Not one bee actually, but many. As it so happens, the global bee shortage- yes, there is such a thing- has stretched its long fingers into the rolling farm land of Macadonia. Ten year-old teals,yellows and worn purples make each stack of boxes looks like a sinking house from a decade of pastels, half of them abandoned. So our host, Ljupco was going to stop by the home of his bee mentor to ask some buzzing questions. As usual, we are asked if we want to come along.
This asking is only a formality, like the way our guide in the Sahara would ask us if we wanted tagine for dinner, as if there was anything other than tagine available. Or the time when, with a shy and apologetic no, we tried explain that we would prefer to sit in a cafe and write rather than go on a waterfall seeking adventure with some very nice people. A perplexed look from both mother and son told us we had chosen the wrong answer. They responded by telling us they would ask again later. Apparently giving us enough time to adjust our answer appropriately. "Yes, we would love to see the waterfalls!"
So it was safe to assume when we were invited to go along that our afternoon would be spent listening to two men talk in Macedonian about bees, like it or not. This might have been awesome, actually, if it held any real promise of us getting a peek at the honey making process. But, like Leigh's hopes of milking a cow, a goat, or an ewe (anything that lactates actually) and Leigh's hopes of picking wild mushrooms, this exciting promise to try our hands at rural life was empty. An hour later we are sitting at a table with two uneaten salads and some crunchy snacks staring at an emaciated dog with swollen tits and wondering if it would be socially unacceptable to feed the dog what the humans clearly had no intention of eating. The men are drinking two very small glasses of rakija, luckily we were spared that pleasure and are instead treated with freshly made juice from the red berry no one knows the name of.
Like most farming families in the rural parts of Macedonia, this family has way more fruit growing on their trees than they know what to do with. Actually, I should rephrase that. They have way more fruit than I would know what to do with. Years of experience have taught these people that those trees weighted down with apricots the size of my fists and the color of sunsets might shed too much fruit to eat, but buckets and buckets of them are great for drying. An experiment we tried to replicate in our apartment, only to end up with rotten fruit and an ant problem.
The other solution to a rich harvest is juice. Around this time, bottle after recycled beer bottle is filled up and caped off with juice from whatever berry they have growing uncontrollably in their small plots. Here is the land of raspberry juice, blueberry juice and at this farm, juice from a little red berry that is the perfect bright red color of salmon eggs. The juice looks like fruit punch Kool Aide, and tastes the way fruit punch Kool Aide could only dream of.
Somewhere in my second or third glass of juice, the bee expert announces that he too knows an American! Another trend you might notice anywhere outside of Western Europe as a foreigner- people are really excited to introduce you to all of the other Americans/Australians/Brits in the village. What could be more fun than two Americans? Three Americans! What is less fun than three Americans? An entire country of them. The bee keeper calls Jerry, the local Peace Corp volunteer, drives to his place and has him at our table in less than half an hour.
Considering the bafflement at our previous lack of enthusiasm for going to the discotechs, it is odd that our decision to go out with Jerry and his other altruistic friend is greeted with such bewilderment. Isn't this the family that nightly gave us the shoulder shrug, head tilt, eyebrow raised combo as we proved to be boring anti socialites who would rather sit at home making fresh sour cherry cobbler than go out, drink enough beer to feel bloated but not enough to get drunk, dance to music that leaves our eardrums ringing only to wake up the next day just strung out enough to do it all again? Yes, we are boring old people, but enough is enough people! Once a month I am as wild as the next hormone charged twenty something, but every night? They only laugh at us when we tell them "You people are crazy."
After inviting the 15 year-old and arranging a complicated system of cabs, phone calls and 1 AM curfews (for the 15 year-old, not us) we find ourselves in Jerry's very posh apartment counting in Macedonian for a drinking game I am thrilled to bring home. After six months abroad, many of them learning how other cultures consume alcohol, I was thrilled to ignite my competitive side playing good old American drinking games. If there is anything we can spread to the world, why not competitive binge drinking?
As writing about getting drunk and staying out all night is a little juvenile, I will just say that we got drunk and stayed out all night. The sun was well in the sky when we stumbled into Jerry's flat, Leigh passed out on the couch and I stayed up a little longer. Don't worry, we sent the 15 year-old home at one.
The only complication in our "wild night out" was our volunteered obligation to the farm and the constant criticism of our sleeping patterns. Tired and a little pathetic from the heat, we had been going to bed early (11ish, before everyone else, including the old people) and getting up late (10ish, before everyone else, including the old people). After three days of this, we are informed over lunch that sleeping until 10 not only wastes our days, but apparently the days of everyone in a 5 K radius. We look to the 15 year-old to back us up. Teenage boys sleep all day, right? He is no help, with a nod of his head we find out that we've been wasting his days too. We are instructed to wake bright and early the next morning, to be outside in the bushes at seven so we can pick berries and be on our way to the city early.
An early wake up call would have been fine, except that the morning of our harvesting also happened to be the morning after we spent the whole night dancing, drinking and carrying a girl barely drunker than ourselves home. The same morning we passed out at dawn. Lucky for us, it's way too hard for me to sleep when I'm covered in sweat and it gets that hot here around 8 AM, so I am able to wake up Leigh and the two of us, both still very drunk, pull off the miracle of our lives. We find a cab, tell him where we live and are picking the remainder of the cherries off the bushes by 8:30.
Apparently morning drunkenness is something regular here, considering our friend Pijo could barely walk one morning when he promised to show us how burik is made at his uncle's bakery, but it is still new to us. It felt as if I were coming home to my mom's house, drunk and repeating in my head "act sober, act sober." Ljupco is taking care of business somewhere else, we have the bushes all to ourselves. During the day, cherry picking is a strenuous but gratifying work. But when you are still a little leathered from the night before, it is a whole new challenge. Is that branch swaying, or is it me? I swat at a cherry, only for the entire branch to dodge my grasp and leave me a little dizzy from the lilt of it. Sometimes, I have to focus my attention to the smaller blue berries (not to be confused with blueberries) that are more tedious, but at least they stand still. I can only hope that our 15 year-old friend and his father don't notice how long this is taking, or the fact that I have to sit down every few minutes to remind the world that it shouldn't spin around so fast.
It is eleven by the time we finish pulling fruit off of all of the cherry, red berry and raspberry (turns out, great hangover food) bushes and by then we have the help of Ljupco, Andrej and an older woman. All of whom either have no idea that I would fail a breathalyzer or are just too polite/used to drunks to point out my inebriation. Sometime after a hot glass of fresh goats milk and honey, we are finally sober and in retrospect, very impressed with how we conduct ourselves as drunks.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Saving the world, one kitten at a time
We've already extended the rental on our car twice as we were racing down the N-1 to make it to Lisbon during the pathetic two hour window that Eurocar is open between their two hour lunch break and when they close. Somehow all the businesses can manage being open for only 4 hours a day, I have no idea what people in Portugal do if they need to rent a car after 4 pm. Avoiding the tolls means taking the smaller roads that wind through industrial parks, main streets of small towns and the "rotas du vihno" which lead you through wine country but take you no where near vineyards that you can actually tour or taste. It's infinitely more scenic than the toll roads, but takes twice the time.
It looked like we might just make it, even though we had to forgo out planned stop for Leito, the regional specialty of roast suckling pig. At first, when talking to the football team that more or less adopted us at the wine festival, I assumed that it was just a smaller breed of pig. Two days later, in the rare silence between Leigh and I, I burst out "oh, suckling, as in baby pig!" It was one of those classic Genna finally catches-on-moments, followed by the classic Leigh-makes-fun-of-how-slow-Genna-is moments. But, if we held course and weren't tempted by a road side coffee shop we would make it in time to drop off the car and find a place to sleep in Lisbon.
Up ahead the cars in front of us were all swaying to the right to swerve around something, which I assumed was trash or a dead animal. It isn't until we approach that it hits me as Leigh makes the same jarring swerve trying not to hit it, a kitten! Holy shit, what is a kitten doing in the middle of the road! What the hell is a kitten doing in the middle of the road!
