There is a little to catch up on before going into the Semana Santa trip. So here goes…
First, Katya is gone. I had a dinner at my house kind of in her honor the weekend before she was supposed to leave. We had a bottle of wine between the three of us (Milena, Katya and I—Bharathi doesn’t drink) but somehow managed to get quite tipsy from it. Milena spilled some wine on her white shirt and so, rather than being all bummed about it, she let Katya paint the other breast with wine to match. I have pictures. Delightful wine breast painting session. :)
We tried to go out that night with the Mexicans, but they had many guests in their flat to entertain and therefore couldn’t really afford to give us much attention, and since Batikano (bar) was mostly dead that night anyway, the night came to a close early.
The next day, the Mexicans put on a workshop for their guests and for the town on graffiti painting and making furniture out of cardboard. It was great fun, but we were tired and Milena and I left early. The furniture was actually quite cool.
The next week was fairly boring, except for the rather catastrophic hit my friendship with Milena took. Details are unimportant and unnecessary, but suffice it to say that Milena apologized as well as she knew how, I forgave her with a new maturity that has sprung up as of late, and we sat smoking in the main park in Castuera for hours hashing it out and piecing things back together. I have never smoked more than four cigarettes in one day—I think I smoked eight that night.
I had been debating how to use my next weekend because the Mexicans had invited us to go to Cáceres with them, but I didn’t want to get bored with the Mexicans or the girls and was considering going to see our English friend Nick in Cabeza del Buey by myself instead. I ended up doing that. Despite the fresh forgiveness that felt so healthy, it was good to have a weekend away from that crowd.
Nick and I really didn’t do anything. Which was what was so nice about it. :) We had a deeeeeeep talk the first night and then just hung out and read, listened to music, and searched for internet the next day. I was content.
The next weekend was Festivalino—a music festival in a town called Pescueza, near Cáceres. It’s a tiny town that puts on this music festival every year and draws thousands of people to its tiny main plaza and windy streets, where there are two stages squished in with live music, along with a big stage set out in a field outside the city, reminiscent of Woodstock. Lots of hippies. Lots of fun. It was somewhat awkward with the older Spanish people watching over us, but we had a good time anyway. My favorite band was the main attraction, which was some sort of reggae/Scottish folk/rap mix. It was soooooo good. Surprisingly good for such an odd sound. So catchy. I want to find some of their music and get it. They wore kilts on stage and, though Milena and Philipp and I left before this happened, they allegedly flashed everyone in the audience after finishing their last song. They were not wearing underwear.
And the next day there was a Top 40s DJ set up in the field outside the city. Really good music too, but I was the only one dancing in our group with much interest. One thing Spain has taught me—how to dance. I think I’m a better dancer since coming here just because I have lost the fear of looking stupid. They all stare at me anyway, as if I have some kind of American flag stamped on my forehead. So I just danced.
On Wednesday the 13th, I got on a train (hyperventilating and nearly throwing up from fear, mind you) to Madrid, after spending several hours cooking pasta with all the veggies and meat that would spoil before I got back, to take with me and trying to figure out how to get it into the milk bottle that I could throw away later, only to realize once I got it in that I had no idea how to get the pasta back out. That was a process, write to me if you want to know more. I saw the city of Madrid that evening and found that it’s a terribly romantic city when it is warm—the typical European romance you imagine. I heard about eight different languages and everyone from my age to 35 was out, plus many of the other ages were out as well. In Castuera, the only people that come out are the old men, the young kids, and the mothers that spoil them. There are no young people. I wonder why? Oh yeah, because no young person with their soul intact wants to subject it to the slow cynical slaughter of nothingness that is a small town. They move away and try to do something with their lives. But Madrid was actually pleasant to be outside. Unlike the times I saw it before with my mom and David. I’m sorry that you two had to miss Madrid in warmth, because it’s way better.
