A Long-Awaited Pictures Post

And here are my pictures from Spain.  Finally.  I couldn't find the cable to my camera, and then I realized that I have an SD card slot on my computer which will receive the card from my camera.  Needless to say, I felt like an idiot for not noticing something on a machine I've had for about eight months.

Anyway, enjoy the photos!  I may post others on Facebook.  We'll see.  I don't like FB as much as I like Blogger so I'm not sure yet.

Crossing from Tangier to Tarifa.  It's not really obvious here, but the swells were actually quite large, since it was raining and rather windy.

Flamenco dancers!  They were in the mall attached to the train station in Malaga.

The Malaga coastline at night.  There were lots of palm trees, which made me very happy.

A statue (I forget of whom) in the square in either Malaga or Cordoba.  I can't remember off the top of my head.  I think it was Cordoba, though.

The mosque-turned-cathedral in Cordoba.

Renaissance meets Moorish.

The other side of the Renaissance area.

Reflection of the moon rising with a sunset in a river just outside the mosque/cathedral.

That's all I have time for right now; finals are coming up and I have lots of things to do.  I will try to post photos of and commentary on my trip to Oujda soon.

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plains

Hola! Again I am late with my blog posts. I'd like to think it's because I'm doing and experiencing so many cool things that I just don't have the time to write about them. In reality, though, the problem is more likely that I honestly have a hard time writing some of these posts and thus tend to put them off. Don't get me wrong, I like--well, more precisely love--writing, which is obvious if you've seen other things I've written, but it's really, really hard for me to write nonfiction, unless it somehow relates to economics.

I suppose it's not the actual writing that's the difficult part. It's getting started. Some of the things that happen don't really have a beginning; they're sort of a link in a chain of really weird and random events that are somehow connected but I don't always know how. Writing my blog posts is a bit like trying to solve a crime. I know how, where, and who, but I don't always know why, and that's the part that really matters in the long run.

Now that I've gone all metaphysical and scared off half my readers by awkwardly bringing the "crime" word into a blog post, I'll wriggle my way into my actual topic.

Yes, it was raining in Spain when I arrived there a few weekends ago, though I don't know if the rain in Spain does in fact fall mainly in the plains. I took a ferry from Tangier to Tarifa, right across the Strait of Gibraltar. From there, I took a bus to Malaga, which was a charming city, and would have been more so had the sky not been dripping for the first day and a half I was there. In spite of the rain, though, I had a great time in Malaga and will post pictures soon of some of the cool places I saw.

After Malaga, I moved on, again by bus, to Cordoba, which, incidentally, was mostly populated by retirees. One can tell a lot about a city from the books in its train and bus stations; in Cordoba, the books ranged from apocryphal gospels to vegetarian cookbooks to tarot, palm-reading, and seance how-to guides. The last category was by far the best populated, though I didn't actually see any ads for psychics and such in the city proper. Perhaps Cordoba is a DIY psychic city. I don't know, because I didn't think it would be a great idea to walk up to some Spanish stranger and ask about it when my Spanish is barely adequate to conduct an incredibly superficial conversation. It also would have been awkward in general.

I will post pictures of everything soon, I promise. This is a words post.

After Cordoba was when the Bad Things started happening, again related to travel. Much ado and several hours later, we made it to Algeciras, which was the city from which we were going to catch the ferry back to Morocco. Unfortunately, the last ferry crossed at midnight, and we missed it by about twenty minutes. We ended up spending the night in the port until the first ferry of the morning departed at six. That was a very long night, but I guess it was character-building.

Once we got on the ferry, we relaxed a little. We had time to spare before our train from Tangier left. Everything was looking up.

About that. I think being hopeful about travel running smoothly somehow jinxes it. Smooth is the last word I would pick to describe the remainder of the trip.

Relative to my last post, this trip was peachy. I didn't end up standing near a train bathroom for hours, but I did end up sitting in a freezing-cold compartment for around six hours. For scale, the whole ride was supposed to be about four hours. It seemed like we sat still on the tracks more than we moved.

By the time we got to Meknes, it became painfully clear that we would not make it back to Ifrane in time for classes. At that point, everyone's cups of care spilled, which resulted in all of us laughing maniacally for a little while and then, upon arriving back in Ifrane, going to the marche (local market) to get hot food and drink mint tea and watch people try to walk in the cold, kind of heavy rain accompanied by capricious gusts of wind.

I spend the next weekend here in Ifrane, since I'd kind of had enough of travel for a while. As you no doubt can see, I'm posting this on a Saturday; yes, I will be traveling this weekend, but not to the place I had initially planned. And yes, I will post pictures of my adventures this weekend, too.

Hasta luego. Unless something really goes haywire, in which case hasta mucho luego.

(Yeah, I'm just making stuff up now. I'm tired, okay? You'll get to read why in my next post.)