drawings than letters is very shocking at first, and becomes somewhat entrancing later on. I think the Arabic script is one of the most beautiful looking typesets on the planet and to see it everywhere, especially when it’s been written as graffiti on dusty car windows, or scratched into the side of a building with a stick, or carved by mischievous waifs into drying concrete, it adds a level of humanity that’s often missing in Western portrayals of the language.

“Oh yeah, it’s just a bunch of somewhat arbitrary symbols used by other human beings just like me, and it just happens to congeal together and mean stuff like ‘Wash me’ or ‘Real Madrid sucks balls’, just like we write in English!”

Again, obvious as it may sound, it’s something I didn’t really think about much until I was in Tangiers, surrounded by Arabic everywhere. I think it really took the dirty car window to make me fully realize how alike we human beings truly are.

            Now, Morocco is not just a country that uses the Arabic alphabet, but it’s also a Muslim country, and so it was also the first time I had ever been to a country where Jesus-ians did not predominate. Although Morocco is a “liberal” Muslim country in comparison with some of its fanatical neighbors, it is still a much more conservative, pious society than any I have ever experienced in my life. Five times every single day – beginning at 5 AM, to the chagrin of would-be lazyheads everywhere – a member of the clergy called a muezzin chants the Islamic call to prayer from the minarets of every mosque across in the Muslim world.

 It’s a fascinating and hauntingly beautiful phenomenon, and at risk of causing Edward Saïd to roll over in his grave, I think it’s one of the most “exotic” things I’ve ever experienced. That is to say, it caused me to have another one of those “Toto, I’m not in Valladolid anymore” moments.

I wanted to explore more of the religious buildings and institutions in Morocco, but alas, as a non-Muslim, the buildings I’m allowed access to are few and far between. However, I was able to see through the gates of a few of the Muslim cemeteries, and one of the things I noticed was an abundance of cats sunning themselves within.

            For those who don’t know, in Islam cats are seen in a favorable light due to the Prophet Muhammad’s own affinity for the furry felines, and unfortunately for us dog-folk, he was not down with the canines. Because of this, there are more than a few feral-but-well-fed-looking cats wandering around, and I’m guessing a lot of people give the poor bastards food. Specifically, several times when we were dining in the Moroccan aire libre, there were prowling kitties showing up ASAP after we had begun. 

And, like good tourists in a Muslim country, we paid alimentary alms to our feline hosts. Some of them, I must admit, were pretty goddamn cute, and their wiles were exceedingly difficult to resist and if I’m dropping the “c”-word, you know I’m not joking.

            So it was perhaps due to this VIP treatment in Moroccan society that the cats were so profligate everywhere we went, and it was especially interesting their residence in the aforementioned cemetery. I won’t lie, it was somewhat surreal to see an orange tabby sunning himself on a crumbling, granite tombstone, and one adorned with what looked like several paragraphs of Arabic calligraphy. It was a real contrast for me, a perfect mix of lo rutinario, the routine – the complete banality of a cat stretching out on a rock; and lo extraño, the strange or different – the afterlife of a culture that I don’t understand and probably never fully will.

Here's another example of that phenomenon:

More to come.

For another great interpretation, check out mi compañero Dave Palmer’s blog here.