I slept overnight in the airport (got hit on by a French gentleman who spoke like zero English but made the effort for my pretty face anyway), ate my pasta from a bottle in a private bathroom away from the prying eyes of passersby (at first with the fork that I eventually abandoned and then finally just tipping the whole bottle upside down and slurping it through one mouthful at a time), and washed my face in the public bathroom, woohoo!
And here is where my journaling enters. I kept a journal on paper to be transferred to this blog, but I didn’t have much internet, so my readers—okay, reader—will be getting it in one large clump. So, if it seems disjointed, that’s because it is. :D
At 4:30am I was awakened by a nice security officer and told to stop sleeping on the floor. It was time to get in the delightful Ryanair line anyway. Which ended up taking like a freaking hour to get through, only to find out I was in the wrong line, at which point I cut into the correct line, got checked in, and raced to security. Once I got my bag on the conveyer belt and stepped through, the man stopped me. I had a fork (from the pasta) and water still in my water bottle. Weird thing was, they didn’t even care about the fork. I just showed it to them and they were like, yeah, whatever. The water, on the other hand, was a bigger deal to them. Already crunched for time, I was told to go back to the other side of security, dump the water, and do the whole process again. I couldn’t just dump it now? I had only forgotten, that was all, and I would have gladly dumped it. No, I had to go back through. I angrily zipped my backpack back up and turned to go back through, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. The lanes of security were full of people coming towards me and the other ways were blocked. I looked back at the officials who had told me to go back through. They were absorbed with something new. I took my chance and fled. I illegally went through. :) No one came after me.
Then there was immigration control. My visa is expired (completely normal—the visa only lasts three months and that’s why I had to get a residency card upon arriving) and so the policeman inside the big glass box glared at me and demanded my residency card, which I thought I didn’t have. He griped and complained and looked at me overly sternly and said he hoped I would be able to get back in. But he stamped my passport and let me through.
Then there was the line for the plane (I found my residency card). I got to the front and they were checking bag sizes VERY carefully, which I was worried about. I mean, I only had my small backpack with me, but I had never checked to make sure that it would pass inspection. And there were several people in front of me whose baggage did not make the cut and they were having to shell out to get the bags to their destination by checking them. Luckily, mine barely slid into the checker thingy. Phew.
So, a too-early wake up, an hour of frustrating lines, illegally passing through security, illegally passing through immigration, and barely passing the bag size check later, I was on my flight. It was short and I was to Marrakech (I got to watch the sun rise over the Straights of Gibraltar as we were flying over it—hell yeah!) within two hours. Woohoo! Morocco! Yeah, it makes me one of the coolest people I know.
And then I spent 12 hours in the Marrakech airport waiting for Jes. Haha. Anticlimactic.
I would have gone out into the city and planned to, but the person that I was to meet canceled on me the day before and mostly I was just afraid of being trapped outside of the airport with no way to contact Jes. So I waited between immigration and customs. I exchanged some euros to dirhams (1 euro=10 dirhams). Lots of reading. It wasn’t so bad. I had a nice seat in the corner, where the bag boys apparently normally hang out. They seemed a little frustrated that I was always there every time they wanted to sneak a break and gossip together. And there were some airport officials that were worried about me and I think even offered to find me some food, but they only spoke French and my French, well, it’s not so good. So no communication there.
Then Jes showed! Really good to see hear and many of my fears were calmed. We changed money and found the bus to the city bus station for 20 dirham (which I don’t know what that is in USD, but it’s about 2 euros… I realize that means nothing to any readers, but work with me—I’ve lost the ability to double convert and speak in terms of euros these days). When we got to the bus station, we were immediately attacked by people harassing us to go where their buses went. No! We don’t want to go there! But they could give us such a deal! We found a nice man who helped us make the necessary phone calls to find out where we needed to go and we bought an overnight ticket to Zagora for that night. Of course, the young man charged us an extra 10 dirham over what he should have. Welcome to Morocco. No one does anything for free here. But we appreciated the help and didn’t mind paying the equivalent of one euro extra.
