Yes, while most people were sane and decided not to travel during the holiday period, I logged a ludicrous amount of miles flying halfway across the world to Buenos Aires. Lots of firsts– first time in South America, first time spending more than 10 hours in a plane, first time I decided to fly on 2 weeks notice round the world during Christmas. Yup… that happened. I figured that being too cheap/too lazy to sort something out was the worst reason to not travel during the holidays so at the last minute I took a few days off and headed to a decidedly more welcoming climate.

Wouldn’t recommend flying last minute during Christmas. When things go wrong, everyone’s already effed off to their holidays.

A few things to consider if you’re going to Buenos Aires. 1) don’t fly Air Europa. 8 hour delay on Christmas day without food, water, or any way to call/email home to explain what was going on. Yes, I demanded a refund. They told me to go to hell. Soooo I emailed the press. We’ll see what shakes out of that. 2) if you’re American, expect to pay $160 upon landing for a 10 year visa. The Argentineans are a smart bunch– if the US is going to charge tourists $160 for a visa, SO WILL THE ARGENTINEANS as a “reciprocity” fee. Thank goodness I’m a Latvian! 3) learn some Argentinean spanish– it’s pronounced wayyy differently than Castellan Spanish, so “pollo” (chicken), typically pronounced “po-yo” becomes “posh-o”. So I was trying to figure out what the cab driver was saying about all of the posh fields… then realized he was talking about chickens. Right…

anyway, you can’t say anything about Argentina unless you start with food. OH MY GOSH WAS THERE FOOD. EVERYWHERE.

I must have gained 5 kilos on that trip. Argentina is famous for wine, steak, and apparently milk and milk derived products like dolce du leche which is this caramelly sort of thing that I never quite figured out but goes into all sorts of delicious things like facturas (pastery sort of creations that’ll give any croissant in Paris a run for its euro), media lunas, media lunas grases (yesssssss fat nom nom nom), alfajores (two cookies with dolce du leche in the middle, covered in chocolate), chocolate, and ice cream. mate. gelato has nothing on this stuff. NOM NOM NOM.

Unlike on other trips, I didn’t go camera happy. Some of this was because I didn’t do a lot of typically touristy things– time was spent mostly with family (and to be honest, eating. and then sleeping. a lot. because eating is hard work!), but much of it was because I didn’t want to go around with a camera glued to my hand projecting “buen dia, soy gringa loca!”.

no es bueno.

in general I felt quite safe, mostly because we stayed out of any place that was even remotely dodgy. until that one cab ride where all of a sudden the cabbie turns round and starts locking all the doors… and ceases stopping at intersections… yes. that’s how you know you’re in that part of town.

you have to be quite careful in argentina with fake currency– I am the proud owner of a fake 20 peso bill, along with a likely not fake 20 peso bill– everyone you give money to runs their hands over it by instinct to feel the quality of the paper.

I’ve found myself unconsciously doing that to my credit cards in the UK.

//drum hit cymbal crash

I even managed to go out dancing one night at la catedral! beautiful old converted something or other with wood floors and a stage. we were expecting tango, and had dressed to match the occasion… and instead found ourselves in the middle of a dance whose name I can’t remember but has its roots in barn/peasant dancing. sort of like latvian folk dancing really– lots of clapping, spinning, and general merriment to be had by all.

new years eve was spent watching fireworks from the 13th floor balcony– great view of the city and undisturbed except for manuel the tortoise who is 40 years old and has a taste for toes if you let him start to nibble.

managed to get 7 bottles of argentinean wine back to the UK– technically I think the limit was 8 but that was combining the remainder of 2 allowances into one… which I didn’t want to risk. Good thing too because I was randomly stopped and searched by the customs lady coming out of Gatwick. Annoying because I had to unpack the carefully arranged wine for inspection, then repack it with the hopes that I did just as good a job. thankfully it all made the trip from gatwick to the office just fine

all in all it was a lovely trip and I look forward to my next sojourn south of the border!

I got an email in my work inbox from Ellie, forwarded from the organizer at clouddog saying that they had an extra triathlon spot due to someone injuring their back. Guess who went “hey that sounds like an excellent idea”?

//raises hand

Me, whose closest sport contact for the past year or so has been coxing… which obviously involves just sitting on my buns and yelling at people.

Excellent.

