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.
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.
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.
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ReplyDeleteLOL!
Great to read some of your adventures!