Marruecos

Even though I have only just recently raised my overall continents-visited total to two, that number is about to increase again, by exactly 50% in fact, to three. After about four minutes of discussion, some of my colleagues and I decided that the air was not hot and dry enough in Spain, so to seek even warmer, more arid climates, we are traveling several hundred miles (or "kilometers", as they ass-backwardsly say here) to the continent of Africa, specifically to the country of Morocco. Many of you may be familiar with Morocco  as the setting of the timeless film "Casablanca", a movie which has absolutely nothing to do with White Houses, despite its misleading title. It also has nothing to do with Humphrey Bogart being a badass and much more to do with him lamenting various lame-ass loves lost, and saying very famous, impetuous lines of dialogue.
Morocco, being an awesome place, has wild monkeys. This makes it rank high on the list of Awesome Countries I Have Visited That Have Wild Monkeys, the only other current entry being Mexico, and I wasn't even in that awesome part of the country. I was in the part with lots of sand and cacti. Not many monkeys. Apparently, based on the fact that Morocco has these wild apes, there hath burgeoned a cottage industry of Chaining Monkeys Up and Making Them Do Funny Things for Tourists. Fortunately, we are visiting Marrakech, Morocco, where this entrepreneurial phenomenon has gained its strongest foothold in the bazaar of Jemaa el-Fnaa, which is one of the busiest and largest public squares in the world, a place I totally, definitely did not just learn everything I know about from Wikipedia. In Jemaa el-Fnaa, which borders on the unpronounceability of the most vowel-lacking Slavic last name, training chained, hungry Barbary apes to do their masters' cruel bidding is one of the area's most lauded past times, and I know that your's truly will soon be checking up on the laws for across-border primate transportation.
To get to our captive-simian destination, we're going to be flying with RyanAir, a blossoming Irish airline with a lower budget than a Canadian MLB team. RyanAir has become famous in recent years for their maddeningly low ticket prices, which they can proffer due in part to severe skimping on every single part of their budgetary expenses, save (hopefully) the wings, fuselage, and other somewhat important, integral parts to a flying machine. I've never flown RyanAir before but apparently the insides of the airplanes are covered in advertisements, as if the passengers have been condemned to fly in the inside of a European soccer jersey or a budget-shortfallen city metro car. Personally, I can't wait for the experience. I don't know about you, proverbial hypothetical ghost-reader, but I have always looked around airplanes and lamented the acres of virgin white space, just ripe and lusting for crass advertisements. It's about goddamn time airlines started making money off stupid bullshit!
Once our Doritos®-sponsored plane out of Madrid lands in Tangiers, in the nothern-most part of the country, we are going to procure the least dangerous taxi we can find and try to get to the train station. Then, we are going to take an overnight train to Marrakech.
And there, my friends, trained monkeys await.

October 12th - The Rearing Righteous Head of Sloth

I had grand plans of adventures

On Spain’s special day

But alas, instead, both sloth and sorrow

Done wasted my day away.

I schemed to hike a mountain,

I planned to survey the land,

I desired to use my bird’s eye view

To erase my mind’s miles of sand.

But unfortunately, as do the plans

Of mice and men cascade

To the ground, my day’s plans have gone,

And I know they can’t be saved.

So here I am, feeling bad for me'self

My warm computer in my lap,

Writing this quasi-thoughtful poem

As an excuse to take a nap.

So this is for all those wandering, wan souls

Whose days desire to be free,

From wanton plans, demands and schedules

That bind them eternally.

“Oh no, I should be doing such and such,”

Screams the restless mind,

But for fiestas commemorating massacres,

Well, maybe a little rest is fine.

Actually, now I realize

That I can give my excuse more weight

If I add humanistic themes,

Protesting oppressive states.

So my sad-for-yourself and morose masses

Seize upon your sloth

As a symbolic gesture of solidarity

With those whom empires wrote off.

Instead of worrying about achievements,

Engagements, and prior arrangements,

I’ll dedicate my restful nap,

To those who couldn’t take one

Due to imperialism’s trap.

And so with that, my excuse is made

My reasoning aspersion-proof

So fuck all the reprimanding, demanding plans,

With my nap, I fight for truth.

A strange phenomenon / Un fenómeno extraño

            In Spanish, there is no word for “procrastination”.

Usually, with the “-tion” words, one can just change the ending to “-ción”, throw a couple of extra letters in here and there, and voilà, you’ve got your Spanish translation. Sure, sometimes the translated word will not echo the original meaning perfectly, but at least you’ve produced a real-life Spanish word. I’ll show you some examples:

“nation” – “nación”

“position” – “posición”

“station” – “estación”

You get the gist.