You can read more (and most importantly, donate to help support the charity that I’m running/swimming/biking for) at this link. (if the hyperlink fails, copy/paste the below into your address bar. Mom, that means highlight it (left click, drag your mouse from left to right so that the text is highlighted in blue), press the apple key and hold it, then press c and let go of both keys. Then click in the address bar, delete anything already there, press the apple key and hold it, then press v and let go of both keys. The apple key should be the key just to the left of the space bar)

www.virginmoneygiving.com/ValerieJordan

Yes, there will be more Lanzarote posts and a post about the Olympics, eventually. In the meantime, feel free to donate early and often

(and yes, I’ve finally figured out how to spell triathlon. there is only one a. a good start!)

On with the show.

Or the preview at least since it’s nice today and I’m baking cookies later! nom nom nom

The basic details– I, along with 5 other friends on the grad program, went to Lanzarote (flew into Arrecife, stayed in Puerto del Carmen) for a week. It was billed as a beach loiter holiday which was excellent since I hadn’t been on one of those since Hilton Head in… um… well… too many years ago. (For the peanut gallery, Hawai’i doesn’t count since we spent most of the time exploring cool places not laying on the beach napping and reading trashy novels).

Anyway, it was a week full of laying on the beach

Laying by the pool

Laying on the beach

Loitering in the pool

We stayed in a lovely villa (Casa Lydia) which had everything– pool, balconies, full size nice kitchen, barbeque, and was about a 10 minute walk down the hill to the beach. Highly recommended if you’re ever looking for a place to stay, though the current owner is trying to sell at the moment so it may not be a villa for much longer.

Being me and inheriting a penchant for rummaging in bushes from my mother, I had to go explore the island a bit. I went on 3 organized tours– one to the volcano in the south, one to the caves and a bunch of Cesar Manrique’s buildings in the north, and one to the market in Arrecife. More posts to follow!

Not in Venice.

Right so after Casablanca we were looking for more of a hit than a miss and the guidebooks (and riad guy) all spoke highly of Essaouira, a beachy town on the coast.

Beaches? Heck yes. We were on holiday after all.

So it was up again somewhat early for our last full day in Morocco and off to the bus station this time for a 3 hour journey to the town. (Why is it that all day trips from Marrakech seem to take 3 hours? Like the Twilight Zone but…anyway). As a warning– the most popular bus departure time (around 10am) is actually the “comfort plus” bus, which means it costs more than the normal bus. For the extra fare, you get a bottle of water and your choice of a newspaper to peruse on your way, along with headphones to listen to the radio. I’d recommend getting up earlier and catching the 9am bus to avoid the extra 5 quid charge.

The bus ride over was pleasant, though my French was not quite up to the task of interpreting the creole language spoken on the radio so I understood about 1/4 of what they were saying. Something about a contest?

Right. When we got to Essaouira, it looked like a lovely little seaside town with quaint side streets, and a massive protest with camels. Not a joke. No idea what they were on about, but they had camels, which in my opinion totally makes it a worthwhile cause.

We wandered around a bit, then popped into the least sketchy looking kebab shop on one of the streets in the medina. That’s when it all started going a little… soggy. The weather had been looking a bit unfortunate all day, but we figured we might get lucky since every other day on the trip had been beautiful.

Alas, it was not to be.

Yes, it was pouring, torrentially flooding, the second coming of Noah’s Ark, raining.

And as cute as towns go, there’s not much that can be done if the entire place starts to flood. We tried to wait it out, but after about half an hour of huddling underneath a roof, we made a break for the bus (about a kilometer away) and loitered in the shelter until the next one came to take us back.

Getting to the bus was a bit of an adventure since… yes, the street was under water. Morocco isn’t the sort of place where you’re willing to take off your shoes and wade through murky muddy water because you never know what you might step on, like glass. Not wishing to test any of our medical insurer’s policies, we crept across a pile of strategically placed rubbish and managed to land more or less in one piece on the other side of the moat.

We made it back, drenched, cold, and exhausted. Our plan was to eat at the same place in the medina where we’d eaten many of the previous nights (Number 1) but… they were gone! Just packed up and peaced out! So we had to settle for someone else, who decidedly couldn’t cook as well.

The next morning was the trial of the suitcase & rug, as I tried to figure out how to (and cursed myself a bit for) get my rug back to the UK without paying its’ weight in gold for a checked bag fee. Now the guy had said that the king of Morocco decreed that airlines weren’t to charge checked bag fees but, having gone up against a few rather officious gate agents in the past (don’t even start) I figured there wasn’t a prayer that was going to work.

