Bad Things Come in Threes (or Fours?)

Remember how I said I was going to a beach this weekend? Well, I definitely made it to a beach. It was beautiful; I'll post a few pictures of it once I get them on my computer. There were a few things that happened, though, that will probably provide some amusement for my friends especially in the Western world. Be forewarned--this is going to be a long post.

Getting to the town by which the beach was located wasn't a problem. The town is called Asilah, and it's a very cute town. My friends and I wandered around the medina a bit the first day we got there, and the second day, we decided it was time to go to the beach. We tried a beach just next to the medina, but it was rocky and there was trash everywhere and it was probably the length of a football field. Not exactly the awesome beach we'd been promised. Thus, we wandered back into the medina and met a really nice Rastafarian guy who apparently lived there and knew the beaches. He got us a horse cart to take us to the "Paradise Beach."

I'll say this right now: horse carts are not as romantic as they appear in the movies. The cart on which we rode was basically a flat deck on wheels and was connected directly to the horse with no suspension whatsoever. That doesn't seem like an issue until the horse starts trotting/jogging and you realize that you can feel every single step the horse takes. Bonus: the horse's bouncing is magnified because the arms and bed of the cart act as levers. In addition to all this horsey bouncing, the side roads in Morocco have a lot of potholes and such, and since the cart has no suspension, you feel every single one of those, too.

That's child's play compared with the highway, especially on the way back from the beach.

Apparently horse carts don't adhere to the same traffic laws everybody else does. This means the cart will take the quickest route possible from point A to point B. Unfortunately, the quickest route occasionally entails going the wrong way on an 80 km/hr highway. If that's not terrifying, I don't know what is. On the way to the beach, it isn't really a problem, since traffic is going that direction, but on the way back, it can be a problem. I was facing backwards, so I didn't get the full effect, but the occasional shrieks from the people in front were enough.

It sounds awful, but it was actually insanely fun, in a heart-pounding, muscle-tensing sort of way. It was better than a roller-coaster because the danger of falling off was actually quite real, which made each moment that much more exciting. Every Moroccan we saw giggled at us. They probably knew what sort of tomfoolery was involved in riding on a horse cart.

The first sort of bad thing happened on the beach when a very creepy older guy started talking to my group and wouldn't go away. He also started hitting on the girls, which was no fun. Ah, the joys of being female in a foreign country.

We should have heeded this omen (and the previous omen, in which one of our group had an unfortunate and painful--but happily not life-threatening--accident), but we didn't. Oh no. We had more snafus to encounter in the next 24 hours.

We pretty much had to run to get to the train station on time, in an eerie repeat of our performance on the way to Asilah. By the time we got to the train station and obtained a few "pizzas," we were told by an upsettingly lackadaisical ticket agent that our train was, in fact, going to be forty minutes late, so all our rushing was in vain. We decided to make the best of it and go eat our "pizzas," which were little more than tough bread with a veneer of tomato sauce and some cheese and mystery toppings.

At last the ticket agent deigned to sell us tickets, and soon after that, our train came. During the rush to get on the train, the group got separated into two different second class cabins. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, except that in this case, in an inspired moment of scintillating asininity, someone had decided to put a first class cabin in between the second class cabins. This meant that our group could not get back together. To add insult to injury, there was only standing room in the carriage my part of the group had boarded, and we were some of the last to board, which meant that we were standing next to the carriage bathroom. The problem here was twofold: first, we were standing sardine-like in a high-traffic area, and second, train bathrooms are not renowned for their cleanliness. I think the last time this particular bathroom had been cleaned was when it was built. I'm sure you can imagine how it smelled. All that was the second bad thing.

At least we were on the train at this point and it was moving.

For the moment, that is.

Probably fifteen or 20 minutes into the ride, the train lights suddenly flickered and went out, and the train screeched to a halt. Someone had opened the door to our carriage to let a bit of fresh air in and have a smoke, which I thought was a really bad idea considering that the train goes in the vicinity of 100 km/hr at its fastest. At first we figured that opening the door had caused the problem, but it turned out that the carriage in which the other part of my group was riding had somehow broken down and had to be fixed.

