Spain and the Conclusion of my Adventures (at least for now)

In a week I'll be flying back to the states. So I guess  this will be the last entry in my blog. Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of this project.

 

After the lovely weather in Tangier, (70-80° F), the heat of Spain hit us like a ton of bricks. It was in the high 40s C, (well over 100 F) without a breath of wind. I don't do very well in extreme climates and I was pretty sure I was going to die. I was NOT excited about standing on the side of the road to hitch a ride to Sevilla, especially since all the hitchhiking forums had said Spain is horrible for hitching. However my bad karma is leaving a place, not coming into a place, and we caught a ride within about 20 seconds.

We were picked up by a Polish trucker who spoke no English or Spanish but was very nice. He gave us chocolate and explained how he had a truck filled with crabs from Africa. We had to draw a map to make sure he was going where we were going but it all worked out in the end. He took us directly to Sevilla, the easiest hitchhiking experience I have ever had. He dropped us off near downtown and we were able to walk very easily to the house of Rafael, our Spanish couchsurfing host.

Rafael is an interesting character. After many denied requests for places to stay in Madrid and Sevilla, I had posted an emergency couch request and Rafael contacted me. I get the impression he likes to be the night in shining armor that saves girls in need. He was very sweet, and very helpful but he hosts a LOT of surfers and I got the impression that his roommate Hannah has had enough guests. She turned out to be nice too however and I was really grateful to them for hosting us. They gave us a lot of good information about places to eat. Natalee was on an eternal quest to eat churros but we seemed to have the worst churro luck in the world, and could never find any.

Sevilla is a great city. The architecture is so beautiful and intricate. There is a fantastic palace where you can really see the Arabic influence in the mosaics. The detail is incredible.  Every room has a fountain in it. It really made me want a house with a fountain in my living room, but first I need to find a place to live, and then afterwards try to put in a fountain. I loved the palace, it had the same sort of architecture that I had been hoping to see in Eastern Europe but could never seem to find. There was also a great network of subterranean tunnels and baths under the palace. I really wanted to go explore them but you can only go in a little part of them. They're all lit up and very cool in the heat of the day. I wanted to stay down there forever but Natalee said we had other things to do.

Natalee had two goals in Spain- to go dance Salsa and to eat tapas. Tapas are the coolest thing ever. A tapa is a meal but really tiny and only costs a couple euros. You get a lot and then share. I love it. It's like food in miniature, and you can try a bunch of different dishes without getting hugely fat.  I got really excited about them and I think I drove Natalee insane with my tapas obsession. Our second day in Sevilla we went Salsa dancing. I have never tried it and I can safely say I only stepped in a few toes. Natalee is actually really good and I think all the guys there were in love with her. As for myself I felt a little out of place and very clumsy, but it was nice to get out. The only time you can really get out in Sevilla is in the middle of the night, since it's so hot during the day.

While in Sevilla an American girl from couchsurfing contacted me. She had seen on the site that I was in Sevilla and she messaged me to tell me that she and her husband had passed through Algeciras and Sevilla on their honeymoon. However they had left their camera with all their honeymoon photos on the bus from Algeciras to Sevilla. Daniella had tracked the camera down to the bus station in Sevilla and wanted to know if I could pick it up and meet her in Oakland so she could get the pictures. I agreed to try to get it for them and there started an epic adventure to procure said camera. Natalee and I stopped by the bus station but the girl there told us she had no idea what we were talking about. I contacted Danielle for more information and she told us the camera had been sent by bus to the station and that she was sure it was there. I talked to her for ages and got a list of information, then enlisted Hannah, the roommate of our couchsurfing host to come help. We went back to the station (stopping several times on the way to avoid dying of heat stroke) with our list of details and asked to speak to the manager. Maybe he had been trying to keep the camera for himself, but he seemed a little intimidated by the three of us showing up at the window and handed over the camera, with all the photos intact. It made my day and Danielle was over the moon that we had safely obtained her photos. I'll meet up with her and her husband in the fall to give her the camera. They have a house in Paraguay and she has offered an open door there whenever I want to come. I might take her up on that, I would love to see Paraguay.