So, having worn a massive trenchcoat, I proceeded to put on pretty much every single article of clothing I brought with me, and shove the rest that I couldn’t into my pockets. The suitcase was reserved almost entirely for the rug, and a few miscellaneous electronics.

We rock up to the check in agent, and she takes one look at my bag and I know I’m doomed. The thing is so over stuffed it looks like Kim Kardashian on a “classy” night out, and there’s no way in hell it’s fitting into that tiny little metal thingy designed to keep people within the luggage limits. Sure enough, when she asks me to try to fit it in, there’s not a prayer. She says “well you’ll have to check it”. I’m unimpressed. Elle has the presence of mind to ask how much it’ll be and I swear I almost fell over when the lady said it was free.

F-R-E-E.

Checking a bag.

Raise your hand if you remember a time when you could check bags for free.

//crickets

Ouch I’m getting old.

Anyway, crisis averted. I could also take my purse out from under my coat where I’d stashed it (… styling…) and then chuck my coat with great glee onto the xray machine and watch as the people who read the scans looked really confused that this coat had a charger, toiletry bag, socks, shirt, and a few pens shoved into it. And with that less than graceful turn, it was out of Morocco and back to rainy London.

When’s my next holiday again?

Not really, but it sounded fun.

Tuesday morning was spent sorting out the bill with the riad guy, and cutting a deal whereby we could retain our massive room but just pay for 3 people instead of 5. Win.

The plan was to visit the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca and do a bit of exploring around there. All of us had seen Casablanca and were looking forward to seeing the city that inspired the glamorous, fatal attraction movie that has now become a must see classic.

It’s about a 3 hour train ride from Marrakech to Casablanca and it’s relatively straightforward, if a bit irritating at times. The trains felt safe (we weren’t hassled even though we were riding in the second class carriage with all of the locals) but there were chronic issues with the PA system whereby you’d be treated to the chronic hiss and spitting of the loudspeaker. A bit difficult to sleep but we managed a bit.

We arrived in Casablanca around 2 in the afternoon and took a cab (the cabbie ripped us off by charging 50 dihrams where he really should have been using the meter– petit taxis in Morocco are all required by law to use the meter but some of them don’t and they’ll fight you for it– but… we only figured that out later) to the mosque. Unfortunately we’d missed the last guided tour and the guards looked a bit… dodgy… so we settled to walking around and looking from the outside, which was impressive to say the least.

There weren’t too many people around so it was quite peaceful, and it was easy to see why it had been built so close to the ocean; the breeze and the salt air was a lovely complement to the building itself. The scale of the place was immense, as was the detail in the mosaics which were put on every surface (ceiling, floor, walls, columns, fountains…)

However what was most striking was the dichotomy that the mosque complex represented in relation to the surrounding areas. Essentially it appears that the king issued a decree that his mosque was going to go by the ocean, and that he knocked down a bunch of slums to make room for it. There are still remnants of the slums on either side, with clean swaths delineating the complex from them. Morocco as a country isn’t terribly rich, and the people tend not to live in huge fancy houses and such. There are a lot of people asking for money on the streets, and muggings for money and petty theft seem to be pretty common. So it was very striking to have this massive government funded mosque built on the remnants of slums. (I haven’t verified that this is the case, but that’s just what it looked like from an impartial observer).

We didn’t stick around too long and started walking up the beach towards what we thought would be restaurants. We did get quite a few more remarks and whistles from the randoms fishing off the pier than we’d had when the boys were with us but it didn’t seem malicious; mostly it seemed like they were pulling a Dad– “just testing”.

The cabbie had warned us that there wouldn’t be any cabs around the mosque and offered to wait, but since he was a bit of a creeper we told him to scram and figured we’d be able to find something relatively easily.

Well… the guy was right. No cabs to be found. So we decided to try to hail a cab off the main street. It was amazing how many cabs didn’t stop and how many random cars did.

Don’t worry Mom, we didn’t go with any random cars. We finally got a regular cab and whilst he quoted us a way high rate (50 dhs) to get to the main part of the city we weren’t about to continue to play in traffic and get stuck in the bushes. We asked him to drop us off by some restaurants and he dropped us off outside the medina/souk, assuring us that there would be food just inside. Well there was street food but by this time we were exhausted and a bit disillusioned at the entire city* so we were looking for some proper food. Luckily we managed to get directions from some random cafe proprietor and finally sat down to lunch (which by that time was more like dinner). We wound up loitering in that cafe until the next train came and we headed back to Marrakech.