We ended up standing there in that entryway, by the stinky toilet in which three guys decided to smoke hash, for probably half an hour. I was really tired by this time, so my recollection of time may be off. Anyway, the train finally started moving again after that half hour, and we contacted the rest of the group--thank goodness for cell phones--to coordinate positions. All that constituted the third bad thing. It wasn't all bad; there was a kind Moroccan gentlemen who had some essential oils or something with him which he used to occasionally alleviate the smell of the bathroom.

When the train arrived at the next stop, my part of the group hopped off and then back on again in the somewhat nicer carriage in which the other part had ended up. We reconnoitered for a while and finally found places to sit and more or less sleep.

The train had been moving about long enough for us to get back to Meknes, where we were supposed to get off, when someone peeked out the window and realized that the train was stopping in Kenitra. This would have been okay if we had wanted to go to Rabat, which is on the coast. Unfortunately, Meknes is a good hour and a half to two hours inland from there by train. Apparently we were supposed to change trains at some point a good distance back, and we had not noticed this little tidbit printed on our tickets. Another friendly Moroccan gentleman told us we could get off in Sale, which is right across a river from Rabat, and go back to Meknes from there. We got off and went to the ticket counter immediately, where we learned, to our dismay, that the next train from Sale to Meknes left at 11:25 at night, an hour after we had arrived in Sale. Again, this normally wouldn't be a problem, except that we needed to be back for Monday morning classes and Grand Taxis stop running at 11 and don't start again until 5. It looked like we would be spending the night in Meknes, so we started calling around for hotels in Meknes. Courtesy our invaluable Francophone, we found one for 50Dhs per person.

The time came for our train to arrive. We waited five minutes past the correct time and then noticed that the sign said it was now delayed by 30 minutes. Fantastic. All that was the third bad thing.

Finally, after all this ado, we arrived in Meknes and got to the hotel. The train had been freezing cold, and we were all shivering or close to it, so we were hoping for warm rooms. Apparently such rooms are not to be had in Meknes for 50Dhs per person. I have trained with heavy punching bags that had more give than these beds. The bedsheets were torn and looked like they hadn't been washed in weeks, and the blankets smelled weird. I slept in my clothes. The running water in one of the rooms didn't work at all, and in the other, there was mystery hair in the sink. There were two toilets; one was a regular toilet and the other was the hole-in-the-floor kind. Neither of them flushed normally. After we left the hotel the next morning, we figured out that flushing was the reason there was a little bucket next to a tap in each of the bathrooms. These bathrooms also were lacking in the hygiene department, and had probably not been cleaned even before they were put in.

Oh well. At least we had a roof over our heads. This might have been a fourth bad thing. There's still some debate as to whether the hotel was the fourth bad thing or the "pizzas" were or my friend's accident was, or if maybe there were five or six things. There's also debate about whether or not the Bad Things Meter resets at midnight, which would have meant that the hotel incident started a new chain of bad things.

Anyway, after this adventure, we at long last got a Grand Taxi back to Ifrane and arrived at the university at about 11. As I sit here now on my relatively comfortable bed with my computer on my lap and access to the interwebs, it feels like ages ago that all this happened. Looking back, I can see the hilarity of our situation, but at the time, it felt awful. I tried to console myself with the thought of how I could put everything in my blog, but that idea didn't hold up well once we passed Kenitra. It's all here now, though, and I'm chuckling about it as I write. At least it's something I can tell kids about when I'm crotchety and old and people can teleport wherever they want and don't have to deal with the ins and outs of ground transportation anymore.

"Dern kids. In my day, people missed trains instead of just getting lost in little pieces somewhere in the atmosphere or the digital world or whatever the heck place you younguns jabber on about. Trains were actually something to complain about!"