As Leigh swung the car to the right to avoid it, it looked like it is rolling over on its back, almost like it were playing, proving it was still alive. A hundred yards up when got our breath back Leigh asked if we should go back, pull it out of the road. It's still there, still alive, when we get back to it and I lept out of the car, getting splashed by the passing trucks and honked at by other drivers who must have thought "what is this crazy girl downing in the middle of the road." I must looked like an idiot, scooping up near road kill in the middle of the wet road with the bright green scarf that I bought in India. Luckily, it looks like everybody was taking to toll roads and traffic was sparse, it was easy to make it over to the shoulder to set the limping stray in the grass, where it just sat there, limp but living. It was so wet and pathetic that it looked more like a drenched rat than something little girls would beg their parents for. Leigh as pulled the car back on to the road, she looked at me with that a sort of sad desperation. "We can't just leave it there."
So ten minutes later were driving towards Leiria, a town on the way to Lisbon, with the car reeking like wet cat. Leigh had no idea what to do, I had no idea what to do. We were now in a country where we spoke nearly none of the language with a barely living kitten we found of the side of the road. How do you say vet in Portuguese? How were we going to explain to explain that yes, we know stray animals die in the roads all of the time in this country? Yes, we were those bleeding heart Americans who wanted to save this furry little creature.
These are the kind of situations where I am usually the sensitive one and Leigh acts and the reasonable half of our operation. You couldn't say our pair is brains and brawns so much and brains and a little too much heart. But this time, as we are both becoming aware of the possibility that the best thing we can do it to put it to sleep, and the fact that we might be the ones left with that terrible responsibility, you can tell that she is as soft as I am. We can't kill it ourselves, we've got to find a vet, somehow.
Driving into the next town, the tiny wet creature I've got in my lap starts to move. When I first wrapped my fingers around its fading body it was barely moving. Breathing seemed like all it could do, you would expect a stray to struggle as you plucked it off of the road, but this one just lay in the scarf passively. Its front leg was twisted, looking deformed and broken, but finally, just as we are entering the next city, it is starting to move, to put weight on its legs and to notice that the inside of this car was not the environment it was used to.
Leigh pulled in to the parking lot next to the town market that was just coming to a close. With the cat in my arms, hoping that "kitten wrapped in scarf" might come across as "where is the nearest vet?" to whomever we could find. In the pattern of our constant dumb luck, the town vet is just around the block. More dumb luck, it was open even though we have arrived doing Portugal's gaping lunch hour. Oh yeah, and the vet was the most attractive man I have ever seen. This is the man women fantasize about when they fantasize about vets. As he opened the down, the two of us where stunned. It took several minutes, between our language struggle and our general goofiness around good looking men who aren't immediately trying to sleep with us, to explain that we had a stray cat that we found on the road, and yes, we wanted him to do something about it.
Naturally, good-looking-vet-guy was also super-compassionate-vet guy. He brought us into his office, where I am sure each of us secretly hoped he would seduce us, felt the kitten's insides with a stethoscope, helped it to poop (which seemed to be it's biggest probably), found it's dislocated hip, and gave us the best news of our life, "it is probably going to recover just fine." I was shocked when Leigh, who swears to never want a pet, asked the question I was thinking, "do you know the rules about flying animals from Portugal to the US?" In the same soothing voice he used to tell the cat (in English, by the by) "I know, I know" as it squealed at having it's little cat turds pushed out of it, he told us it needed rest, to come back in three hours and it should be much better. After dicking around in town, looking for a wine co-op and ending up at the super-market instead, we returned to find our wet rat transformed to a fluffy, adorable, and calm kitten, thanks to some rest, food and kitty drugs.
Don't freak out Mom, I am not bring a kitten home with me. Not that I didn't contemplate the possibility of either bring him to Macedonia with us, or even returning there after to pick him up. Turns out smuggling cats into the United States is almost as hard as smuggling drugs into the United States.
It looked like we might just make it, even though we had to forgo out planned stop for Leito, the regional specialty of roast suckling pig. At first, when talking to the football team that more or less adopted us at the wine festival, I assumed that it was just a smaller breed of pig. Two days later, in the rare silence between Leigh and I, I burst out "oh, suckling, as in baby pig!" It was one of those classic Genna finally catches-on-moments, followed by the classic Leigh-makes-fun-of-how-slow-Genna-is moments. But, if we held course and weren't tempted by a road side coffee shop we would make it in time to drop off the car and find a place to sleep in Lisbon.
Up ahead the cars in front of us were all swaying to the right to swerve around something, which I assumed was trash or a dead animal. It isn't until we approach that it hits me as Leigh makes the same jarring swerve trying not to hit it, a kitten! Holy shit, what is a kitten doing in the middle of the road! What the hell is a kitten doing in the middle of the road!
As Leigh swung the car to the right to avoid it, it looked like it is rolling over on its back, almost like it were playing, proving it was still alive. A hundred yards up when got our breath back Leigh asked if we should go back, pull it out of the road. It's still there, still alive, when we get back to it and I lept out of the car, getting splashed by the passing trucks and honked at by other drivers who must have thought "what is this crazy girl downing in the middle of the road." I must looked like an idiot, scooping up near road kill in the middle of the wet road with the bright green scarf that I bought in India. Luckily, it looks like everybody was taking to toll roads and traffic was sparse, it was easy to make it over to the shoulder to set the limping stray in the grass, where it just sat there, limp but living. It was so wet and pathetic that it looked more like a drenched rat than something little girls would beg their parents for. Leigh as pulled the car back on to the road, she looked at me with that a sort of sad desperation. "We can't just leave it there."
So ten minutes later were driving towards Leiria, a town on the way to Lisbon, with the car reeking like wet cat. Leigh had no idea what to do, I had no idea what to do. We were now in a country where we spoke nearly none of the language with a barely living kitten we found of the side of the road. How do you say vet in Portuguese? How were we going to explain to explain that yes, we know stray animals die in the roads all of the time in this country? Yes, we were those bleeding heart Americans who wanted to save this furry little creature.
These are the kind of situations where I am usually the sensitive one and Leigh acts and the reasonable half of our operation. You couldn't say our pair is brains and brawns so much and brains and a little too much heart. But this time, as we are both becoming aware of the possibility that the best thing we can do it to put it to sleep, and the fact that we might be the ones left with that terrible responsibility, you can tell that she is as soft as I am. We can't kill it ourselves, we've got to find a vet, somehow.
Driving into the next town, the tiny wet creature I've got in my lap starts to move. When I first wrapped my fingers around its fading body it was barely moving. Breathing seemed like all it could do, you would expect a stray to struggle as you plucked it off of the road, but this one just lay in the scarf passively. Its front leg was twisted, looking deformed and broken, but finally, just as we are entering the next city, it is starting to move, to put weight on its legs and to notice that the inside of this car was not the environment it was used to.
Leigh pulled in to the parking lot next to the town market that was just coming to a close. With the cat in my arms, hoping that "kitten wrapped in scarf" might come across as "where is the nearest vet?" to whomever we could find. In the pattern of our constant dumb luck, the town vet is just around the block. More dumb luck, it was open even though we have arrived doing Portugal's gaping lunch hour. Oh yeah, and the vet was the most attractive man I have ever seen. This is the man women fantasize about when they fantasize about vets. As he opened the down, the two of us where stunned. It took several minutes, between our language struggle and our general goofiness around good looking men who aren't immediately trying to sleep with us, to explain that we had a stray cat that we found on the road, and yes, we wanted him to do something about it.
Naturally, good-looking-vet-guy was also super-compassionate-vet guy. He brought us into his office, where I am sure each of us secretly hoped he would seduce us, felt the kitten's insides with a stethoscope, helped it to poop (which seemed to be it's biggest probably), found it's dislocated hip, and gave us the best news of our life, "it is probably going to recover just fine." I was shocked when Leigh, who swears to never want a pet, asked the question I was thinking, "do you know the rules about flying animals from Portugal to the US?" In the same soothing voice he used to tell the cat (in English, by the by) "I know, I know" as it squealed at having it's little cat turds pushed out of it, he told us it needed rest, to come back in three hours and it should be much better. After dicking around in town, looking for a wine co-op and ending up at the super-market instead, we returned to find our wet rat transformed to a fluffy, adorable, and calm kitten, thanks to some rest, food and kitty drugs.
Don't freak out Mom, I am not bring a kitten home with me. Not that I didn't contemplate the possibility of either bring him to Macedonia with us, or even returning there after to pick him up. Turns out smuggling cats into the United States is almost as hard as smuggling drugs into the United States.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Adventures behind the wheel
First gear, second gear, third girl and I am thrilled to be driving a stick again. Our luck, or simply the fact that we are in Europe, that we should get a manual when we finally decided to nut up, rent a car, and wonder through the parts of a country that you can't find if hitch hiking is illegal. Naturally, the first thing we did was empty the contents of our packs on to the back seat and assemble sandwiches to eat on the road. Not exactly home, but we did our best to make it that way. Thank god Eurocar didn't give us an automatic.