The bus ride was rough. We had all our luggage in our laps and my chair was broken. It wouldn’t have been so bad had I been sitting in the broken seat next to the window, but I was on the aisle. The arm to the seat wouldn’t stay in the upright position, so I had nothing keeping me in the seat and out of the aisle. So any turns—and there were a lot of winding turns that we were blind to on the way there but saw plainly on the way back in the daylight—had me falling out of the seat. To make it worse, we were right behind a partition, so I couldn’t stretch my legs out under the seat in front of me. And just when it can’t get worse, the recline function was broken. I was sitting stock-straight and falling into the aisle for all 8 hours of that bus ride. Jes slept. I did not. I’m still a bit bitter. But we made it in one piece and it was certainly an experience.
We got to Zagora at 7am and were immediately met by someone who asked if we had a place to stay. He said he was from couchsurfing, but he was not our guy. We thought, hmmm… it’s still a little weird that they’re so outrageously eager to host us. But we called Samadoo from a pay phone (my phone was out of money because apparently making calls with it from Morocco eats up like two euros per minute!) and he was there within ten minutes! He and his friend Obama took us to the Kasbah. It all felt a little commercial, so I asked Samadoo straight up (I’ve learned from months with non-native speakers that directness isn’t perceived as rude and it really is the only way to be understood well) if this was a business of his or something. He said no and almost seemed frightened that we had asked that. We did not understand.
A Kasbah is like a labyrinth. It’s a huge community of “houses” built together and sharing walls made of mud. The floors are dirt, there is little to no running water, and no lights. To get to Samadoo’s little area of the Kasbah, we had to walk through the labyrinth. Once you enter the Kasbah, everything changes. The outside world we’d just traveled through disappeared, the temperature dropped a good twenty degrees, and everything went quiet. I say that the Kasbah is like a community, but I’m not actually entirely sure. I mean, we saw people in the passageways as we went to Samadoo’s, but as far as other living areas, I don’t have a clue. I have no idea if other people lived there.
So we met the Taiwanese couple and the Japanese couple that were already staying there (another reason it felt commercial, because generally couchsurfers can’t host more than three people at a time and hosting three different parties of people would be a big deal with working out logistics and all). They were very nice. They went to the desert and we would have liked to go with them, but there was not room. So we just chilled out on the first day. We went into the town—Samadoo’s Kasbah community is like ten minutes out of the town of Zagora—with Samadoo and went into a shop where we had tea with the shop owner, bought head scarves, and hung out. Then we met up with Obama (who does not speak English) and we all went to a hotel nearby and had some beers. They paid. And they were paying for our taxis each time. We kept feeling weirder and weirder about it. The guys swam in the pool at the hotel.
Because of the heat of the day, Jes and I got tipsy pretty quickly on only two beers each, so we went back to the Kasbah and took a little nap and had some lunch. We tried tajine for the first time. We ate tajine with bread, using only our hands. It was hard for me to come back to Spain again where they use utensils. Anyway, we helped prepare the tajine by peeling the vegetables. The flies were terrible.
Later in the evening Obama took us for a walk behind the Kasbah. It was a huge grove of palm trees in a valley with fields of different things growing amongst mud walls that separated property. It was pretty cool. Also really awkward though, because Obama doesn’t speak English and so he walked ahead of us about twenty feet at all times and didn’t say a word. We just followed. For like two hours.
We got to a river where we sat on the banks and Obama made is little miniature camels (dromidarios!) out of reeds that were by the river. There were little boys fishing and they flirted with us. Jes kept taking flash pictures and they would get all shy and run away and then be back again within a minute. And we obviously didn’t understand a word they said because neither one of us understand Arabic, French, or any of the local languages of Morocco. :)
We went back to the Kasbah where we laid on the roof for a while looking at the stars. We had some wine with tajine dinner with the two boys and then went to bed.
