Having just caught Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy out here in Edinburgh, I thought I'd offer some thoughts, because reactions to the film, especially from the uninitiated, seem to include a lot of confused queries about what happened and what 42 meant.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie on a purely visceral level as it was a joy to watch. From the sperm whale to the Guide to the planets visited, the eyes were treated to a high-tech realization of the original audio series and book. Time flew by so quickly that the end of the movie seemed improbably close to the beginning. Yet there were failings that I have to admit. The story, packed between action, effects and gags, was often sliced and diced to the point of incomprehensible conciseness. While not much was left out, not much was elaborated upon either. Characters came and went, and now, one hour after the movie ended, I'm beginning to wonder why exactly the director felt it necessary to put John Malkovich in the movie for 2 minutes in an absolutely random role (lacking any context whatsoever) as Zaphod Beeblebrox's (Sam Rockwell) former opponent for galactic president, Humma Kavula. The greatest weakness was in how the story was transposed to the screen.

But despite the obvious weaknesses, I am still quite happy I saw the movie for the sake of the gags and the excellent character choices. Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) was pure movie magic as Arthur Dent, playing the Britishness perfectly and remaining likable throughout. Zooey Deschanel, who is almost sickeningly sweet and cute (in that sort of "I can't help being so cute" bunny rabbit way), grew on me as Trillian, Alan Rickman's voice job for Marvin was an exact recreation of the voice I had in my head after reading Guide originally, and Mos Def did a decently entertaining Ford Prefect. I was more ambiguous on Sam Rockwell as galactic president Beeblebrox. He was over-the-top as required, but at times his character came across too strongly channeling the spirit of a petulant child, to the point of excess. Slartibartfast. What a name, and Bill Nighy filled the role well.

There was nothing about the movie that makes it as worthy as cult status as the book, but it was highly enjoyable in parts even if the sum was no greater than said parts. Highly recommended for a viewing experience though not so highly for plot coherence or a deft translation of the book into film.
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Update (or rather just something entirely new to add):

Lessons for American Media

The BBC stands as a symbol of both what a media organization should and shouldn't be. It should make politicians, businesses, and powerful individuals accountable to viewing audiences by uncovering scams, asking tough questions, and digging into dirty laundry. Witness last night's episode of Question Time, a political issues show that had a special "grill the leaders" night where all three major party candidates: Blair, Howard, and Kennedy, came in and answered questions from the host and the audience, which sat 25 feet away and included numerous openly hostile questioners who were allowed to openly argue with the candidates, especially Blair, for extended periods of time. By the end, Blair was sweating buckets and half the audience looked like they had eaten something sour. That's how you make politicians accountable--if they make a decision like Iraq, you make them face tough questions on national television from people who refuse to be shooshed or threatened like some reporters seem to be in order to buy silence. The BBC has a clearly defined agenda of cutting through bullshit and red tape on behalf of Brits. That is generally a highly laudable aim and is something that American outlets need to keep in mind at all times.

But, as recent events have shown, the BBC in all its power is too deeply involved in British political life to avoid getting its feet muddy. This isn't a case of the 60 Minutes' National Guard memo that tarnished Dan Rather's legacy, but rather incidents of seeming idiocy, hubris, and political opportunism. This week, it was discovered that the BBC had "embedded" several hecklers at a Conservative rally to help create footage for their upcoming documentary on political protest. Apart from the requisite Conservative outrage as expressed by the Daily Telegraph, there arose a general sense of disgust with the BBC for allowing something so stupid to happen. The situation was compounded by there meek assertion that they had planted people at the rallies of other parties, despite not having any readily procurable evidence to support such a statement.

Last year (?), a BBC internal probe found that the Beeb, as its known, was clearly siding with liberal interests in its news presentations. (stuff on Iraq?). The largest problem here is not with what side the Beeb favored, as British media outlets are often vehemently opinionated even in their news coverage. Though the Beeb is state-funded, the issue of its political leanings are not as important to American media as is the "holier than thou" feeling such actions create. BBC seems to think itself above responsibility to the taxpayers funding it to act with the sort of integrity and honesty it demands of the subjects of its investigations. Planting protestors, taking baseless stands on Iraq, (etc.) without even bothering to explain itself at times is the height of hubris. Behavior like this loses funding, viewers, and credibility. This is the lesson that is most important for American media to understand. If no WMDs are found in Iraq, Fox News should make that clear to its confused viewers. If the National Guard documents were bogus, CBS should take actions to clean house and restore trust. If PBS and NPR find themselves tilting to the left politically, they should question whether they have the right to show such an inclination (that is, whether they are left because the truth requires it of them, or just because they personally tend to tilt in said direction) while surviving wholly off of taxpayer funds.