Personally, I'm a little shocked that they let us rent a car at all. A little strung out after an all night, sub-zero, bus ride followed by a staggering morning, our gate into the airport is no less than a wobble. The bright orange sign that looms above us says "Budget," and after asking the clerk if he spoke English, Leigh announces "right, we would like to rent a car" in a such a matter of fact tone that I was surprised the reaction wasn't a chuckle and "yeah, right." It might just be the fact that after 6 months of constant contact we can read each other's tones like a secret language, but something in the way she announced "WE would like to rent a car" was conscience of the joke of it all. WE would never rent a car to people like US, two girls who look like they might be fifteen and who clearly have no idea what they are going to do, how long they want the car for, or how much is should cost. To all of our surprises, the clerk presses the keys to our Suzuki Ibiza into Leigh's palm, looks disconcertingly at me, and reassures that I will not be the driver of the vehicle. Is it the sweat pants, the frizzy hair or the fact that I'm carrying a sack full of snacks that makes me look like a bad driver? But whatever, sure, I wont be driving the car..
Which is only a partial lie, most of the trip I occupy the passenger seat, begging Leigh to pull over for every road side cherry stand between Coimbra and Porto. Old women sell us the fattest cherries I have ever eaten, cherries so meaty I couldn't say they were a vegetarian product, by the kilo. I am sure collectively we consumed two kilos of cherries a day. Not that I can tell you exactly how much a kilo of cherries is. Six months outside of the US and we still haven't mastered the metric system. Either way, its a lot of cherries and still it is not enough.
Stirring clear of the exorbitantly expensive toll roads, we opt for the scenic route. Village after village ambles by in a blur or awnings, tiled churches, vineyards and gardens. It might be degrading to a country full of adults, but Portugal is cute with a capital C. Outside of the larger cities of Porto, Lisbon and Coimbra, the landscape seems to be aging with the people. Beautiful buildings, older than my country, are deserted with broken windows and the people hobbling along at a crawl and scowl at us as we drive by. This may seems like a sign that the Portuguese are unfriendly, but it is entirely the contrary. Get lost, ask directs or simply say "Bom Dia" to someone and the friendliness will blow you away, and sometimes in the wrong direction.
In an eagerness to be helpful, we have had several people give us directions that they themselves didn't know. Rather than admit that they can't help you, most will just make something up because they want to make you happy. With direct or misguided directions, shop owners have left their posts to walk us part of the way to the wine shop, restaurant, veterinarian (more on this later...) or hotel you are looking for. They'll spend 10 minutes in a language you clearly don't understand trying to combine hand signals and half Spanish words trying to send you in a direction. It makes me want to go home and find every lost person in Colorado and give them very specific and helpful directions. Although I am not a believer in Karma- at least in the spiritual way most people are- I owe the world a lot of good deeds, I feel like a kindness sponge here in Portugal.
ps. please forgive the spelling on this particular post- I am a terrible speller and the spellcheck on blogger isn't working currently, so I will have to return to it later.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
¨littering and...¨
The time had come. After two weeks of hard work scooping shit, hugging cows and pretending to understand Catalan we were sad to leave our new family (human and bovine) but ready to return to the city. We had done a load of laundry, desperately hoping the remainder of our garments wouldn´t contaminate the very clean apartment of our friend Alberto, who was kind enough to let us crash at his place, again.
Sometime around Friday Josep, in a rare inquiry that did not evolve subtly implying that there is sometime deeply wrong with our country, asked us when we would like to leave. Thankful that we didn´t have to be the ones to bring up the topic of our departure, we ask if Monday is okay. To our luck it seems that Josep is planning on a trip to Barcelona on Monday as well, the first one in 8 years, and is willing to take us along. Saving us the 6 euros a train would have cost and giving us an opportunity to dry out the garments in the car because we were too lazy to bring them in from the rain.
Cops are nothing new for us on this voyage. We´ve bravely (well maybe not so bravely) faced the Tourist Police in Kashmir, which was nothing compared to our repeated run ins with the Indian Army stationed there. We are pros at looking foreign, dumb and cute- a useful combination when it comes to getting out of trouble with underpaid authority figures.
Some 20 minutes outside of Ripoll, we are flagged to the shoulder by a short cop wearing a gray uniform underneath the lime green reflector vest, which was just a tad gratuitous considering it was the middle of the day. After Morocco, I half expected Josep to hop out of the car, slip the copper a twenty and be on our way. After all, that was how it went down every time our shared taxis were pulled over in Morocco. There, coruption in the police force is no less common or publicly acknowledged than donut addicted cops are in the US. It´s treated as a common joke, a fact of life. The taxi drivers usually include the cost of their bribes into our fares.
So naturally, when the humorless cop sternly asked for our papers we were shocked. Really? We weren´t even driving, why does he need our passports? Before Leigh manages to fish my documents out of my purse (they were the most handy) the cop explains something in Catalan or Spanish too quick for Leigh to comprehend. He walks away with my passport in hand, leaving Josep to explain in his slow and deliberate Spanish that we were pulled over for not wearing seltbelts.
What? We die a little bit everyday from the second hand smoke in bars but you´re telling us they actually take the seatbelt law here seriously enough that they would pull us over? As the second cop car pulls up, Leigh and I glance at each other, unable to hide our shock that our personal safety choice is a grave enough offense to warrant the attention of three cops, two cop cars and doubtlessly a appalling sum of public funds. Clearly we are dealing with a bunch of small town cops who want to to be heroes but have little to do but pull cats out of trees and pull over unsuspecting tourists. Josep seems fidgety, which is nothing new, but this time it seems out of guilt and stress. He hadn´t noticed we were unbuckled and this little detour was putting off the trip to the city that he genuinely admitted made him nervous anyway.
The newer cop, a puffed up, self important son of a bitch, comes back with my passport and looks at Leigh while rattling off something in half Spanish half Catalan. He repeats himself twice, after Leigh informs him that she is not a native, is confused how this is a big deal, and needs him to speak slower. The jerk doesn´t slow his pace with each repetition, just increases his tone of indigence. ¨Vale?vale?¨ meaning Ok. He repeats like a broken record with no pause included for us to slip in ¨No, no vale!¨ I, of course, don´t understand a word of it except for a few numbers, which is cannot discern between 105 and 150. Surely that can´t be the fine.
Leigh responds as patiently and deliberately as she can, even though I can hear from the cracks in her voice that her anger is starting to burst through. She tells him we´re Americans, tourists, and that we didn´t know the law. He looks dumbfounded, as if he didn´t understand a word, which seems unbelievable considering that Josep uses the exact set of words to explain that we are Americans, tourists, and didn´t know the law. We´d be good little girls, put on our seltbelts (after all, who needs personal liberties) and drive away safely now. We´d learned our lesson, all we needed was a warning.
But that was not the case, apparently this was the cop who had SEEN us drive over the hill seatbeltless, and CALLED his buddy to insure that we were properly reprimanded for our crimes. He was the hand of justice. A hand that held the passport of a curly brunette but was too stupid to discern that it was not the same redheaded girl he was trying to fine. After several moments of confusion on his part, he returns to his car to do god knows what with Leigh´s passport, the same thing that had taken him 10 minutes to do with mine earlier. For once in my life, I had hoped the gigantic BUSH on the inside of her passport would do us some good. Fat chance.
Josep is getting increasingly anxious as time wears on. We´d been stopped for 30 minutes and he was already behind enough to miss the sporadic hours of whatever office he needed to visit. In the cop´s absence, Leigh and I practice the use of every curse word and insult we knew, disregardful of our conservative companion. ¨Fucking Fascist sons of bitches, they can´t really be writing us a ticket for not wearing seatbelts!¨ The both of us are spastic, seething with rage and disbelief. The seatbelts that we had retrospectively strapped ourselves in, even though the car was still, could barely contain us. I half expect her to bolt from the car for the hills, or worse for the cop car to reason our way out of this absurd charge.
When the cop returns and hands the ticket to Leigh she nearly jumps out of her seat. ¨105 Euros? That´s like 150 dollars! Is this for the both of us?¨ No, the duchbag explains, seeming to want us to think he was being compassionate for only writing the one citation. He wasn´t sure if I had been wearing a seatbelt, whih I had quietly slipped in on with the same ear for danger that as a teenager made me put on my bike helmet only when I was somewhere my mother could see. So 105 euros was for one person, and the slime ball wants us to think we were lucky!!!