We stayed three days in Sevilla, and were planning on hitching to Madrid, but there was a slight problem with our second couchsurfing host in Sevilla so we ended up taking a horrible 6-hour night bus to Madrid. Natalee is gifted with the ability to sleep sitting up but I spent a miserable night on the floor of the bus trying ineffectually to sleep. We rolled into Madrid at 5am and sat in the bus station until the sun came up. This all became OK for me when we made the acquaintance of a lovely hippy guy in the bus station. He was having a hard time finding a computer and Natalee and I rushed to his aid. He was surprised we offered to help; he said most people seemed to think he was shady because of his dreadlocks. I told him we like hippies with dreadlocks.

We had been unable to find a couchsurfing host in Madrid, so we splurged and spent three nights in a wonderful hostel. It was a really nice way to end our trip because it was great to have a place to put our stuff while we explored the city. The hostel had a kitchen where we could cook food, and due to our tight budget we ended up having a lot of pasta. There were a lot of interesting people at the hostel and we immediately made a tight group of friends with a Dutch girl, an insane Serbian hippy, and two Brazilian guys. We all went out for tapas and beer but ended up getting a little drunk and into a little trouble. However I avoided getting into a fight, getting arrested, getting injured and waking up to someone regretful, so I consider the night a success. The Dutch girl is halfway through medical school so she and I talked a lot about it. It seems that if med school is really something that interests me then I should go in Europe. 

I didn't take as advantage of Madrid as much as I wanted. I was tired most of the time, maybe still from the Ramadan schedule, or maybe because I'm a little depressed about going back to the states. Natalee ended up getting up early to see the city while I slept all morning, but I got out a little. I spent a lot of time wandering through a beautiful park in the center of town. I like being alone sometimes, and there were almost no tourists.

We went to a couple museums that have free hours in the evening. They were crowded but it's really nice for them to offer free hours. They feel that it betters society to offer free art to the public, which I completely agree with.

The Prado museum is the second largest in the world, after the Louvre (which we couldn't afford to go to). It had some really interesting art, mostly old and religious. I get a little tired of Jesus art; I can only look at so many paintings in one day. Jesus is blond and blue-eyed in every one. I would really like to see one that showed what Jesus actually looked like but he lived thousands of years ago and there are so many stories about him that I think no one will ever really know anything about  him for sure. There was a really interesting painting that explained the creation of the Milky Way. It showed a huge fat woman squeezing her breast and spraying milk that became stars. It was quite odd.

The next day we visited the Museum de la Rena Sophia, which is mostly modern art. It might have been my favorite museum on my travels. They organized the art by date and they had some fantastic pieces. I saw Picasso, Dali, Kandinsky (a personal favorite of mine) as well a lot of others. Some of the art I didn't like but most of it I loved. They had apiece about the Kennedy assassination, which was really interesting. One of my favorite pieces was a room at the end of a long hallway. I entered the room to find the artist had told the story of the Obama election with laws signs. It was so emotional for me, having worked on the campaign and been so involved with that election. There were McCain signs and Hillary signs but they mostly were Obama. There were signs as well that said things like, "McCain fan, you stole our Obama sign but you can't steal our vote". It just reminded me of that year and how the country so united, everyone talking about the election and everyone trying so hard to get him elected. Everyone I know can tell you where they were that night we all watched it on TV, gradually realizing he was going to win. I have never known the country to be that unified. And now no one can agree with anyone else and I'm terrified the insane Republicans will take the presidency. All this came down on my head while I stood in that room filled with Obama signs and I can't deny I may have shed a tear or two. I wish desperately I didn't care about politics, that I could live in blissful ignorance like so many Americans. Traveling abroad for so many months has really made me see America in a different light, especially when I'm in places where there is such a strong youth movement. I am continually frustrated by my people and it feels like the change I try to bring about never seems to do anything. It's a strong argument for me to plan to go to school in another country, maybe to take advantage of my British citizenship. When frustrated with your country how long should you try to make it better before you throw in the towel and say fuck it, I'm going somewhere else?