The next day was bad weather. I didn’t know that you could really consider just wind bad weather, because I don’t really count wind as weather. It’s more just movement to me. But in Zagora it was a sandstorm. So it was looking like our desert trip was a no-go. We made them find someone anyway. Obama took us into town, where we got something to eat. I went to buy water (a very nice man who spoke some English helped me find a place) and on the way was stopped by a desert trip salesman. He said he did the trips for 35 euros per person. Obama had quoted us at 70. So I knew something was up. I went back to the restaurant and told Jes and we agreed to talk to Obama. When he came back for us, we spoke with gestures and tiny bits of English. He said it was because the trip we were going on was 70 euros for big dunes, or there was a 35 euro one on little dunes. We told him we wanted little dunes. He said he would get us the big dune for 35.
So we set out. It took three legs of taxis to get to our destination and just before the last leg, Obama went to buy cigarettes and I asked if he would buy me some. He then asked if we wanted to smoke hashish. We said sure. As we were leaving the hashish deal, we saw a policeman. He pulled us over and the driver and Obama got out of the car to talk to him. Us two pretty young things were left in the car alone. The policeman had seen them at the drug dealer’s house. Obama even got in the car with him for some reason. Maybe to be questioned? Maybe for a bribe? We don’t know. But everything was fine. Obama came back, showed us that he had left the tiny brick of hashish in the car with us, and we set out once again.
The wind was whipping the desert. We smoked some of the hashish on the way there and it hit hard. I guess I didn’t know much about hashish. We drove for a long time—maybe an hour? We went over a mountain pass of sorts and drove more. Then we went off the road. At this point I started to get nervous. We had no exit strategy. I was scared. If this was some sort of trick, there was no way out of it. We were two beautiful young American women in the car in the middle of the Sahara desert with two Moroccan men.
We busted through sand drifts with the car just like you would bust through a snow drift. We finally made it to the tent with the camels. We had tea and sat to wait as the wind blew hard-core. I should explain this tent. It wasn’t like a tent really, I would say more like a yurt. It was a box, with walls made of some sort of slender wood, covered in carpets and blankets to try to impede the entry of sand. Along the walls were cushions with tables scooted up to them. The floor was made of rugs on top of the sand of the Sahara desert.
(Moroccan style facilities.)
So anyway, we ate fresh almonds and drank tea and smoked more hashish. It seems that when the wind blows as hard as it was blowing, the Moroccans just have to wait it out. There were about eight men in the tent and they just hung out in the darkness of the tent and waited for it to stop. We napped. The hashish definitely affected my dreams, though how it affected my dreams is only for me to know. :)
We went hiking on the dunes for a bit. Obama was just awkward. We didn’t know what to do with him. Our cameras were crunching and protesting because of the sand that had made it into everything we owned at that point. Jes’s quit working altogether for a while.
We had dinner and left the camel-riding until morning, since the wind was still blowing. We watched the sun set…
There was a full moon (Dude, a full moon outside of the tent where we slept in the middle of the Sahara desert—I felt like my life was unreal). The tent was nice, albeit sandy. There were four little tents outside of the big one. We got a tent to ourselves. It was less protective than the big tent because it was just made of wool, but by the time we were ready for bed the wind wasn’t really blowing so it didn’t matter. It was comfortable. And we were hyper.
Obama woke us up for the sunrise…
The sunrise on the Sahara desert. Sheesh. It was awesome. We had a breakfast of bread and cheese. Then we got our stuff together and got on the camels! We rode them out to the main road, where we caught a taxi. The camels were cranky. They were soooooo tall! And quite smooth riding really. I felt badass. How many people can say they rode camels on the Sahara desert? Not many. At least not amongst my circle.