*Casablanca is known as the industrial/commerce city of Morocco and… it lives up to that reputation. The entire place feels very dirty (like I’d imagine Pittsburgh was in the coal mining and steel heyday) and looks a bit like what I expect NYC will look like after the apocalypse. There are few places in the world that I’ve been thus far to which I wouldn’t return, but Casablanca is one of them. It was an interesting experience, but is best left at just that.

Bogart’s Casablanca is the way remember the city.

We were all interested in taking a cooking class to learn how to make traditional Moroccan dishes. The riad offered a class for 15EUR/person so we thought why not?

Well… we learned how to chop onions! Apparently true tagines take 4 or 5 hours to slow cook so instead of doing that, the instructor put a bunch of stuff into a pressure cooker and called it a day. We did get to chop onions, but that was about it. We were all shocked by the amount of sugar that goes into tagines– apparently Morocco has a high incidence of diabetes and… well… it’s quite easy to see why. For 4 servings, she must have put in 4 cups of sugar. Delicious but oh my.

(I’m not quite sure why Fez is trying to stab me in that photo… don’t worry Mom, he missed)

After lunch we loitered a bit before deciding to try out a hammam. These are traditional baths popular throughout the Middle East and north Africa, and are reminiscent of what I’d imagine the Roman baths once were, with a little bit of a different style.

We turned up without an appointment after thoroughly checking out reviews of places online. We opted for two different packages; Elle and Jess went for the extra seaweed wrap while I opted to not mess with seaweed. The boys also went for seaweed but the sexes are separated in the hammam so we bid them adieu at the entrance and went our separate ways.

Monday early evenings apparently aren’t the most popular hammam times so we had the entire place practically to ourselves. We started in the changing rooms, stripped to nothing except for these little disposable pants that were provided by the hammam. Then we were led slipping and sliding through steam filled rooms, placed on little stools, had assistants pour water on us, then left to marinate in some steam on benches.

The entire experience had a bit of a surreal feeling to it since the people working there didn’t speak much English, and not much French either. So they couldn’t really warn you too much about what was to happen next, so everything was a super surprise.

Anyway, we were eventually fetched and hustled (read: they grabbed your hand and then went from 0 to 60 in 0.25 seconds since they clearly know where they are going and have shoes that don’t skid all over the floor) to another room with several suspiciously morgue like tables where we were rinsed again (surprise!) and then vigorously scrubbed with black soap (savon noir) which is some concoction of argan oil and scrubby stuff that sloughs off a surprising amount of dead skin (yuck).

Then it was some more rinsing and off to another room with more tables (these were slightly less morgue like– the metal was covered by a white vinyl cover that was incredibly slippery). Here we were treated to full body massages and had some nice skin softening argan oil product rubbed in. The ladies clearly enjoyed their jobs because as soon my lady realized that the bottoms of my feet were ticklish she took great pleasure in tickling them just for kicks. And she did it to Jess and Elle too. Good times

Then it was off to the showers for me to rinse off the last bits of the savon noir and back to the changing rooms to get dressed and wait in the nice loitering room of sorts for Jess and Elle to get their seaweed treatments, and the boys to come back. They gave complimentary mint tea (I’ve got to get a good recipe for that, since it’s the only tea I’ve found so far that I wouldn’t mind drinking again! Probably because most of it is sugar… anyway) and had a bunch of French Cosmopolitan magazines rattling around so I amused myself with those.

Jess and Elle came out shortly thereafter, and we waited quite a bit longer for the boys. They came out and looked a bit shell shocked; I don’t think either of them were quite prepared for the full body massage so they seemed a bit traumatized by the entire affair. The girls agreed we’d all go again, and the boys… well… they reserve judgment for another time when perhaps the memories aren’t so fresh.

Now that we were all clean, it was off to a restaurant to celebrate Elle’s birthday. Unfortunately the 23rd happened to fall on a Monday when many places in Morocco are closed. So we flipped through the guidebooks that I’d brought (thanks Mom) and searched a bit on the internet before finally settling on the Cafe Arabe. Now this place was buried in the middle of the really confusing and easy to get lost in souk, so I gave this about a 50% shot of working, especially at night.