.....Yeah, this is a work in progress, just wanted to get it down somewhere.

I'm a Googler. It's like an addiction for me--I see can see the legendary Bruce Dickinson exclaiming "Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription ... is more Google." The moment I meet you, I want to know who you are, not in real life, but according to the Gospel of Google. Are you even listed on the first page? Do you have the luck of an uncommon last name, or are you stuck deep in a pack of non-Mormon Smiths? I need to know before my relationship with y'all can be consummated. Tell me pretty baby, cuz I need to know.

I've Googled my family, myself (way too often), my friends, and people I've only heard of, just to gain some sense of knowledge. I could also talk to people to find out details of their lives, but I don't really LIKE people. They are troublesome, bothersome, and time-consuming. Better if they were all Google manifestations.

I write this tract, as embarrassing as it is for me, because I felt like I should soften the blow before I knock everyone out with my announcement. Despite all the Brian Wagner's in the world (yes, we are surprisingly common online), despite the failure of my efforts to top the charts all throughout my prolific days as a journalist for the Grantonian, Willamette Week, Portland Tribune, and the Columbia Daily Spectator, I have now, finally, FINALLY, become the ultimate Google destination for "Brian Wagner". Go ahead, try it, type in my name. I can wait ........



Impressed? There I am, numero uno, not just for a random mention, but for my entire photography website. Sixth and Seventh also for my blogging at Blue Oregon. Yes, folks, I am a loser, but at least I am a prominent loser. IN YOUR FACE, Brian Wagner the anonymous actor. IN YOUR FACE, Brian Wagner the computer coder. IN YOUR FACE, Brian Wagner the classical guitarist from my hometown. And IN YOUR FACE, Brian Wagner the "experienced packaging professional and innovation leader with 18 years in the field." You can all eat my dust. Because there ain't no looking back now, no darling. Onwards and upwards into the Googlesphere. Today the top spot, tomorrow the whole first page!

Hahaha mwahahaha bwahahahahaha!!!

Sorry. Got carried away. Leave me a note. Maybe I'll Google you. Actually, scratch that. I WILL Google you. Starting this week, I'm going to present my results from my Google search each week--maybe you'll learn something new about yourself (at least, everyone else will).

P.S. If you search under "Biggerz", my nickname, I have 6 out of 10 on the front page. Take that other "Biggerz" imposters.

I like lists. On my old blog, I used to provide, in the spirit of High Fidelity, a constant stream of Top 5 lists for my amusement and the reading pleasure of my "readers". So while studying for tomorrow's exam, I thought I'd just make up a random list. Today's list: Great CDs that don't have a single unworthy track
-The Coral, The Coral
-Marah, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky
-Marah, Float Away
-Dire Straits, Alchemy 1 and 2 (live)
-Weezer, Blue Album
-Jack Johnson, Brushfire Fairytales
-Whiskeytown, Faithless Street
-Electric Six, Fire
-Ryan Adams, Gold
-Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
-Elton John, Live in Australia
-Fastball, Make Your Mama Proud
-Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together
-Sugarcult, Start Static
-John Mayer, Room for Squares
-Ben Kweller, Sha Sha
-Silvertide, Show and Tell
-Blues Traveler, Straight on Till Morning
-Bruce Springsteen, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle
-Peter Lerman, Varsity Show 109: Dial "D" for Deadline
-Everclear, So Much for the Afterglow
-Grosse Point Blank soundtrack

Oh how i want American TV. Luke Ridnour, the Seattle SuperSonics star guard (from the University of Oregon), somehow blocked 2 shots in yesterday's victory. If you've seen the 6'2 Ridnour, you'll understand why I would want to see these blocks to believe them.

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, the best sports book of this new decade, has a great piece in the NYTimes Magazine this week about "types" of young baseball players and the pressure they face to conform to established stereotypes and expectations. Must read.

Follow the Link

If you have an American computer, and you happen to be living in a different part of the world, you probably hate the "region" system as much as I do. Thanks to the infinite wisdom and greed of the movie companies, DVDs manufactured in the US are Region 1 and the UK, for example, is Region 2. Most computer DVD players read only the region they are sold in; my Apple Powerbook can switch between regions a total of 5 times, but after the fifth switch, your computer permanently freezes in that region. Just plain peachy.

