Couchsurfing in Lyon

After a cafe breakfast of cappuccinos and croissants, Josh and I said goodbyes and I took the tram to the Geneva airport, where my Swiss Blablacar driver drove me into France, to Lyon. She was from Lausanne, of Algerian descent, and spoke French, and today she was driving to Lyon to do some shopping. An hour or two later I was exiting a big, generic French mall and walking with my backpack and banjo on the streets of Lyon, looking for my Couchsurfing host’s address.

I had already made arrangements to be hosted in Lyon for a couple nights and Paris for a few more, but it was only after making these arrangements that I discovered a new function of the Couchsurfing site/app that I should have been using all along – instead of sending requests directly to potential hosts, you can just post a public notice of your trip and let hosts contact you. I didn’t think people would respond, but while waiting for the hosts I’d messaged to respond, I posted one in Lyon to test it out. I ended up getting a couple of offers from fellow musicians, although by then I’d already found a host. We arranged to hang out instead. I had social plans!

Olga, my host, was working from home that day, so I met her at her apartment. She’s a Polish woman who’s lived in Lyon for around a decade and loves it. Her interestingly accented English is excellent, and I’d hardly been there ten minutes before she was asking pointed questions about my deepest motivations and philosophies. She’s an intense person, and if you give an answer she doesn’t like she’ll challenge it. We talked about travel and cultures and the direction of the world while she cooked us a little vegan lunch, thinly sliced, exotically spiced, sauteed zucchini and other vegetables. And then she was off on business and I was off exploring.

Knowing nothing of Lyon except for the high quality of its food, I wandered for hours, crossing a river into the main part of the city. Like Pittsburgh, Lyon is built in the crook of two merging rivers, filling up its peninsular center and spilling out across the waters on both sides. Cool shops and parks fill the middle bit. After snacking and popping into a couple music shops, I crossed the second river and took the inclined rail up the hill to the cathedral. Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The church itself is a blocky, white Gothic thing. It was closing for the evening when I arrived, so I walked around the side, noticing an old priest talking kindly to some tourists in the shadow of a statue of priest who looked exactly like him. Beside the cathedral is a lookout point where tourists crowded up to the railing to see the whole city spread out beneath in the peach-colored twilight.

Down the hill lay the ruins of a massive Roman amphitheater. The taller bits are crumbling, but the amphitheater itself, stage and stairs and rows and rows of seats built into the hill, is startlingly intact, untouched. Despite other tourists and a small pack of teenagers quietly milling around, I felt quite alone, surveying the ancient view in solitude. It was silent and a bit surreal. At the bottom, behind the stage, there are rows of big stone slabs with Latin inscriptions, moved out of the way and clustered together, evidently not worth putting in a museum. They looked ancient, but they were just sitting there heavily, where anyone could look at or sit on them. It’s amazing they weren’t covered in graffiti.

I finally got a hold of Sarah, the Couchsurfer I was going to hang out with that evening. We were going to grab some food, but her texting was frustratingly intermittent. She was going to meet me in twenty minutes, so I set up to busk on a cool, narrow, pedestrian street full of restaurants and neat shops. An hour and a half later, grumpily walking back towards Olga’s, little tummy rumbling up a storm, I finally heard back from her again – apparently she’d had another international visitor who needed some guidance on his way out of town, and she hadn’t thought to tell me. I decided to get over it, and we met up in the main part of Lyon and got dinner at a fun little creperie. Now, crepes are all over Europe, one of the dominant street foods in any mainland European city. But this was my first French one and my first sit-down one, so my expectations were high. Well, it was delicious. I had a meaty salad with morally questionable foie gras in it (seemed appropriate), then a tasty little savory crepe with goat cheese and whatever the French version of bacon and eggs is called, and finally a dessert crepe loaded with nutella and some ice cream.

All the while Sarah told me about her life, with all the innocent self-absorption of an enthusiastic college-aged creative type. She’s a Frenchwoman of North African descent, working in event organization, if I’m remembering right. She’s gotten to meet a whole bunch of celebrities that way, which she loves talking about (she’s since moved back to Paris to be in the middle of the action again). For her, the main perk of the job is exposure, as she’s also an aspiring singer with a decently popular YouTube channel. Covers are her main thing, and because our methods of performance and creation are pretty different (I’m more about the writing, and performance is just something I fumble through), I couldn’t relate much to her experience, but it was fascinating to hear her opinions on things. She’s just starting out, but she’s not taking the grassroots, word-of-mouth route like me. Her strategy is to be seen online as much as possible and rub shoulders with influential people through her work, all with the intent of getting swept up into the rapid pop-music current. And heck, she’s hung out with Katy Perry through her job, so maybe she’ll do it.

