Europe. Contiki. Need I say more?

I am so excited to be back in Europe! I absolutely love it here – if it was easier to get a visa, I swear I would move here. Everything is so beautiful and ornate, even buildings like the post office are just so intricately designed. It’s not like at home where all the buildings are put up as quickly and cheaply as possible – there’s so much character! I’ve also enjoyed it from a food perspective. Morocco had absolutely no variety in food but Europe has everything – in the last week I’ve had Italian, Thai, Mexican and I’ve got my eye on a sushi restaurant. Oh, and I’ve had Eastern European of course (think schnitzel, goulash and strudel). Food is such a huge part of the travel experience – I can eat Chinese food at home but it’s so different the food they actual serve in China. Thinking about all this food sure has made me hungry!

I’ve already seen much of Europe so I wanted to do something I had not yet visited before, so I chose Eastern Europe. We are visiting Germany, Czech, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland in just under 2 weeks. It’s so fast paced but I love it. It's been so interesting to learn so much about both Communism and WWII. It's also different to be in a part of Europe that is dominated by Jewish quarters - I'm so used to everything being Catholic, it's a new dynamic for me. I was fascinated to learn about the Berlin wall and everything the people went through - it is so sad to think that they suffered for so long. What remains of the wall now does have some cool art work covering it.

I had already been to Vienna and Budapest so I was most excited for the other cities. Imagine my surprise that my favorite city so far was Budapest! I feel like I breezed through it so fast last time that we didn’t really get to enjoy it much. This time, we had quite a bit of free time so I was able to enjoy it at my own pace. I went with one of the girls in the tour and we just got lost. I love doing that – just going for a wander, not looking at the map, stopping for a coffee or a gelato, then trying to figure our way back home. That’s exactly what we did yesterday – did a little bit of shopping, had some food, sent some postcards and just relaxed. I loved the laid back feeling of Budapest, I could really see myself living somewhere like that. The best part of the day was in the afternoon I found my way to a movie theater and finally saw Harry Potter! I know, I know, it’s been out for ages, but I haven’t had the opportunity to go to a movie. This one was actually in English with Hungarian subtitles, so I’m pretty sure I’m fluent in Hungarian now as well! It was such a good movie but I was a little sad for the end of the Harry Potter era. I also missed seeing it with my sisters….it was sad to go without them! (Love and miss you girls!)

Of course, since this is Contiki there are also lots of late nights and early mornings. Some people hate on Contiki because it is for people 18 – 35, it’s a large bus with 50 people and there is lots of drinking and wild nights that happen. However, I really enjoy the Contiki type travel. I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but it’s nice to be with people who are your own age and everyone is outgoing and nice. You get to know so many people in such a short period of time, and it’s like you’ve known them for years. It’s so much fun to go out dancing in Prague or go to a beer festival in Berlin, then you have a 5 hour bus ride the next day where there is nothing to do but sleep. I’ve got enough serious times on the trip, like hiking on Everest,  that I love having a variety as I see the world. I love Contiki and the people on my tour are so much fun!

Since this is the Europe section, I’ll leave you with the two most common tourist places here – a castle and a church. Enjoy!

Camels and Headscarves

I will start of by saying I really, really enjoyed my time in the south part of Morocco. After my time in the north, I was pretty unhappy and very worried about staying here for 2 more weeks. I didn’t really enjoy that part – it was all about seeing big cities, food problems and shopping – I know, be surprised! The problem here is that I have no room to carry things, so my love of shopping has been stinted. The only thing I bought was the rug, because they offered to ship it home for me. However, the south was completely different. We were able to get off the beaten path and see some really incredible little towns and we had some opportunities to do very different things. In addition, I was able to take some time and learn more about the culture of Morocco, which made me think a lot so much about my life verses theirs.

First, the cool stuff that we did. When we were in the northern part of Morocco we took trains and public buses everywhere, but in the southern part the transportation is not reliable, so we had a private mini bus. We visited so many out of the way places – we went to the High Atlas Mountains, the Sahara, the Mid Atlas mountains and spent a couple days on the beach. My favorite day, by far, was the day we went to see the Sahara. We had quite a long day on the bus to get there. We had a stop in the afternoon where we all bought head scarves and learned how to tie them. See, it’s not just me!