Luckily, after a little research, I figured out how to get around these restrictions. If you have an Apple (this is the only system I've done this on), go to System Preferences and under CDs and DVDs, turn off the function that activates your DVD Player when a DVD is inserted. Then, download the program VLC, available free online. Then open any region's DVD through VLC and voila, it works without having to mess with your DVD player. Splendid!

I think I might rent Braveheart after my next exam on Thursday; having just come back from the Scottish Highlands, I've got a bit of William Wallace fighting to break to the surface. Funny story, by the way. Well, not funny. More tragic and gruesome. But all the same, I learned recently how William Wallace died. After he was captured by the English after his great victory (as portrayed by the man behind Jesus Christ in Braveheart), he had his arms and legs tied to two horses, who pulled in opposite directions until all his bones were dislocated. Then he was hung until his face turned blue. Then, still quite alive, he was cut open and his intestines were pulled out and burnt in front of him, as he was still conscious. This happened after he was castrated. Then, finally, his head was chopped off and paraded around. Phew. Quite a day's work for some poor executioner.

Recently, the BBC's flagship news show, Newsnight, was forced to replace its financial advice portion with a daily weather forecast, despite the opposition of the show staff. This is what transpired in the first four days of Jeremy Paxman, the show's anchor, providing the weather (transcribed by moi):

"Day 1: and now, on the theory that while some people are interested in markets, everyone is interested in the weather, here it is, the usual folksy nonsense about clouds bubbling up and advice about wearing wooly socks. Eastern parts will mainly avoid the rain, except for those that don't. Western areas will be cloudy with rain except in those places that don't have rain.

Day 2: and finally, by popular demand, the second Newsnight weather forecast. Take an umbrella with you tomorrow.

Day 3: We now take you directly to tomorrow's weather forecast. It's a veritable smorgasbord: sun, rain, thunder, hail, snow, and cold winds. Almost worth going to work.

Day 4: the forecast is ... it's April. What do you expect?"

The hilarity of this approach was brought to my attention by the excellent show Have I Got News For You, in which two duos of politically-knowledgeable comedians fight to get more points for making fun of the news. It may sound odd, but think about a 30-minute segment of SNL's Weekend Update if a) it was funny, b) it was British, c) it involved lots of pictures of Prince Charles and jokes about the pope's funeral, and d) was funny. I watched the same episode twice in two days when I was in Wales for the FA Cup Semifinal match (that's football/soccer for y'all) between Arsenal (my team) and Blackburn. Among the other things this show brought to my attention was that when David Letterman was a weather forecaster in Indiana, he once congratulated a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane. Priceless.
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Also, while reading through the liberal paper The Guardian today, I came across numerous articles that served to highlight the sheer lack of objectivity that has destroyed the BBC's credibility in recent years. It turns out that, to help aid in the filming of a documentary on political protestors and hecklers, the BBC actually inserted protestors into Conservative rallies to cause scenes while being discretely filmed. It doesn't look like the BBC disrupted any other parties' rallies. The sad thing is, by this point the BBC isn't even trying to explain itself or apologize. I mean, I love the liberal media, but this kind of paper-thin journalism is the bane of serious journalism. Creating the news is obviously something the media can't avoid, because by deciding to report on something, the media is raising its profile. But it is easy, as someone with a journalistic background, to condemn active attempts to create events in which to portray news, even if it is in documentary format. Michael Moore may be able to get away with that, but when the BBC tries to sell itself as an honest source for news and investigation, sensationalization of this sort rubs me the wrong way.

Thus, this allows me to finally offer props to Willamette Week in Portland, where I interned two summers ago. It picked up a Pulitzer Prize this year for uncovering former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt's 1980s affair with a 14 yr-old girl, an affair that the major state paper, the Oregonian, had chosen to ignore over the years despite being offered information several times. Integrity in journalism means not bowing to popular pressure in cases of wrongdoing (trite, but effective).

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Finally, just to float an idea: if we are becoming disgruntled with our inability to affect war-making decisions, especially if said decisions are costing us hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, how does the idea sound of requiring a national referendum to be taken within one year of the initiation of any large-scale military conflict, which blocks the government from spending more than X billion dollars before receiving funding permission? If people vote on war funding like they vote on taxes, there will be fewer invasions and more multilateral efforts simply by economic necessity. I like the idea on first thought, and may develop it in the future.
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Which one is truer? Or do they both work, but in different disciplines? :

Sherlock Holmes, Hounds of the Baskervilles: "It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has all the facts. Inevitably one twists the facts to fit the theory, rather than the theory to fit the facts."