However we somehow managed to find the place, and it was well worth it. I highly recommend it if you’re in Marrakech; it feels very high class, but the prices are reasonable and the food is quite good. They have a nice selection of Moroccan, Italian, and fusion foods, and served alcohol. It’s interesting to note in how few places alcohol is to be found in Marrakech, at least in the old part of the city. Apparently the sale of alcohol in grocery stores and such is forbidden within the walls of the medina, though certain brick and mortar stores are licensed to sell to tourists. They say that in the new city (with all of the chain hotels and urban planning) alcohol is much easier to find but since we were more interested in experiencing the true Marrakech we didn’t spend any time in the new city.

That closed the day, and the last that the boys would be with us. They took a flight out Tuesday morning to go back to London, and we girls took the train to Casablanca.

The general consensus was that we wanted to do something epic. Exactly what sort of epic was yet to be decided, and somewhat discombobulated. In the end, we decided we wanted to go to the Sahara, go dune buggying/off roading, and then camp out under the stars.

Before you have a heart attack Ma, that didn’t exactly happen. Turns out that the real Sahara is about 10 hours drive one way from Marrakech, and the riad guy said that anywhere closer was mediocre. Well, we weren’t too keen to spend a lot of time and money on anything less than the real thing so the Sahara was pushed to another trip.

The alternative, as suggested by the riad proprietor was a trip out to the Cascades D’Ouzoud, a waterfall style place about two hours drive from Marrakech. So it was up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to make our way out there.

Morocco is an incredibly diverse country, as we saw on our way to the cascades.

Or, saw somewhat in between naps. I’d considered renting a car instead of hiring a car and driver but after seeing the lunatics in Marrakech that plan went out faster than the devil in a church. People in Marrakech consider driving as a… creative endeavor, whereby road signs, medians, traffic signals, and lane dividers are road decorations and completely open to interpretation. A 15 foot wide road may be 2 lanes, 1 land, or 3 lanes, all within a space of 500 meters.

Anyway, we eventually got to the town closest to the cascades and were greeted by a guide. He seemed like a reasonable person who offered to take us around for whichever length of time we wanted and then if we liked the tour at the end, we would pay him approx 5 euro/person. The group wasn’t too keen on hiking (polar opposite of Kaua’i) so we were leaning towards spending about two hours rummaging in the bushes before heading back to civilization.

The surrounding village was a traditional Berber village and our guide, Maoloud, pointed out several unique features such as the marks on the olive trees which denoted to whom they belonged, and bamboo huts which served as saunas/shower rooms made by this one guy. We also stopped by an argan oil cooperative where we all got to put in about 2 seconds of work grinding argan nuts into oil. It takes about a week to get 1 litre of the stuff, which helps to explain why it’s so expensive.

Then it was off to continue down to the bottom of the cascades. We’d seen the view from the top, which was quite nice, but Maoloud assured us that the best was yet to come. And he was right.

At the bottom there’s a mini Morocco-Maid-Of-The-Mist tour which can be more aptly named as Colorful-Barge-Rowed-By-Old-Dude-Close-To-The-Falls which cost about 50 pence per person, and took you across the river to boot. The Maid of the Mist could take some pointers from this guy.

Fez had to test out the rowing (which is very close in motion to sculling on a crew boat)… the boat running into the rock side sort of sums up his skill

Then it was up about halfway to eat a leisurely lunch on a terrace overlooking the cascades.

Throughout the day, we learned all sorts of random facts about the stalag(mites? tites? still am not sure) and the various vegetation growing around the village. Maoloud used to be a botanical guide of some sort so he knew every scrubby bush and weed, along with some fascinating stories about more reknowned plants like the Carob tree. Apparently each seed from the pods of that tree weighs exactly the same anywhere in the world (200 milligrams) and used to be used as a precise measuring tool for small gemstones… hence the term carat for diamond weights. Learn something new every day right?

After lunch we continued our trek up the hill where we got up close and personal with some of the wildlife that we’d only seen at a distance earlier in the day: monkeys!

(the dad monkey is unimpressed with the program)

They live wild close to the village and they don’t disturb anyone, and no one disturbs them. They’ll come up quite close too and don’t seem to be very scared of the humans loitering in their living rooms.

We ended the day by taking some more photos of the cascades (waterfalls and cascades are different– Niagara is a waterfall because there’s only one place where the water falls. These are cascades because there are three different falls in succession– another great fact to wow your friends!) and then headed back to Marrakech to grab some dinner from the night market and pass out. In the end, we spent about 6 or 7 hours wandering around the cascades, much longer than anticipated. But it was so worth it!