At first I was convinced this was blackmail, extortion, which I ask loudly with the cop still lurking outside of Leigh´s window. I half hope he understands English, he should know that he IS the crook. The paper work is extensive, and the fine is immediate, meaning we could pay right on the spot or pay twice as much later. Somewhere in there it is implied that if we didn´t pay eventually, they would come and take Josep´s car. Josep seemed to want to get the whole episode over with as soon as possible so he could return to his cows, who love him even without a seatbelt. Still there was symbathy in his voice, turns out that he had also had been pulled over and paid an extraordinary fine for not having the proper light on a tractor he was driving on the dirt road from a neighbor´s house to his own. This, also, happened in the middle of the day. Had it not been for Josep´s nervous presence, and the chance that we could get him in trouble, I am almost certain we would have refused the fine, called the cops the arms of the fasict authoritative system that they are and gotten hauled off to some cell for disorderly conduct.
But we can´t let them get away with this entirely. When he comes back, he hands Leigh her credit card and it´s slip to sign. She grudgingly signs it, all the while muttering things under her breath that, thankfully, only I can understand. Next is the slip documenting our heinous crime. He explains in his inflated baritone is the denouncement. I am sure this is just the Catalan word for tickets, but the connotation is still there. Leigh is to sign it, agreeing to the fine and the ticket, whatever that means considering we had already forked over 105 Euros, at least six days worth of living. Instead, like the pistol she is, she looks him straight in the face, saying ¨Yo denunico la denunica,¨ roughly I denounce the denouncement. Good girl, the denouncement remains unsigned, denounced, as it were. Unfortuantly, even though a little of our dignity had been salvaged, we still drive away 105 Euros poorer and with much less respect for the Spanish government. Not too mention, the delay makes getting to Barcelona in time impossible and our host is forced to drop us off at the train station, where the ticket is somehow four euros more expensive than the one to Ripoll even though we had driven half the way.
Sometime around Friday Josep, in a rare inquiry that did not evolve subtly implying that there is sometime deeply wrong with our country, asked us when we would like to leave. Thankful that we didn´t have to be the ones to bring up the topic of our departure, we ask if Monday is okay. To our luck it seems that Josep is planning on a trip to Barcelona on Monday as well, the first one in 8 years, and is willing to take us along. Saving us the 6 euros a train would have cost and giving us an opportunity to dry out the garments in the car because we were too lazy to bring them in from the rain.
Cops are nothing new for us on this voyage. We´ve bravely (well maybe not so bravely) faced the Tourist Police in Kashmir, which was nothing compared to our repeated run ins with the Indian Army stationed there. We are pros at looking foreign, dumb and cute- a useful combination when it comes to getting out of trouble with underpaid authority figures.
Some 20 minutes outside of Ripoll, we are flagged to the shoulder by a short cop wearing a gray uniform underneath the lime green reflector vest, which was just a tad gratuitous considering it was the middle of the day. After Morocco, I half expected Josep to hop out of the car, slip the copper a twenty and be on our way. After all, that was how it went down every time our shared taxis were pulled over in Morocco. There, coruption in the police force is no less common or publicly acknowledged than donut addicted cops are in the US. It´s treated as a common joke, a fact of life. The taxi drivers usually include the cost of their bribes into our fares.
So naturally, when the humorless cop sternly asked for our papers we were shocked. Really? We weren´t even driving, why does he need our passports? Before Leigh manages to fish my documents out of my purse (they were the most handy) the cop explains something in Catalan or Spanish too quick for Leigh to comprehend. He walks away with my passport in hand, leaving Josep to explain in his slow and deliberate Spanish that we were pulled over for not wearing seltbelts.
What? We die a little bit everyday from the second hand smoke in bars but you´re telling us they actually take the seatbelt law here seriously enough that they would pull us over? As the second cop car pulls up, Leigh and I glance at each other, unable to hide our shock that our personal safety choice is a grave enough offense to warrant the attention of three cops, two cop cars and doubtlessly a appalling sum of public funds. Clearly we are dealing with a bunch of small town cops who want to to be heroes but have little to do but pull cats out of trees and pull over unsuspecting tourists. Josep seems fidgety, which is nothing new, but this time it seems out of guilt and stress. He hadn´t noticed we were unbuckled and this little detour was putting off the trip to the city that he genuinely admitted made him nervous anyway.
The newer cop, a puffed up, self important son of a bitch, comes back with my passport and looks at Leigh while rattling off something in half Spanish half Catalan. He repeats himself twice, after Leigh informs him that she is not a native, is confused how this is a big deal, and needs him to speak slower. The jerk doesn´t slow his pace with each repetition, just increases his tone of indigence. ¨Vale?vale?¨ meaning Ok. He repeats like a broken record with no pause included for us to slip in ¨No, no vale!¨ I, of course, don´t understand a word of it except for a few numbers, which is cannot discern between 105 and 150. Surely that can´t be the fine.
Leigh responds as patiently and deliberately as she can, even though I can hear from the cracks in her voice that her anger is starting to burst through. She tells him we´re Americans, tourists, and that we didn´t know the law. He looks dumbfounded, as if he didn´t understand a word, which seems unbelievable considering that Josep uses the exact set of words to explain that we are Americans, tourists, and didn´t know the law. We´d be good little girls, put on our seltbelts (after all, who needs personal liberties) and drive away safely now. We´d learned our lesson, all we needed was a warning.
But that was not the case, apparently this was the cop who had SEEN us drive over the hill seatbeltless, and CALLED his buddy to insure that we were properly reprimanded for our crimes. He was the hand of justice. A hand that held the passport of a curly brunette but was too stupid to discern that it was not the same redheaded girl he was trying to fine. After several moments of confusion on his part, he returns to his car to do god knows what with Leigh´s passport, the same thing that had taken him 10 minutes to do with mine earlier. For once in my life, I had hoped the gigantic BUSH on the inside of her passport would do us some good. Fat chance.
Josep is getting increasingly anxious as time wears on. We´d been stopped for 30 minutes and he was already behind enough to miss the sporadic hours of whatever office he needed to visit. In the cop´s absence, Leigh and I practice the use of every curse word and insult we knew, disregardful of our conservative companion. ¨Fucking Fascist sons of bitches, they can´t really be writing us a ticket for not wearing seatbelts!¨ The both of us are spastic, seething with rage and disbelief. The seatbelts that we had retrospectively strapped ourselves in, even though the car was still, could barely contain us. I half expect her to bolt from the car for the hills, or worse for the cop car to reason our way out of this absurd charge.
When the cop returns and hands the ticket to Leigh she nearly jumps out of her seat. ¨105 Euros? That´s like 150 dollars! Is this for the both of us?¨ No, the duchbag explains, seeming to want us to think he was being compassionate for only writing the one citation. He wasn´t sure if I had been wearing a seatbelt, whih I had quietly slipped in on with the same ear for danger that as a teenager made me put on my bike helmet only when I was somewhere my mother could see. So 105 euros was for one person, and the slime ball wants us to think we were lucky!!!
At first I was convinced this was blackmail, extortion, which I ask loudly with the cop still lurking outside of Leigh´s window. I half hope he understands English, he should know that he IS the crook. The paper work is extensive, and the fine is immediate, meaning we could pay right on the spot or pay twice as much later. Somewhere in there it is implied that if we didn´t pay eventually, they would come and take Josep´s car. Josep seemed to want to get the whole episode over with as soon as possible so he could return to his cows, who love him even without a seatbelt. Still there was symbathy in his voice, turns out that he had also had been pulled over and paid an extraordinary fine for not having the proper light on a tractor he was driving on the dirt road from a neighbor´s house to his own. This, also, happened in the middle of the day. Had it not been for Josep´s nervous presence, and the chance that we could get him in trouble, I am almost certain we would have refused the fine, called the cops the arms of the fasict authoritative system that they are and gotten hauled off to some cell for disorderly conduct.
