Europe Equals Adventure...

...but home equals Christmas and family and friends.

Despite a weird grilling from the passport guy in London before my connecting flight to Dublin, I got in without incident. It was a quiet night, doing some work online before getting to bed early so I could get to the airport alright.

I was a little worried about the current storm systems going around the Midwest, but my Aer Lingus flight touched down right on time in Chicago. By the way, if you're going to Europe, look into Aer Lingus. While they only go to a few US hubs, my round trip flight direct to and from Dublin cost $420, which has shocked everyone I've mentioned it to.

So there it is, the end of my two month trip in Europe. I had an incredible time, I spent more than I expected, my head is exploding with random little facts. I saw many great friends and made several more. I was often uncomfortable and confused and a little lost, but it was never too bad, and I came out the other side feeling much more in control of where I was going and how I was doing it.

Since I was bored on the plane, here's my trip by the numbers:

57 days
12 countries
42 towns or cities (this includes some layovers)
18 hostels or hotels
26 train trips
9 planes boarded
4 ferry crossings
10 books read
19 new beers tasted
1 celebrity met
6 different currencies in my wallet now

When I was visiting Angela in England, her brother James remarked in conversation how skeptical he was of people who do trips in Europe to "find themselves". Likewise, my friend Stevo said that it seems like everyone does a trip like this, and so many of them claim that it changed their life, but how often is that true? I became pretty preoccupied with both of these opinions, and it's made me look with a more critical eye at how I describe my experiences.

Did it change my life? Probably not in so many words. I'm still planning on living in the same place and doing the same stuff in the immediate future that I was before I left; I still think many of the same things about politics, my friends, etc. I'm not planning on disowning or deifying America by any means.

Maybe the most accurate thing to say would be that my trip informed, expanded, and electrified my life. I saw so much and learned so much, many things that I know I will always remember and take me, from the gothic towers of Edinburgh and the indescribable beauty of Vatican City to the cold watchfulness of Russia and the beggars and schemers and sellers of Marrakech. I have more images and experiences to compare to my daily life, more possibilities and considerations.

One important thing I learned is how incredibly accessible Europe is. As an English speaker, it's really never that hard with the tourist infrastructure there, and the internet has really intensified that even more. Everything there feels so much closer and real now. And in a larger sense, the rest of the world feels closer. In Russia and Morocco, I was right on the edge of a whole other mess of stuff, and it really wouldn't have been much more difficult to just keep going.

I'm more self-reliant now. I was originally going to take this trip with two other people, but I think it turned out to be a fantastic thing to go alone. (But Ari and Colin, I still want to travel with you guys sometime.) It made me stretch myself, get used to meeting people out of the blue constantly, which might be one of the most valuable lessons I learned. As Mike said in Barcelona, there are good people everywhere.

The first thing I noticed when I got back was how easy everything was suddenly--I knew the area I was in, I knew the people, I had all kinds of stuff suddenly. Living with just a small backpack for 2 months made me start to question the way I consume normally. Travel throws all your needs into sharp relief, shows you what you really focus on, what is important to you when you don't have much time or money to throw around.

And God, this stuff is addicting. I was planning new trips while I was on this one, figuring out where else I could go, how I would get the money.

However, despite all that, the big umbrella realization over everything else was how incredibly lucky and blessed I am to be able to do something like this trip. So many people in the world will never have this kind of an opportunity, and at first that made me feel incredibly guilty when I really thought about it. However, I think a better reaction is to live well with what you're given, and not to waste it. I don't know exactly how to do that, but I think I know a little more about the questions I need to be asking.

And I am so grateful for my friends and family. So many different people have commented on the blog or sent me emails because of it, and the support really helped and made me focus on my trip in new and different ways. It makes coming home all the sweeter.

Thank you so much to everyone who ever read a post on this blog. I hope you guys enjoyed it; it was sometimes as much fun to tell the stories as it was to live them. Maybe I've inspired a little wanderlust in some of you, and if you do a blog I'll be its biggest fan.

Happy Holidays.

This is Europe Equals Adventure, signing off. (I've been wanting to say that for weeks.)

The Red City of Marrakech

December 13th-15th--I got off the train at the Marrakech train station at just a little after noon. And so, yes, even if there's nothing by that name anymore, I took the Marrakesh Express and I can probably die happy now. (Just to be clear, "Marrakesh" is the English spelling and "Marrakech" the French and therefore national spelling.)

The Moroccan dirham is stronger than both the Czech crown and the Russian ruble, interestingly enough. Currently, 11 dirhams equals one euro, and 7 dirhams equals one dollar. However, on the street, the easier to calculate ratio of 10 to 1 for the euro is used pretty universally by cab drivers and shopkeepers.

