Tiempo de niebla, tiempo de esperanza

            This is my fourth month in Valladolid and I’m beginning to come around to understanding its ways. If you’ve been one of the people whom have asked me how things have been going, I’ve probably given you a response that was only partially true. Truth be told, up until recently I have struggled with this city of Vieja Castilla. To catapult from being immersed in the friendly, outgoing nature of Oregonians, to the windswept reserve of vallesoletanos has been shocking. The cultural differences are more befuddling than any language barrier, the latter of which is no small obstacle.

            For weeks, I have felt lost, wandering these tiled streets. I’m sure many expatriates feel this same way during the first part of their sojourn. Many faces were scornful and uninviting, to my eyes at least, and the prototypical concrete-block apartment buildings that I now realize are so classically Spain became terrible eyesores, mocking my sense of pleasurable aesthetics. It was as if no one cared how I felt, even the architects. There were so many things that I couldn’t believe, so many things that I couldn’t stand. I was incredulous. And then I became scornful myself. I became distrustful.

            Throughout my “dark gray period”, one thing remained a luz at the end of the tunnel, and that was my students and my school. I have nothing but the utmost respect and love for everyone at IES Las Salinas in Laguna de Duero, and everyone there has been so great to me – the silly American. Despite the fact that many of my classes seem more circus-like than pedagogical, I have learned so many things from mis niños and I wouldn’t trade the time I’ve had with them for the world.

            Recently, though, the “dark gray cloud” has begun to lift. Things have not seemed so sin esperanza, people have not seemed so scornful, and I have found myself more confident and capable of taking on challenges. I realized that, to some extent, there’s no point in fighting the way things are, and especially the way people act. Sometimes, we have to make adjustments to our own minds and attitudes in order to adapt to the environment we find ourselves in. Then, and only then, can we change the world around us. Fighting it does no good.

            Valladolid is known throughout Spain for its fog – la niebla. Many vallesoletanos complain about this meteorological phenomenon, especially because it often comes hand in hand with temperatures bajo cero. However, after having spent the last five-odd years of my life in the Pacific Northwest, the chill of the fog hauls in a welcome wave of nostalgia for me.

            It was the other day, was on my daily walk home from work that I realized just how thick and all-encompassing the fog was. Instead of walking the mile or so straight to my house, I decided to take a right turn on a street that jutted off to the right, into a neighborhood I had never explored before. On both sides were low-slung rows of buildings, some of which had those classic, ochre Spanish-tile roofs (à la the quasi-Iberian architecture of Southern California housing developments, but the real thing). There were the typical grizzled men wearing flatcaps smoking short cigarettes clustered around the entrance to every bar. The smoke from their cigarettes mixed with their frozen breath and the fog as it wisped upwards. A school had just let out and there were kids everywhere, laughing, shrieking vivid obscenities, and wringing their hands to ward off the shock from the cold air.

            After a kilometer or so (don’t worry Americans – I’m just rounding up a little bit from half a mile), I came to a wall blocking the street off from the train tracks that bisect the city. As in any city in the whole universe, train tracks are the Shangri-la of ne’er-do-wells, graffiti-taggers, and general mischief-seekers everywhere, so I thought it would be a great place to take some pictures of the Real Spain.

The Real Spain is not the mosque at Córdoba, it’s not La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and it’s not la Costa del Sol in Andalucía. The Real Spain, to me, is miles of lonesome train tracks disappearing into the distance; it’s a pre-1978-democracy warehouse that has been abandoned to the elements, both human and temporal. The Real Spain is an incongruous, Lego-assortment of buildings that looked like they were Tetris’d out of the sky, but in that very sense are perfect just how they are. The Real Spain is kids running out of school, screaming vivid obscenities, and the Real Spain is coquettish but serious-looking women looking at you but trying hard to avoid like they’re looking at you at all costs, out of habitually avoiding piquing the avarice and encouraging advances from their shameless, macho counterparts.