Breakfast was served at our riad every day…

on the roof terrace!

What a win. It was pretty cold in the mornings (the guidebook described Morocco as a cold country with a hot sun) but the terrace had a tent which caught the early morning sun and, most importantly, a propane powered heater that we all fought over. Breakfast included some sort of Moroccan pancakes which I’m definitely going to have to make at home. I think they were made of cornflour and sugar mostly; great texture and sweetness, accompanied by some apricot jam. And of course, fresh orange juice and mint tea.

Orange juice is one of those Moroccan experiences that can’t be missed. The juice is really out of this world– even better than what you can squeeze fresh yourself at home because, well, the oranges they use come more or less from their backyard. Unless you happen to live in the great retirement state, you don’t have a prayer of getting the same taste. The trip was worth it just for that!

Anyway, putting aside my obsession with orange juice, we got on with our day.

The souks were an explosion of color, noise, and surprisingly, the stench of diesel. This came from the massive amount of 70s era crotch rockets that people were driving through the pedestrian paths in the market. These pathways weren’t too wide; the biggest were probably 10 feet across, the smallest more like 3 or 4. But every path was fair game for those bikes, and for the donkey carts as well.

But that was only the beginning of the menagerie.

Joe and Fez were accosted by a bunch of “snake charmers” (we have since decided that the snakes were either very tranquillized or completely dead) who decided to temporarily turn them into snake hangers. Elle was unimpressed.

But as with everything in Morocco, there was a fee for this involuntary treatment as furniture. After taking a few photos, the people wanted 10 quid each from all of us. Scatter!

We also saw a bunch of poor monkeys being carted around– looked to be an involuntary hugging scheme designed to force the unsuspecting participants to fork over some cash to get the animal off of them. And yes, that is a diaper on that monkey.

And finally we saw a bunch of chameleons sunning themselves on their cages. By a bunch, I mean there were a few big ones, and then a bucket full of mini ones. We considered picking up a pet but figured that getting through customs would just get a bit too tricky. Though the sales guy assured us we could get ‘em past if we just “hid them in your mouth”.

Right.

Not sure who frisks him when he goes through customs but clearly they have been slacking.

The highlight of the morning was our trip to the tapis part of the souk (carpet). It was one of those random bits hidden away around a corner and we almost didn’t go in. We were almost immediately accosted by this guy who said he worked with a cooperative and would show us how the rugs were made and tell us about the history.

Well, we got a perfunctory explanation of the process and a short demonstration since there was a woman working a loom as we walked in (and even his English wasn’t amazing), but most of the time was spent showing us different types of rugs. There were some really amazing pieces, and he demonstrated the tightness of one of the weaves (which is made with some sort of plant silk) by extinguishing a cigarette on it. Didn’t even leave a scratch– the rug just doesn’t take fire.

Of course all of those ones were $1000 and well, my budget isn’t quite up to that.

But the peanut gallery had gifted some dinero for my birthday/christmas with the express condition that it “not go into the general operating expenses”.

So I bought a rug.

So did Joe. We bargained down the price whereby we got each rug for about a third of the price that he was initially asking. Not sure if that says more about our bargaining skills or the amount of markup there is on everything in the market. Probably the latter.

There was some consternation about how on earth we were going to get these things home but at that point it was more excitement and “screw it we’ll figure it out”.

It was off to the riad to drop off the rugs before heading back to the souks to try to find the tanneries, which the guide books said were well worth a visit.

At least that was the marginal plan. We wound up wandering a bit into the bushes, noticeable when there were few stalls and more homes, and more people looking at us like we were invading their personal space. We were finally approached by this guy who probably just wanted us out of his backyard. He kindly offered to take us to the tanneries and actually didn’t try to extort money! Best guy ever

He dropped us into the very enthusiastic but business like arms of this tannery tour guide of sorts who gave us the shortest, fastest, and most unintelligible tours of the various pits filled with horribly smelling muck (remember this was in January when the heat wasn’t even that bad… I can’t imagine the smell in the middle of July… eugh!). Luckily we were given “Moroccan gas masks” (read: sprigs of mint) to help. We were then led to this little shop which had leather goods made from the leather in the tannery. Unfortunately it was also quite expensive so we bargained a little then peaced out fast. Where we were accosted by our “guide” looking for money. He was a bit more reasonable than the animal people luckily.