For a long time I thought that the scarf across the bottom of your face was only a religious thing, but I learned today that it is a necessity as well. When you are in the middle of the desert and the wind is whipping the sand everywhere, the last thing you want to do is take a swift mouthful of sand. The scarf in front of your face prevents this, the same way your sunglasses are imperative to protect your eyes. Once we were bundled up correctly, we all got on our camels. If you’ve never ridden a camel before, I will tell you it’s not as easy as it looks! They put a bunch of padding on a try really hard, but there is just no way to avoid that hump! You either have to sit super far forward and hit the handle ever time your camel walks, or you sit really far back and don’t hold on to anything – scary! This is a picture of my lovely camel and me…

After our camel ride we rode 4x4s out into the middle of the dunes. There wasn’t another soul around – there were just miles and miles of desert. It was soooo hot and windy and completely inhospitable, you realize there is no way people could live out here. And yet, people do. I have no idea how they do it, with nothing around you except the sand. People used to cross these deserts on camels with their whole nomad families, walking for 52 days at a time (there were signs everywhere that told you how many days to Timbuktu). How did they survive those journeys? What did they eat and drink? How did they stay safe from others they encountered? (we were only 35k from the border of Algeria, which freaked me out!) Even with all these thoughts rolling around in my head, I managed to admire the beautiful barrenness of the desert around me.

Besides our amazing day in the desert, we also saw some other crazy stuff. In one small area here, they actually have goats that climb trees. Don’t believe me? Here is a picture of a goat standing in a tree, eating nuts like this is nothing out of the ordinary!

We also got to spend a day touring Mollywood. What is Mollywood, you ask? Well, it’s Moroccan Hollywood, of course! I didn’t realize it before, but a fair number of movies are made in Morocco every year. It’s a lot of movies that take place in hot and dry places, for example Egypt, ancient Rome or the desert anywhere. The most famous two that they mentioned a lot were Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. We got to spend the day walking around the large backdrops, putting ourselves in those scenes. If you didn’t know better, you might think I had actually gone to Egypt!

In addition to the fun places we visited, I had the opportunity to live in a world so far from my own. Being in Morocco has transported me to a culture completely foreign to me, one that has made me think about how my world compares to theirs. On the surface the differences are easy to see – the women here wear jilabas (the dress/robe) and some wear burhkas (the face covering), the call to prayer rings out over the city 5 times every day, and 99% of the people you see walking around or working are men. I’ve thought a lot about why they live the way they do – is it a choice each person makes or is it something forced on them by another member of their family? How is it possible that so many people live in such poverty? Why doesn’t their government help them more? Are they happy?

There are so many questions that I can’t answer. Maybe they are quite happy living in a world where less is more. Do we really all need cell phones and computers and high definition tvs and two cars to be content? We’re so used to being in a world that is go, go, go, but would it really be so bad to slow down for a while? One of the girls in my group, Lizzie, kept saying that she wanted to leave her normal life and join a nomadic family. They just move around all the time, seeing new places and not putting down roots. This is okay for them though, because the most important thing in their world is the people around them. I’m not quite ready to join the nomad tribe yet, but I think it’s good from time to time to slow down and take inventory of what is most important in our lives.

When you go into a city in Morocco, there are 5 main things you will find in all of them: a school, a bakery, a hammam (bath), a souk (shops) and a medina (old city). When I first arrived I took this to be how it is in some of the small cities, but assumed it wasn’t that way in a large city like Casablanca. However, yesterday I was wandering on my own and happened to come across a poor area of town. The time was about 7pm, and the sun goes down at 7:35, so everyone was preparing to break their fast for Ramadan. I smelled the incredible smell of baking bread, and started to see families walking by with a pie, or three loaves of bread, or an entire cake, still in its pan. I realized that they were all coming out of one door, and that’s when it hit me – this was still the bakery for the entire community. The people are so poor that they do not have electricity or hot water or an oven – they prepare their creations in their own home, but do not have the means to bake them. They have to take them in their pans to the local oven and have them baked there. To see this happening still in a large, urban town like Casablanca really puts things in perspective. After all, how often do you see the guy below just wandering through the streets of a major city?

