It’s day 80, and while Phil has us beat in the amount of ground covered, we’ve had to kill fewer pagans to do it. Otherwise the last 80 days have gone largely like I expected. The biggest surprises have been how exhausting this whole thing really is, and how much it’s costing. The budget’s saying we might have to come home a month sooner than planned, unless we’re willing to live in our storage locker.
The blown budget’s due mainly to two things: first, we’re not getting off easy on any of the costs that I thought we might get off easy on. Second, and more significant, the dollar is worth slightly less than Showbiz Pizza Place skee-ball tickets. For most of the trip a dollar’s bought about €0.67, making a Euro is worth $1.50. It’s impossible to maintain a sensible budget when there’s a 25-50% mark-up on everything.
So, we’ll probably shave a few days off of India, a few off of southeast Asia, a week or two off of New Zealand (which we’re okay with because we originally planned six full weeks for a country the size of a handful of Fritos) and a week or two off of Australia, getting us back in the USA at the end of May. Though once we leave the Eurozone things might improve financially, so we’ll see.
Right now, we’re down to our last week in Europe, and we’re getting very sick of doing things. So we’ve decided to stop doing things. We’ve rented an apartment in a fishing village in southern Portugal for a week, starting Thursday. We’ll sit around and play house — cook our own meals, catch up on this blog and the hundreds of photos I have to post, and hopefully rent a PS3 at one of the local video stores oh please oh please. Then on Christmas Eve we’ll climb on a boat for Morocco and say good-bye to Europe and the first third of our journey.
Shift-option-2 for the Euro symbol, by the way. And did you know that in most European countries there are so many diacriticals that the keyboards have an extra option key to allow for morw characters? The @ sign is usually something like extra option-?, which means that if I use an Internet café it takes me an extra 10 minutes to type an email address.
That’s Arabic for “Merry Christmas,” at least according to the Internet, which is always right. We’re in Tangier, Morocco, where they call Christmas “Friday.” I can hear the mid-afternoon call to prayer through the window, and it’s raining so much that some of the streets downtown have turned into lakes, which doesn’t stop Moroccan drivers from attempting to float their cars across them.