The Real Spain is a controlled-chaos circus that’s impossible to figure out, and the only way to give you an idea is to list some examples of its characteristics. The Real Spain, whom I have come to not only accept, but love and embrace, is a place of live ghosts and just plain life, and you have to be with it for a while to figure out how to not figure it out.

And like Camus, I’m really starting to embrace the absurd.

Oh, and you know what the name of the street was?

Camino de Esperanza.

(Get out your Spanish dictionaries)

"No Golfing" - A Reverse Viaje

Going back in time six hours is a bitch. I don’t mean like H.G. Wells, “going back in time”, but like changing time zones. Your body doesn’t like it, your head doesn’t like it, and it makes everything seem wavy and strange when you try to focus your eyes.

            Today I woke up at 5:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, which would be 11:30 AM in Valladolid, Spain. To make the best of this unceremonious jolting of the brain-time continuum, I decided to get into my Subaru Forester and head to the gym. Unfortunately, the gym is not all that close to my house, and if you’re familiar with standard, American suburban-wasteland “planning”, you’ll know that when something is three miles from your house, you don’t always have a direct route. You have to make some choices.

I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, we already have traffic at 5:45 AM. And I made some shitty choices. I went to the longest lights; I got stuck behind people driving their $100,000 Lexuses at the speed of low-battery golf carts; and at one point, I was trailing a school bus that seemed to be picking up every wayward child in the vicinity. Leave no room for doubt: this all made me very angry. But it was a warm, terra cotta feeling of soothing anger; a nostalgia for traffic jams past.

Anyways, after about three hours in traffic – give or take two hours and forty five minutes – I got to Spring Hill Rec Center, currently high in the running for the Most Generic Suburban Place Name of All Time award, highlighting an adroit use of the classic combination: Soothing Adjective + Unoffensive Geographic Feature. As the candle would have sung in “Beauty and the Beast”: a tale as old as time.

As I turned my sturdy, liberal bumper sticker-bedecked Forester into Spring Hill’s parking lot, the newly awakening sun’s rays illuminated a wooden sign on the side of the access road. When I read this placard’s warning, I realized that where I had arrived, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was just as strange of a locale – just as much part of my world-hopping adventure – as any cathedral’d villa in Spain or any ancient mosque’d hamlet in Morocco. This sign, perhaps ignored by many of the locals as if it were something as commonplace as a speedbump or as routine as a traffic light, blew my mind. It baffled and astounded me; I couldn’t believe what it said:

NO GOLFING

            We’re all accustomed to seeing signs telling us not to park somewhere, not to idle for too long in one area, or even demanding that we not give money to pandhandlers.

But telling us not to play golf?

Have legions of flat-capped, caddied renegades straggled so far off the course that they have started impeding traffic? I want you to understand that this sign was nowhere near any type of golf course. There was nary a green nor sand trap for at least five miles in any direction, so what does this mean? Have people starting teeing off wherever the fuck they want? And moreover, has this become a problem warranting an official county sign?

This was not in a field where one might practice his or her drive. This was not near any kind of surface or area conducive to the playing of golf. It was next to a narrow access road leading towards a rec center. Granted, the game of golf is indeed a pastime that can be construed as “recreation”, but would this suggestion be enough to set off an orgy of chipping and wedging so as to require a warning to halt these activities?

The suburbs are a strange place. Despite the often banal and superficial façade, there are things going on behind these manicured lawns and on these power-washed driveways. It is a place of intrigue, wile, and deception. Just as much as Montmarte, Madrid, or Marrakech.

I have thought about this all day and, honestly, the only conclusion I can draw from the “No Golfing” affair is this:

We are all insane.

París I - Banlieues

            First of all, to call the bucolic Beauvais Airport “Paris – Beauvais” is tantamount to saying “San Francisco - Modesto” or “New York – Trenton”. If you missed those narrowly-scoped geographic references, those are two cool, world-class cities incongruously linked to two much shittier cities because they have cheap airports about an hour and a half away. Of course, I’ve never been to either Modesto or Trenton, but I’ve read their Wikipedia pages. Things aren’t looking good.