Einstein: "If the facts dont fit the theory, change the facts."

Travelogue Part Three: "Please, Take My Money! I obviously don’t need it because I am a rich American."

If you are ever in Marrakech, I daresay your visit is incomplete without a visit to the bus station. Elizabeth and I were met at the front entrance, on the morning of the 29th, by a very nice guide who showed us where to buy our ticket, where to purchase food, and how to find our bus. At one point, before we actually went out to the buses, I tried to offer the guy some money and he turned me down. I thought, not so illogically, that maybe we had just found a helpful guy in Morocco. Later, I would look back at my naivety and laugh at how young and inexperienced I was (I was judging myself in this way only hours later—I grow up quickly). When he finally led us to the bus, which was unmarked and impossible to find without a guide—in fact, none of the buses were marked—he demanded 35 dirham for each of us, plus 20 dirham for baggage “insurance.” We haggled helplessly for a few minutes, as I’m sure he had us well-pegged as stupid Americans, until we finally forced him off with whatever change we had and a one euro coin.

By the time he left us, E and I had a chance to look around the bus and take stock of our situation—the only Westerners on a bus that looked like something Nicolas Cage would be wrongfully imprisoned on. And for the sake of responsibility, we had gotten on the bus one full hour before it left. Luckily, as we were starting to despair about our isolated plight, two British girls hopped on. E and I, silly gits that we are, started happily whispering, “look, more normal people!” And then, just as we were about to head out, 8 more Brits boarded, which meant that the bus now had become standing room only for a 3 hour trip. I’m not sure that standing was actually worse than the narrow confines of those seats—oh, and did I mention I had to piss the whole ride? On the ride there, we got to chat with all the Brits, or I did, sitting at the aisle, while E just was squished and forced to be anti-social. Most of the Brits, it turned out, had actually hitchhiked from London to Morocco for charity. Coolest charity ever? Possibly. It’s called Link, and it does this every year. It is like Run for the Arts when I was young, where kids and their parents strong-armed neighbors into giving money for every lap of a track the kids could walk/run in a certain time period. Except that instead of a track, these university students (500 of them were in Morocco at this point) got money for sticking their thumb out from England to Spain to Morocco.

Three hours later we arrived at the Cascades D’Ouzoud, which includes a massive picturesque waterfall, a river starting at the waterfall that meanders for several miles before forking into two tributaries, and a large valley where the party is (camps, outdoor restaurants, no electricity, no toilets, etc). I describe the waterfall thusly in my upcoming fraternity newsletter:
When you first look on a large waterfall, with its massive streams of water jumping off of tall rocks only to loose their dominance of gravity and fall, plummeting into pools below, the sheer majesty of nature drives itself home. Try catching sight of a certain area of water as it shoots off the top--instead of staring at the waterfall as a whole, follow that water with your eye as it falls to the earth. The whole of time seems to slow to a crawl as your eye perceives the water shooting out, falling, and speeding up until it smashes itself on the ground below.



It turned out that of the two British girls who had first boarded the bus, and who were not hitchhikers but instead a fashion student and a hairdresser, the hairdresser had been to the Cascades twice before. This meant our guide on the 25-minute walk to the bottom of the valley didn’t try to charge us, and we were met by one of the camp hosts, Mohammed, partway down because he remembered the girl, Becky, from her previous visits.

Pasty Brits:

Our whole merry band ended up camping together and hanging out together for the next two days. In the daytime we sunbathed, ate tagine (a chicken and potato dish that is very common in Morocco), swam, hiked, and generally enjoyed the land. In the evenings we read, played numerous card games, talked, tried the amazingly bad fig schnapps, and were entertained by some of the locals. Our collective favorite was a Berber guide named Hamid who was relatively fluent in English. A tour guide to the daytime tourists, in the evenings he would join our little party and tell jokes, play bongos, drink the fig schnapps mixed with Hawaiian Punch, and smoke cigarettes and weed. The highlight though, as Elizabeth pointed out in an email she sent to all her friends, was when he decided to play for us some traditional Moroccan music that he and his friends had recorded. To play the tape, he brought out, on a dolly, a car stereo, a car speaker, and a car battery, all of which he proceeded to stack on the table. Jury-rigging at its best. The only question we had was where the car had gone or if there had ever been a car.

