Good God Granada

Ross and I took a 5 hour bus ride from Madrid to Granada that in no way resembled the horrendous bus rides we were subjected to in Morocco, in that nobody flung orange peels at my face and the rest stop looked like someplace humans could live, rather than the dimension Pinhead in Hellraiser comes from.

But Granada is really cool. They have a unique local food called tapas, which is essentially a beer and a piece of food somewhere in between an appetizer and an entree. They usually cost about 2 dollars. Ross considers this to be some kind of fantastic deal, and does nothing all day but eat tapas and ask me if I want to go get some more tapas.

We recently decided that we need a budget if this trip is going to last longer than 3 weeks, so Ross and I decided to stick to about 10 Euros a day, with rollover Euros within the week, but not across the Sunday-Monday divide, coffee and beer excluded. Fortunately, we decided that tapas count as beer.

Kilometro Cero

I´m in Madrid now, although there is a lot I still want to say about Morocco.

Sucks for you Morocco. The first thing I noticed about Madrid was the size. I guess in terms of population, Madrid is about equal with Casablanca, both weighing in at a respectable 3 million, but when I got a look at the Madrid metro map, I was thoroughly intimidated. That thing is a hydra-like beast, serpentine and multi-headed. I had seriously never seen so many lines and transfer stations. So Ross and I disembarked from Easyjet Flight U2 277Y, and upon being confronted with this beastly map, could do nothing but stare dumbfounded.

Fortunately, it turns out that the Madrid Metro is really well designed, and the signs in the transfer stations are printed in such a way that it is almost impossible to get on the wrong train, and the future transfer points and transfer lines are also clearly indicated. So I did that. I bought a ticket for 10 journeys, because Madrid apparently refuses to use a card and credit system for its metro, and I rode around, creepily ogling the cute Spanish girls, with their delightful propensity to wear Converses, and their unsettling desire to wear disgusting, pajama-sized jeans. as well as being harassed by itinerant musicians, who wheel about homemade portable karaoke machines, which they use to torture entire cars full of people until the victims deposit their strange European currency into a hat. It is a weird custom.

I guess that isn´t so weird. But I did notice one uniquely Spanish thing while riding the metro. When Ross and I first rode into Barrio de la Concepcion, which is the closest stop to the person whose couch we are sleeping on, I saw what looked like a "slippery when wet" sign guarding a large pile of sawdust. 3 days later, the pile was still there. Apparently the customary Spanish solution for leaks, and other water related crises is to throw sawdust around and forget about it, which helps explain why the Spanish had such a difficult time hanging on to the Netherlands in the 1600s.

Taxis, buses, donkeys

Morocco is a pretty large country, but can get pretty sparsely populated on the edges. In the densely populated areas, i.e. the routes between Marrakesh, Rabat, Casablanca, Tangiers, and Fez, there are regular trains and buses. But in the frontier regions, particulaly the dusty towns near the Sahara Desert, traditional transportation tends to..... breakdown, for lack of a better word. Fortunately, a combination of Moroccan entrepeneurship and good samaritism, (or its Koranic equivalent) have combined forces to allow people to move from village to village with an adjective that comes very close to reliably.

The first line of defense is the long distance taxi. I don't know how this institution began, but it is by far the most interesting piece of the Moroccan transportation pie. In all towns, regardless of size, there is an area that can best be described as the taxi depot. There, a host of Moroccan dudes stand idly by their impossibly old and improbably held together Mercedes while shouting the name of the city they are headed. After you find your driver, it is simply a matter of waiting for 5 other passengers (4 in the back, 2 in the front with the driver) heading the same way.

Of course, once the journey is underway, the taxi driver is free to make extra money by picking up anybody he sees on the side of road. I don't know if there is an upper limit to the amount of people allowed into one Mercedes, but can personally testify to at least 12, including the driver.

There are also huge Volkswagen vans prowling the highway system that will stop for anyone and charge an amount of money ranging between 0 and 20 dirham, which is worked out according to a rule system so arcane, I assume it takes a whole life lived in Morocco to understand.

Moroccan Internet Cafes

I would wager that roughly 1/17th of my time in Morocco has been spent either in search of a cyber, or waiting for the horrendously slow Moroccan internet to load gmail. The Moroccan system of internet cafes, or cybers, has a few rules that I've been able to deduce as I watch the white screen with the small, red "loading..." sign in the bottom right that tells me my gmail account is a mere 3-4 minutes away.