            Actually, Beauvais is not a bad looking town. It’s got some pretty verdant green fields and some pretty quaint looking countryside. What’s the word I used before? Bucolic? Yes, that describes it perfectly. Truthfully, I’ve always thought that “bucolic” sounds like a disease pathology and not like something relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. ORIGIN early 16th cent. (denoting a pastoral poem): via Latin from Greek boukolikos, from boukolos ‘herdsman,’ from bous ‘ox.’, but hey, I don’t get to make the rules. Some old, rich white men do.

            After the initial 45 scenic minutes of the shuttle from the afore-insulted Beauvais airport, things started to get grimy and much more smokestack-y. This outer ring of Parisian suburbs, called banlieues in the barbaric native tongue of the Frenchmen, were not what most would consider feats of aesthetic architectural achievement. Most of the buildings are lifeless-looking high rises that seem to have been mail-ordered by the dozens from some sinister art-deco building warehouse.

From what I have heard, many of these areas are not places you would live if you have the means to go elsewhere. They are the French equivalent of the large-scale government housing projects in major U.S. cities, complete with many of the same features of social depression and malaise.

The Parisian banlieues are not a pretty place from a distance, and I know that things are no better from close up. In fact, that word in and of itself in French, like the word “projects” in English, carries a connotation - deserved or not - of crime, gangs, poverty, and of a large minority population. However, like most European cities, their “projects” are on out the outskirts of the city and not inside it. Interestingly, translations of the word “suburb” or “suburban” in many European languages connote the exact opposite of the American English equivalent.

(If you want to see a damn good film that illustrates this phenomenon, check out the movie “Gomorrah” – a modern-day Italian crime epic set in the suburbs of Naples. Not a pretty looking place to live.)

However, seeing Paris’s less glamorous side first was a good introduction for me, an American that has all the wrong ideas about what “France” means. I was thinking berets and mimes and art museums and dinners by the Seine and fine wines and snobby waiters. And while Paris does have all of these things – though perhaps not in the imagined quantities – at the end of the day, it is a giant, world city. And as one of the most important cities in all the world, of course it has soot covered smokestacks and block housing and people on the streets and miles of graffiti-painted walls, claiming injustice and begging for a peaceful (or other) resolution. Of course the people here struggle, of course they are grimey, of course they are on the grind, and of course they fight for what they have, just like anyone else in the world.

Paris is not at all postcards and paintings, and I was naïve to think so.

In real life, it’s much, much more alive than that.

Magallanes

            Spain is a place of contrasts, for me at least. My life as an American teacher here is a strange concoction of wildly different situations. There are alternating waves of intensity, ranging from the very active and high energy, such as my work at the school, to vapid expanses of bleak llanura – flatness – where I feel understimulated and, frankly, a little bit bored. The periods of high activity are some of the more frenetic I have ever experienced: I have to think on my feet almost all day long, and mainly in another language. Likewise, the flat periods are often devoid of stimulation, with a paucity of motivation to change the current situation at hand. It is certainly a strange life. It’s a good one, even if at times it can be very difficult. Honestly, without the difficult times, there is no why I would know just how sweet the good times really are. That’s the way it always is, isn’t it?

            This kind of oceanic existence – being raised and lowered by a metaphysical tide – is nothing new for me. My life has always been up and down, just like everyone else’s I guess, but maybe a little bit more extreme. We all have light and dark periods, but most of us never reach celestial exuberance nor infernal depths. Truthfully, I would try and avoid describing my own world so melodramatically, but like I mentioned before, I recognize the radiance during the times of contentment because of its stark contrast to those times where everything has a more subdued, matte finish. Either way, I try to keep the sine wave – la onda – from peaking too high in the Himalayas, but at the same time stop it from scraping the bottom of the deep-sea trench, this oceanic life I have somehow found myself circumnavigating.