On our last day there, E and I joined the rest of the group in taking turns diving off the only bridge in the valley into the icy cold water below that flowed from the waterfall. At the end, we all went jumping off a rock into another area, where we used body soap to perform a crude approximation of a bath, all the while trying not to get swept downriver by the current.



So E and I headed out, along with Shez, a secondary school teacher in London, and Alistair, an Australian who lives in Edinburgh. We shared the backseat of a Mercedes-Benz taxi all the way back to Marrakech. Our initial perceptions of luxury were quickly dispelled by the loss of a hubcap only 5 miles after leaving the Cascades. Elizabeth quickly grew bored and slightly irritated as Shez and I argued heatedly about economic theory (his specialty as a business economics teacher) and praised our mutual favorite football team, the Arsenal Gunners. When we arrived back in Marrakech, we agreed to meet at the Grand Hotel Tazi for drinks an hour later, as E and I had 3 hours to burn before our train left to take us back to Tangier overnite. We sat for 90 minutes and chatted with Shez, Alistair, and Sarah, an Australian who teaches theater and acts in London. We finally left them, grabbed pizza (yes, they have pizza in Morocco) and caught our train. It was a horribly uncomfortable ride all night long because we were dead-tired and were forced to try to nap sitting up in a compartment that was nearly full. When we arrived in Tangier at 7 am, we wanted to kiss the ground. Instead, we headed out immediately to find the port from where our ferry back to Spain would depart. Having been to the port before, albeit in the middle of the nite, E and I decided to shun the overeager taxi drivers and walk. This strategy would have been fruitful if not for the fact that our always dependable Let’s Go guidebook somehow had fucked up the map of Tangier, which had us walking 20 minutes in the wrong direction before thumbing a cab on the side of the road and being taken much farther in the opposite direction than our map could have ever indicated (of course, Let’s Go is put out by Harvard students. Fucking arrogant pricks).

We caught our ferry, a huge Spanish liner of high quality, to Algeciras, where we immediately caught the bus to Sevilla. We planned to head straight from Sevilla to Salamanca (where Elizabeth is living) on the overnite bus, but we arrived in Sevilla 25 minutes after the last bus left. So instead we got a room at a hostel, grabbed some food, and watched the Spanish equivalent of Saturday Night Live (it was even worse than this season’s cast) before calling it a nite.

And here, before the plot thickens, I’ll put an end to this third installment. Ta ta!

David Brooks delivers another social commentary of note in the NYTimes this week. Despite all the sex we see everywhere, from the Janet Jackson boob tube to 'Fitty's rapping, American youth are heading the opposite direction toward greater restrictiveness in their sexual attitudes. I won't try to explain the gist of the piece beyond that, go read it yourself, link below. Here are a few solid grafs, though:


"The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere - on "Desperate Housewives," on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet - except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious ...

"Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral sex are also greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is really happening. Meanwhile, teenagers' own attitudes about sex are turning more conservative. There's been a distinct rise in the number of teenagers who think casual sex is wrong. There's been an increase in the share of kids who think teenagers should wait until adulthood before getting skin to skin."


I have often confessed to lacking a solid ideological base on which to make judgments--even if I think my mind is made up, hard evidence and convincing anecdotes can often sway me. That, I think, is one reason why I feel the conservative crusade against explicit entertainment and culture is patronizing and invasive. There is an assumption that America's youth are going down the collective shitter, but across the board, violence and sex have been shown in recent years to be on a constant downward slope.

I tend to look at baggy pantsed, potty-mouthed youngsters (dear god, 21 makes you old) and cringe, but as Brooks writes, "When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. ... In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair." I think American youth are smarter than conservatives give them credit for, but then again, what could you expect? To a rebellious youth, what exactly about conservative ideals holds any appeal whatsoever? This is why the old joke is about Democratic youth becoming Republicans in their old age, not vice versa.

Brooks makes a solid and necessary point about taking make-believe with a grain of salt when the story told by reality contradicts the theory of corruption and ruin.

I was going to put up travelogue part 3 today, but I'm postponing it until tomorrow. My cat, Nikki, had to be euthanized today after long-term medical problems that have culminated in kidney failure. This post, as short as it is, is in memory of her.

This is her a few days ago:



This is a picture I took of her a few years ago:




Rest in peace Nikki

Due to the fact that I am going to be in Cardiff, Wales, until Sunday night for the FA Cup Semifinal game between Arsenal and Blackburn, I am postponing the completion of this travelogue until I return.