The next day, after walking across town and having a fancy croque monsieur (which apparently translates to “gentleman crunch?!”), I tried my hand again at busking. The cool little area under the cathedral had been great in the evening, but the daytime audiences were standoffish, so I went to the main shopping street. I had better luck there for a little while, but I kept being told to move – by a mall employee, then by a squad of police – so I gave it up around when my second Couchsurfing pal was ready to hang out. Damien met me there with his guitar, and we made our introductions, bought some beer, and headed down to the riverwalk to jam.

The benches down by the river are really the perfect place for an outdoor jam session. Dogwalkers and families strolled by lazily like flotsam in the river beneath them while we told each other our stories through songs we’d written and favorite covers. We swapped instruments a bit; I’d missed playing guitar, and everyone likes trying out a banjo. Music is a great language to have in common, but Damien had great English, too (as did Sarah). Maybe it’s because people in the Couchsurfing community tend to be globally minded, but I was having great luck finding French people who didn’t mind speaking English with me. Besides that, Damien had consumed as much American media as the rest of the western world, so we knew a lot of the same music, and we bonded quickly over our mutual love for Adventure Time. Later we grabbed falafel and went back to the apartment he shares with his brother, where we played with the instruments he had lying around for a while. Then Damien’s older brother dropped by, and we all talked about Star Wars while drinking Pastis, a spirit popular in southeastern France that’s served diluted with water and basically tastes like boozy licorice.

Damien is my kind of dude, and I sincerely hope we hang out again. It’s true that Lyon had delicious food and a nice vibe, but my favorite thing about it was the new pals. To anyone planning some Couchsurfing travel, I recommend posting your trip publicly and seeing who offers to host you. Generous people will appear.

Geneva

Oh, man. I’ve gotten so far behind, but we’re almost there. I will finish the story of this trip and I will do it in a somewhat timely fashion, you have my word.

There are lots of miles between Rome and Geneva, so I made my next journey in two parts. Neither involved hitchhiking; if you’ve read about my last experience trying to hitch in Italy, you’ll understand why I wasn’t about to try that again. The first was a Blablacar ride to Milan, a conveniently placed Italian city that I hadn’t been to yet. I didn’t like it at all, and I won’t dwell on it . After a series of Italian cities that I loved, Milan just felt like an endless strip of high-end clothing stores and expensive restaurants. And my busking profits were abysmal.

I got the rest of the way by OuiBus, France’s version of Megabus, and the trip from Milan to Geneva was super cheap. If it seems strange to you that a French bus took me from Italy to Switzerland, check out Geneva on a map. It’s this weird little nub of Swiss land that pokes into France, a little Swiss peninsula. It was mostly tunnels and all at night, so I didn’t get to enjoy the views, but thus I passed through the Alps once more.

By this point European border crossings were nothing new to me. Going by ferry and plane within the EU usually didn’t even warrant a customs search or a passport stamp, and driving over borders by motorway had been as uneventful as you could imagine. But this time, passing through the mountains into France at midnight, the OuiBus stopped at customs. And it stayed stopped. Eventually A man walked down the aisle and collected every passenger’s passport, and then left the bus. Then we waited. Then we kept waiting.

It was a tedious half hour or more before the French customs officials tromped back onto the bus. But rather than return our passports, they brusquely addressed a young dude whose papers were apparently not legit. He put up a fuss in heavily accented English, but they weren’t having it, escorting him off the bus and, presumably, sending him back to Italy. I wish I knew his story. He didn’t seem like a refugee or a terrorist or a criminal, but he could have been anything. He did know some English. His skin was hardly darker than your average Italian. He looked disheveled, and he carried only a small backpack. That’s all I remember about him.

The OuiBus arrived in Geneva, and I walked across the city center to Josh’s apartment. It was late on a weeknight, and the city was dead silent, though I did pass a few clean, professional-looking people on the streets. I even couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Josh. We’d been friends at the beginning of college, always getting along easily and enjoying each other’s company, but we fell out of touch as our friend circles drifted apart. I hadn’t spoken to him since before graduation. But he seemed pretty eager to host me. Our last conversation had taken place while I was in the UK (give or take) and he was in Iceland. The airline had lost his bag, so he was stuck in Reykjavik with almost nothing. I passed along some Iceland info and encouraged him to hitchhike, and he ended up giving it a shot. Iceland is the easiest place I’ve hitchhiked, and he had a really good first hitching experience.