Rock the Kasbah

Welcome to Morocco! This has been a very interesting week, to say the least. We have a smaller group here (there were 16 people in my group in Central America but only 12 people here). The group was 8 Australians, 2 Kiwis and 2 Americans – not a whole lot of variety! We change groups tonight so I’ll be interested to see who else shows up. Our tour leader, Jamal, is great. Here’s a picture so you can see who is keeping us safe – I absolutely love his shirt!

This part of the trip has included a lot of visiting different cities and walking around, not nearly as much activity as the Central American portion. A lot of the people were on the last leg of their trip, so we spent a lot of time shopping. The souks (shops) here have everything you could ever possibly want to buy and there are 20 different vendors next to each other shouting at you to buy from them. You get very used to saying no, No, NO! The vendors are very pushy and will try to grab you to get you to come into their shops. Or if you do buy something from them, they want you to come to the shop of their brother/cousin/friend just over this way to look at something else. You have to bargain for everything you buy and I did learn an interesting fact yesterday – they give you a different color bag based on how you bargain, to tell the other vendors in the market. If you are a sucker they will give you one color (red in Marrakech, might be different in other cities), if you drive a hard bargain they will give you black and if you’re somewhere in the middle you get green. We learned to hide our bags, especially if you happened to make a bad deal!

Also of importance, I turned 30!!! I can’t believe I’m 30 – I feel so much younger than that, but I guess age doesn’t lie. I had a wonderful day – we walked all over the medina (old city) of Fes. The group was sweet enough to get me a cake for dinner, which was really lovely. During our shopping in Fes, I bought a rug! It’s a beautiful cashmere rug and I love it – it will look amazing in my house. I’m so excited about it, here is a picture for you to see!

I have really enjoyed all the cities we have seen. I arrived in Casablanca really late and we left early the next morning so I’ll have to see that at the end of my tour. Over the course of the trip we have spent a morning in Rabat, a morning wandering around the ruins of Volubilis, a few hours exploring Meknes and an afternoon lounging on the beach in Tangier. Some of them I would have liked to see more of, but for some of the other an hour or two was plenty. I really enjoyed the night we spent in Moulay Idriss, a small village where the first King of Morocco is buried. It is a town built on two hills so the roads are tiny and narrow with hundreds of steps. I also loved the small town of Chefchaouen. It is a small laid back town with some great restaurants and it is where many Moroccans go on vacation. It is painted all blue and white and reminded me so much of Greece. In fact, many things in Morocco have reminded me of Greece – some of the tones in the music, the massive amounts of olives and olive oil found here and the colors in some of the towns. I also went to a public bath house in Chefchaouen where they put you in a sauna and scrub you from head to toe. It’s quite an experience and you leave with 8 layers less skin than you started with, but you’ve never felt cleaner in your life! Here’s a couple of pictures of Chefchaouen, so you can get a small feel for the city.

It’s also possible that I’ve become a born again vegetarian! The day after my birthday I got soooo sick – I thought my body might be giving up because I had hit the big 3-0 and it just didn’t want to live anymore. I had a horrible fever and didn’t get out of bed for 24 hours, it was so awful! Anyhow, once I did start to feel better, I wasn’t hungry at all. I would eat a bite or two and be completely full. One of the days I swore I was going to actually eat, but then we walked into a market and saw a camel head (see below if you dare). They eat camel here and this happened to be 10 minutes after some of our group went for a camel ride, so that was the end of food for that day. Yesterday I was going to try to eat some chicken, but as I was walking out of a shop, a man carrying a dead goat hit me in the shoulder with it’s dead body, leaving blood all over my white shirt from where it’s head used to be……ewwwww. There are no words to describe how disgusted I was, I wasn’t sure whether to cry or throw up. Goat blood all over my white shirt from it’s decapitated body – makes me sick just to think about it. After dead camels and dead goats, and seeing how meat is treated here, I just don’t think I can bring myself to eat it again. Guess we’ll see how the next 2 weeks in Morocco turn out!