-The Management

Note: As you can see, I'm having photo problems. Hope to have that fixed soon.
-Brian

TRAVELOGUE PART TWO

MARRAKECH, CARE TO HAGGLE?

Something I forgot to mention in the last installment. Most of the “toilets” in Morocco are holes in the floor, which you squat above. Think about that for a second … Oh yes, and they don’t seem to understand the notion of wiping your bum after you’ve shat. So often there is no toilet paper. But enough about unsanitary conditions, let’s move on to fresh-squeezed orange juice, cobras, and monkeys on a leash. Yes, I’m talking about the medina in Marrakech, the second-largest marketplace in Morocco.

But first, our train ride from Casablanca was the first pleasant travel experience we had had thus far, as I read Dicken’s Martin Chuzzlewit and E read Rand’s Fountainhead as we snacked on digestives (what the Brits call their cracker/cookie thingies) and watched the fairly comprehensive scenery, which was far from the desert we had expected to blanket Morocco. We arrived in Marrakech at 6 pm on the 27th, where we were met by a friendly and honest taxi driver (a rarity, many are friendly and dishonest) named Ahmed who took us to our hotel and gave us his cell phone number if we were interested in a guided tour of the city. Marrakech traffic, as we realized during this jaunt, is unlike anything we had ever experienced. There were lines on the road, but no one seemed to follow them. It was like the Indy 500, cars constantly jockeying for position on one broad expanse of road, while thousands of motorbikes and bicycles whizzed in and out of openings. If the congestion hadn’t kept our speed down, I would have been much more worried, as Jerry Seinfeld’s bit on the seemingly groundless faith taxi drivers inspire even when driving crazily kept popping into my head.

When we arrived at the Hotel Ali, a tourist/backpacker hostel that served meals on the roof terrace, we famished travelers rushed upstairs to wolf down a splendid buffet of Moroccan food while staring out into the marketplace located in the Djema’a Al-Fna, literally, the Assembly of the Dead, where sultans used to hold public executions and beheadings. After wandering around the square a bit, we called it a night. The next day was a whirl of seeing Marrakech.


We saw the Museum of Marrakech, which displayed modern art, including several great paintings, and was set in an old Vizier’s palace.

We saw the ruins of an old mosque that was now a tourist playground.


And we strolled through the Al-Bahi’a Palace in the southeastern quadrant of Marrakech, which looked like a mix between a hotel garden and deserted resort. But it was quite beautiful.


Later that day we went shopping, as I bought a leather bag and an Arsenal football jersey (but not without a lot of haggling). The jersey will come in handy this weekend, as I bought on impulse a ticket to the FA Cup Semifinal in Cardiff, Wales this coming Saturday, in which Arsenal takes on Blackburn. By the way, if you don’t already know, I’m a huge Arsenal fan. I’ve got a Robert Pires bobblehead doll next to me right now. Good ol’ No. 7. A few Arsenal pictures from my London leg of the trip will be in a later post. After the shopping, we decided to walk directly through the Medina to the bus station to buy tickets for our Tuesday (the 29th) morning trip to the Cascades D’Ouzoud, a gorgeous waterfall camping area three hours outside of Marrakech. I followed obediently behind Elizabeth, because she has some sense of direction, and I can generally get lost in my own house. We trekked around for 30 minutes following her father’s tried and true method, which is to ignore the streets and just be sure of going in the correct compass direction the whole time. 30 minutes later we turned into a square. It looked familiar, we both noticed, before realizing that we were back in the Djema’a Al-Fna. It was a splendid 30 minute loop. We gave up on finding the bus station that day. Instead, we took a taxi to the train station to buy our return overnite ticket to Tangier for when we returned from the Cascades D’Ouzoud. Of course, in my normal bungling fashion, I bought the tickets for April Fool’s Day, instead of March 31 like I should have. Oops. We later had to correct that on March 31, which lost us our beds on the train, and made for a miserable nite leaning against the window. But more on that later.

That nite, E and I felt in the mood for a drink, so we were going to check out one of the many terrace restaurants ringing the square. But we were informed that no alcohol is served near the square, and were instead directed to the Grand Hotel Tazi, five minutes away, where beer was served in a lounge at the front entrance. We were on our third Special Flag, the home-brewed lager, when an Australian at the next couch asked if he could join us. He introduced himself as Nick, and we later learned he was headmaster of a London reform school. E and I had a nice two hour chat with him over several more rounds of beer, before we called it a nite at 1 am to head to bed. He gave me his phone number, to call him up when I was in London, but unfortunately I never got around to ringing him up.