Sometimes, like I said, the original word will mean something slightly different than the Spanish “equivalent” you end up with. Take every pyromaniac-pseudo-poet’s favorite:

“conflagration” – “conflagración”

While in English, the former is a nearly-unnecessary word that means a large fire (I’m pretty sure you can almost always say “fire” instead and sound like less of a turn-of-the-century British asshole), the latter Spanish version actually means an outbreak of war, an uprising, or a revolt. I actually like “conflagración” a lot more than “conflagration”, and I think from here on out, it should be used in a lot of really epic Spanish-language metal songs.

Inasmuch, no matter what you do to the word “procrastination” (one of my favorites in good ol’ English), nothing can turn it into Spanish. One would think a simple “-tion”/”-ción” switcharoo, giving us “procrastinación”, would do the job, but alas, we are left with an Anglicism - an orphan of a direct transliteration, a non-word that wants so badly to have its linguistic Gepetto turn it into a real boy. I mean word. Turn it into a real word.

So some people have been asking me in recent days, “Alex, why haven’t you updated your blog yet? What are you doing over there in Spain that is so goshdarned important that it precludes you from signing onto the internet and writing a ludicrously self-indulgent synopsis of your Iberian travails? You mean to tell me that dealing with epithet-shouting, paper-avión-throwing, other-person-starting-it-accusing, million-mile-an-hour-Spanish-speaking twelve-year old Castillian hellions is making you too tired to write a blog entry at night? You mean you want to just drink a 1.65€ bottle of wine and chill out instead of trying to think of something to write at night?

Well, I used to know the word for this phenomenon, but it seems to be escaping at the moment.

Buses, Vending Machine Misappropriation, and Inhumane Laws

            I had a series of increasingly unhelpful encounters with “Information” kiosks in the Madrid airport. One particularly surly señorita, complete with über-Spanish, “I-don’t-give-a-shit-but-I-actually-do” coiffure, told me the regional buses left from “over there”, signaling in a cardinal direction that included at least half of the airport.

            Eventually, I found the bus depot. I helped an gracious, old Spanish man use the touchscreen ticket machine, which marked my second positive interaction with a native Spaniard in the two-ish hours I had been in the country. The first was with the customs officer who talked more about the book I had in my hand – Don Miguel Ruiz’s “Los cuatro acuerdos” – than about my reasons for entering the Kingdom of Spain.

            On the bus to Valladolid, I met another one of my fellow future comrades in English-assisstant-teacher-dom, the venerable Don Dave Palmer of Newton, Massachussetts. The two of us were both delirious with sleep-deprivation and new country-ation. Dave had been to Spain before so he told me a lot of what to expect, and he was with me on that hallmark first-time of being fucked over by a broken Spanish vending machine which stole my money. This was only a portent of future pilferings inflicted through the false promises of false-prophet Spanish vending machines. More on this later.

            Alas, Dave and I did not sit next to each other due to our far-flung seat assignments, which they apparently take pretty seriously on the Spanish ALSA bus. My seatmate was a stoic-looking young Spanish woman, who made sure to be looking out the window any time I glanced over at here. However, about halfway through our two-and-a-half hour bus ride, I decided to try and talk to this Spanish lady. This would be my first attempt at a real conversation with a native speaker. I had not slept in many, many hours. My body and my brain were both very confused.

            “I haven’t slept in hours. I’m American,” I blurted out in Spanish. These were my carefully chosen opening lines. “I’m very tired.”

            And again, much like my compañero on the flight over from the U.S., my seatmate on this bus livened up and immediately became very nice and helpful. She felt bad for me, el pobrecito gringo who hadn’t slept in a long time. She said I could sleep when I got to Valladolid, but that unfortunately for my tired-ass self, this happened to be the week of the Festival de la Virgen de San Lorenzo, and that sleep would neither be appropriate, nor possible, upon my arrival. This festival, she said, was the most important one of the year in Valladolid and that I had no choice but to partake once I arrived. There would be food carts aplenty, loosened-to-nonexistent public drinking and drunkenness laws for the few days, and that bars would not close.

Ever.