But we can´t let them get away with this entirely. When he comes back, he hands Leigh her credit card and it´s slip to sign. She grudgingly signs it, all the while muttering things under her breath that, thankfully, only I can understand. Next is the slip documenting our heinous crime. He explains in his inflated baritone is the denouncement. I am sure this is just the Catalan word for tickets, but the connotation is still there. Leigh is to sign it, agreeing to the fine and the ticket, whatever that means considering we had already forked over 105 Euros, at least six days worth of living. Instead, like the pistol she is, she looks him straight in the face, saying ¨Yo denunico la denunica,¨ roughly I denounce the denouncement. Good girl, the denouncement remains unsigned, denounced, as it were. Unfortuantly, even though a little of our dignity had been salvaged, we still drive away 105 Euros poorer and with much less respect for the Spanish government. Not too mention, the delay makes getting to Barcelona in time impossible and our host is forced to drop us off at the train station, where the ticket is somehow four euros more expensive than the one to Ripoll even though we had driven half the way.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Holy Cow
In the near four months that Leigh and I have been abroad I think I have seen most in terms of animal life than I will for the rest of my animal life. In India, at first you are excited to see monkeys on the roofs of buildings, but you learn to hate and fear them after one of them practically snatches an orange from you hand or tries to get away with the spoon to your oatmeal. Cows are the cause of traffic congestion, and often you have to find a new ally to get to your hotel, as the cow that is blocking your usual route refuses to budge as he swings his huge horns unpredictably. In Varanasi, I discovered that the ugly, desiccated version of a cow is- in fact- a water buffalo, and that baby goats are so cute that abandoning that delicious mutton dinner seems like the best course of action. In Morocco you can feed a camel spaghetti and then ride him over a sand dune. Or you can realize that a full grown man is almost as big as a full grown donkey and therefore, perhaps, should not be riding one around town if dignity has anything to do with it.
Further North, the animal life is back where we are accustomed to it, fashionable middle aged ladies parade their fashionable little dogs down the fashionable streets on fashionable leashes. I´ve never felt like more of a hippie, simply for wearing Keens and a dirty pair of jeans. So four days later Leigh and I jettison ourselves back to the dirty world we are accustomed to- choosing to volunteer with wwoof, an organization that connects willing volunteers with organic farms in exchange for housing and food. Naturally, out of all the vegan, raw food, veg farms available, we decided that the only dairy farm on the list might suit our interests a little better, especially one where we might have the opportunity to make cheese. It´s a foodie wet dream, eat your heart out (or don´t) Andre.
The unmistakable smell of animal surprises me every morning as I hobble out of our bedroom. If it has been raining, and usually it has, the cows have spent the night in the barn directly under my feet. Sometimes you can catch a view of one in the huge canyons between the ancient floorboards of the farmhouse. We have stumbled into some sort of Catalan dream. The farm house would look like something you could rent for a wedding, if it weren´t for all the tools, hay, various animal feed and cow shit strewn about. Every morning and every night we milk the 29 female cows while trying to avoid the very frightening, and very lucky, single male. The Torro looks like a pale version of the Minotour- a myth that never stirred my guts until just now.
As he shuffles from cow to cow, caressing utters with the familiarity that a father should have with the body of his child, Josep asks us forced questions about the United States. Or we try and awkwardly make conversation. Josep is presumably in charge of the farm, which has been in the family for 300 years, he tells us. Both of his parents, and his aunt all still live and work in a sort of slow motion version of what they must have done in their youth. We are surrounded by characters so close to imaginary that they must be real, or so real and human that they seem imaginary, I do not know which.
I was never able to fully imagine what a furrowed brow might look like until I met Josep, his forehead folds in ripples from him eyebrows, giving him the constant look of worry. When he is muttering indecipherable over a fence post or a somewhat misshapen block of cheese I have no idea if he is speaking Spanish or Catalan, to me or to himself. His movements are often nervously frantic, jittering. We are only half joking when, after following him into the woods with a giant pair of clippers, a razor tooth saw, an axe and a chainsaw, we laugh about how he is taking us into a secluded spot to hack us to bits and bury our various limbs under the shed. Especially as he stands in the middle of a field, hand on chin, looking around nervously, shifting a few steps to the left, looking around again and muttering to himself, as if trying to decide what spot muffles sound the best. No, we really are there just to repair an electric fence, one that I will enviably shock myself on later. He is anxious around people, the kind of nervousness developed from a lifetime of talking mostly with animal, or torturing them. It is definitely the former, he is gentle even as he is yelling at the cow who daily trys to sneak into the shed where the cereals are kept.
Jaime is his father, whom old age and hard work have folded slightly at the waist. Only slightly, as if he was going from sitting to standing and got stuck just before he was fully upright. This does not stop him from working most of the day, hauling hay across the farm with a basket half his height in a slow toddering manner. With the basket slung over his shoulder, he moves from one barn to the other with an odd grace for someone who seems like they need to keep their legs straight at all times or risk crumbling. He drinks a glass of red wine at every meal, including breakfast and talks to us all the time, although not in the tone he uses for the animals, which is so different that it sounds more like a made up language than baby talk.
Florinida is so tiny that most 12 year old American kids could probably fit into her jumper. She is plugged in, and by this I mean that she drags a long hose behind her, a blue oxygen tube taped together in parts. It reminds one of the cord to a vacuum that constantly has to be gathered up, de-tangled or detached from whatever piece of odd furniture it has gotten caught on. Despite the inconvience it seems that pulling the tube (which I assume is attached to a tank somewhere upstairs, although I have never seen it, the cord simply seems to disappear into the ceiling) behind her is infinitely preferable to dragging around an oxygen tank around like a piece of permanently luggage. I am horrified for the day when I trip over the cord, tugging it out of her nose and accidentally strangling her. Everyday after lunch she stuffs as many cookies into her tea as possible, making it into a sort of sweat gruel that she consumes with a spoon.
Then there is Tia, whose name isn´t Tia but we call her that anyway. She was never married, never had kids and has lived on the farm all of her life. I will ask her questions in my fledgling Spanish, ¨clean here?" which she will almost always answer in a story, even though I think she knows that I have no idea what she is saying. She just likes to talk anyway, which is perfect because I love to listen to her. It rains here daily and she has mastered getting things done regardless, using whatever is available. With the white caps of plastic bags peaking out of the tips of her boots, a shower cap holding her minimal hair, which she dyes black despite its lack of abundance, she´ll brave the rain with the skeleton of what used to be an umbrella. Sometimes she´ll drape a giant brown bag over her like a cape, go out with a hoe and tackle the vicious weeds that she wont let us go near, worried they might hurt us. It seems culturally out of place, but there is nothing that captures her so well as the term "bad ass."
As he shuffles from cow to cow, caressing utters with the familiarity that a father should have with the body of his child, Josep asks us forced questions about the United States. Or we try and awkwardly make conversation. Josep is presumably in charge of the farm, which has been in the family for 300 years, he tells us. Both of his parents, and his aunt all still live and work in a sort of slow motion version of what they must have done in their youth. We are surrounded by characters so close to imaginary that they must be real, or so real and human that they seem imaginary, I do not know which.
I was never able to fully imagine what a furrowed brow might look like until I met Josep, his forehead folds in ripples from him eyebrows, giving him the constant look of worry. When he is muttering indecipherable over a fence post or a somewhat misshapen block of cheese I have no idea if he is speaking Spanish or Catalan, to me or to himself. His movements are often nervously frantic, jittering. We are only half joking when, after following him into the woods with a giant pair of clippers, a razor tooth saw, an axe and a chainsaw, we laugh about how he is taking us into a secluded spot to hack us to bits and bury our various limbs under the shed. Especially as he stands in the middle of a field, hand on chin, looking around nervously, shifting a few steps to the left, looking around again and muttering to himself, as if trying to decide what spot muffles sound the best. No, we really are there just to repair an electric fence, one that I will enviably shock myself on later. He is anxious around people, the kind of nervousness developed from a lifetime of talking mostly with animal, or torturing them. It is definitely the former, he is gentle even as he is yelling at the cow who daily trys to sneak into the shed where the cereals are kept.
Jaime is his father, whom old age and hard work have folded slightly at the waist. Only slightly, as if he was going from sitting to standing and got stuck just before he was fully upright. This does not stop him from working most of the day, hauling hay across the farm with a basket half his height in a slow toddering manner. With the basket slung over his shoulder, he moves from one barn to the other with an odd grace for someone who seems like they need to keep their legs straight at all times or risk crumbling. He drinks a glass of red wine at every meal, including breakfast and talks to us all the time, although not in the tone he uses for the animals, which is so different that it sounds more like a made up language than baby talk.