The next morning, we woke up at 545 still groggy, in order to pack, before catching a taxi to the bus station. But that’s the beginning of another story entirely, so I will leave off there.

Until tomorrow, here's your moment of zen, straight from Marrakech:

A Travelogue in Five Parts (or Four. Counting is for ninnies)
PART ONE

To truly appreciate the epic nature of my spring break travels through Morocco, Spain, and England, it is necessary to envision a PBS documentary about the potato bug then double the fun and adventure quotient. Right about there is where my amazing trek rests on the scale of importance.

My trip was not that of a college-age movie, where Tom Green eats my rat back on the ranch while I’m out stealing camels and mooning the locals. I’m unfortunately more boring than that (note to self: stop being honest). Let’s try that again, starting with …

SPAIN, IN AND OUT IN A FLASH
Landed in Malaga, Spain on the evening of March 24th to be met by Elizabeth, my beautiful travel companion, also the only competent person in our merry band of two. It was Semana Santa, which involved a plethora of religious processions through the town which snarled all foot traffic and greatly prolonged our quest to reach our pension (aka hostel). We ended up sipping sangria and eating tapas at an outdoor cafe at 11 pm before we even got back to the pension, but we got back there, I settled in, and we headed out to grab drinks, including a fascinating local drink that mixed brandy and champagne, with a Marachino cherry thrown in for good measure. The next morning we were up at 5 am to catch our bus to Gibraltar, where we were going to be touristy for a day. Unluckily for us, it was now Good Friday, and half the peninsula (despite being under British control, most of the inhabitants are Spain-hating Spaniards) was closed. But we got a taxi tour, along with a Dutch family, of the mighty Rock of Gibraltar, which included stops at underground tunnels, viewing points, caverns, and monkeys! Yes, the only wild monkeys in Europe, tail-less Barbary apes that climb on your head to get cookies:

Leaving Gibraltar was a problem, though, as the ferry service was shut down due to Good Friday. So we walked across the border to La Linea, Spain, and caught a bus from there to Algeciras, where we caught a ferry to Morocco.

MOROCCO, O TRAGIC LAND OF ARAB MYSTIQUE AND FRENCH CUISINE

After crossing over on the evening ferry from Algeciras, Spain on March 25 we found ourselves at the port in Tangier, Morocco at roughly 11 pm local time. We knew the CTM bus station where we would catch an overniter to Casablanca was somewhere outside the port gates, but a Moroccan port isn’t exactly clean and well-lit. Walking past the dozens of taxi drivers who sit around the port and compete to see who can woo the stupid Americans to take a taxi to a destination around the corner, we nervously walked past shadowy figures wandering around the walls, several gendarmie (local police), and a pack of feral dogs, we found our way to the station, where we caught the bus out of a city that has a reputation for professional-quality pick-pocketing and theft. We were on our way to Casablanca, where Rick and his Café (watch Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart, you uncultured Neanderthals) awaited us.

We arrived in Casablanca in the early early morning of the 26th, having not slept for two days, and promptly were forced to sit in the bus station lobby watching tennis broadcast in English for 2 hours while we waited for the sun to dawn on the city and guide us to our fine hotel establishment of choice. As the exchange rate in Morocco is approximately 8.5 dirhams to 1 US dollar, we weren’t too badly off. Exhausted, we tumbled into bed and slept from 8 in the morning, not leaving our hotel until 4 pm that day. It is important to understand that the only reason we were staying in Casablanca was my obsession with the eponymous movie and my desire to hunt down the year-old Rick’s Café, opened by my fellow Portlander, Kathy Krieger, who I had first heard about in a news article. Setting about at 4 pm with no idea where Rick’s was, except that we knew it was set against the Medina wall (the Medina is the equivalent of Old Town, enclosed by a very large wall). We headed to the right and just followed the wall, even as the area got succeedingly seedier. We were besieged by people asking us for money (hey look, foreigners! One of them is blonder than Glenn Close!) and were about to give up and try to look inside the Medina wall when lo and behold we spotted a balcony labeled Rick’s.
The Crusaders had reached Jerusalem! Allah be praised (I’m mixing up religions…shit). Rick’s wasn’t open for dinner for another 30 minutes, so we walked to the Hassan II Mosque, the third-largest in the world, and the only one in Morocco open to non-Muslims, and stared up, and up, and up, at the tallest minaret, all 200 meters of it, at the top of which was a giant frickin’ laser, from which a 20 kilometer beam is shot out toward Mecca to direct prayers.
The next day we were going to tour the mosque, but for the moment, we just stared and admired the pink sky behind the mosque. We headed back to Rick’s, where we were the first guests of the evening.