Josh’s welcome was super enthusiastic, and any concerns I may have had about us drifting irretrievably apart were eased immediately by the dude’s familiar warmth and good humor. It was a weeknight, but we stayed up extra late catching up, sharing the ongoing tales of our adulthoods and those of our mutual friends. After college, and studying abroad in Switzerland for a semester in his senior year, Josh’s career as a consultant with charitable NGOs had taken him to such far-flung places as Malawi and Baltimore. Now he was consulting a global NGO in Geneva, the hub of all things international and well-intentioned, dating a cool German girl whom I would meet later, and really enjoying it all.

I spent about a week there. When Josh would go to work, I would rest it up in his apartment, playing his roommate’s guitar and ukulele, reading the book Jane had lent me, or catching up on the ol’ blog. Or I might venture outside, braving Switzerland’s absurd prices, and get a snack or go busking. The main shopping street turned out to be a pretty good location, with lots of passersby and a decently generous populace. The Swiss currency has coins not only for 1 and 2 Swiss Francs, but there’s also a huge coin for 5. That’s crazy, and I made a few of them, and they made me very happy. It was a good busking city.

In the evenings, Josh would come home and we would go do things – maybe grab dinner, maybe explore the city a bit. One night, before joining his girlfriend Stefanie at a surprisingly sloppy young-people party, we got embroiled in an intense game of public-park chess, with the big goofy pieces and all. We were decently matched, but just as I started pulling ahead, an old Swiss man began gruffly advising him, totally oblivious to any subtle  cues that we’d rather play our own game. He got more confident every turn, and soon he had fully taken over and I was playing big goofy park chess with an old Swiss man who seemed to live for big goofy park chess, some kind of public chess groupie. AND I WON, thank you very much.

Foes

Geneva is a strange city. If you’ve ever lived in D.C. (which I haven’t), the dynamics might feel a little familiar – tons of non-local people live there to work in cool, interesting jobs, like helping international NGOs or various countries’ UN delegations. As a result, almost no one is a local and few live there very long, so the city is missing a bit of the distinct character other cities tend to have when locals commit to making their neighborhoods cooler. Geneva’s energetic young people are busy with other things and transient. Josh, being a healthy extrovert, has found himself a very active, welcoming group of friends, the kind that forms in one’s first year at college, where everyone’s different and from different places, but they all arrived friendless at the same time, so there no cliques to overcome and new people are always being welcomed into the fold.

There was something going on most nights. In addition to Josh’s cool German girlfriend, I met a sassy girl from Philly, an Aussie, an Englishwoman, a Canadian, and an American who had previously been Josh’s coworker on a wholly different continent, and a ton more whose origins I can’t remember. That last American’s friend was the Wall Street Journal’s John Kerry reporter, so she was in town to cover his diplomatic meetings with Russia. She was with us on the day we climbed the Mont Salève, the long, beautiful mountain ridge that overlooks Geneva from the south, across the French border. From its top you buy ice cream or a pint of cold beer and watch the paragliders dramatically launch and soar out across Lake Geneva, all the way across the city, back over France on the other side.

Like Lucerne, Geneva is no drab concrete cityscape. It’s lush and green, overlooked by mountains, crossed gracefully by a big lake and two rivers, all safe for swimming. And people use it all. There’s a little pier with a gravelly beach that juts into the lake from the middle of the city, constantly swarming with swimmers. One night we took our swimsuits and blankets and jumped off a bridge into the river, letting the current take us back to our little spot to dry off, eat snacks, and enjoy some friendly international conversation while the daylight slowly faded. I had a great chat with Stefanie about the concept of national pride (if your concept of American pride ever needs a good harsh challenge, talk about patriotism with a German). It’s the impression from that night that’s defines my memories of Geneva – a beautifully placed city where friends come easily and live eagerly, because none of them will live in Geneva forever.

Rome Is Many Cities

The train from Florence to Rome took us through mountain valleys and long, long tunnels, substantiating what I learned in Latin and history classes about the Ancient Rome being rugged and rocky and really only suitable for growing olives and aspiring conquerors.