Florinida is so tiny that most 12 year old American kids could probably fit into her jumper. She is plugged in, and by this I mean that she drags a long hose behind her, a blue oxygen tube taped together in parts. It reminds one of the cord to a vacuum that constantly has to be gathered up, de-tangled or detached from whatever piece of odd furniture it has gotten caught on. Despite the inconvience it seems that pulling the tube (which I assume is attached to a tank somewhere upstairs, although I have never seen it, the cord simply seems to disappear into the ceiling) behind her is infinitely preferable to dragging around an oxygen tank around like a piece of permanently luggage. I am horrified for the day when I trip over the cord, tugging it out of her nose and accidentally strangling her. Everyday after lunch she stuffs as many cookies into her tea as possible, making it into a sort of sweat gruel that she consumes with a spoon.
Then there is Tia, whose name isn´t Tia but we call her that anyway. She was never married, never had kids and has lived on the farm all of her life. I will ask her questions in my fledgling Spanish, ¨clean here?" which she will almost always answer in a story, even though I think she knows that I have no idea what she is saying. She just likes to talk anyway, which is perfect because I love to listen to her. It rains here daily and she has mastered getting things done regardless, using whatever is available. With the white caps of plastic bags peaking out of the tips of her boots, a shower cap holding her minimal hair, which she dyes black despite its lack of abundance, she´ll brave the rain with the skeleton of what used to be an umbrella. Sometimes she´ll drape a giant brown bag over her like a cape, go out with a hoe and tackle the vicious weeds that she wont let us go near, worried they might hurt us. It seems culturally out of place, but there is nothing that captures her so well as the term "bad ass."
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Dirty/Clean
This one is long, so if you don't care to commit the time, just know a little detail of my current life: this morning I woke up to the calls of cows, chickens, goats, sheep, peacocks, dogs and the morning call to prayer, which I am informed is the head of the Mosque yelling "wake up! God is better than sleep!" at 5:30. This is all after meeting 3 Peace Corp volunteers and following them into their villages, where smoking a cigarette makes you a prostitute and the women- the unbelievably wonderful women- will make you coffee with milk they took from the cow just for you, five minutes before.
-fair warning, Mom, you might not like this one-
Two weeks after we dropped off the face of the planet, into a strange version of paradise, we re-entered the real world with a surprising element of culture shock. To get out of Imsouane and get anywhere after, one has to go to Agadir- the sweaty, busy, ugly town that those who don't have tons of time visit to say they got to the beach in Morocco. Or, as my friend Rachid pointed out, it's the only city in the area where one can find disco techs and women in the "business, you know," winking, "the business." Never the less, on our way to the desert we had to spend one night there.
After making all sorts of friends in Imsouane, we were given numbers and contact info for all sorts of places we could stay for free in Agadir. Awesome, as Morocco turns out to be more expensive than we had predicted and Spain is going to be a killer on the wallets. We hoped on the hot, sweaty bus and somehow end up in the backseat again. It seemed like a good idea at the time- roomy and all- but after the bus swung wildly around a few seaside corners, I felt more like I was on one of those awful theme park rides that's sole purpose is to insight nausea. We again assumed luck when a guy we'd met a few times in Imsouane departed with us, leading us right to the guy whose house we were supposed to sleep in. I know it sounds sketchy, but we were assured that we would sleep with the guy's seven sisters, and nothing says safety like seven sisters.
What followed was maybe the most boring and awkward 6 hours of my life. There were two of them, Mhad and Abdorahim, the later being the one with the sisters and the former being the one whom we'd met earlier. Mhad's stomach bubbled over the buckle of his jeans, he wore a light blue Diesel polo and shinny designer shoes, an outfit that in combination with his personality screamed douche-bag. Abdorahim wasn't so bad, he just was entirely without personality. After a quick meal that we devoured most of, we went to Mhad's house, because "it was just so close." Immediately after entering the stale one room apartment the boys recline on the sides of their hips, legs pressed together and body curled in an S that is reminiscent of porn stars, on the three cushions that form the "salon." There was something revolting about the way they laid down, even though it was just like all men in Morocco. Later I would put it together, they laid down with expectation, like we were hired prostitutes.
Of course, at the time I though it was just the awkwardness that sometimes comes out of language and cultural barriers. Sometimes it happens like this, you are invited into a home and it gets awkward as both parties have expended all of their words in the mutual language, this one being French. But this was different, 20 or 30 minutes would go by where no one would say anything. Leigh and I tried occasionally speaking to each other in English to relieve the silence, but it only made things worse as the boys never spoke to each other and we just looked rude. We tried everything possible to spark conversation, taking inspiration from our surroundings. I saw a Barcelona poster- "oh, you like football, is Barcelona you favorite?" "Oui." "Do you play?" "No." "Do most people like Barcelona here?" "Oui." End of conversation.
Later, when we tried to get some air and some space, telling them we were going to the Internet and would meet them later-maybe- they insisted on showing us where the Internet was and then standing there for the 2 hours we spent online, and going for coffee afterwards. I didn't get it, they couldn't be having fun. Unable to tolerate the silence anymore, Leigh and I just start talking as if they weren't there- reckoning that this must be the meeting of the four most boring people on earth. Then it dawns on us, we'd been trying all night and there were some people who could talk to us for hours in broken French. It definitely wasn't us, it was them.
A few fours later we sit in awkward silence in the apartment again, tired as hell and wondering when we would get to sleep. Waiting for Abdorahim to head to the family's house, I guess that it might not happen, the sleeping with women around, and consider getting a hotel. My instincts say "go go go!" This had gone from weird to kind of creepy, especially after Mham sat next to me and tried to hold my hand-which I quickly jerked away, body language was apparently not among the languages he spoke- after claiming to want to examine my tan. The option of bailing is discussed and we got up to leave, after getting the impression that these boys expect something they are not going to get, and are stopped by their confusion. After explaining that we want to sleep alone, alone alone, they assure us that is the plan and look as us like assholes for thinking any different.
That's when Abdorahim, the harmless one, leaves, abandoning us to rearrange the cushions pushing Leigh and I together as far as we can get from Mhad, reminding him as many times as possible that we want to sleep alone. He looked confounded, especially when we did the best we could to play the possibly lesbian card, making a bed for the two instead of splitting the cushions and sleeping separately-a safely move. I wanted to go, badly, it felt creepy, but at that point it was late and every time we had trusted someone it has turned out really well.
Sometime in the middle of the night the inevitable happens, I have to pee. With at least three hours before daylight I can't hold it, so I leave the room, feel around for the bathroom and then feel my way back to the room. As I try to gently swing the door open I discover his fat, disgusting shadow waiting for me. At least Leigh was in the room, even if she was sleeping I knew she would wake up to my screaming if I needed her to. He put his fat slug arm around my waist and tried to tug me in the direction of his mattress, after I fling it off he tries again. It took a violent shove for him to get the point. Yes, I was a girl and he was a boy, but that fact didn't even come near to suggesting that I was going to have sex with him. Gross.
I crawled back with Leigh and didn't sleep a bit, all the while watching his creeper shadow and ready to sprint for the door with my friend and to spend the rest of the night on the street- it was late and all the hotels were closed. The morning comes, and as content as Leigh is to sleep because I haven't told her yet, I wake her up and tell her we've got to leave soon. As I head to the toilet again- I didn't get sick in India but my stomach does crazy things here- I worried about how stupid it was not to follow my instincts and just get the hell out of there the night before. When I returned, Leigh stood in the doorway, both of our packs in hand. "We're leaving." As the boy tried to follow us out, to show us where the Hamman is, we deny him, with no concern of rudeness. "We can find it, ALONE."
We're out of the door when Leigh informs me in my short time in the bathroom he had done the hand on leg move and asked why we weren't going to sleep with him. First chance I had I told her what had happened in the middle of the night, and we agreed, he was a Fucker. And we would never do that again. Sorry Mom- I guess the follow my instincts lesson is one I had to learn the hard way.
To cleanse ourselves of that awful experience- we immediately went to the closest Hamman, the Moroccan bath house, for the first time. The Moroccans we've met are very clean people, and often it is suggested in as polite a voice as possible that we finally take a shower, so with soap, a glove that is wrapped in sand paper-more or less, shampoo and the tiny dish towel we bought for 5 dirham because we left our towels in Imsouane, we entered a giant tiled room with no idea what we were doing.