I took a cab to the city center for 40 dirhams and stepped out into the Djemma-el-Fna, the main square of the Medina, or old town. This square is one of the main attractions of Marrakech, and it's difficult to grasp at first. It's enormous and chaotic and colorful and dusty. And hot. I had been shedding layers on the train as the day moved on and we approached Marrakech, and it was easily 75 degrees F, a dry heat like the southwest US. In fact, the climate and environment is extremely similar, even to the nearby Atlas mountains which get up to Rocky Mountain heights. On the train, Magid told me that you can drive three hours from Marrakech and be skiing in the mountains, traveling the desert, or swimming in the ocean.

The Djemma-el-Fna

I had to walk around a bit to find my riad, or hotel, and I was immediately set upon by all kinds of people asking me if I needed to be guided somewhere, if I had a place to stay, if I wanted a henna tattoo, and come into my shop, come here, my friend! That's the general character of the place anyway, but the fact that I'm white was clearly the main motivator. I also got offered more drugs than get imported into the US every year. Seriously, like every other shop owner offered me hash when I said I didn't want to buy a scarf. I guess maybe it's the beard... Marrakech has become a big tourist town, and the white people have all the money and are the easy marks. Being able to speak French helped a lot, as I was at least able to respond to them in one of their own languages, but it was a lot to get used to at first.

The center of the riad

At the riad, I finally took a shower to wash off all my travel grime and set out to wander around in the souks, or shops. There are only a few different types of souks in terms of what they sell, so the competition is one of personality and timing, rather than of goods and prices.

This picture is for my new look, but also to show how low the door to my room was. I hit my head on that thing at least twelve times.

After a few minutes, a kid a few years younger than me came by and perfunctorily asked for a smoke before telling me he would take me to the tannery. I realized that there was going to be some kind of squeeze, but I followed, because I was interested in seeing the tannery. The kid's name was Youanis, and he led me up and down and around the narrow streets for about 10 minutes before we came to the tannery.

A man at the entrance gave me a bunch of mint leaves to hold to my nose as we went through, because the stink is pretty overpowering if you're not used to it. The guy said it would be 50 dirhams for the whole tour, which sounded fine to me.



At the end of the tour I was shuttled into the tannery souk adjacent, where I was given a sales pitch. I did end up buying something, as I was planning on doing all my Christmas shopping in Morocco, and did an OK job of haggling, though not great by any means. I got the price down 50%, but I managed to get better over the two days I was there, getting things for about 20% of the first asking price. The truth is, of course, that I have no idea if that's even good, and if I got robbed blind.

After I left the souk, the tour guide demanded 100 dirhams for the tour. I laughed and gave him the 50 he had asked for previously. Youanis led me back to the square and asked for 50 more. He was kind of pushy, which irritated me, and I gave him 20, which sort of satisfied him.

This was the point where I started to really dislike the culture of the market and souks. It teaches you to ignore almost everyone, and it's often difficult to get people to accept no for an answer. They'll even pull you by the arm sometimes. The number of times I had to fend people of exhausted and annoyed me. I was seeing a lot of interesting stuff, but I wasn't feeling comfortable or relaxed at any point--of course, that was kind of the point of the trip.

I went out into the main square and did the snake thing, too. If you can see in the one picture, the guy was literally holding a cobra in my face. I don't really understand how any of that works, how they calm them and tame them so much.



I did a little more shopping, and then wandered around the main square as night fell. They had set up a huge screen on one side for the film festival, and were showing V for Vendetta for some reason.

The Djemma-el-Fna changes dramatically at night. Storytellers, acrobats, and musicians take over one side, drawing big circles of people. On the other side a huge food stall area gets set up, with the men calling out to everyone to come to their particular place. Again, the food is all essentially the same and priced the same, so everything depends on the personality of the guys working at each place.

I wandered through for a bit, then settled on one place for no particular reason. I met a British couple at the table who had been skiing in the mountains during the day, and we compared notes on Marrakech. They agreed with many of my observations, but were more accustomed to them after five days.

Something that threw me was that after I had finished a plate of food, women and children would come up with plastic bags and ask for the scraps. I gave them what I could, but with a weird sense of shame because they were so businesslike about dumping my chicken bones into their bags.

At the same time, that dinner was when my opinion of Morocco started to change. The guys at my place were funny and relaxed and always in friendly competition with the guys across the way who had less people eating. While I still had issues with the personal space stuff and the open deceit and culture of the marketplace, I started to have a better sense of humor about it. The trick was always to remain calm and have some perspective of just what was going on. I don't think that the culture in the marketplace will ever be my culture, but I was able to accept it more.