The taxi we caught had a large assortment of people already in it. When I say taxi, it’s a really funny thing. There are like a thousand taxis around at all times. They are like the 1980s hatchback Honda Civic wagons, the color of mellow urine. They’re old and well-used and pretty shitty. They reminded me of all the buses in Ecuador and how the Ecuadorian bus driver’s would pimp their rides with the frilly velvet curtains and plush dashboard toppers. Hilarious. So anyway, there we were, crammed into a taxi the color of urine with at least 9 other Moroccans, some men and some women, half of which are wearing turbans.
We went to the supermarket, to a very old Jewish Kasbah (Jes is Jewish, so it was cool for her) where there was a synagogue that would have fit maybe 20 people in it at most, and a ceramics fabrication place. The walls were lined with beautiful dishes dyed amazing colors with natural dyes. I bought 6 bowls that are just lovely.
We were feeling herded and babysat and it was driving us nuts. We would ask Samadoo if he could walk us to the road and tell the taxi driver where to take us and we would go on our own. But nooooo. We had to wait for them and then all go as one big family. They had new couchsurfers and they were taking them into town for something and said we could just go eat with them. We wanted to go to the hotel where we were two days earlier and eat there. We got in the taxi and they were just going to drive on past the hotel so that we would stay with them. It took a very sturdy, “No, please stop here,” to be able to get away from them. It was seriously getting on our nerves and freaking us out!
So we went to that hotel. There was a swimming pool and an outside shower, and since there was no running water in the Kasbah, we figured we would just swim a bit and rinse off and then casually use some shampoo in the outside shower. It felt awkward, but turned out just fine. And we ate lunch there. The man working was very nice. Very helpful. I had a coke, a beer, fish, and salad. It was sooooo good.
Samadoo met us there after a while and then we left and met up with Obama. We watched Obama eat in a restaurant, wandered around for a little bit and then went back to the Kasbah for the night. We had intended to take the night bus out back to Marrakech, but staying another night made more sense. We smoked more hashish, had tajine, drank wine. We sat on the roof for a while and it seemed like they wanted to maybe make moves on us or something but didn’t know how. So we said goodnight and they wanted us to stay. We left anyway and climbed down the stairs to our bed on the floor. I was well hashished when I got into bed. Jes said I giggled and talked in my sleep that night. Apparently I said something like “Don’t do it” or “I won’t do it.”
We were up early the next morning to catch the 6am bus and after we were all packed and ready, Samadoo said taxis didn’t run that early. So we went back to bed a little angry to get up for the 10am taxi. We woke up at 9:30 thinking that we were going to be late, but Samadoo then told us we could catch the bus right outside of the Kasbah, eliminating the need to go into town. Why he didn’t tell us that at 6am so we could catch that one, we don’t know. It was frustrating. But they had a nice breakfast for us, which was nice.
They took us out to the top of the hill outside the Kasbah and we waited for the bus. We got on the bus after an awkward goodbye. They really wanted us to stay. As soon as we got on that bus and it started moving, I let out a sigh of relief. We had escaped whatever that weird experience of staying with them had been.
The bus ride was long and hot, but beautiful. I was definitely sweating the whole time. Jes kept trying to take up two seats, while there were people having to stand. I was frustrated by that because it made me feel guilty for traveling with her.
I made two new friends during the ride, one of which gave me and Jes boxes of dates as presents and the other of which I think was being lewd but I couldn’t understand his come-ons. I gave out my number to both of them. Haha. The lewd one spoke like no English but he was bound and determined to keep hitting on me. I think he was 19, but he looked 30. Not in a bad way. He definitely had sex appeal that isn’t terribly inherent in shy 19-year-olds. But he kept talking to me in French and I would understand little bits and pieces and at some point understood that he was asking if we could make a baby (maybe in an attempt to communicate that he wanted to have sex with me?). Haha. So I lied to him and told him that I had a boyfriend in Nicaragua. I’m not sure that he even understood me because he continued his unintelligible lewd comments, but now with a little more finesse, since you don’t openly ask a taken woman for sex. Jes slept through all of this. :) I read all during the time I was not a sex object.