The minaret right next to the Jemaa El Fna square

Eh… let’s go to Morocco.

Sure, why not?

That’s not quite how it all went down, but it was close. I was loitering at Elle’s house for a Tuesday movie & Pizza Hut cheesy bites night when we started talking about holidays and how we wanted to go somewhere interesting. Somehow we hit on going to Morocco. And it just snowballed from there. We opened the invitation to a bunch of people from JPM and a few other random London friends and wound up with 5 people booking tickets to go, for more or less the same period of time. Elle, Joe, Fez, and I got there on Friday, Elle’s sister Jess joined us on Saturday, and the boys left on Tuesday while we stayed till Thursday.

Since everyone was coming and going more or less at random, the only “plans” we made were booking plane tickets, and the first nights’ accommodation. Everything else was to be decided on the fly.

This of course caused no small amount of anxiety to the peanut gallery back in the States and led to repeated demands of information on my travel companions including parent’s numbers, maiden names, first cat’s cousin’s name, favorite TV show, and bizarrely, the color of their luggage. (?)

Anyway we left Friday afternoon on the first on time flight I’ve been on since I can remember (not sure if that says more about my memory or the inadequacy of airlines…) and landed in Marrakech about 7:30pm.

We knew we had to take a cab from the airport so we walked outside to experience our first taste of haggling in Morocco. Unfortunately for us, haggling for a taxi from the airport to the medina isn’t the best idea since the taxi drivers have all of the power; you really want to get to your hotel after being in an airplane for 3 hours.

Also, they don’t speak much English.

Scratch that, very little English.

So “we” managed to scrounge up a few French phrases out of the dusty crannies of high school brain fragments (Shusti would be scandalized I’m sure) and off we went. Well… turns out the radio guy who told the cabbie where to go told him to go to the wrong place… we stopped in some dodgy alley and the taxi guy got out to try to figure out if it was the real place… it wasn’t… so out came the map and my French to try to steer us on the up and up.

Eventually we got to the environs of our hotel. We stayed in the medina (the old part of the city) where not all of the streets are passable by car, so the taxi dropped us off with the instruction to walk forward about 20 meters, then turn right where the street sign is.

Sadly this particular street sign was only in Arabic and actually on the left, so we completely missed it, walked around a bit, got laughed at heartily by a bunch of locals, and then one guy led us to our riad and expected a tip for walking about 50 meters. Welcome to Morocco. We were warned about this though so we rebuffed his advances and promised to stop by his restaurant to have a look (not his, but one which pays him a commission for whoever he brings in. What a racket!). (turned out to be super expensive so we gave it a miss)

We checked out our room and chucked our stuff down to go out and search for food.

The riad was quite nice, and the proprietor was amazingly friendly (except he didn’t speak much English so… my French was requisitioned once again), though there wasn’t a ton of hot water and it was really really cold at night since there wasn’t a heater.

Have to give props to the peanut gallery for shipping over some travel guides on Morocco for my birthday. I was full of semi useful tidbits about Marrakech and ideas for things to do throughout the trip. Therefore it was off to Jemaa El Fna for the famous night market for dinner.

By this point it was about 10pm and a Friday so the market was slightly quieter than it would be on subsequent nights. But it was still quite something, with a thousand different people all selling the same stuff and shouting at you to get your attention. Memorable phrases included “hey fish and chips!” (because all white people are English) “hey tourist!”, and the equally memorable if less polite heckling (as we were walking past one orange juice booth to get juice from a competitor– impossible not to do since there were 8 stands in a row) “I hate you…. I hate your mother… I HATE YOUR @*#%@#*&$ MOTHER”

We died laughing.

The nightmarket food stalls consist of a bunch of large picnic tables with plastic table cloths under a tent, close to a massive grill. Everyone sits close together and is served complimentary bread and mint tea, which is a Moroccan specialty. It is amazingly good, mostly because it seems to be made mostly of sugar with a splash of water. It is also called Moroccan whiskey by some intrepid stall marketers who are willing to say anything to get you to sit down. So if you’re offered “free Moroccan whiskey” take it under advisement that it will refer to mint tea which is free anyway from all of those vendors.

We made it a goal to try as much food as possible, and had some really good tagines and couscous. Less nice from my point of view was the (disgusting) lamb head that the boys decided to order as a laugh. A literal lamb’s head.

We got the last laugh as they wrote it off as pretty gross and gave it to one of the many people passing the table asking for money.