After dinner I went back to the riad, tired and overwhelmed but excited to do more on Friday.


Friday morning I went up onto the riad's terrace and met Kihei, a guy my age from New Mexico doing a 9-month trip around the world by himself. I was duly impressed. We both had plans to see a famous garden north of the Medina, so we went together. He's an architecture and urban planning student, and we went by the big mosque, the Koutoubia, on our way.


Getting into the new part of town was the perfect thing to do. It's still very much Morocco, but somehow more real, with more modern concerns and rhythms as opposed to the time warp of much of the Medina.


We stopped at a cafe and sat behind an older French woman and her young Moroccan escort. Probably not a bad vacation, I suppose.


The Jardins Majorelle, named for and founded by a French painter, were gorgeous. The painted blues and yellow contrasted sharply with the color palette of the rest of the city, and there were plants from all over the world.


After the gardens, we returned to the Medina and walked into the new Cyber Park on the edge, a spacious and beautiful park with free internet posts all over the place. Probably the most modern and progressive city feature I saw on the whole trip, interestingly enough. Kihei stayed there for a while and I moved back into the market to do more shopping and get up on top of our riad to watch the sunset.

Up against the wall of the Medina

My FIFTH witnessed car crash!

The Koutoubia

The sunset happened at around 5:30, right at the same time as the evening call to prayer. It had startled me the night before, and this time I was ready to record it, because it didn't sound anything like I expected. It was pretty amazing to watch the sun go down and hear the speakers around the city start calling out, growing in volume until the speaker closest to my riad blared out. Just press play below and look at this picture to get a sense of the atmosphere--it gets better after 30 seconds or so.




After the call to prayer, I played some guitar on the terrace as I waited for Kihei to come back. After one song, I heard applause from somewhere. I stood up and saw a young Moroccan girl hanging up laundry on the other side of the wall on her part of the roof. She asked if she could listen, and so she sat on the wall for a while while I played.

Kihei came back and we went out so I could finish shopping and meet up with some people he had met the night before. I was looking for some mint tea to bring home, and when I asked someone he led us around the streets for a while before coming to an herbalists' souk with four guys inside. I was a little nervous given some of the stories I had heard from Paul Newman and my friend Ade, especially when they started to close the door, but everything turned out alright. I know that sometimes tourists have gotten into situations where they are forced to buy large amounts of drugs, or just robbed when they think they are shopping, etc.

After the herbalist, we met up with the people Kihei knew and hung out for a while until going to dinner in the square again. I went to the same place I had gone the night before, and convinced them to give me a discount for returning with a friend.


Afterwards, we ate snails in a broth at a booth off to the side. While we were there, a film crew came by, filming a cute blond British woman in makeup being shown around Marrakech and reacting over-cutely to everything. They came to our snail booth, and we ended up getting interviewed about our Marrakech experience. I'm sure we sounded like idiots.


We finished the night playing guitar up on the terrace with a (I'm going to spell this wrong) chicha, or hookah between us. Amazing time. At around 1 AM, I went down to pack.

I decided to keep the guitar after all. However, this posed a bit of a problem because of all the stuff I had bought in Morocco. I could only check one bag with the airline, and have only one carry-on. But then I had an idea. I took the strings off the guitar and pushed as many of my clothes inside as I could--underwear, long underwear, a t-shirt, a hat, etc. This gave me enough room to fit everything in my bag.

And then I was ready to go back to Dublin to catch my return flight home.

Disorientation and Changing Continents

December 12th-13th--I wasn't exactly sure how I was getting to Casablanca and then Marrakech, but I knew I was getting there.

I went to a web cafe in the morning and then wrote down all the applicable times for buses, trains, and ferries, then said goodbye to Jaris and headed out.

I headed to the bus station and got a ticket for a bus leaving at 1:30 to the port city of Algeciras. While I waited, I played guitar outside, and a random Spanish guy came up and borrowed it to play some flamenco.

I hate bus travel. The ride lasted four hours, and I was pretty sick of it by then. I tried to sleep as much as possible. At Algeciras, I had to transfer to another bus to get to Tarifa, where I would hopefully catch the 7:00 ferry to Tangiers, Morocco. As I was boarding the bus I met a nice Irish guy in his 40s who was planning on a trip into Mauritania and the Sahara and Senegal. His name was, no joke, Paul Newman.

Sunset over Tarifa through a grimy bus window.

The bus was late leaving, and as Paul and I talked, we looked worriedly at our watches, hoping that we wouldn't have to wait for the 9:00 ferry. The bus arrived in Tarifa at 6:45, and we assumed it would be a short walk to the terminal. We were wrong.

