…I recommend it, because it makes a great title for a blog post. I’ll write it in a day or two. The gist is that I survived, and our Morocco trip, including three days in the dunes, has been mostly delightful. We’re in Fes on the way to Casablanca, and from there we leave for Istanbul tomorrow.
Seth Madej
If You’ve Never Been Deathly Ill on the Floor of a Mud Hut on the Morocco/Algeria Border…
أجمل التهاني بمناسبة الميلاد و حلول السنة الجديدة
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.
Our week in Portugal was extremely enjoyable, in that we spent more time sitting on the couch than we did doing all other things combined, which is exactly what we wanted. More…
Doing Things is for Chumps
Two firsts for me today: I filleted a whole fish and I prepped and cooked a whole squid. I went about both the way you’d hack out a log jammed into your lawn mower, but it seemed to work okay. The fish was a sargo, which I’m told is sort of like a croaker. I just picked it from amongst the piles and piles of fish at the Tavira market that had just been pulled out of the ocean hours ago, because it looked to be about the right size and I guessed it would be the right balance of oiliness/meatiness. The squid started out about eight inches long and weighed about a pound before I removed the parts that I suspected would be unpleasant to eat. They both went, along with some chorizo and little tiny clams, into what turned out to be a lovely caldeirada, which is basically a Portuguese bouillabaisse.
I also have a couple of pounds of salt cod soaking in the fridge right now, enough for two attempts at bacalhau, a traditional Portuguese Christmas dish that we were served at the Douro winery where we spent the night on the way down here after driving through 500km of snow, ice, and impenetrable fog along switchback roads on the side of a mountain without a guard rail.
The point of all this is that right now I’m having such a nice time not doing any of the things that I’ve been doing the last 12 weeks that I might not get around to catching up on the blog like I’d hoped. Also we have the view out of our terrace to stare at (pictured), which takes a surprisingly large amount of time. We’ll see how it goes.
Happy Phileas Fogg Day!
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.
Bilbao. Bilbao Baggins. Bilbaoring.
The Guggenheim Bilbao is closed on Mondays. And yet here we are on Monday in Bilbao, a place that would be much better to take a day trip to then to spend three nights in. Unfortunately Bilbao is six hours from anywhere one would want to spend three nights in. Regardless, this isn’t an oh-fuck-it’s-closed story, because Sophie and I knew the museum would be closed. Which is why we planned to spend our extra day here in Basque country doing two other things: sleeping late, and laundry.
And so we arrived off the train from Barcelona last night at 11pm, walked the kilometer to our hotel, and told the guy at the reception desk that we had a reservation. He said, “No.” He seemed confident that settled things and turned back to his computer. Back in September I might have assumed that he was right and just headed back to Barcelona. But now I have 11 weeks of hardcore travel experience under my belt. So I replied, “Yes.”