I don’t know if I expected Bogie himself to welcome me, but of all the gin joints we could have gone to, this one was about as perfect as they come. It didn’t try to BE Rick’s identically, but it exuded Rick’s. The crowd, as the place filled over the next 3 hours, was almost entirely international, with spatterings of English speakers thrown in. Kathy, known as Madame Rick, wandered around the place on a constant rotation, checking in with diners and talking to her waiters, all who were locals. In local terms, this place was very high class, as a nice meal for two came out to $70, or 560 dirham. The piano player cycled through western standards, as well as several turns of Sam’s “As Time Goes By.” The food was excellent, as was the local lager, the cheesecake, the bread, the coffee, and the wine. But the best part was our several chats with Kathy, who was delighted to meet fellow Portlanders, and came back to talk more later when she realized that I had e-mailed her a week earlier about visiting; with Jack, a Boeing engineer from Seattle who was a Saturday night regular; and my pathetic attempts to make all our orders to the waiter en français. I walked out of there a happy, happy man. At the door a taxi was called for us, and I got my first up close exposure with the nature of a poor nation with undemocratic system (my previous international travel had been confined to western Canada). Our taxi driver, who spoke very good English, was in the vein of many taxi drivers, exceedingly chatty, and we learned his life story. His brother, sister, and mother have all moved, over the years, to Fort Worth, Texas of all places, but he, as a relatively low-income single man, is not allowed by the government to obtain the visa he needs to visit, because, he said, they think he would stay and never return. Which, he added, was quite true, if he went to the US, he had nothing to come back for, other than his taxi. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this account, because its common in news accounts; but I had never heard it from a man’s mouth before, and I think it struck me then that whatever air of superiority I might strike as a “rich” Westerner, I was going to be in for a lot of uncertain situations over the next week where I would see life that didn’t fit my previous notions of the global benefits of capitalism and American hegemony. More on this vein of thought later in this ‘logue.

I want to keep this first installment short, so, like Charles Dickens serializing Martin Chuzzlewit, I can draw in enough readers to substantially increase my readership—I’m sure Dickens would agree that he and I, good ol’ Charlie, are on the same level here. But for now, let’s finish up Casablanca. That night, E and I headed back to our hotel to read before passing out, still stuffed to the gills with happiness and good food. The next morning (27th), we were up early and packed, because we were going to tour the Hassan II Mosque before we hopped on the train to go to Marrakech. The Hassan II is astonishing in scale—40,000 people can worship inside it, 80,000 in the square outside of it Packed into a large English-language tour group, which oddly included 3 Japanese men who seemed to deliberately get lost at every juncture and took a ridiculously number of pictures of each other posing, we followed our guide into the mosque after taking off our shoes. E and I, unlike everyone else, had our travel packs on, so we were a bit more weighed down and preoccupied, but that ultimately did little to detract from the sheer majesty and awesomeness of the mosque, pictures of which I’m including. It was fascinating to have the rules and customs explained as we walked from room to room, and I found myself fighting back immediate feelings of judgment when the balconies in the main worship area were pointed out as the spots where the women were allowed to be, while seven times as many men filled the floor below. Everything about the tour seemed so alien, from the bathing rituals to the prayer schedules, but the mosque was obviously designed to create a sense of awe in the viewer that would overcome whatever initial critical thoughts might be conjured. Its sheer majesty dwarfed even the largest cathedrals I had seen, and its age—only a few years old—left it shining gloriously in a way that no dusty old church could hope to match. But such subjective judgments are those of a tourist, not a serious spectator. Honestly, I struggled to even drink in all that I saw in my short stint inside, before we were ejected once again into the brilliant sunshine (even then, you could literally feel your tan developing inch by inch). E and I grabbed a cab and headed to the train station, to hitch a ride to Marrakech, the tourist center of Morocco.

Back tomorrow, but goodbye for now...

Massive amounts of spring break updating on bridge diving, souk haggling, mercedes taxis, tapas, and Arsenal (complete with pictures) to start tomorrow...