Right, so that’s where I left the post last week after finally getting that thing into the flat and where it would have stayed if not for the particularly persistent peanut gallery in my life who all have decided that I’ve-taken-long-enough-to-settle-in-and-need-to-start-blogging-about-my-life-again-RIGHT-NOW-#*%&@*$&@#*$ thank you very much.

*cough* mom *cough*

I’ll start my gradual and sporadic “return” to the blog scene by recounting the tale of the TV cabinet.

Mark and I went to Portobello Road market on a Saturday a) because I’d never been there and b) because we needed to purchase a cabinet on which to set the TV. No, we did not yet have a TV though the boys assured me that it would be purchased henceforth and forthwith, whatever that means.

We got there around closing time (4pm) which meant that we could snag a bunch of baked goods that people were trying to offload at half price As we were munching our recently acquired ridiculously cheap muffins, I spotted a guy wheeling a cabinet with a sign on it that said 15 quid.

Here’s where the rational part of my brain should have stepped in and considered the fact that this guy was wheeling this thing. “We” thought we could make it work so we bought it on the spot. It measures approximately 33″ wide by 35″ high by 15″ deep ish.

First step was to try to get it to the bus stop, since paying to take this stupid thing home via a cab would just be ridiculous and cost way more than the thing was worth. Luckily, the guy with the trolley wheeled it to the nearest bus stop… and we soon realized this would be a slightly bigger undertaking than anticipated.

The first bus that came by refused to let us on with the cabinet since it was somewhat full. The second bus, although almost empty, also refused to take us on board. At this point we were beginning to despair since the sky was starting to look ominous (it had been pouring on and off during the entire morning which we’d spent at Greenwich– I was such a tourist there with the Prime Meridian… yes, it is marked… and had delicious sushi at the market nearby) and rain was starting to fall.

Let’s discuss wood veneer and rain.

End of discussion.

A third bus approached and thankfully he let us on, probably because he felt sorry for us standing in the rain with a massive TV cabinet that was missing one drawer knob. Phase 1, success.

At this point we started planning the rest of the journey home since we had more or less just gotten on the first bus that would let us on and was headed south towards central London. We realized that the most direct way would be to take the Jubilee line from Bond Street to Canada Water. Good plan.

Theoretically at least. What we forgot to take into account was that we’d have to get off the bus on Oxford Street and walk the 1/4 mile to Bond Street station. At 5pm on a Saturday. Meaning the place is more packed with tourists than the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. Oh my days.

The other part that made this all the more sporting was that you couldn’t just lift this thing up by the top; the choices were to lift by just compressing your hands on either side of the thing (deemed the “brute force” lift because you were relying on your wrist strength to keep the thing off the ground and it was good for about 5 feet before your hands mutinied) or brute force lift it up a little then grab the bottom (raw particleboard) with your hands and mash your face into the side of the cabinet so that you weren’t throwing your back out. So… we started carrying the thing down Oxford Street.

Obviously we caused a bit of amusement in the crowd as people started trying to figure out what exactly we were doing with this thing. Sadly that tended to cause them to just stop and stare usually directly in our path of travel.

Anyway, we reached Bond Street, navigated through the ticket turnstiles (with lots of help from the amused station workers) and down way too many escalators. Yes, we held this thing as we rode down. No, don’t try this at home.

Had to wait for a few trains to go that were just too full to take– turns out there was a big rugby match going on whose supporters consisted largely of old bald drunk men who thought our project was hilarious.

Then it was out at Canada Water and waiting for a bus to take us to the flat. Once again, we had to skip a few buses whose drivers wouldn’t take us on board. One even tried to tell us there was a policy against taking furniture on the bus (that’s actually a lie– you can take whatever you want on as long as the driver says it’s okay). And again we lucked out that a driver was willing to take us.

The cabinet barely fit into the lift, but it did. Phew!

My arms were in pain for days. Wow did that hurt.

Since then we have acquired a TV, some black bins from IKEA for storage, another cabinet pull, and painted the thing baby blue. Don’t ask about the color– the boys spent ages agonizing over what color it ought to be so as soon as they reached a consensus that was all she wrote. Thus far it is one of the few things in the room that isn’t some form of beige or brown. Eventually our color palette will expand… if we find a spare moment to decorate. By we, I mean me. Because I live with two guys who (generally) couldn’t care less about color.

Except when it comes to TV cabinets. Go figure.

And just because I can, here’s the view from my kitchen window.

//winning