…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
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, MoroccoClick here to comment
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…
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, Morocco, Spain, tangierClick here to comment
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.
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, food, portugal, santa luzia, taviraClick here to comment
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.
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, practicalitiesClick here to comment
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.”
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, bilbao, practicalities, SpainClick here to comment
I haven’t posted many pictures of us lately, and since my mother and mother-in-law are the only people still reading this blog and that’s what they want to see, here are a bunch. (We’re having a lovely time in Barcelona, by the way. It’s like New York with LA’s weather.)
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- Suomenlinna, Helsinki, FInland
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- Narivk, Norway
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- Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy
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- St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City
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- Krakow, Poland
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- Suomenlinna, Helsinki, Finland
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- Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain
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- Rome, Italy
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, Barcelona, Finland, helsinki, Italy, krakow, narvik, Norway, Poland, Rome, Spain, vatican city, VeniceClick here to comment
My apologies to Civitavecchia which is not in fact the “dingy outskirts of Rome” but actually a rather tony suburb filled with restaurants and hotels and even a block full of carnival games and Italian teenagers. The ferry ticket office, tastefully positioned between the shipping containers and Ms. Bikini beachwear outlet, had enough tickets available not just for us but also for the entirety of the Swiss Guard and their tailors had we happened to bring them along.
The ferry ride itself was pleasant enough, though I was forced to watch most of the video for Sting’s “We’ll be Together” in the ship’s bar. We arrived in Barcelona and over the last four hours have found it to be warm and full of delicious Catalonian food and weird Modernisme architecture and with an easily navigable metro system with ticket machines that are eager to take our money. And that’s all we could ask for.
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, Barcelona, Italy, Rome, SpainClick here to comment
We just spent three days in Rome, where we saw tan people in aviator sunglasses and leather jackets in the Colosseum, tan people in aviator sunglasses and leather jackets on Palatine Hill, and the part of the Trevi fountain visible between all the tan people in aviator sunglasses and leather jackets.
Also we went to the Vatican and had lunch with the Pope. He let me wear the hat. Turns out it shows you who’s going to Hell. (Sorry, Oprah.)
Now we’re on a commuter train out to the port of Citavicchia. Our original plan had been to head north to Milan and then make our way by train across the south of France to Spain. But it turns out that would be a colossal pain in the ass and that it would be just as easy to get to Spain from Nice by flying home to Pittsburgh then catching a bus.
So instead we’re skipping our return to France altogether and taking an overnight ferry from Italy to Barcelona. Two months ago the thought of missing out on the south of France would’ve seemed crazy to both of us. But after 10+ weeks of travel, we are very willing to flash our lights at France so it’ll pull over at the Roy Rogers and get the fuck out of our way so we can get some paella. So we opted for spending €70 to relax in an en suite cabin across the Mediterranean.
The only catch is that the boat leaves in a few hours and we don’t actually have tickets yet. We know when it leaves and how much it costs and that they supposedly sell tickets at the port — which is way off in the dingy outskirts of Rome. So we’re headed out there in the dark and hoping for the best. Tomorrow we’ll either wake up in Spain or in a tent made of pizza boxes. I’ll let you know.
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, Italy, practicalitiesClick here to comment
We arrived in Venice Thursday night with a full moon sparkling on the canals and realized we were in a magical place filled with magical pumpkin dumplings and magical €5 carafes of magical wine, where we drifted to sleep enveloped by magical wallpaper so gaudy that we could hear it. And then we woke up.
In the morning, after finding a $2800 accounting error in the budget (Whoops! No more food this month!) we walked outside to find it pouring rain and windy and freezing. When it rains a lot in Venice the streets flood and walking through the narrow lanes becomes a lot like being flushed down a toilet. We hunkered down in our hotel room and, with the forecast the same for the next day, planned on catching a morning train out of town. We plodded to sleep cursing Jupiter, Al Roker, and all of the other Roman weather gods. And then we woke up.
In the morning, the sun was shining, and the sky was blue. We walked outside and saw the pink light of a maze of a city that for centuries has hidden the hands of saints and the hearts of sculptors. Venice had magically turned into… Venice. We crossed an arched bridge, turned a corner and vanished.
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, Italy, VeniceClick here to comment
I’ve gone my whole life without meeting anyone else with my last name that I’m not related to. That’s not counting the other Seth Madej that I found on Google who, much to the detriment of my future job prospects, once fronted a band in New Jersey called Master Bater and the Meat Beaters.
But things are different in Poland, where Madej is not an uncommon name. It’s also pronounced in a somewhat logical way, unlike my family’s pronunciation of MADGE-ee, which makes no sense in any language but does lend itself to all sorts of cool hip-hop names like “Seth the Mad G,” or “Your Madejsty.” But in Poland it’s MAH-day, and in fact both there and in Hungary I found that if I told hotel clerks my last name was MAH-day, for the first time in my life I didn’t have to spell it.
More…
Categories: Madejcal Mystery Tour | Tags: around the world, PolandClick here to comment
