"There's Like A Scene in My Hostel"

It’s five days in a row now that I’ve seen the sun come up, the most in succession since high school. Each day it’s to go somewhere new and as long as I can nap a bit on the way, I’m ready to go every morning by 7h30. This morning I found myself up at 5h30 off to Paris Gallieni international bus station to catch the 7h30 to Amsterdam. After printing my ticket at the 24-hour internet café near the Pantheon and after a few minutes freaking out that I hadn’t given myself enough time to switch metros 3 times AND because of the continuous strikes on the RER B I had to walk a few blocks to get on the 4 instead of just hopping on the train at Luxembourg like always.

So now I’m on the bus sitting next to two semi-bilingual Dutch boys, thinking about all of my international travel buddies and friends and that in one week I will be flying back to the States, back on my home soil for the first time in almost four months.

After all the madness that has been France, learning French, discovering that I like French, resenting French, being decent at French, etc., it has been really welcome to get out of Paris, dirty city of too many angry people, into places like Marrakech, dirty city of a lot of friendly people and too many tourists, and further into the real life of Morocco, albeit on a van full of tourists. However, our journeys to Ouarzazate, the Dadès Gorges, some villages in southeastern Morocco, and finally to the Sahara Desert allowed us a rare opportunity for Westerners to get to know even vaguely what life is like in a developing nation like Morocco. We learned to tie turbans and make mint tea, play Moroccan drums properly and say various curse words and questions in about 6 other languages.

Tuesday when I arrived at my hostel I met my Argentinean-living-in-London roommate Solé and the two of us went out to Moroccan dinner, as mentioned in my previous post. Our other roommate, a Finnish girl named Marina, was keen on napping through the evning and writing a letter to her 33-year-old girlfriend back in Finland. She had decided that she needed a vacation and up and left for Morocco for three weeks, including through Christmas, to the dismay of her girlfriend. She had also chosen to tell her mother that she was flying to South Africa to learn English for a few weeks, knowing that there was no way on earth her mother would let her come to Morocco by herself. These conflicting wishes along with a day of flying from extreme cold to actual sunlight must have been exhausting, so an evening sleeping in Marrakech, while typically a faux pas, was in this case well-deserved.

Upon our return back to our hostel there was a boy who had arrived and was chatting with the hostel owner (a very kind be-scarved woman) in French, much to my joy and delight. Yes! Someone to practice with! I proceeded to hop on the computer immediately, checking email, Facebook, and of course blogging a bit while Solé and Christian the Australian and French "bloke" on summer "holiday" from “uni” in Canberra (remember, the Southern Hemisphere’s seasons are reversed) chatted a bit about Morocco and their plans and consulted Christian’s copy of Lonely Planet: Morocco, which would become our bible over the next 5 days.

The four of us proceeded to get extremely lost, meet some locals and translate what they were saying in French into English for the non-French enthusiasts, learn about spices, visit various palaces, eat more tajines and couscous than you can possibly imagine, and generally enjoy one another’s company to the point that when Solé and Christian expressed interest in taking a weekend excursion to the desert and Marina followed suit, I didn’t have any interest in staying in Marrakech without them. Not to mention that Timothy “You Can Call Me Mister” Spencer had arrived at our hostel, swinging a Jack Daniels bottle and his misogynistic ways about. A former heroin trafficker and long-time traveler and wooer of women, Mr. Spencer took a liking to Christian and told him his entire life story while chain-smoking cigarettes in the night. After one too many stories of fucking Portuguese prostitutes on the beach and running from Interpol, along with other debaucherous activities, Mr. Spencer told Christian that he couldn’t believe that he was in bed with one of the girls, and Christian took this opportunity to get the hell out, saying that he might as well try to get with one of us, grabbing his sleeping bag, and coming to sleep in our room. Needless to say, Mr. Spencer was sure proud that he could bolster the sexual confidence of a strapping young fellow such as Christian, and proceeded to get drunk the entire next day, much to the terror and irritation of our Islamic hostel staff, and he was asked to leave the next night. In the meantime, the four of us went to a contemporary art museum in an ancient palace, ate more delicious tajines, planned our trip to the Sahara, discovered the only bar in town, and Marina and Solé tried Orangina for the first time.

Also we exchanged many a story, including family recipes, native cuisines, and breakfasts around the world.

--------------------

It’s really amazing how much cheaper everything is anywhere outside of Paris. Currently at a Shell station somewhere in Belgium (which is a super-weird language if you’ve never seen it before, such as “hot water” = “heet water.” Oh. OK.) and everyone is grabbing paninis and beers for the remaining hour and a half ride, including the two gorgeous Dutch boys next to me. I’ve been asleep almost the entire way, save trying to use the disgusting toilets on the bus (weirder than any toilets in Morocco) and having an Arabic man moo at me because of my septum ring. I replied politely in English, “sir I’m pretty sure you look much more like a cow than I ever could, what with being about 70 pounds overweight and all,” smiled, and sat back down. The joys of an American accent. I guess we’re near Antwerpen because I keep seeing it on signs everywhere. I suppose we’ll be in Amsterdam fairly soon, we’ve been driving about 5 hours and it keeps getting colder and there’s snow all over the ground except for when we go into cities to pick up other passengers, including a lot of French people all through Belgium. Though I guess they speak French here too now that I think about it. In fact, all Europeans speak more than one language since their equivalent of driving to Virginia requires knowledge of an entire new set of verb conjugations just to be able to read road signs (see: France to Germany). Inside the Shell station a Spanish boy was asking for a Belgian sandwich and upon realizing that he spoke no Belgian, the cashier immediately asked “Français? Espanol? English?” Of course by now we all know Tarantino’s joke from “Inglourious Basterds,” where the German actress exasperatedly interrogates Brad Pitt as to if he knows any other language than English, and when of course he doesn’t, it’s a given since he’s an American and none of us do. This is something we must remedy, and everyone should learn at least Spanish and maybe Canadian French and Arabic. This includes me actually.

The bus driver has put on te second film of our trip. The first was “Wild Hogs,” in which William H. Macy, Tim Allen, Cedric the Entertainer (?), and John Travolta have a midlife crisis and take a motorcycle trip. Or something inane like that. We watched it in French. Now we’re watching “Step Up” or one of those movies like that with dancing and bad hip hop and Channing Tatum that stupid actor who looks like a soldier in every film he’s ever done. Movies like this make American look bad, and as the only American on this bus, I resent the choice. On that note, one woman was speaking English to me to tell me what to do in like for the toilettes at the gas station so I just replied in French. If you insist on being a bitch to me, I will plead ignorance.

In Amsterdam, busy meeting strange people including my three massive German roommates.

Bisous.