As I’ve come to understand since, Spaniards firmly believe that our legally-enforced “closing times” at bars are a relic of antiquated Anglican Puritanism, a sure-sign of incipient fascism and the erosion of civil liberties. How, they ask, can the government mandate that bars stop serving drinks? How is this allowed? They’d imagine that in a country that still executes its citizens by firing squad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Lee_Gardner) that you could at least get a drink at 4:30 AM if you wanted to. They speak in hushed tones about our enforced stop-drinking time. They can understand the firing squad, they can understand paying thousands of dollars for health care and college, but they can’t understand bars closing at 2 AM.

Isn’t there an international treaty against that?

La salida de los EE.UU. - The Exit from the U.S.A.

  El día miércoles 7 de agosto 2011

La salida

            Though it has improved, as of September 2011, Dulles International Airport remains a hellhole. Though the hole into/near/surrounding hell is not quite as infernal as in the past, hellish it remains. Luckily, while waiting in the several football-field-long line for international check-in, I was fortunate enough to have my distraught and frantic parents by my side to help me maintain my sense of equilibrium. Though the electronic check-in kiosk did not believe I was a real person, nor did it trust that I was not a terrorist trying to blow up La sagrada familia, I still was able to board my flight to Madrid.

            Did I mention my flight was free? Because of flying back and forth from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Oregon for five years straight, I had a shit-ton of SkyMiles to use up. To be sure, it would more suffice to say that my parents had a shit-ton of SkyMiles to use up, but you know how that kind of thing goes. Suburban entitlement and all that. That I’m a spoiled kid, don’t know the value of money, etc.

            Despite the fact that I purchased the tickets with SkyMiles from United Airlines, my actual flight service was provided by AerLingus, an Irish company, and let me tell you, this was the right decision. Those of you out there who have had the pleasure of hearing updates from the cockpit in a soothing, nearly-stereotypical brogue from the Old Green Country will understand just how awesome it was to fly AerLingus. The flight crew was an eclectic mix of genial Spanish folk, surly Americans, and plucky Irish lasses. This made for an interesting array of cultural hodgepodge.

            And good goddamn, our plane was huge. There were three or four different partitioned classes, each with at least a hundred seats arranged in alternating groups. There were sets of two seats on the port side of the plane (that’s left when you’re facing the front of the plane) five (!!) in the middle, and three on the starboard (right) side.

 Yes. I just looked those nautical terms online. They’re useful for aircraft descriptions.

            Upon finding my seat (47A sounds right - let’s say 47A) I was more than relieved to see that it was a window seat in one of the port-side, two-person rows. “Thank God,” I said to myself for dramatic effect.

Before too long, a rather pensive looking man with gray hair came and claimed the seat next to mine: the proverbial 47B. We exchanged half-smiles and nods of courtesy, but we quickly went back to awkwardly feigning attention to our own just-arrived-to-our-airplane-seat affairs. Arranging carry-ons, strategically placing books and crossword puzzles. The standard fare.

            After a few minutes had passed, our Irish-brogued pilot-oracle came over the loudspeaker system and informed us in dulcet, Celtic tones that due to “th’ fahckin’, god-fuhrsayken stahrms in th’area, wi’ th’ fahckin’ lightnin’ an’ whatnot, w’re goin’ ta hahve to l’cate a nyew pahth in which we c’n take off, th’re, ladies and g’ntlemen.” (He did not say the more profane first half of this sentence. You should pretend he did.) Naturally, as any good seatmate would do, I engaged in the archetypical make-friends-on-public-transportation strategy of Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness Technique - one as old and as stoic as time itself.

            “Huh, shocking,” I said, turning towards my seatmate. “At least they have Irish accents!” You can tell that this was a positive point for me.

            The man’s face, which had initially looked quite serious, if not a bit cold, slowly warmed. Slowly, like one of those new-fangled, curly lightbulbs. With a worldly chuckle, he said to me, “Well, you know, I’ve flown this flight a lot, and that’s one thing that always makes it better for me. I also love Irish accents!” At least, this is what I remember him saying. Who doesn’t love a good Irish accent? Nonetheless, with that simple offering of Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness - the oldest trick in the book - I made a new friend.

Goes to show you kids: don’t be an asshole on a plane.