Anyway. The museum was fantastic and I was so happy that we got to see all that art. After that we walked home through the city. Near the museum there is a fantastic living wall that is at least 5 stories tall. I was so impressed by it; there were a dozen different kinds of plants. I want one of those in my house too, along with a fountain in each room. (My house is going to be the coolest ever...)

There is also a fantastic house that looks like the architect was on acid. It's covered with faces and squid and flowers and is totally hectic and crazy. I loved it, and went out of our way to show Natalee. It was designed for a banker and is held as a meeting point for officials.

Our last night in Spain we came back to the hostel to find we had a new roommate in our dorm. Until then we had enjoyed the dorm with only me and Natalee and two lovely Dutch girls. However our new roommate was quite a character. He was a Spaniard apparently from Madrid, and had no bags or belongings. We couldn't figure out what he was doing in our hostel and we wouldn't get a straight answer out of him because he was blind drunk. Over a course of several hours he took five showers, each time using my towel and my roommates' shampoo. Then so smoked a bunch of cigarettes in the bathroom. It was quite unfortunate. When the Dutch girls tried to confront him he told them it wasn't necessary to be worried, because he's gay and "big men fuck him many times". In the end we asked that he be moved to another room, which was a situation that worked out for all involved. It was an interesting end of our trip. However the awkwardness of our encounter with the drunken Spaniard was made better by Natalee finally finding churros. They were quite nice.

Early the next morning we headed out to the airport, Natalee to go back to the US and me to go back to spend a week more with my family before flying back to the states for the Burning Man festival. After only 6 months I have very few connections to Bay Area, I have no job or house to go back to, and only 18 cents in my bank account. However I'm excited to see my friends so I figure I'll stay around the bay area at least for a couple months. I can't decide if I'm happy to go back. I'm sure after all this time I'll experience severe culture shock and I'm definitely not looking forward to the stress of having to figure out my life. But I feel like I really need to start being an adult and maybe getting my shit together in terms of a career.

 I have had the greatest time traveling, getting to visit three continents and more than a dozen countries and I can't wait to see other exotic places, possibly visiting Saudi Arabia in the spring to go diving in the Red Sea, one of the best dive sites in the world. I have made the most amazing friends and seen the craziest things, climbed a mountain and got stung by jellyfish and somehow avoided getting arrested by the Greek and Italian police. I hitchhiked with a bunch of meth heads and narrowly avoided having to prostitute myself at the Turkish border. I think I took some Canadian guy's virginity (oops...) and broke a French guy's nose in the middle of the night and managed to not get sold to the illegal organs trade (my mother is relieved). I was almost forced to convert to Islam and I can bargain with a Moroccan merchant in Spanish, French and Arabic. I can say, "you are the nicest goat" in Dutch and can tell an Arab man to enjoy his Ramadan hunger.

I'd say that isn't half bad.

Ramadan in Morocco

Ah. The long awaited continuation. Having no computer, it has been too hard to find a place to work on my blog. So I had to wait a couple months.

It was so weird coming back to the house I partially grew up in.

I caught a ride to Cluny, the nearest town to my parents' house. As we drove through the town I passed my Junior High (hideous place) and the bench where I had my first kiss and the place I fell off a horse once and thought I was dead because I knocked the wind out of my lungs and couldn't breath. The guy I was hitching with was so amazed that I was finally coming back after 8 years that he went out of his way to drive me all the way to my parents' house 10 minutes outside town. My mom cried when I came home. She cries a lot, when she reads the news, when she watched Love Actually, when one of her kids stresses her out or makes her happy. She's a very intense, emotional person.

Nothing here has changed. It's as though the French countryside is frozen in time. The neighbors put in another window and the field that used to grow alfalfa now grows grass. My being here is apparently a big deal though because everyone wanted to come look at me and say how much I had grown. (Not true by the way, I was 17 the last time I was here and exactly the same height). Also I have no more friends here. The boy I was in love with when I lived here is now in jail and all the people I used to hang out with have moved away. It's pretty lonely.