Arrived in Marrakech a sticky 9 hours later. We took a taxi to the hostel, which was really cool. It had a central open courtyard and pretty good bathrooms. We were going to stay with another couchsurfer, but he cancelled at the last minute. We showered and then banded with some fellow travelers and went to the main square in Marrakech that is so famous. It’s called the Fna something. Yes, the one that was bombed a week later.
We ate dinner with an American, 3 Brits and a girl from Singapore in the square from one of the carts. Then we had ice cream with the girl from Singapore and went walking around. We ended up in a street that was dark with a few men, at least one of whom was drunk. I said, “Let’s get out of here.” The girls listened. Thank goodness for survival skills! So we went back to the hostel.
The next day (4/19) we walked a lot with the 3 Brits and the American (2 of the Brits and the American are teaching English in Madrid!), saw the Jardin Majorelle,
ate tajine again, went shopping, had “Epic Mojitos,”
made friends with an older Aussie woman, and smuggled a kitten into the hostel. :) It was this tiny little thing and it was hungry, so we put him in my bag and smuggled him into the hostel and gave him some of our cheese. Sooo cute.
The next morning I got my monthly visitor! Woohoo! So our spice-buying excursion with our Aussie friend was delayed a bit, but then we went out with her and her dog to the place where she buys her spices. Oh, and she is a chef—she even teaches cooking at her hotel in Marrakech. So we trusted her spice picking abilities. She was so nice. I bought 360 dirhams worth of spices.
Then we took a taxi to the train station. Edwina our Aussie friend told us that it should cost no more than 15 dirhams. So he originally said 40 (is our skin that white?) and we finally got him down to 15, or so we thought. We paid him the 15 and got out and he chased after us. He chased us down for 5 more dirham, but we were firm. We had agreed on 15. And it was frustrating and embarrassing because you don’t want to be taken advantage of, but you also don’t want to be a cheap-skate.
So we got our train tickets for a night train to Tangier for the next day. We walked down a flowery boulevard back towards the city center. We saw the Royal Theater, which was huge and cool, still under construction. We walked more, past a park.
One of the things on our list was to visit one of the mosques, but it turns out we weren’t allowed in. That was sad. So we kept walking after getting lost several times and went to Badi Palace, which was not that awesome. Mostly it was just crumbling walls. But we were tire, so we went back to the hostel, showered, finished postcards, etc.
We set out to eat and then shop afterwards, but we didn’t end up getting any shopping done because the shops closed. But we ate a good dinner with our Aussie roommate from the hostel in the square again. We split up to go shopping, which didn’t turn out well, so we went back to the hostel.
So the next day we got up kinda early and ate breakfast, showered, and packed up our stuff to store at the hostel until later. We had a few more things to do on our list, as well as some shopping from the night before. We saw the tombs, which were packed with people. I was bummed, because we didn’t get to see the men’s tombs because we didn’t have the patience to stand in line, but apparently it was way cooler than the women’s tombs. But we’re not line people, so we said screw it.
Then we saw the arch into the city, which was cool. Then the Bahia Palace, which was, in fact, a palace, unlike the other crumbling ruins. It was funny because the Morocco book that I have said about the Badi that it was simplistic compared to the Bahia. Yeah, if simplistic means crumbling mud walls and bird shit. Bahia had lots of lovely tile work.