Like every other Italian city I’ve visited, but perhaps to an extreme, Rome possesses several identities all at once, in a kind of jumbled harmony. The first I saw was Rome as a big world city on the scale of London/NYC/Paris. It was the biggest mainland European city I’d been in so far, eclipsing even the sprawling Barcelona. It seems inevitable that modern cities of this magnitude grow towards each other in a practical way – cities this big don’t function without some sacrifices to efficiency. The train station was huge like an airport a ten-minute walk in one direction just to get to any exit. Then we took a metro train to the neighborhood where our AirBnB was, near the Vatican. Throughout this trip, Italian language aside, we could have been almost anywhere – whether you’re in L.A., London, or Rome, big urban public transit is what it is.

We emerged in a quiet neighborhood with a broad main street, flanked with shopping options and tourists, and quiet residential side streets that told us we were no longer downtown. Our AirBnB was on the same block as a classy-looking gelateria with a line out the door, which we were sure to investigate as soon as we’d rebounded from our transit lethargy. It was perhaps the best ice cream I had in all of Europe.

In the evening we wandered toward the Vatican and saw a second face of Rome, of Catholic Renaissance Italy. Well, first we got pizza, but more on that later. The Vatican is nearly empty at night, but you can still get in there and walk around. The Piazza San Pietro, where the Pope addresses people, is enormous, encircled in columns and cathedrals, dramatically lit, grand everywhere you look. The canonization of Mother Theresa was going to happen in just a day or two, so the plaza was being set up for the ceremony, with a big icon of her displayed in front of the basilica and a big seating area roped off.

We took the scenic way back, crossing a couple fancy bridges covered in Renaissance statues, passing Castel Sant’Angelo, an ancient Roman castle that was later renovated and used by the Catholic church for hundreds of years. The bridges were populated with people snapping pictures and merchants trying to catch their attention, but at this hour the crowd was pretty thin and nobody bothered us.

The next day our goal was to explore some areas Jane hadn’t seen yet. We would save the big sights for the night and check out some of Rome’s more modest offerings. Just a short walk east from our place was a busy area full of restaurants and shopping, interspersed with the ridiculously fascinating ancient sights and relics – even outside of Rome’s oldest areas, ancient stuff is just strewn the city like it’s no big deal. In Piazza del Popolo there were plenty of tourists snapping pictures of the 3,200-year-old Egyptian obelisk, 67 feet high and covered with hieroglyphs, brought to Rome 2,000 years ago, broken and lost during the slow collapse of the empire, rediscovered and restored almost 500 years ago. That stone has been standing in that spot for twice as long as my country has existed, and it’s life has been seven times longer than that. And for most tourists it’s an afterthought. That’s Rome for you.

We explored a huge park on a hill, Villa Borghese – a big rich estate with lots of nice landscaping, good for a pleasant walk and a breathtaking view of the city. If you look around long enough you’ll find a big pond there where you can rent little boats and float around in relative peace, listening to the wind swish through treebranches and ancient stone archways. We didn’t rent boats, but we watched some happy little turtles swim around. Then we made our way back to the AirBnB, getting more for a late lunch – more on that later.

That night we saw another Rome. I’d seen hints of it in the other Italian cities, and I would see it again in tiny pockets of France, but Rome is the only place where it really persists in earnest. All within a brief walk of one another lie the ancient Roman coliseum, the forum, and the Pantheon, among countless other relics of Rome’s most ancient era. They’re still busy at night, but you can walk right up and touch them without much hassle. The Pantheon is enormous and solid; at night a big crowd gathers in front of it to sit on the steps and eat and drink and talk. The coliseum looms darkly, its arches all ominous shadows. Parts of the forum are illuminated at night by bright floodlights. In some places they’ve put up bleachers for people to sit and muse at the still, stoic ruins. And even in the middle of the night, people do. Because of the way cities tend to sink over time, or rather the way the land tends to rise and leave the old parts behind, the excavated portions of the forum are sunk below street level. From the elevated seats, it feels like ancient Rome is performing on a stage for the modern world, putting its best columns and arches forward.

We also stopped by the Trevi Fountain, a massive, ornate outdoor fountain from the 1700s where dozens of epic statues hang out and splash around in the water together. The best part was watching a continuous flow of tourists pose for selfies in front of it, politely waiting their turns for the best spots. When they had pals or boyfriends their photo shoots were more subtle, but you could still pick them out. They were the ones trying so desperately to look unimpressed, downcast, wistful, or tragic. I hope their pictures turned out nice. We were very entertained.

The next day was the last day of Jane’s European vacation. We had decided to go out strong, squeezing in as much exploration as possible before the reluctant, inevitable goodbye. By sheer luck, the forum was free to enter that day, so we were able to wander around the ruins by foot, touching walls and stepping down stairs. We bumbled our way into a 4th century Christian church, Santa Maria Antiqua, that adjoins the old forum, now excavated and with much of its early Christian art and architecture still intact.