Costa Rica and Paris

After a whirlwind few days at home, I am happy to be back on the road. I really enjoyed being home, sleeping in my own bed and seeing so many of you, but I was running around like a crazy person! I think I slept a total of about 12 hours the whole time I was home so I’ve spent lots of time in Paris catching up! There were all kinds of things I was going to do while I was in Denver, but I just never really got around to them, including writing about Costa Rica. I figured I have some time now, so why not combine it with Paris – they’re close enough, right? Sure, let’s go with that.

I really enjoyed my time in Costa Rica. There is so much to do there – it’s a mecca of outdoor activities with something cool waiting around the next corner. I wish I had more time to spend there, I can see why some people go for 2 weeks at a time. We spent 2 days in Monteverde, a city up in the cloud forest. It’s nice and cool up there which I really loved after weeks and weeks in the heat and humidity. We got to have lots of amazing food, but after a month in Central America, everything seemed so expensive. It’s partially because Costa Rica is much more developed than the other countries and they have many more tourists, so they are able to charge more for everything. It was quite the culture shock, but the sushi was amazing!

My favorite activity in Costa Rica was the ziplining. I had only been one time before on a short zipline but these ones put that experience to shame. In Selvetura Park, we got to do 15 different ziplines, some of them were 1 km long. It was so much fun! Some of them you do on your own and some you go with another person, which was what I loved the best. I always ended up with the daredevils who wanted to go super fast and never braked! At the end there was what they called a Tarzan Swing - it was a big tower that you had to jump off of and then got to do a pendulum swing. It was lots of fun but man jumping off the tower by yourself is such a hard thing to do! 

The other city we went to in Costa Rica was La Fortuna. The first night there we went to these amazing hot springs. There were probably 30 pools of different temperatures and some that had slides attached to them. It was so relaxing to just lounge in the springs after the active days and long days on the bus. The next day we spent white water rafting! I absolutely love rafting – I really should look at doing it more at home, especially when runoff is happening. I would like to understand the mechanics of it and be able to do some Class 5 rapids. We were able to do some Class 3 & 4 rapids and had a great day! The other fun thing about La Fortuna is that they have an active volcano. It hadn’t produced any lava for about 6 months but it started smoking the day we were there. I hoped the lava would start flowing (don’t worry, it goes down the other side of the volcano so we were totally safe!), but all it did was smoke. If you look hard, you can see it below!

Paris
As most of you know, I visited Paris when I came to Europe in 2009, but I really loved it and felt like I didn’t get to have enough time here. I was able to book a few days here this time, to just come back and enjoy the city. I have spent most of my time just puttering around – I didn’t spend a ton of money and see all the big sights, since I did that last time. This time I just went lots of little cafes, had afternoon coffee and chatted with other travelers. I lit a candle for a special baby named Lucy at both Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame. Sacre Coeur is a lovely church built on top of a hill and I just feel in love with it. I sat there for hours, both in the church and outside of it, listening to a local man play music and just enjoying the feel of it.

I was also lucky enough to be in Paris for Bastille Day, which is similar to the 4^th of July in America. Many of the Parisians had they day off work and there was a festive mood in the air. I went to a parade on the Champs Elysees in the morning. Their parade was similar to ours, but it was completely focused on the military! There were no beauty queens, politicians or marching bands – it was all about tanks, helicopters and fire trucks.

The thing to do at night is go to the Eiffel Tower and watch the fireworks. There is a huge concert with many bands and the feeling is just so relaxed. Everyone is having picnics and laughing and just enjoying the day off. You know I couldn’t do a post about Paris without the required picture of the Eiffel Tower or Jess doing something cheesy, so here you go!

You know it's going to be a bad day when....