A woman who speaks no french occupies the first room, where we strip down and wonder if the underwear should stay or go, hand the over money dirham by dirham until it is enough and observe that the woman exiting is wearing underwear. Right, underwear it is. With two buckets made from recycled tires, we walk past two empty rooms and enter the third tiled chamber full of naked Moroccan women sitting on mats on the floor washing themselves. We fumble around until a woman notices that we're just standing there, snatches our buckets and fills them for us. To figure out the protocol, we watch the other women, or rather Leigh watches and dictates to me, as I took my glasses off and can't see a damn thing.
Scrubbing ourselves with the glove of sandpaper seems impossible, so finally we "do as the romans do" and start to scrub each other, after all, everyone else is doing it. With lament, we scrape off our tans, discovering that we were dark only because we were covered in dead skin. If you've never been to a Hamman but think you've been clean, you are mistaken. Dead skin rolls of in clumps that looks like lint off of a sweater. It sounds gross, but it's actually kind of cool.
Naked Moroccan women are something else. They are big, full, and have the roundest, darkest nipples I have ever seen and a tolerance for heat that is unbelievable. In the sweltering heat of summer they wear so many layers of cloths that they would like like hobos expect for their exceptional taste. Shirts on top of jeans, sweaters on top of dresses and a cloak and scarf on top of it all. The Hamman is no different, and as I am considering what heat stroke feels like and remembering how I don't even like saunas that much they are as comfortable as I have seen women in this country; just hanging out chatting. They scrub, they lather, they rinse and repeat the whole process at a leisurely pace, free from the men and all of the thankless work that seems to define their lives here.
We exit clean as I have ever been, leaving all the awkward and skeezy events of the previous night behind with layers and layers of dead skin that have probably been on my for years. On to the desert, more heat, blue men, camel jokes and a guy who can walk through the Sahara everyday of his life in a pair of worn out Nike flip flops.
-fair warning, Mom, you might not like this one-
Two weeks after we dropped off the face of the planet, into a strange version of paradise, we re-entered the real world with a surprising element of culture shock. To get out of Imsouane and get anywhere after, one has to go to Agadir- the sweaty, busy, ugly town that those who don't have tons of time visit to say they got to the beach in Morocco. Or, as my friend Rachid pointed out, it's the only city in the area where one can find disco techs and women in the "business, you know," winking, "the business." Never the less, on our way to the desert we had to spend one night there.
After making all sorts of friends in Imsouane, we were given numbers and contact info for all sorts of places we could stay for free in Agadir. Awesome, as Morocco turns out to be more expensive than we had predicted and Spain is going to be a killer on the wallets. We hoped on the hot, sweaty bus and somehow end up in the backseat again. It seemed like a good idea at the time- roomy and all- but after the bus swung wildly around a few seaside corners, I felt more like I was on one of those awful theme park rides that's sole purpose is to insight nausea. We again assumed luck when a guy we'd met a few times in Imsouane departed with us, leading us right to the guy whose house we were supposed to sleep in. I know it sounds sketchy, but we were assured that we would sleep with the guy's seven sisters, and nothing says safety like seven sisters.
What followed was maybe the most boring and awkward 6 hours of my life. There were two of them, Mhad and Abdorahim, the later being the one with the sisters and the former being the one whom we'd met earlier. Mhad's stomach bubbled over the buckle of his jeans, he wore a light blue Diesel polo and shinny designer shoes, an outfit that in combination with his personality screamed douche-bag. Abdorahim wasn't so bad, he just was entirely without personality. After a quick meal that we devoured most of, we went to Mhad's house, because "it was just so close." Immediately after entering the stale one room apartment the boys recline on the sides of their hips, legs pressed together and body curled in an S that is reminiscent of porn stars, on the three cushions that form the "salon." There was something revolting about the way they laid down, even though it was just like all men in Morocco. Later I would put it together, they laid down with expectation, like we were hired prostitutes.
Of course, at the time I though it was just the awkwardness that sometimes comes out of language and cultural barriers. Sometimes it happens like this, you are invited into a home and it gets awkward as both parties have expended all of their words in the mutual language, this one being French. But this was different, 20 or 30 minutes would go by where no one would say anything. Leigh and I tried occasionally speaking to each other in English to relieve the silence, but it only made things worse as the boys never spoke to each other and we just looked rude. We tried everything possible to spark conversation, taking inspiration from our surroundings. I saw a Barcelona poster- "oh, you like football, is Barcelona you favorite?" "Oui." "Do you play?" "No." "Do most people like Barcelona here?" "Oui." End of conversation.
Later, when we tried to get some air and some space, telling them we were going to the Internet and would meet them later-maybe- they insisted on showing us where the Internet was and then standing there for the 2 hours we spent online, and going for coffee afterwards. I didn't get it, they couldn't be having fun. Unable to tolerate the silence anymore, Leigh and I just start talking as if they weren't there- reckoning that this must be the meeting of the four most boring people on earth. Then it dawns on us, we'd been trying all night and there were some people who could talk to us for hours in broken French. It definitely wasn't us, it was them.
A few fours later we sit in awkward silence in the apartment again, tired as hell and wondering when we would get to sleep. Waiting for Abdorahim to head to the family's house, I guess that it might not happen, the sleeping with women around, and consider getting a hotel. My instincts say "go go go!" This had gone from weird to kind of creepy, especially after Mham sat next to me and tried to hold my hand-which I quickly jerked away, body language was apparently not among the languages he spoke- after claiming to want to examine my tan. The option of bailing is discussed and we got up to leave, after getting the impression that these boys expect something they are not going to get, and are stopped by their confusion. After explaining that we want to sleep alone, alone alone, they assure us that is the plan and look as us like assholes for thinking any different.
That's when Abdorahim, the harmless one, leaves, abandoning us to rearrange the cushions pushing Leigh and I together as far as we can get from Mhad, reminding him as many times as possible that we want to sleep alone. He looked confounded, especially when we did the best we could to play the possibly lesbian card, making a bed for the two instead of splitting the cushions and sleeping separately-a safely move. I wanted to go, badly, it felt creepy, but at that point it was late and every time we had trusted someone it has turned out really well.
Sometime in the middle of the night the inevitable happens, I have to pee. With at least three hours before daylight I can't hold it, so I leave the room, feel around for the bathroom and then feel my way back to the room. As I try to gently swing the door open I discover his fat, disgusting shadow waiting for me. At least Leigh was in the room, even if she was sleeping I knew she would wake up to my screaming if I needed her to. He put his fat slug arm around my waist and tried to tug me in the direction of his mattress, after I fling it off he tries again. It took a violent shove for him to get the point. Yes, I was a girl and he was a boy, but that fact didn't even come near to suggesting that I was going to have sex with him. Gross.
I crawled back with Leigh and didn't sleep a bit, all the while watching his creeper shadow and ready to sprint for the door with my friend and to spend the rest of the night on the street- it was late and all the hotels were closed. The morning comes, and as content as Leigh is to sleep because I haven't told her yet, I wake her up and tell her we've got to leave soon. As I head to the toilet again- I didn't get sick in India but my stomach does crazy things here- I worried about how stupid it was not to follow my instincts and just get the hell out of there the night before. When I returned, Leigh stood in the doorway, both of our packs in hand. "We're leaving." As the boy tried to follow us out, to show us where the Hamman is, we deny him, with no concern of rudeness. "We can find it, ALONE."
We're out of the door when Leigh informs me in my short time in the bathroom he had done the hand on leg move and asked why we weren't going to sleep with him. First chance I had I told her what had happened in the middle of the night, and we agreed, he was a Fucker. And we would never do that again. Sorry Mom- I guess the follow my instincts lesson is one I had to learn the hard way.
To cleanse ourselves of that awful experience- we immediately went to the closest Hamman, the Moroccan bath house, for the first time. The Moroccans we've met are very clean people, and often it is suggested in as polite a voice as possible that we finally take a shower, so with soap, a glove that is wrapped in sand paper-more or less, shampoo and the tiny dish towel we bought for 5 dirham because we left our towels in Imsouane, we entered a giant tiled room with no idea what we were doing.
A woman who speaks no french occupies the first room, where we strip down and wonder if the underwear should stay or go, hand the over money dirham by dirham until it is enough and observe that the woman exiting is wearing underwear. Right, underwear it is. With two buckets made from recycled tires, we walk past two empty rooms and enter the third tiled chamber full of naked Moroccan women sitting on mats on the floor washing themselves. We fumble around until a woman notices that we're just standing there, snatches our buckets and fills them for us. To figure out the protocol, we watch the other women, or rather Leigh watches and dictates to me, as I took my glasses off and can't see a damn thing.