I made promise to my parents that I would put in a month of work for them on their old farmhouse. They have been fixing it up since before I can remember and the progress is slow. They don't agree on anything and there are always problems. I thought originally I would be doing some work at the hospital here but that fell through and so I found myself living alone with the parents for the first time in about 10 years. It's beautiful here but I was slowly beginning to go insane spending so much quality time with mom and dad. I hadn't really talked to my father in over a year which made things a little awkward but generally I think we all have handled it with a lot of grace. I have a short temper and everything my mother does seems to drive me insane, and this is compounded by the fact that we have nowhere to get away from each other.

Piet and Mieke came to visit which was nice. They got totally wasted with my parents and danced to 60s music.
Piet pretended to be ashamed of the women but I think he actually liked it. 

Also there is no Internet so keeping in touch with people has been pretty difficult. We almost had Internet in the village but because of village drama it still doesn't work here. The deal is the mayor of Chateau (our town) is a Nugue. The Nugue family has a long-standing rivalry with the Petit family. When the village had to decide if they were going to get the Internet, the Nugues were pro-Internet and the Petits think the Internet causes cancer. Being the mayor, Mr. Nugue won the debate and put up the pole for the Internet connection. However, being the vindictive bastard he is, he put it up right in front of the Petit house. The pole only lasted 24 hours before someone sawed it down in the night. That was the last attempt to have Internet in Chateau and thanks to the stubbornness of French farmers I am cut off from the world.

Despite the fact that they drive me insane, it's nice to see my parents. As a teenager I always thought they ruined me raising me but now I think they did pretty well.    

My first week in France, my dad and I went to Geneva, Switzerland, which is two hours away by train. It was nice to get to visit, I enjoyed seeing a city that is so important politically. Also there are free bikes there as part of a plan to make people drive less so we were able to get around easily for free. Also there is a huge fountain in the middle of the lake that is especially cool, it shoots 7 tons of water into the air and is 140 meters high. You can walk out to it and get totally wet so we did. The lake is beautiful and we got to visit the Botanical Garden where I continued my constant search for salamanders. I feel like my life is divided into two parts: half is spent looking for salamanders and fish and half is worrying about money. Geneva was nice because my dad payed for pretty much everything so I got to not have to worry about money for the first time in ages. However after Greece there is a sad lack of fish in Switzerland. The water of the lake was so beautiful but there were no fish to be seen, nor salamanders. We managed to have a good time anyway. Geneva has great street names, like Purgatory road and what I believe is Chicken-shit road. They also have a really awkward church that unsuccessfully combines a bunch of styles of architecture. 

The Burble rolled in from Romania after I had been here for two weeks. It's really nice to have him here, except he snores too much. Together he and I have had lots of adventures, including our current obsession, which is exploring the abandoned hospital in the next village. The hospital was a TB hospital in WWII and then possibly a psychiatric facility. Now the entire place is empty. It's massive and creepy. There is still a bunch of stuff there as though the occupants just left everything and ran from some dark unseen force. There are all the patient files still (the EMT in me is horrified at the HIPAA violation) and there are still a lot of meds as well as wheelchairs and gurneys. It's seriously the creepiest place ever. There is only one way to get in and out, so if there are things in there trying to get you, they could easily trap you on any of the 6 floors. This includes a basement and subbasement and attic. The basement we explored but the subbasement was too creepy even for me. It apparently has tunnels in it that were used to evacuate mental patients to other buildings but we haven't explored them yet. The whole place has an horrible feeling that something dead and slimy is going to latch onto some part of you and drag you into a room to eat you. It looks exactly like the set of 28 Days Later. Every time we visit I am fairly certain I am going to die there. Hospitals are creepy in general and there is no way this one isn't haunted by the ghosts of insane TB patients. I plan to shoot a horror movie there someday.