1. The farther away from Casablanca you get, the slower the internet will be.

2. Never ask the staff for help, because they probably know less about computers than your grandmother. (Once, I couldn't log in to skype because there was a new version available, but the internet was so slow that the new version would take 6 hours to download. I called the staff guy over, and he proceeded to delete all the cookies on the computer, individually, and told me to try logging in again. I tried, naturally it didn't work, and again, he deleted the 1 new cookie, and told me to log in again. This happened 4 times.)

3. Never look at another person's monitor, because you won't like what you see.

In a tiny desert town called Tazzerine, where Ross and I were stranded in for one night, we were directed by a friendly seeming Spanish-speaking Moroccan to a small cyber described as "muy tranquilo." We went in, waited ages for the computer to boot up, logged into gmail, snuck in a quick bit of meditation while my inbox loaded, and finally managed to read one email before the power went out. Ross and I looked at eachother, shrugged, and repeated the process, power outage and all, after which we told the manager "nos vamos." He gave us a look of understanding and resignation, and said we didn't have to pay.

Later we found out that the entire town suffers from intermittent power outages, which makes me wonder why anyone would attempt to open a cyber at all.

Rabat deux

So it turns out Rabat is the capital of Morocco. Embarassing. For me, not Morocco. Rabat is a really cool city. Yesterday I went to the medina, which I understand to be Arabic for the old walled city, usually containing the souks, which are the open air markets full of snake charmers and monkey wranglers, among other less savory characters.

Ross and I went to the beach, which had 2 lonely surfers and a horde of kids playing soccer on the beach, with the requisite old Moroccan gentlemen drinking coffee on the shore. Ross and I joined the old Moroccan gentlemen for a bit of coffee and gossip, then went down to the beach and inexplicably began collecting very small seashells. Time well spent.

I still don't know if they are policing tourists or policing for tourists.

Rabat

I'm in Rabat right now, which is a town on the coast of Morocco. We are staying with a French girl named Sophia and her German roommate. Sophia works for an NGO which does microfinance, although she said her major was in history, which made me happy.

Ross and I spent most of the morning having coffee at a beach side cafe, which is apparently something that all Moroccan men tend to do. I have yet to see a woman drinking coffee in a coffee shop. I am half inclined to think this would be a good tradition in America as well, although eavesdropping would become a lot less humorous.

Men in coffee shops are invariably seated facing towards the street. Only once did I see a guy sitting with his back towards the street, and I couldn't help but think of wolf packs, and that he was definitely the mangy wolf in the back with last dibs on sweet caribou meat.

Planes, Planes and Automobiles

It has been awhile since I wrote anything in this blog, but I'm finally traveling again, although this time I'm going to the White Continent, which is a brand new experience for me.

I woke up at 5:00 this morning. Rather, I was woken up at 5:00 this morning, after getting home at 1 and packing until 3:30. Now, I don’t usually need or get a lot of sleep, but this is pushing it, even for someone as Circadian rhythmically-challenged as I. I want to say that despite arriving at the airport an hour and a half early, my family still almost missed our flight, but that really isn’t true. My dad just has a tendency to freak out when airline employees are criminally slow in their baggage checking. After berating a few Delta employees and smuggling toothpaste through security, we made it to our flight with time to spare for the McDonald’s breakfast that I have come to associate with San Diego departures.

My grandparents were apparently lost in JFK, which, in previous years, wouldn’t have been so frightening, but my grandpa has recently become extremely mobile, thanks to his new scooter, and I was forced to imagine him riding through the terminals pinching the asses of any flight attendants who can’t recognize a mischievous grin. But I guess that turned out alright. There aren’t any lawsuits that I’m aware of, anyhow. I was busy catching up with Evan, who is at school in New York and decided to swing by JFK for a drink, no big deal.

Finally, after a 6 hour layover, we got on the plane to Budapest, where I sat next to two overfriendly Romanians name Ilena and Arpi. I’m not sure about the spelling on either of those, particularly “Arpi,” but I am hoping that “Arpi” is not actually RP, some strange Romanian equivalent to JR or LT. Anyway, they were very nice, despite being from Transylvania.

Now I am sitting in the Budapest Marriot on Sunday morning, although it feels like Friday night, and “this morning” actually occurred 40 hours ago. I feel spastic in time.

The drive into Budapest from the airport was kind of boring. I saw 3 McDonalds, two KFCs and a Burger King. There were also some gas stations, but the prices seemed like San Diego’s from 4 months ago. That is probably because of the wacky Hungarian money, called a Forint, which exchanges at 200 FT to 1 dollar, unless you are me and trade with gypsies, in which case the exchange rate drops to around 170 to 1.