            I found out that my seatmate’s name was John, and that my first impression of him as stoic and cold was so very far off. John was a genial, bright-blue eyed man of about 65 years who maintained a reserved, wry smile the whole time I talked to him. John had seen many places and met all stripes of people: I found that he was not only a doctor of physics (from Penn State, undergrad in English at Virginia Tech) but for many years, he was a colonel in the Air Force.

            So basically, if you’re reading this, you’re currently wasting your life compared to John. John was a rocket scientist and a high-level colonel in the Air Force. He has been to, like, every country on Earth. He can fly planes. He can build goddamn missiles. Shit, he can be build the goddamn plane and the missile. And fly the plane. And shoot the missile.

So throughout our hop across the Great Atlantic Puddle, he regaled me with myriad stories of his trips to and exploits within diffuse parts of the globe.

“I’ve been around a little bit,” John said a couple times, smiling that unassuming smile, relishing in his almost laughable understatement. At one point, he pulled out a book he had in his backpack. In fact, it was not any book, but an aviation industry catalogue that inventoried all the available types of planes on the market. “Every time I’ve ever flown, I found the plane that I flew in this book and made a little note of the year and date.” The book was full of black stamps and Sharpie marks. There was something on practically every page.

“So I’m taking it you’ve flown this kind of plane before, then,” I asked him.

John looked at me like I’d an asked an alcoholic from Kentucky whether he’d ever tried this stuff called bourbon.

“Oh,” he stammered, “well, yeah. This was one of the easier ones. Did this one a lot. AirBus [insert number and letter combination here]. In fact, this one was [insert tons of technical stuff that I pretended to understand].”

“Oh yeah, definitely,” I replied. “Definitely.”

So John was visiting his globe-trotting daughter, who just finished teaching in the Ukraine and recently moved to teach in Madrid. On the benefits of first-world residence, John said that “she’s glad the lights will come on every time you flip the switches. And that you can drink the water.” Apparently, you can’t always drink the water in the Ukraine. Not too big on water-drinkin’ from the tap ‘round there. Anyways, John reassured me that I would absolutely love teaching kids in a Spanish high school, and that his daughter had already told him that she never wants to come back to the United States, but that she would like stores to be open on Sundays occasionally. “They sleep a lot. The Spaniards really know how to kick back and relax.” I would later find out that this was another one of John’s famous understatements. But that’s for a later chapter of this story.

After a little bit longer of the Ol’ Colonel making me feel like I was one of the most uninteresting people on Earth because I had never been caught in a snowstorm in Antarctica, unable to safely return to Christchurch, New Zealand, after checking the parameters and readings of some ultra-super-crazy-ass, scientific data-collection shit at the South Pole, he decided he was going to try and get some sleep. He grabbed his Irish-themed, shamrock-bedecked AerLingus pillow, adjusted his seat back into its most non-upright position, and was out like a light.

I sat there for a little bit and thought about how if I hadn’t done the ol’ Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness Technique, I might never have found out about John’s wild, interesting life, nor would I have considered the shallowness and astoundingly low quantities of awesome, cosmopolitan, secret agent-rocket scientist-colonel-ness that compose my own. Goes to show you kids: don’t be an asshole on planes. Ask your seatmate whether they’ve ever been to the South Pole. Ask them whether they’re a Penn State-trained, James Bond-esque, Air Force Physicist Colonel. Or you may never know.

Me? I’m no near-hyperbole, paramilitary scientist-badass, so I can never sleep on planes. I sat there in my own way-too-tired and banal world for a while, ruminating on the interesting-ness of chance-meetings like mine and John’s, and I noticed how clear I could see all of the stars. The Big Dipper; the Milky Way; some other stars and shit with insanely long Greek names, peppered with a bunch of letters and numbers which make them seem way more epic (like Procyon A/B, 47 Ursae Majoris). I could see it all.

Then, at about 5 AM EST – or Some Other Time, Spain Time (I don’t like math or looking up foreign time zone names) I started to see a otherworldly orange phosphorescence on the horizon. And then I realized: it was a new day on another continent, one I’d never been to before.

And then I thought,

Oh shit, I’m going to be here for a year!