            I’m going to expand on this more in a second, but I’m going to put this up now as a preliminary to my foray into some more philosophical themes here. And don’t worry – it is all related to this viaje – this journey. Being here, in and of itself, is a foray into the philosophical, so it is only right that I go into it here on this blog. It’s something that directs a lot of my thoughts and thus my worldview.

            Hold on tight.

            

Le Maroc, Pt. Quatre: Estamos (casi) jodidos.*

             There will not be much room for pretty pictures in this entry because I want to convey the message through words the best I can, and because throughout this whole episode, I didn't feel much like snapping pictures.

             I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with being led down ominous alleys by strange men in North Africa, but let me assure you that there is a reason why you have not heard this listed among many of your friends’ favorite hobbies. It’s shit-your-pants terrifying - that’s why. So as Dave, Michael, Will and I were very hesitant to follow Mustafa off the main strip of shops and down a dimly-lit, person-less alley in Djemma el-Fna, if for no other reason than that we did not much feel like being murdered. Especially not in an alley in Marrakech. Maybe I haven’t been reading enough Beat generation literature, but it doesn’t seem like many good things happen in dark alleys in Marrakech. Plenty of good things happen in well-lit streets and in vivacious, bustling plazas, but foreboding alleys tend to fall short of the Top 10 Great Places for Good Things to Happen list.

            So fuck. We’re being led down this ominous alley by a strange man named Mustafa in Marrakech, and he’s totally beckoning us to come despite our obvious hesitation. Because, y’know, it was, like, horrifying. Of course, being good sheepish Occidentals, we didn’t want to offend our guide by implying that we thought he was going to murder us in a dimly lit alley, so we didn’t want to speak up or say anything that was going to offend him.

            We didn’t want to say anything that was going to offend him.

            Let me say that one more time, just so that its entire conceptual foundation sits clearly with everyone reading this.

            Despite the fact that we were all deeply worried about the whole prospect of being led down a fucking dark, desolate alley in Marrakech by a complete stranger wearing fake RayBans, we were too timid to say anything because we didn’t want to offend him, a man we had never met before in our life, and whom we would most likely never see again.

            Yeah, we’re idiots.

            So as we Pied-Piper’ly follow Mustafa down the alley, we are very apprehensive. We were shooting each other glances, muttering under our breath. We knew this wasn’t a good idea at all, but we seemed trapped in the moment, unable to get out of it. Such is group psychology.

            Suddenly, just in case the austere penumbra of the alley was not scary enough, a child and his burqa’d mother starting following closely behind us, and the child began to sing in Arabic. Actually, “sing” is not the correct word here - “chant forebodingly” is a better phrasal verb to use. So not only are we about to be killed, but our impending doom is being welcomed with terrifying majesty of song. Shit. As we continued to walk down this alley, we agreed in hushed tones that while the alley was already bad enough, there was no way we would go into a building.

            Finally, like ancient Phoenician sailors finally breaking through a blanket of clouds to see the glory of the sun once again, we emerged from our alley-based purgatory into another bustling street market.

            Well, shit. Thank God we didn’t go into a building right?

            We’re still not trusting this Mustafa character. Relieved though we certainly were to not have been stabbed in the kidneys or extorted with any kind of long knife, we did not feel like we were yet out of the woods. Rattled, shaken, we continued on, being led towards a so-called “authentic Berber market” by Mustafa. We follow him around another bend, under a somewhat lower doorjamb, and it just looks like another market, except with a lot of dudes in white coats.

            Mustafa turns to us, looking a lot like Giancarlo Esposito in the movie 1994 movie “Fresh”, and says, “Authentic Berber pharmacy.” He then starts up a set of stairs to our left, beckoning us along with him. Dude did a lot of beckoning. He was huge on beckoning. “Come, come. Let’s go!” he said to us, as if there was an hourglass losing sand somewhere. Well shit, we must have collectively thought, We’re in a building. And we’re about to go up some stairs into an even more recessed part of this building. Well shit.

