Again With the Hustle

We met Omar on the train from Meknes to Fes. He struck up a conversation with the usual, "Where are you from," and then told us about his family in Fes, and his job at the Roman ruins of Volubilis, near Meknes. We told him about our lives and families. His English was great, and he had us break out our Lonely Planet so he could show us his favorite places in Fes. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice kept asking, "Are we being hustled?"

The Hustle is everywhere in Morocco. Walk into the medina of any city, and suddenly you are the center of attention. Where are you from? Welcome to my country. Would you like some tea? Do you need a guide? A carpet? Hashish? Would you like to give me 5 dirham? The answers to these questions is almost invariably no, but still they are asked by men or boys (they are always male) from the ages of 6 to 60, with the median somewhere in the late teens/early twenties.

It is, I would imagine, something like being a hot girl at a club. The fact that I make eye contact, or smile, does not mean I necessarily want what you are offering. I'm just trying to be polite, but maybe I can't do that.

But Omar didn't ask us for anything. He seemed to genuinely want us to have a good time in Morocco. He talked about how important tourism is for his country's economy, which is why he wants tourists like us to have a good experience - so we can recommend it to our friends. He warned us against using the "faux guides" - kids who hang out in the medina, and give tourists a quick, often inaccurate tour. If we wanted a guide, he had a friend who was an official, government-licensed tour guide, and an former Art History professor. But there was no pressure - he gave us a phone number, and said, "Call if you like." Then he said goodbye, shook our hands, and went on his way in Fez.

This is how I want interactions to go, but I'm not sure that's fair of me. I am from a rich country, and I am traveling around a poor country just for fun. Do I also have the right to expect that these interactions be free from any economic dimension? Does the fact that money is involved necessarily polute the relationship, rendering it somehow "inauthentic?" I don't know...

We called Omar's friend that day (yesterday). Today, he showed up at our hotel in his spiffy new Fiat and took us on a brief tour of the old Jewish quarter of Fes, a couple of mosques, and a view point outside the medina. His English was also great, and he knew plenty of interesting details and stories.

Then he took us on a rather extensive tour of handicraft workshops and showrooms - ceramics, brassware, leather, and, of course, carpets. The pressure to buy was generally light and quite decorous, but the tour of shops continued until we said we were through.

Was that a hustle? Wafa Lo (Omar's friend) almost certainly got a kickback for the sizeable collection of leather goods Lee ended up purchasing. Did some of that find its way back to Omar too? Who knows? And I'm not even sure that's the right question to ask. All I know is that Fes has been great, and I'm hereby recommending it to all my friends.

Insider/Outsider

Last night, the night of our arrival in Tangier was not only grey and rainy. It was also Eid al-Fitr. As of today, Ramadan is officially over, and good muslims are once again free to eat, drink, smoke, and have sex during the daylight hours. Eid al-Fitr - the Feast of Breaking the Fast - begins at sundown on the last day of Ramadan.

The Feast is not a big, crazy-go-nuts, party-in-the-street type of feast - something which became quite obvious to Lee and I as we wandered the rainy, deserted streets of Tangier in search of dinner last night. We had umbrellas, but by the time we found a place that was both open and sold food, we drenched below the knees and damp below the shoulders. The only other occupants of the restaurant were a quiet German couple, and a couple of old Moroccan men who didn't eat, but just sat at a table and chatted with the waiter. It had the languid, vaguely melancholy vibe of a restaurant on Christmas Eve.

Late into the night, from the house below our hotel, we heard the sound of people laughing and shouting, all to the soundtrack of Justin Timberlake and Moroccan pop music. Early the next morning, with the skies clearing slightly, we heard, from far off, the sound of a horn being blown, and of drums, and of a muezzin singing the extended version of Allah hu Akbar. We wandered around quite a bit, but everything was closed, nobody was on the street, and we didn't have an in.

* * * * * *

Covaleda was unseasonbly sunny when we were there. My uncle Antonio, who was born in the small Castillian village near Soria, and aunt Tab, who was born in California and married Antonio twenty-some years ago, both commented on how lucky we were that it wasn't freezing cold and rainy. It had been drizzling constantly until we got there.

The rain was good for the mushrooms, though, and that's why we were there - to pick and cook and eat the wild mushrooms that grow in the forest around Covaleda. (The forest, incedentaly, was a gift from a Spanish king to the people of Covaleda to show his appreciation for a lovely hunting trip he had enjoyed in it. That was several hundred years ago, and the forest is still collectively owned by the people of Covaleda.)

The family house in Covaleda has roughly twenty bedrooms, a glazed tile roof, a tower, and a generations-long history of intrigue - full of blackmail, disinheritance, lost fortunes, and great one-liners with all makings of a sweeping epic novel.

Days at the house were spent cleaning mushrooms, hearing stories, and eating more than I ever considered possible in a single day. Here is an example of a one day's eating schedule:

11am - Breakfast of pastries and cafe con leche
2pm - Afternoon beer, tapas and socializing at at least two bars
4pm - Lunch. First potato and fresh mushroom stew. Then grilled lamb chops. Then pork chops. Then industrial strenght aguardiente and patxaran, a sweet, basque liquer.
5:30 - Nap. Direly needed.
8pm - Evening beers and tapas, again at no fewer than two bars.
Midnight - Dinner of baked chicken and bean-and-ham stew.