As it became clearer how far the ferry was, we sped up, first a kind of trotting walk, then a jog, then a full out sprint. So there I was, sprinting down the streets of Tarifa with my backpack and guitar next to Paul Newman...

We made the ferry. And since it's only a 45 minute trip into Morocco, which is another time zone, we got there 15 minutes before we left. A short mix-up with passport control later, we were free in Morocco.

We had discussed our options on the ferry--Paul was going to Rabat, I was going to Casablanca, and we could either stay the night in Tangiers or get the night train that serviced both cities. We opted for the latter.

This meant getting a cab to the train station, and fending off numerous offers from Moroccans at the ferry landing offering places to stay, as well as one guy who tried to convince us he was with the Ministry of Tourism. Paul had some pretty crazy stories about traveling in Morocco in the 80's and 90's, so I was wary of everyone who approached us. But we got a nice cabdriver who took us to surprisingly glamorous, if small, train station. There we bought our tickets and had some mint tea while we waited for the departure at 9:00.

On the train, soon after we left, an man sat down in our cabin. After making small talk for a while and talking about his kids, he described his town, Asilah, and how good it was for tourists, especially at this time of year. Soon after we made it clear that our plans wouldn't accommodate a detour, he left to "have a smoke". He never came back.

I got maybe four hours of sleep on the train, woken up by Paul as he left at 3:30 when we stopped at Rabat. Good luck in the Sahara, Paul.

The train arrived in Casablanca at 4:30 AM. While my true destination was Marrakech, I wanted to see a little of Casablanca on the way. However, I didn't want to be wandering the darkened streets at 4:30, so I bought a ticket to Marrakech for 8:50 and hung out and read a book until 6:30, when some light started showing itself. I had heard of a huge mosque, the Hassan II Mosque, the third-largest in the world, located on the seaside in Casablanca. I took a cab out there and watched the sunrise at the mosque, an inspiring experience. Also, however, a surprisingly cold experience--it was 0 degrees Celsius when I left the train station at 6:30.


When I caught a cab to get back to the station, I paid him a little extra to go to a breakfast place. He was hungry too, so we sat in a cafe eating Moroccan pastries while drinking mint tea and spoke French while watching Al-Jazeera on TV. Pretty surreal.

Claude Raines in 2007

However, one thing to note is that Casablanca has the worst smog cloud I've ever seen. It's a city of 6 million people and the economic center of Morocco, but the cloud is worse than New York or Los Angeles. I looked out over the ocean and wondered where the weird dark cloud was coming from before I realized that it was smog, that the smog stretched out into the ocean. It's a long way from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman these days.

On the train to Marrakech, the weather got warmer and warmer and I started to shed the layers I had put on in Casablanca. The ride took only about 3 hours, and on the way I met an aspiring Moroccan film director named Magid. He was, in fact, blond haired and blue eyed, but fully Moroccan and Muslim. He told me that there was a huge international film festival happening in Marrakech, with several big Hollywood stars. I had no idea about this before hand.


And then suddenly the insane bustle and undeniable life of Marrakech was upon me.

The Granada Experience

December 11th--Getting up at 6:00 to get to the train station after a night like that was the worst thing imaginable, but I did it. There were only two trains to Granada, and the early one was the only one that would get me there at a reasonable time.

I got in around noon and got in touch with my friend Jaris, and 20 minutes later he rolled up through 8 years on a bicycle to pick me up. We met at the same time that I met Ade, as the two have been friends since they were little kids, but Jaris stopped coming to camp before Ade, so it was even more of a shock. But just like with Ade, those same things came out again, and I refound a friend. That's not even a word, but I wrote it, and it was true.


Jaris is studying architecture in Granada, and took me around the startlingly beautiful city. Granada is essentially at the foot of the tallest mountain on the Iberian peninsula, Sierra Nevada, and while flooded with tourists, it's got a great, relaxed feeling. It also has the Alhambra, the old Muslim palace that is a huge tourist draw. We were still able to walk around parts of it for a while without paying.


Another thing that distinguished the city in my eyes was the huge amount of extremely artistic graffiti everywhere. Here's a few of the best stuff I saw:


We also walked around some old royal gardens, where I chased some ducks.


It was way more fun than it looks.



At night, we went around and had tapas, which I'm convinced is the greatest invention in the history of man. You pay for your drinks (already really cheap by European standards) and you get a small plate of often great food for free. Jaris and I went to a few different places and had a full meal. Truly fantastic idea.

I again wish I had more time in Granada, but the next morning it was time for a long journey that wouldn't end for 24 hours.