Oujda

Greetings, earthlings!  As the time approaches for me to go back where I came from, it has been impressed upon me that I have been remiss in posting on this blog.  When I made this blog, I fully intended to post about once a week about my travels on the weekends or other cultural experiences and things like that.  No doubt you all have noticed by now that this has not been the case.  Please accept this small offering of pictures from a trip I took almost a month ago and just now put on my computer as a token of my sincere contrition.

The trip to which I refer was over the First of Muharram, and it was to Oujda, a city 15km from the Algerian boder.  Prior to the closing of the border in 1995, Oujda was a major overland trade center as well as an industrial center.  Now, it's mostly just industrial, and has clearly been suffering from a bit of a depression.  The main tourist attraction in or near Oujda is the Sidi Yahia oasis.  Loosely translated, that means the Saint John oasis.  Apparently Algeria is also visible from some of the hills surrounding Oujda, but most of those hills are rather difficult to get to.  Because of its proximity to Algeria, Oujda is in many ways more of an Algerian city than a Moroccan city; it tends to be more conservative than the rest of Morocco, and is not much of a tourist center, so furriners, especially light-skinned, medium-haired females, get stared at.

Anyway, here are the pictures.

Tree on the way in to the oasis.  I'm not sure what kind of tree it was.

Another tree framing the water in the oasis.  To the center-right there is a cafe.  The island in the middle is for the ducks who live at the oasis.

More water, but from a different angle.  The wall that surrounds the oasis makes it difficult to get to the hill behind, from which one can apparently see Algeria.  I wouldn't know since, well, the hill was hard to get to and it was kind of a sketchy part of town.

Water and tree.  And ducks in the lower right corner.

There were also roses growing near the wall by the entrance.

This is a short distance down the street from the oasis.  As you can see, there's absolutely no water, underscoring the importance of water and thus the oasis, especially in earlier times when water storage and filtration and such were not as advanced as they are today.

I went to Marrakech this past weekend, which was really fun.  I'll put up the few pictures I have of it soon, but I think that will mostly be a words post.  I didn't take many pictures because every time I took out my camera, about fifty people would descend on me asking for money because apparently I was taking their picture, even if they were behind me, and thus I had to pay them.  This was an interesting experience and definitely worth a words post, hopefully in the near future.

Later, gators.

Still here, at least physically

For your entertainment.

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.)