The Burble, to everyone's horror, has managed to get Lyme Disease. This isn't serious if caught on time and we think he'll be OK. He caught the symptoms along with the trademark bull's eye around the tick bite. I think it's fascinating.

We spent the 14th of July (la fete de la bastille) in Lyon with Hugo. It was great to see him again and we made some plans for him to come visit me in California, possibly in November. We split a bottle of cheap champagne and watched the fireworks. Fireworks always seem pretty ironic to me. Everyone ooooos and ahhhhhs and talks about how beautiful they are and no one seems to care that they symbolize bombs. I got into a slight altercation that night that involved my breaking my hand on someone's nose. Hugo was horrified but I think he still likes me. That reminds me, I should make sure we're cool, since he seemed pretty traumatized by my un-ladylike behavior.

My good friend Natalee arrived in France on the 19th of July to travel with me for three weeks. I went to the airport to pick her up. Natalee and I haven't really seen much of each other the past year so it was amazing to see her in Europe. We were instantly engaged in a fierce political debate, mutually sympathizing about the horrors of Mitt Romney and the idiocy of the Tea Party. We were so involved in our discussion that I passed the exit of the freeway that would have taken us home. I didn't realize this until we were a good 125 km out of our way. With the time it took us to get off the freeway and turn around we had to pay and extra 40$, fill up the gas in the tank ($60) and drive almost 300 km more than intended. We were almost 5 hours late back to he house and my parents were out of their minds with worry and immediately revoked my driving privileges. However after this slight mishap (which used up most of the money I had hoped to have for Spain), we arrived at my parents' house. It's a really nice piece of property and Natalee was thrilled to get to hike around the trails in the area.

The plan was to travel with my parents to Vezeley, a beautiful town in the north, and then to Guedelon, where some people are building a medieval manor house using only the tools and techniques that were available in the 10th century. It's pretty touristy but it's cool to see them working. The architecture is all the more spectacular when you think that they are creating the building with no modern tools. We also got to see an amazing show where they reenacted the last ten centuries or so of French history. It was done in a huge field and had 600 people and 50 horses. It was pretty epic. It was a little stressful for me because after more than a month with my family I was sort of feeling that I needed some time away from my parents. So they dropped us off in the town of Nevers and we headed to Paris for three days before flying to Morocco.

Paris has never really appealed to me. Many of the Parisians seem stuck up to me and in July it's so filled with tourists that you can go weeks without even hearing French. However Natalee couldn't go to Europe for the first time and not see Paris. And actually I ended up having a really good time there. We got to stay with Vincent, one of the French guys who saved me at the Turkish border.

The first day in Paris we walked across the city, fascinated by the flawless Parisian legs. The French women are seriously gifted with long perfect leg genes. Walking through the city in jeans with huge backpacks, we were sweaty and dirty and we felt incredibly out of place wandering through throngs of women with perfect teeth, hair, nails, clothes and bodies. We ended up doing a lot of sitting and people watching, because it was hot as hell and our backpacks were getting heavier by the minute.

People watching in Paris is amazing. The women are always great to see and there are also tourists from every country imaginable. We played 'Spot the American' for a while (white cotton socks with tennis shoes, huge expensive camera they don't know how to use, map of Paris, loud offensive butchering of place names), then watched some hippies get into a fight with a cop who didn't want them on the lawn.  We also walked to the bridge where thousands of couples have attached locks to the railing. People really go all out, they get locks engraved. It was cool, except a little silly and romantic. There were also tons of people making out, I guess Paris is supposed to be romantic or something.

Then it was time to meet Vincent.

Vincent took us to his house near Bois do Bologne where we had a floor all to ourselves, shared with an evil cat and a large black wild guinea pig with dreadlocks. The cat was horrible, so neurotic that he yowled all night and kept us up. The guinea pig, who lives in the back yard, is incredibly friendly and comes to say hi to you when you go outside.

