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...