            Now let me explain something. This might not seem so bad to you guys reading this. You might think that because of my humorous tone that this was somehow not terrifying, that we took all of this lightly. Jovially. Jocularly. No. This was very, very scary. I don’t know exactly how to convey the sense we were all having, but I’ll do my best. Simply put, we felt like were falling farther and farther into a trap that had been laid for us. We all knew the risks of following local guides in Morocco, especially ones that you did not make an attempt to solicit – that is to say, guides that “seduced” you into following them. All of the guidebooks and sources of information with any shred of value will tell you that the number one rule in any country like this is do not follow unsolicited guides into unfamiliar places. Despite all of us being fully aware of this fact, and thinking we had some semblance of being in charge of our respective destinies, we had all gotten sucked in. Due to Mustafa’s smoothness and disarming demeanor, we had all become enganchado – hooked – and we didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. We were all disappointed with ourselves for supposedly knowing better and still going along with him. We felt like we were about to pay for our mistake in doing so, with at least our wallets, and who knows what else. We were truly scared at this point, and we were feeling sorry for ourselves for falling into this obvious trap.

            So we go up the stairs into the “Berber pharmacy”. We file into a fluorescently-lit room that is lined with jars of what appear to be different ointments and powders. There are two men, who don’t look particularly friendly or happy to see us, wearing white lab-style coats. Mustafa talks to them quickly in Arabic. Michael asks Mustafa, pointedly, though not intentionally at the time, “Are these your friends?”

            One of the men with the lab coat quickly says, “No, he’s not my friend.” He ekes out a half-smile.

            Mustafa turns to us and says, “OK guys, I’m going to step outside and have a cigarette real quick and these guys are going to talk to you.” Before we could really assent, Mustafa was gone and the door was shut behind him.

            I don’t know if my words here can really demonstrate how frightened and sad we all were at this point. Scared for our physical and proprietary selves and upset that we had let all of this happen to us, been so enganchados. It’s pretty easy to sit here now, write and/or read this, knowing that everything turned out OK, and to think I’m maybe exaggerating or overreacting a little bit. But the God’s honest truth is that we were right there in that lifeless linoleum room, looking at one another, thinking we might be in some serious trouble. We did not know what to do.

            I have never been so scared in my whole life. Will, Michael, Dave and I all exchanged glances in that room that spoke Encyclopedia-Britannica-volumes of regret, fear, panic. Not to offend anyone with more delicate lexical senses, but there was one sentence stuck on repeat in my mind at the time, and I’m sure my compañeros would second the motion.

            “We’re fucked.”

            This short phrase (Spanish translation: “Estamos jodidos”) sums up exactly how we felt at the time. Well, there’s no getting out of this one. Estamos completamente jodidos. No hay manera.

            And the “Berber pharmacist” went along explaining this powder and that ointment, holding out this jar and that jar for us to smell, but none of us were listening or smelling a goddamn thing that he was proffering to us. We were convinced that something bad was going to happen. Or rather, we were all standing on a precipice of sorts, on the edge of somewhere completely unknown. There was a void in front of us, an uncertain future, and we didn’t know what to do or if there was anything we even could do to change it.

            Finally, after what seemed like much longer than the few minutes it was – because we had all pondered way more than a few minutes worth of thoughts in that period of time – the lab-coated man did that goddamn half-smile and said, “Any questions?”

            And in one of the most genius questions I have ever heard in my life, Will points to a jar of colorful objects and says something to the effect of, “Yeah, I was wondering – I saw a lot of these things downstairs,” putting heavy emphasis on the final word, roughly containing our collective sense of desperation. “Do you think we could go downstairs and look at these again?”

            That’s when, I think, the dude realized we weren’t going to buy anything.

            Mustafa eventually came back, led us around the stupid-ass market for a little bit longer, and I actually ended up buying a silk scarf from one of his Berber “friends”. His “woman” made it. “Made” it. Hmm. Anyways, I’m convinced we’re all still alive because of my scarf purchase. If it hadn’t been for the scarf, we’d all be strung up somewhere in a mountain in Morocco. And it’s good quality silk, too.