Then shopping! We got everything we were looking for, and even stopped for lunch, which was chicken couscous and fries. I got really good at being a hard ass when bargaining. Even in taxis they’d say, “okay 50 dirhams” and I’d say, “no, 20,” and they’d say, “okay, 40 dirhams,” and I’d say, “no, 20,” and so on and so forth until we finally agreed on 20. I got a kick out of it. Then we headed back out and as we were crossing the plaza, a woman came up to Jes and said she did Henna tattoos and would give her a sample, so she pulls out this huge injector thing that looked like a shot with a needle and everything. I thought she was going to stab Jes with a dirty needle! So I was already freaked out. We had been told that the Henna women will do their job even if you don’t ask for it and then ask for way more money than it is worth afterwards. And we had wanted tattoos before leaving, but since we still had more to do before leaving, we wanted to get it all done and then come back for Henna before the train. But this woman kept drawing with her Henna needle, which turned out to not be a needle, just a syringe filled with Henna without the needle. But she just kept going and Jes kept pulling her arm away and saying we would come back later but the woman would not let her go. She was clawing at her arm and she had a partner there to help if things got ugly. Finally Jes got away and the woman came after her and wiped it all off angrily. Jes and I practically ran away.
I had been freaked out the whole time this was happening, but Jes didn’t really seem to mind much. But by the time we got to the teapot store we had planned to go to, her delayed reaction manifested. We were both shocked. I was terrified. It felt nice to be inside a shop and not on the street. We had no desire to bargain and we definitely gave up on Henna. Sheesh.
We packed up our new purchases and hung out on the roof of the hostel for a while to wait for the train. We took off our pants and sunbathed a little. Just chillin like villains, trying to let the shock slide off.
We made it to the train station (after causing a minor taxi uprising in the process because we flagged on down instead of going to the first in a line of taxis) and ate pizza in the station and then got McFlurrys. All on Jes’s mom’s credit card! :) It was sooo delicious. And we were hyper. After glaring angrily at some stuck-up French girls, we got silly again and hopped onto the train. We had a sleeper in the first class and it was super nice. The beds were really comfortable and we had a cabin all to ourselves. We slept the whole night.
When we got to Tangier the next morning all refreshed, we decided not to stick around. So we took a taxi straight to the port in the pouring rain. And we were soaked but made it into the trailer where we could buy tickets for the ferry, yet this stupid ferry company didn’t accept credit cards. Idiots. How can a company that big not accept credit cards. So I had to go back out in the rain to search for an ATM. I was pissy by the time I got back to the trailer and paid, completely soaked. We barely made the ferry because we didn’t realize we were supposed to walk out to the boat. We were waiting where everyone else was waiting.
But we made it on after a long walk out the wharf. It was a very comfy ferry. It was 30-45 minutes across the Straight of Gibraltar and quite pleasant. We went through immigration and got new stamps in our passports and got to show our Spain residency cards. Then we caught a bus from Tarifa to Algeciras, where we could catch a bus or train to anywhere. I was grumpy. I always regret being grumpy.
Since we were back in Spain, my Kindle worked again, meaning that I had internet again. Not that I did much with it, but it was internet anyway.
We waited in Fuengirola for maybe 20 minutes before our next couchsurfing host came to pick us up. This host was a real gold mine. We were getting a little haggard from traveling, and going to Fuengirola was a blessing. Mona and her husband, Jerry, took us in for two nights and we were part of the family. Mona is Norwegian and Jerry Polish. When we got to her house, we found that she has a complex of four different living areas in three different houses and she rents three of the areas out and she and her family lives in the other. If she doesn’t have all the areas rented out, she opens them up to couchsurfers like us as a way to expose her children to many different cultures.
But we didn’t just get to meet Mona and her three adorable kids. We got to meet the WHOLE family. Her parents, sister, and family friends were visiting from Norway, along with some friends of her husband from Australia. Mona and Jerry believe in learning through play and have been raising their kids with those principles in mind, so when we got to the house, we found it full of like 7 children. It was a sprinkly day, so they had a fire going in the fireplace and we came in, sat down, and they offered us a glass of wine. I nearly broke down. It was so wonderful to be with a family again. It’s been so long since I had anything like that. Sure, I’ve been working with kids for seven months, but not in a family setting. And we were asked questions about ourselves and people were interested in us more than just how many dirhams we had on us at the time. Sheesh. I can’t describe how wonderful it was.