Our second day we decided to do "tourist things". We climbed the Eiffel Tower, (in all the time I lived in France I had never done this. It's like living in San Francisco and never having gone to Alcatraz.) This was actually pretty cool, it's really high and you can see an amazing view from the top. From there I saw a fountain where people appeared to be swimming. This was a shock to me because I have been trying to swim in fountains from one side of Europe to the other and no one lets me. So we headed down from the tower and sure enough, there were people swimming in the fountain at Trocadero. I jumped right in in all my clothes and finally got to swim in a fountain. This made my day.

Our last day in Paris we were so sick of tourists that we headed out to Montmartre to wander around and try to find some French people. We walked up to Sacre Coeur and saw the Moulin Rouge and the cemetery of Montmartre.

It's a beautiful place and the graves are massive. Some of them had statues on them of the dead people which seemed really kind of creepy. Why would your relatives want to look at a statue of your dead body?
At some point they built an overpass over part of it which is an odd clash of times.

Sacre Coeur was nice too, except walking up to the church is an ordeal. There are guys the whole way  up selling bracelets and they're really aggressive, they grab your hand and try to tie the bracelet on so they can make you pay for it. I've come to hate strangers touching me and this really bothered me. Once us there though the view is spectacular.
 

We had dinner with Vincent and Pierre, who tried desperately to keep us there but our flight to Tangier was at 5am and we were due at the airport around 4. There are no trains to the airport at that hour so we resigned ourselves to a night on an airport bench. I had neglected to mention to Natalee how cursed I am when it comes to getting out of countries in the hopes it would be a smooth transition from France to Morocco. It wasn't.

(On a side note: I seriously am cursed. Getting out of the Netherlands we hitchhiked with some insane punks who decided they needed lots of Speed (which the driver did while driving) and beer on the road to keep them awake, and we didn't get to Germany until 3am. Getting out of Romania I stabbed myself in the leg with a piece of a spaghetti sauce bottle and had to cut my backpack apart to get all the shards of glass out. Also the people at the border leaving Romania tried to get me to prostitute myself for a Turkish Visa. Leaving Turkey I had to sit on a bus for 19 hours and spent what everyone said was a record long time waiting at the Greek border. Leaving Greece I had to catch a ferrie at 5am because I was worried I was going to get arrested. The ferrie cost almost all the rest of the money I had to my name. Leaving Italy I couldn't get a train and had to sleep in the train station where an old Italian man tried to seduce me and then I woke up to the Italian police poking me.

Leaving France and Morocco were equally stressful, but I'll get to that later. The point is that I have a curse when it comes to leaving countries. I should just stay in one place forever.)

Anyway. We got stopped by security while trying to hop the barrier onto the platform to catch the train to the airport. The security lady was very nice though, and ended up helping us get tickets. There was no train to the airport at that time, despite everyone telling us repeatedly that there was. So we had to take two trains and a bus. However we got to the airport and settled down for a couple of hours of sleep before catching our flight to Africa.

Arriving at the airport we got our passports stamped (Natalee was very excited about this) and headed out to get a cab. Riding into the city we were suddenly aware that we had left the comfort of Western Europe behind. Morocco is nothing like Europe. It's 97% Muslim, so the women show little skin and no hair. It feels like a totally different world. It's a feeling that is hard to describe, but that travelers will understand immediately. The rush I get when I suddenly find myself in a foreign place, where I can't even read the writing is incredible. After traveling for months around Europe I felt thrilled to be back on the road, in a place so different than anywhere I had been before. We were glued to the windows of the cab as we drove into town. I felt as though I had just stepped into a book, maybe Paulo Cohelo's The Alchemist, part of which takes place in Morocco and which every traveler seems to be reading.