            After a little more walking around, Mustafa finally had enough of us, bid us adieu in one of the squares, and walked off into the night. After all that, guy just walks off. Just like that. And we all thought we were going to be killed. Or robbed. Or something.

            Joder.

            But that’s why you don’t follow strangers down dark alleys in North Africa. 

 *"casi" means "almost", for those who wanna know.

           

Le Maroc, Pt. Trois: Para enganchar a un americano / To hook an American

            So by now I’ve had it pointed out to me, by people who’ve read Dave’s blog and by folks whom we’ve told what happened, that the “sinister” goings-on implied by the end of the last blog entry were not, in fact, all that sinister. It was more just highly uncomfortable and frightening to be in the situation at the time. All the same, it sucked for us. We were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles (kilometers) from anything we considered remotely familiar, and so having such a high level of uncertainty in such a remote and strange place was definitely what I would call “sinister”. At least, it had malevolent twinges.

Was that the first time anyone has ever written the phrase “malevolent twinges”? Let’s do a Google search and find out.

Dammit, one other asshole had already said “malevolent twinges”, and it was in a LIVEJOURNAL, for God’s sake. Figures.

Anyways, let me continue the most-interesting narrative here.

            -----------

Marrakech, Morocco. The Red City. It was more a kind of ochre if you asked me, but then again, I was never big on color swatches back in the day, so what do I really know? 

Marrakech, to say it briefly, is an insane place. At particular times and locations in the city, is a place that stimulates every sense of the human body at once, causing so many neurons to fire and so many distinct neurotransmitters to scoot around your nervous system that you kind of just want to go to sleep. The most famous part of the city is called Djemma el-Fna, which is a huge open square, about the size of six or seven American football fields (have to make that distinction over here). In this square, which is the center of the Moroccan sensory overload, there are vendors selling every type of ware you could imagine, from counterfeit iPods to counterfeit Lionel Messi jerseys to authentic Berber handwashes to real-life Jackson’s chameleons. Interestingly enough, the chameleons are actually sold so that they can be burned alive in a particular local ritual that, if I remember correctly, is supposed to cure impotence. It seems like the coolest animals are always killed for such stupid reasons. (Pangolins, anyone?)

In addition to Djemma el-Fna, the old city of Marrakech (the medina) contains an absolutely mind-boggling labyrinth of streets and alleys that house an even more extensive market. If you are not careful, these markets will disappear at night, and you will be left behind in a maze-like network of nearly-identical streets, and you will need some time and more than a little luck to get out of there. Really, I don’t know how you would get out – there are no street signs, few landmarks, and not a whole lot of well-intentioned locals to be found who would be willing you come to your aid given the situation.

This brings me to our strange and disquieting experience. Now, we all know full well that in Morocco you’re not supposed to follow people who offer you their services as guides. Fine, that’s easy enough to understand. But the problem is, some of them are damn tricky about not offering you anything, but instead just starting to show you around without you even assenting to anything. Such was the case with Mustafa.

One afternoon, we were doing the Frogger-like traversing of the main street – I want to say Rue King Mohammed the V – to get to the Medina. By the way, the crossing of the street in and of itself is always one of the most dangerous things to do in Morocco that I’m aware of, and actually, I’d be willing to bet it’s single activity that kills the most people every year in Morocco. More than any terrorism, opium, crime, or rogue guides. But I digresss

As we intrepidly cross the street, we notice that a man has joined us. He’s well dressed, wearing some pretty new looking Levi’s, sort-of-real-looking RayBans, and a non-threatening blue pullover. He’s sporting a pretty well-trimmed mustache. Other than the fact that people who are not Tom Selleck with staches can be scary at times, he seems pretty harmless.

It was a particularly harrowing crossing-of-the-street, and the man looks back at us, smiling, seeming to say with this gesture, “Wow, that was a particularly harrowing crossing-of-the-street, huh? Even I as a local Moroccan would agree with you Americans on saying this, if you were to say it out loud!” Of course, owing to his gold-rimmed RayBan-accessorized slickness, he did not say this exactly, but rather said something to that effect but with many fewer syllables. To use Spanish grammatical constructions, that thing has caused me to forget it at this point. It’s not my fault. Third-person singular, impersonal se, ya’ll.