Scrubbing ourselves with the glove of sandpaper seems impossible, so finally we "do as the romans do" and start to scrub each other, after all, everyone else is doing it. With lament, we scrape off our tans, discovering that we were dark only because we were covered in dead skin. If you've never been to a Hamman but think you've been clean, you are mistaken. Dead skin rolls of in clumps that looks like lint off of a sweater. It sounds gross, but it's actually kind of cool.
Naked Moroccan women are something else. They are big, full, and have the roundest, darkest nipples I have ever seen and a tolerance for heat that is unbelievable. In the sweltering heat of summer they wear so many layers of cloths that they would like like hobos expect for their exceptional taste. Shirts on top of jeans, sweaters on top of dresses and a cloak and scarf on top of it all. The Hamman is no different, and as I am considering what heat stroke feels like and remembering how I don't even like saunas that much they are as comfortable as I have seen women in this country; just hanging out chatting. They scrub, they lather, they rinse and repeat the whole process at a leisurely pace, free from the men and all of the thankless work that seems to define their lives here.
We exit clean as I have ever been, leaving all the awkward and skeezy events of the previous night behind with layers and layers of dead skin that have probably been on my for years. On to the desert, more heat, blue men, camel jokes and a guy who can walk through the Sahara everyday of his life in a pair of worn out Nike flip flops.
Friday, April 11, 2008
...And we're back
After spending near two weeks in a tiny coastal village without electrify and running water, but with plenty of gorgeous men, fresh fish and some other unmentionable goodies, we have finally returned to civilization. Let me tell you, civilization sucks.
So- because I haven't really posted sense we left India almost a month ago, here is a brief overview of our adventures in Morocco thus far-
After an insane five straight days of travel we arrived in Casablanca, took the train into the city, walked out of the train station, looked around, walked right back in and took the train to Marrakesh. According to other tourists we spoke to, we made the right choice.
First thing in Marrakesh, we got screwed by the taxi driver who drove us all over the city to arrive at the hostel that was more or less across the street from where he picked us up. We didn't realize this until after we forked over 80 Dirham for a 2 Dirham ride. Bastard.
Youth Hostels are awesome. After five days without a real bed- or even an Indian version of a real bed- sleeping on the hostel mattress was like sleeping on a cloud, a creaky cloud, but a white puff of heaven none the less. There, we met a Canadian named Carl who helped us with our French and a whole slew of Spanish students on their Easter break. Hopefully, if our funds make it past Morocco, we will have places to stay in oh-so-expensive Spain.
Marrakesh is tourist central. Honestly I think there were more white people in the city than Moroccans. It's a bit of culture shock from India, everything here is so modern and developed. Everyone is very European, and all of the locals dress better than us. Most of the time it feels as if we just walked into an office in sweat pants. The center of the city is the oldest part, where you can get the best fresh squeezed OJ of you life, buy herbal cures for anything, get any fruit you can think of dried and shop for leather, silver, pottery, and trinkets until you drop. If India was a mess of color, Morocco is a minimalist painting. No less color, but more solid. Brightly painted blue doors pop open from white buildings. The bathroom could be painted yellow, the bed room pink and the hallway tiled in yellows and greens.
After fulling exploring Marrakesh, drinking gallons on Oj and getting fondled/followed more than I'd like to admit- I miss the men at home, who find me neither interesting or attractive- we headed to Essourra, a picturesque coastal town where gulls swarm over the square, hoping for abandoned bits of fish left behind as whole crabs are plucked from the ocean, grilled and served in heaping piles. Leigh made friends with a cook as I made a friend I later unmade when he told me he thought our souls were a perfect match, but the cook friend made us a goat's head for dinner. I thought I had seen every graphic food in India until I saw the head, in its entirety, splayed in half on the plate in front of me, ears flopping to the side and eyes still looking alive. Yum... Leigh cowboyed up on that one more than I did, she ate the eye.
When we departed trying to get to Agadir, we got tired of fighting with bus drivers and cab drivers, who try to charge you way more than the price and pocket the extra, so we just headed out on the road hoping to hitch a ride. Sorry Mom. Thus, we accidentally ended up in Imsouane, half way between Essourra and Agadir, halfway between a tiny fishing town a Billibong add. We planned on staying one night, as it was getting late, and ended up there for two weeks. I tried to surf and sucked at it, we saw an older woman make Amaloo- a delicious kind of peanut butter that all the boys warned me to slow down on when they noticed my frequent trips to the toilet- listened to the locals play the dijembe and a Berber version of the symbols. We ate too much, so even though we are tanner, we're a bit fatter. Not that it stopped the boys we were hanging out with, sleeping with tourists is a sort of competitive sport for them, one they are very good at...
So, after a diet of fish, fresh bread, cous cous, and tagine- teahouse people beware, our version is WAY off- we have finally returned to the real world, where electricity and running water are the perks and busy streets, noise and skeezy men are the pit falls. We are in route at the moment for the Sahara, a camel trek and an eventual return to the coast.
Miss everyone at home- although the prospect of return to the states might be something I put off as long as possible.
So- because I haven't really posted sense we left India almost a month ago, here is a brief overview of our adventures in Morocco thus far-
After an insane five straight days of travel we arrived in Casablanca, took the train into the city, walked out of the train station, looked around, walked right back in and took the train to Marrakesh. According to other tourists we spoke to, we made the right choice.
First thing in Marrakesh, we got screwed by the taxi driver who drove us all over the city to arrive at the hostel that was more or less across the street from where he picked us up. We didn't realize this until after we forked over 80 Dirham for a 2 Dirham ride. Bastard.
Youth Hostels are awesome. After five days without a real bed- or even an Indian version of a real bed- sleeping on the hostel mattress was like sleeping on a cloud, a creaky cloud, but a white puff of heaven none the less. There, we met a Canadian named Carl who helped us with our French and a whole slew of Spanish students on their Easter break. Hopefully, if our funds make it past Morocco, we will have places to stay in oh-so-expensive Spain.
Marrakesh is tourist central. Honestly I think there were more white people in the city than Moroccans. It's a bit of culture shock from India, everything here is so modern and developed. Everyone is very European, and all of the locals dress better than us. Most of the time it feels as if we just walked into an office in sweat pants. The center of the city is the oldest part, where you can get the best fresh squeezed OJ of you life, buy herbal cures for anything, get any fruit you can think of dried and shop for leather, silver, pottery, and trinkets until you drop. If India was a mess of color, Morocco is a minimalist painting. No less color, but more solid. Brightly painted blue doors pop open from white buildings. The bathroom could be painted yellow, the bed room pink and the hallway tiled in yellows and greens.
After fulling exploring Marrakesh, drinking gallons on Oj and getting fondled/followed more than I'd like to admit- I miss the men at home, who find me neither interesting or attractive- we headed to Essourra, a picturesque coastal town where gulls swarm over the square, hoping for abandoned bits of fish left behind as whole crabs are plucked from the ocean, grilled and served in heaping piles. Leigh made friends with a cook as I made a friend I later unmade when he told me he thought our souls were a perfect match, but the cook friend made us a goat's head for dinner. I thought I had seen every graphic food in India until I saw the head, in its entirety, splayed in half on the plate in front of me, ears flopping to the side and eyes still looking alive. Yum... Leigh cowboyed up on that one more than I did, she ate the eye.
When we departed trying to get to Agadir, we got tired of fighting with bus drivers and cab drivers, who try to charge you way more than the price and pocket the extra, so we just headed out on the road hoping to hitch a ride. Sorry Mom. Thus, we accidentally ended up in Imsouane, half way between Essourra and Agadir, halfway between a tiny fishing town a Billibong add. We planned on staying one night, as it was getting late, and ended up there for two weeks. I tried to surf and sucked at it, we saw an older woman make Amaloo- a delicious kind of peanut butter that all the boys warned me to slow down on when they noticed my frequent trips to the toilet- listened to the locals play the dijembe and a Berber version of the symbols. We ate too much, so even though we are tanner, we're a bit fatter. Not that it stopped the boys we were hanging out with, sleeping with tourists is a sort of competitive sport for them, one they are very good at...
So, after a diet of fish, fresh bread, cous cous, and tagine- teahouse people beware, our version is WAY off- we have finally returned to the real world, where electricity and running water are the perks and busy streets, noise and skeezy men are the pit falls. We are in route at the moment for the Sahara, a camel trek and an eventual return to the coast.
Miss everyone at home- although the prospect of return to the states might be something I put off as long as possible.
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