I was informed by Tab, and by my uncle's sister Pili, that this is in no way considered excessive.

For two days of the Virgen del Pilar holiday weekend, we ate and drank and picked mushrooms, and heard stories, and then we headed out of Covaleda back to my aunt and uncle's flat in Madrid. This was my first trip to Covaleda since I was a child traveling with my parents, and I certainly hope I don't have to wait another 20 years before I go back again.

Covaleda, I have been told, is like any of hundreds of other small towns that you pass through on busses and trains in Europe. It's not even on of the prettiest or quaintest. But its the town where I have an in, and that makes all the difference.

The Pillars of Hercules

We have bid farewell to Europe.

Lee and I caught a before-dawn train from Granada to Algeciras - this requires a herculean effort in a country where the dinner hour begins at 10pm - and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in the cocktail lounge of a huge, once-luxurious ferry boat.

We have now arrived in grey, rainy Tangiers, and checked into the Hotel El-Muniria. It was in room #9 of the El-Muniria, in about 1958, that William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.

I will write more later - after a week spent with my aunt, uncle and cousins hanging out in Madrid and in Covaleda, the small Castillian village where my uncle was born, there are many stories to tell.

But right now, I'm tired, and I'm having some dificulty navigating this bizarre French keyboard. So you'll all just have to wait.

I Am An Idiot, and I'm Okay With That

I wrote a decently long, and, might I say, quite insightful entry about guidebooks, and when I do and do not trust them, but I just accidentally deleted it, because I didn't know the Spanish word for 'delete.'

Yet another moment of stupidity on the road.

I have come to the conclusion that the greatest skill any traveler can have is comfort with being an idiot. Because, while traveling, you will invariably be an idiot at some point or another. Just shrug, and give a goofy smile to indicate, 'I'm sorry, I am foreign and dumb.'

A few nights ago, in San Sebastian, we figured we had the tapas thing down. You just take what you want from the food sitting on the bar, then you tell the bartender how many you had when it's time to leave. No problem. But then we went to a bar with little signs on all the tapas (aka pintxos) to indicate what each one was. Christian, a Hawaiian ship navigator we had been hanging out with, took one and began to eat, when the bartender yelled at him.

"No, these are hot! I make these!" He used English because, apparently, it was obvious we were tourists.

The bartender took the pintxo and heated it up. Lee realized that it had something to do with the color of the sign, so he confidently took another one.

"No! Top row are hot. I make these!"

Aha. Top row. We're idiots.

I could go on with a hundred other examples from other trips, but this should suffice. I often feel, while I'm on the road, that I am acting like recently defrosted caveman.

Oktoberfest & the Wisdom of Cabbies

After my post about fumbling for my travel groove, I got a number of comments & emails containing a wealth of advice. Thanks to you all for your words of wisdom on subjects ranging from Tangiers to Big Macs. One piece of advice, from the esteemed Mr Kevin Carr, I managed to accidentally follow before receiving it. He said something along the lines of, "even cabbies can provied a entry point to the local culture." Here is what happened exactly one day before his email: Lee, Justin & I were staying at the only hostel in Munich which had open beds when I booked a month ago. It was 100-bed barn of a building called The Tent, and it was, without a doubt, the dumpiest dump-hole in town. I will let these two details suffice to illustrate my point 1. At about 4am, someone stumbled into the dorm and peed directly on a (thankfully unoccupied) bed 2. In the morning, every one of the bathrooms was rendered unusable by the profusion of vomit. I am now 28, and I have come to the inexplicably unsettling realization that being surrounded by loud, drunken, vomiting, bed-peeing teenagers is not appealing to me. In our cab on the way to the hostel, the cabbie asked us where we were from - sort of a universal way in which people to say, "I speak English, and I'd like to talk to you." It always feels like a bit of a gift when people do that, and I'm almost always greatful. His English was great, and the conversation naturally turned towards Oktoberfest. The cabbie was a proud Bavarian - not German, but Bavarian. He never once mentioned Germany, but went on at great length about how Oktoberfest is supposed to be a festival of Bavarian culture, and Bavarian food, and Bavarian hospitality. But now, he said with no small amount of disgust, it was full of young people acting stupid. It was, tragically, full of young Italians. Feeling honored that he considered us to be groovy enough to share this opinion, despite the fact the he was driving us to drunken teenager ground zero, I asked which tents he liked at Oktoberfest, and which ones we should go to. He immediately said, "The Augustiner Tent. And you should go by noon, and then leave by 4pm before all the kids show up. The food is very good; you can eat schweinbraten - it is a very good roast made from swine. And drink two or three beers-" the beers are massive 1-liter mugs "-and no more. These people, they drink 5 beers, 6 beers. It is not good. I can drink 5 beers if I want, but I don't do this anymore. I don't need to prove to anyone that I can drink 5 liters of beer." And, friends, that's exactly what we did. Checked out of the Tent a day early, went to the Augustiner Tent, drank three beers, ate the food, which was indeed fantastic, and listened to the Oom-Pah band rock a house jammed with laughing, singing Bavarians. By 5pm, we were on a train bound for France, and I don't regret it one bit. Yes, there is some faint voice inside of me which says, "You're old, and you really wish you could be partying like those kids." But there is another voice, which, while it may not be louder, speaks in a more self-assured tone, and this is what that voice says: "Ignore the first voice because it has always been kind of an idiot. And listen to the cabbie."