However, this guy does say something quite strange to us, and this is precisely where red flags should have gone up in all of our heads.

“Hey, don’t you guys remember me from the hotel this morning?”

No, dude, we do not remember you from the hotel this morning. At least, we are pretty sure we don’t. Although we should be concerned at this point, more than anything, I think we’re just confused.

So we keep walking a little bit, and this RayBanned dude is walking a little bit ahead of us, safely not part of our group. However, after about thirty meters, he stops, waits up for us, and points to a large building across the street.

“That is the nicest hotel in Africa right there.”

Uh, sweet.

“Yeah, Winston Churchill stayed there, and Sarkozy, whenever he’s in Marrakech,” he says as he scans are not-that-impressed-but-just-confused faces, “that’s the only place he stay.”

Uh.

“You should stay there sometime if you get a chance.”

Uh.

So at this point, we think this guy must work for the hotel. We think we’re all in tune with the locals now, understanding what they’re thinking, seeing the other sides to their games. We’ve got ‘em figured out, this guy is totally trying to get us –

The guy keeps walking ahead of us, acting like he doesn’t care at all whether we follow him or not. And that right there, my friends, was the kernel of his genius. The nonchalance, the lackadaisical gait, the aura that he gave off, that he had better things to do than to hang out with us. But the thing is, that we should have noticed right away, is that he kept stopping to conveniently point things out to us, give us nice historical tidbits. The problem was, he adroitly skirted the line between “I don’t really care, I’m just a nice guy” and “tour guide”. He had us hook-in-mouth from the beginning I think, and I think he knew it.

            After about seven minutes of off-and-on walking towards the medina with this shadow-character, this short-of-stature but tall-of-poise man, we make the fatal mistake of letting him know we’re hungry, somehow, I forget either directly or indirectly.

            “I will take you to the finest restaurant in Djemma el-Fna. Riad Omar”

            Shit, now we’re stuck with him.

            He continues on, “You see, most tourists go to the stands in the square, they get sick, they don’t like it, they don’t know what they are doing.” (He spoke in these chopped sentence fragments. That was pretty awesome, actually. For a linguistics nerd like me at least.)

            So “Mustafa”, as we soon learn he calls himself, oh-so beneficently guides us through the libertine madness of Djemma el-Fna to a relatively hole-in-the-wall establishment on a smaller side street. The door to “Riad Omar” is non-descript and is a place no tourist would ever select without prior knowledge of its existence. Or, of course, someone leading them towards it specifically. Despite all of these signs being presented to us of what was happening, we continue on, ascending the stairs to the restaurant. Mustafa presents us to the waiter and said, “Here, he will take care of you. And oh, if you want, I’ll come back after you all have finished desert and I can show you around a little bit more.”

            Uhhh. We all look at each other. What do we say here? Do we tell him “Hey, no thanks, we’re good. We don’t need any more help!”

            Nope, we sort-of nod our heads and assent.

            Mustafa smiles and says, “OK, great. I’ll be back in a little bit to get you. Enjoy your meal!”

            Shiiiiit. We are terrible at this! However, the food is really, really good. I would safely say that it is one of the best meals I have ever head. Cous-cous, veggies, and young-n-tender-just-how-I-like-it lamb. Mmmm.

Plus, the restaurant is on the roof of the building and we can see all around Marrakech, all the way to the Atlas mountains standing sentry over the city to the west.

            

So we eat and enjoy the view and we talk about how maybe, just maybe, Mustafa is in fact legitimate, and just wants to show us around. Interestingly though, like clockwork, as soon as we finish our meal - as if he were called from the heavens - Mustafa shows up on the roof of the restaurant, all smiles. "My friends, did you like the food?"

Uh.

Almost done. One more part coming up.

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.