We were supposed to meet our Tangier couchsurfing host at 9am by the fountain in Grande Socco. The problem was that no one could tell us the time. Clocks all said different things, and each person we asked was certain they knew, but all told us different times. This caused us a great deal of stress because we arrived to find the square in Grande Socco deserted and we weren't sure if we had missed her because it was 10am or if she hadn't yet arrived because it was 8am. People were also staring at us in our T-shirts with bare arms. I suddenly felt naked and slightly concerned. There is always that moment when couchSurfing where I wonder what on earth I'm going to do if my host just doesn't show up. This happened to us in Prague but in Czech there are hostels. In Morocco it seems there are no hostels and Tangier is a somewhat harsher city than Prague. What's more, there was NO ONE in the streets and it turned out we had arrived in the middle of Ramadan. Just as I was contemplating a small freak-out, a little white girl entered the square and introduced herself as Serena, our CS host. Fortunately it was 9am instead of 10, 12 or 6. As it turns out the government sets back the clocks during Ramadan so it gets dark at 7pm instead of 10. This way you get to eat earlier. (As irritated we were at the time this turned out to be the best idea ever.)

Our host Serena is an American who randomly decided to have an adventure and move to Morocco where she works as a librarian at the local American school. She and her friend Erin live in a fantastic apartment near the center with a naughty but very friendly cat named Loki. Loki immediately adopted us and snuggled onto my lap as soon as I sat down. He and Serena have an odd relationship which seems to consist of Loki trying to do things he's not supposed to and Serena getting irritated at him. She hisses at him like a cat when he does anything he's not supposed to do, and he runs away horrified and hides for about 30 seconds. He has a silly but very appealing personality. Serena and Erin are observing Ramadan so we decided to do this as well. I didn't give this very much though, though I probably should have, considering my deep love of food.

Morocco during Ramadan is weird. People do everything they can to pass the time and not think about their hunger. They do it well through. They sleep in until noon or the afternoon and take lots of naps after that. They lie around a lot and take it very easy. This means most places are closed during the day. As the day progresses however, you can feel this rising tension as people get hungry and begin to anticipate getting to eat when the sun falls. People start to drive crazy and get aggressive with each other on the streets. You can't eat until they call prayers around 7:30, so gradually everyone gravitates to the window straining to hear that song from the nearest Mosque telling them they can finally break their fast.

People usually eat a light meal at sundown, then another big meal around midnight. Then they eat again around 4am right before they call the first prayer of the day telling them it's time to fast again. I fell quickly into the routine of sitting on the window ledge in the evenings watching the street and waiting desperately for eating time. You don't really use clocks there, you make your plans by the prayers 5 times a day. It's taken me more than a week to get out of the Ramadan schedule now that I'm back in Western Europe. After sundown, businesses start to open and as prayers finish people head out into the streets for the night. These are different people than during the day- happy and excited and friendly. No longer hungry, the city empties into the streets to drink tea and orange juice and to socialize. It's like a party.

Over the week we developed our own Ramadan schedule. Waking up around noon or 1, we would lie in bed for an hour or so, in my case reading every news article online in an attempt to get an idea of how the November election will go. Then we would go out for a couple hours to do our food shopping for the evening. This must be done as early as possible because it's incredibly hard to shop for food when you are starving and feel like your stomach is eating itself. After that we headed back to the house for our Ramadan ritual- passing the time by watching the Alien movies, usually jumping up in the middle as we heard them call prayers and running into the kitchen to eat the food that we had been staring at during the whole day. I love the Ramadan schedule, and I felt great while I was there. It's been so hard to get out of, and I still can't eat much during the day. It's a perfect schedule for me, sleeping late and staying up late. Around midnight we would go out into the city, usually with Serena's friend Neil to find a restaurant. Neil is an interesting character. I think he has an IQ of about 150 but as a result I often have no idea what he's talking about. Also he can teleport. I was told this before meeting him but I didn't believe it until I saw it for myself. He will be behind you and suddenly he's walking out of a door a hundred meters down the street and you have no idea how he got there. It's really quite extraordinary. Also he doesn't eat, and all of this leads me to believe he's an android. He's really sweet though. After dinner, (and Neal study), we would head back to sleep for a few hours before getting up at 4am when we would stagger into the kitchen to force ourselves to eat something that would hopefully get us through the next day.

