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!"

Possibly...

...I am the worst travel blogger ever. To everyone who has been looking for regular posts from me, I'm sorry. This whole polychronic thing is really starting to sink in, I think. Well, that and I haven't done anything dreadfully interesting lately.

Okay, let's see; two weekends ago, I stayed here in Ifrane, which meant I did homework and hung out with friends all weekend. That was fun, but not something I'd like to do all the time, since there's really not all that much to do on the weekends in Ifrane unless you like being out until four in the morning at one of the two local "clubs" and marinating in concentrated cigarette smoke. It seems like everyone smokes here, and there are no rules about smoking inside, so if you go inside a restaurant--not even a bar--the air will probably be kind of foggy from the smoke. That's one thing I miss about 'Murica. Otherwise, I quite like it here.

Last weekend (the one that ended two days ago, if you're counting), I went to Temara on a church retreat. Temara is sort of a suburb of Rabat and is right on the ocean. It was absolutely beautiful and the weekend was very peaceful. I'll post pictures of the beach as soon as I rescue my camera from the clutches of my possibly buggy purse. That was the one downside to the weekend; some dastardly little harbingers of itchiness hid out in my mattress at the beach, I believe, because I now have odd little bites on my arms and legs. Oh well. The bites are going down already and I haven't yet sprouted extra limbs or anything, so I think we're good. Hooray for new life experiences!

Other than that, life is continuing along its new status quo. Homework has started to ramp up a bit, a fact which has partially contributed to my recalcitrant blogging habits. There's a lot of reading but hardly any written homework, which is the converse of what I'm used to at my home university. Thus, it's been kind of weird for me to have to make that switch in my mind. Everything is progressing well, though, so I'm not worried.

As for the disturbances in the MENA that have apparently continued, rest assured that none of that has touched Morocco much, let alone sleepy Ifrane. I'm continuing to keep my eyes open--as usual--but all is well here. No worries. Pics to come.

Later, gators.

Pictures Because Tired

Hello, friends!  I'm a little sleep-deprived today, so if some things either don't make sense or are weird pop culture references, that's why.  I'll try to keep that to a minimum, though.

Why am I sleep-deprived, you ask?  Long story.  Mostly it's because my internal clock keeps trying to wake me up at about 6 a.m. no matter when I went to sleep.  I think it's still a little confused.  At least it's consistent.

Anyway, this past weekend, I got to go to Rabat with a bunch of pretty awesome people.  Yeah, I know, I'm way behind in posting this, but I've been... yeah, no, I haven't been especially busy.  There goes that excuse.  I guess my tardiness is attributable to the fact that I've had a lot of writing to do this week for homework so by the time I finish my homework, I really just want to look at pictures of cats on the Internet.  This is all tangential.  See?  This is what happens when I'm tired.  Lucky you can't hear me or you'd get a bunch of bad impressions of famous accents.

The main point here is that I really liked Rabat.  After the desert aridity of Ifrane, the coastal humidity of Rabat was wonderful.  My skin no longer resembled the Utah salt flats.  Of course, it does again now that I'm back in Ifrane, but that's a tangent again.

How about pictures?  They're worth a thousand words or something so maybe I'll just post those and stop trying to form coherent sentences because obviously that's not working.

Kitties in the medina!  Not necessarily pettable kitties, but at least they didn't have pemphigus foliaceus like some other kitties I've seen.

My group went out on a little tiny rowboat to see the sights and so forth.  This was one of the sights.

This was another sight.

This is the inside of what is now the National Jewelry Museum and what used to be the king's guest residences.  We got the whole tour, but we were only allowed to take pictures in certain areas because they didn't want flash photography.  This photo happened to be the one that came out the best.

Rumor has it that this entire pillared area was once covered with a roof, but the roof fell down a really long time ago and the kingdom didn't have enough money to fix it at the time so it's stayed unfixed ever since.  Personally, I think it's cooler without the roof.

The Hassan Tower, which is the most visually significant part of the old mosque that's still standing.  It's up on a hill of sorts, so you can see it from kilometers away.

Oh look, a hoomin!  This particular hoomin happens to be me.  (Unless you were there and laughing at me, you have no idea how ridiculous I looked getting up on that pillar, which is almost as tall as I am.  I still have small bruises on my ribs and a brush burn on my right elbow from doing the worm to get up there.)  Behind me is His Late Majesty Mohammed V's mausoleum.  I took some pictures inside, but they don't look very good because there wasn't much light.  I won't post them here unless someone begs me to.

Another part of the old mosque, taken from this angle because it looks cool.

The flag was cool and I really, really like palm trees.  REALLY like them.

Post Scriptum...
I know many of you have heard about the bombing of the consulate in Libya.  First of all, don't worry; that's a really long way from Morocco, and even if it was closer, I seriously doubt Ifrane would be drastically affected.  Second, there have been no major problems in Morocco itself.  There were/are demonstrations in Casablanca, but as far as I know, nobody's tried to blow anything up, so it's okay.  Everyone I've spoken to here has denounced the actions of the people in Libya as non-Muslim and wrong.  For the people back home who might be worried about me and are reading this, you don't need to be worried.  I'm fine and am by nature a very cautious person when it comes to things like this, so I won't do anything surpassingly stupid and I will keep my eyes open, now as always.

Later, gators.