And since it was Easter weekend, they had hidden all the eggs for an egg hunt but had waited for us to come so we could enjoy it too. :) So we watched all the kids find the eggs hidden in the cracks in the stone walls and inside the shoes piled by the door.
They invited us to go that first night to a wine dinner, but it was a 30 euro cover, which was just a little out of our tiny budgets, so we got to stay home with the kids and watch Barbie fairy movies.
One of Mona’s kids, Jordan, is probably about 6 or 7 years old and one of the cutest things I’ve seen in a long time. He’s not fair-skinned but fairly tan, with platinum blond hair and a quirk in his speech that made him irresistible. I wanted to pinch his tan little cheeks every time he spoke. And he was a flirt, a real ladies’ man—learned, no doubt, from having two older sisters.
Aisha was the oldest—a girl of maybe 10?—and she was a lot quieter and more well-behaved than the middle child, Maia, who was loud, a little crude, and easily distracted by the television. Maia seemed way more spoiled than the other two, which is interesting because middle children tend to be the most well-behaved. And I don’t say that because I’m a middle child. But she was very head-strong. There at least was our similarity.
The next morning we woke up and had breakfast with the family, which was great because it was a Norwegian breakfast, which included caviar in a tube, bacon in a tube, cream cheese, cold meats and other great cheeses, all put on bread. With coffee. It was delicious!
We went off with Mona’s sister to the city center and beach of Fuengirola to “shop.” Jes and I are NOT shoppers, but our guide definitely was, so I think we put a damper on her shopping mood. :) But we had fun anyway. Didn’t buy anything, for sure.
Then we went back to the house and read. Jes made her famous brownies with the secret ingredient (no, not hash). And we stole Aladdin from the other house and watched it in our living area in the calm of the afternoon. Oh so delightful. And when we were reading outside we watched Jonas, Mona’s little nephew of 6 years, run around first without pants or underwear because he just didn’t like them that much. Then, after he got in trouble with the grown-ups for that, he put the whole ensemble back on, but entirely backwards. Jeans. Backwards. Haha, I don’t know how he didn’t notice the zipper in the back.
That night we had a big family dinner where there was lots of wine, lots of speeches, and lots of laughter. We felt so at home. It was a truly wonderful Easter dinner. Then afterward we got ready for karaoke, which ended up being a bust because there was no one in the bars, but it was still fun. And definitely fun to party with the adults. :)
Our final day in Fuengirola we got up and felt a little more awkward than we had felt before with the family. I guess it’s always what the say about guests and fish: they begin to smell after only a little while! So we read in our quarters, packed, and Mona drove us to the Cercanías, which is like a commuter train, to Málaga, where we caught a bus to Córdoba. We checked into our hostel in Córdoba and went walking and had tapas. I realized that this was the Spain that I loved—red geraniums in the window boxes, narrow streets, cafes on the street. Definitely a more awesome and picturesque atmosphere than Castuera. Castuera has its good things too, but this was the real Spain. So beautiful.
We came to Córdoba to see the arches in the mosque that Jes had learned about in her art history class. I only got to see pictures afterwards because they weren’t open that night and I had to be on a bus to Castuera at 7am the next morning. But the town was well-worth visiting anyway. I was bummed I didn’t have more time.
I didn’t sleep much that night, as I was appreciating the internet I had. Got up at 5:30 and left by 6:15 to walk through the dark, abandoned streets to the bus station, which the receptionist had marked wrong on the map. Luckily I had gotten stuck in Córdoba one night before on the way home from diving and had made the same walk before. :)
I caught the bus at 7am and read the whole time, watching the sunrise through the fog that had settled over quiet Spanish villages tucked into the hills of Analucía. Mmmmm…
And back to Castuera by 10:30am, ready to teach classes again the next morning. Next adventures to come, stay tuned... :) Light and love.
Emily