In Tangier they speak Arabic, Darisha, Berber, with some Spanish and some French. With Natalee speaking Spanish and me speaking French we got along pretty well, as well as throwing in a couple of Arabic phrases we learned along the way. The Moroccans are thrilled when you try to speak their language and we became instantly popular with cab drivers and shopkeepers by dropping in an occasional Salam alikoum or ramadan mubarak, which is the standard Ramadan greeting. One cab driver was so excited by our two Arabic phrases, as well as the news that we were celebrating Ramadan, that he threw up his hands and praised Allah for sending us to his cab.

Tangier was a place where I was eternally grateful to for the couchsurfing system. When you stay with locals, they can show you and tell you things that you would never learn otherwise, and in Morocco this included what to wear so we didn't look like fools. Serena made sure we had scarves to cover ourselves, which was good because when we walked around we would occasionally see tourists in tiny miniskirts and tank tops. Surrounded by women in headscarves this seemed incredibly offensive and obtrusive to me. I couldn't understand how these people could wear so little compared to everyone around them and not feel naked.

Pictures are generally frowned upon in Morocco, so my photo gallery is sadly small. I attempted to master the quick snapping pictures when no one was looking but I felt so out of place that I didn't really take many.

Despite our hunger we tried to get out a little during the day to see the city. Our first day we went to the market where the Berber women were selling their crops. These are the women from the mountains and their lifestyle has apparently remained unchanged for hundreds of years. It was wonderful to be in such a foreign place, and food, as well as everything else is so cheap there.

I don't generally plan to stay more than a couple days with one host, (I have learned from experience that it's good to change hosts in case you don't like one of them), so we spent two days with a Spanish woman named Carmen and her boyfriend Yossef. Carmen took us to the beach where the Moroccan girls lift their robes just a little to wade in the water. The water was way too nice to avoid swimming so I put aside my shyness and dove in in a bikini. There were even camels on the beach, which I was thrilled about because I have never seen a camel.

Carmen also showed us how to cook tajine, which is what Moroccans often eat for their midnight meal. I can't really cook but I'm going to make a real effort to learn to cook Moroccan food which is amazing.

We also got to explore the Cazba, which is a beautiful neighborhood where the houses are all really close together. It feels like you have stepped back in time. It's also very hard to navigate because there are a lot of dead ends and a lot of people offer to show you around "for free" and then want lots of money. I loved the white houses and the little streets. It was so deserted with everyone sleeping for Ramadan that I even got a few pictures.

My birthday was a little stressful for me. I spent it with Natalee, Serena, Erin, Neil and Maraya, the other couchsurfer staying with Serena. They made cupcakes for me and we had a little party but I couldn't shake the feeling that I'm 24 and I haven't done anything yet. I've traveled to more than a dozen countries in the last 5 months but suddenly I have no career and no college degree and I have no idea what I'm going to do now. However I had a great post-sunset Ramadan dinner with my friends and I great time screaming at the characters on the screen to get away from the Alien. It was chill but just what I needed to do this year.

After only a week we left Tangier for Spain. The plan was to go to Algeciras by boat and hitch from there to Sevilla, about 200 km. However true to my awful country-leaving karma, everything went wrong. We left the house hours early thanks to Natalee's preparedness but we got hopelessly lost trying to find the bus that would take up to the port. No one seemed to know what we were talking about and we walked for hours trying to figure out where the hell we were. Eventually we got to the bus station but the bus was late and as we waited we watched the time out ferrie was supposed to leave get closer and closer. We had been told that the bus was free with the purchase of the ferrie tickets but we found out that this hasn't been the case for months. We had almost no Moroccan money left and kept the entire bus waiting while we scraped together the little that we had left and barely made it. We arrived at the port about 5 minutes before the ferrie was supposed to leave, tore through customs and onto the ferrie just in time, at about 11:56 when the ferrie was supposed to leave at 12:00. Then the boat sat in the port for three hours for no apparent reason.

However finally we were on our way to Spain, Western Europe and food served all day.