There have been a few times on my trip where you just know it’s going to be a bad day. It might start off okay and then something snaps and you know the day is going downhill quickly. Other times you know the second you wake up that you might as well just go back to sleep. On the first portion of my trip there were a few of those days, which I can look back on now and simply think they are hilarious, especially because they did not actually happen to me personally. Below are a few of my favorite “Oh Shit” moments!

Ferries
As I’ve mentioned before, this trip was totally focused around boats. We went on all types of boats – speed boats for diving, pontoon boats for floating across a lake, rickety & falling apart 6 person boats for going on a mangrove tour or kayaks just for fun. However, you never want to rock up to a ferry depot where you are told from moment uno that you are going to get sick. When you buy your ticket, they give you a “highly recommended” motion sickness tablet. When you actually board the boat, they give every passenger a “just in case” plastic bag. The ferry employs people whose sole responsibility is to walk around handing out paper towels and swapping out plastic bags. Shoot, sometimes they even have to hold babies because the parents are too busy throwing up. I’m not going to go into too many gory details but I will say when they pass out drugs like candy, it’s best to take them!

Chicken buses
I wrote a blog entry before about chicken buses. These are retired, repainted school buses that cram people in, personal space becomes a thing of the past and it’s perfectly normal to see beds & bicycles on top of a moving vehicle. The drivers are completely insane and overtake trucks when there is no room and their engine has absolutely no power. The heat, the smell, the dirt roads and the oncoming traffic are enough to make you wish that you were instead running an ultra marathon through the Sahara. Now imagine doing all of this when you are drunk and hung over…and that’s what happened to one of the girls on our trip.
We knew we had to be up at 6 am for a long day of travel so we went out for a quiet dinner. Somehow the night turned into drinks, salsa dancing and a police ride home for one of the girls (for safety, not due to being arrested!). One of the girls – rock on Kelly! – ended up having quite a lot to drink, so much so that she was still drunk when we got up the next morning. She claimed it was food poisoning, but I think we all know the truth! She is such a champ and I can’t imagine how she did it, but she rode the chicken buses for 8 hours feeling absolutely terrible. At one point she thought she was going to be sick and I’ve never seen a plastic bag fly to the back of a bus as quickly as that one did. She tucked it behind her ears and proceeded to fall asleep on the shoulder of the sweet Guatemalan man sitting next to her. The best part was at the end of the 8 hour day, she thought the chicken buses were the most fun thing we had done yet on the trip. The rest of us were just happy to have escaped with our lives!

The Roommate
At some point in our lives, most of us have encountered a bad roommate. They come in all shapes and sizes – the roommate who snores really loudly, the one who steals your last glass of milk or the one who “borrows” your favorite shirt only to get a stain on it. When you’re traveling on a tour you are put in a room with a random person or three and you just get to jump in and get to know each other. Most of the time it works out well because you are respectful enough to leave hot water for the other person, to clean up your own messes or to leave the key at reception so they are not locked out for hours. Sometimes someone has an early tour or comes in really late and there is no choice but to wake up your roommate. If you are in this unfortunate situation, you try to navigate it as politely as possible – giving a quiet knock on the door, shaking their shoulder to wake them up or calling their name.
However, one of the guys on my tour got the best wake up of all time. His roommate (let’s call him The Runner) decided to go for a 6 am run and for some reason decided to wake up his sleeping roommate (we’ll call him Mr. Asleep). So what does The Runner do? Does he shake the shoulder of Mr. Asleep? No. Does he call out the name of Mr. Asleep to wake him up? No. Does he shout his name or do jumping jacks or start pounding on the walls? You guessed correctly, he does none of the above. Instead he does the unthinkable. The Runner lifts up the blankets and sheets at the end of the bed and starts tickling the feet of Mr. Asleep. Yes, that’s right – he decided it was okay to wake up someone he had known for 2 days by tickling his feet!!!! CREEPY!!! Do you have any idea what I would do to someone who woke me up by tickling my feet? No, I don’t know either, but I promise you it would not be good!