You know that feeling you get when your surroundings totally overwhelm you, when you experience something so wholly beyond your trivial little life that your rational mind shuts off and you feel nothing but wonder until it recovers? I hope you’ve felt it. If you haven’t, it might be time for you to take a vacation. I usually get that feeling from nature – wading out into Lake Michigan, climbing a mountain in Colorado or Washington or the Scottish highlands, or a sand dune beside Lake Superior. Nature exists on such a scale that when enough of it confronts you at one time, it’s hard to keep your priorities still. But I felt the same feeling in the Roman forum, walking down the same paved streets where, 2,000 years ago, citizens of one of the most advanced civilizations and most powerful empires of all time walked. As far as I know, none of my blood is Italian, but I still felt like I was walking among my heritage; in many ways, all of western civilization spawned from Rome and Ancient Greece, so I think the feeling was justified. I felt removed from time, like the timeline containing the ancient and the present had bent back on itself to convey me to a time almost too storied, too familiar, to have ever been real.

By this point, it was settled that I was going to meet Jane in Glasgow before going home, so the weight of our goodbye at the train station was lessened by the knowledge that we would be hanging out again in just a couple weeks. She would fly back home and get back to work, and I would spend one more night rambling around Rome before meandering through Switzerland and France and grabbing a cheap flight from Paris directly to Glasgow. Then I would have about a month to enjoy the company of my new favorite lass and a ridiculous, charming city before concluding my trip. It had been a very affirming two weeks for our little relationship, and although the logistics of our relationship were still frustratingly uncertain, our confidence in each other was only getting stronger.

A quick note about pizza. I had the best pizza of my life in Rome, twice. I say this because there are so many different kinds of perfect pizza, it hardly seems fair to force them into a single category. Much like how Chicago and New York style pizzas have their own distinct appeals, these Italian pizzas were truly special in their own ways.
The pizza place near the Vatican was casual street pizza made with care and invention. You take a number, point at the pizzas you like, and pay by weight. On display are a constantly rotating selection of strange and wondrous pizza possibilities, pizzas of every color and concept, so many vegetables and cheeses and meats and seafoods that I’d never fathomed having on pizza. It was all made transcendent by the dough, an exciting blend of crispy outside and fluffy inside that I could eat forever.

I have less to say about the Napoletana pizza place I went to after visiting Villa Borghese, but it was perfect in its own way. Apparently modern pizza came from Naples (I just looked this up – turns out Ancient Romans had foccacia but not pizza), and now pizza places that claim to follow that tradition have to work to get recognized by a selective Napoletana pizza society. There was a place in Pittsburgh that was part of that, and it was great. This was vastly better. Napoli pizza has a thin crust and sharp, intense toppings. They’re less into the consistent, solid layers that American pizzas have, taking more liberties with their topping arrangements. You can usually see through to the crust between the toppings, as they often have a white sauce or olive oil instead of a solid tomato sauce layer, which is fine because the crust is delicious – light and crispy. My pizza was a calzone, folded only about halfway over itself, and packed with the richest cheese in the world, as well as various meats and veggies that complemented each other beautifully. This pizza was not trying to start a revolution, just representing the epitome (to my mouth) of the purest, most traditional pizza form around.

Those pizzas are a nice illustration of something I think Rome does very well – balance. Yes, it’s got some amazing things to go see, and its status as a tourist hub is well deserved, but while a city like Venice lives mostly off of that appeal, Rome feels very alive. Yes, traditional food is made traditionally there, but there are plenty of neighborhoods where cool young people are making cool young pizza too.

Some Citalies in Italy

The next week, after Venice and before Rome, was a whirlwind of cheap trains and AirBnB bookings across northern Italy, visiting cities that I knew virtually nothing about and Jane hadn’t been to before . It was pretty wild.

Verona, a Whatever City

I’ll be generous and say that Verona suffered from its positioning within the trip. After Venice’s obvious marvel, Verona was just a little Italian city with a Shakespearean balcony somewhere in it. There was nothing wrong with it, it just didn’t make a big impression.

My memories of our day there are sparse. Jane and I were finally starting to feel better from whatever minor illnesses we’d picked up in Spain, and I finally got my hands on a phone charger again – these setbacks didn’t stop us from enjoying the journey, but losing them felt liberating. After recuperating from our journey with a delicious feast of groceries at our little hotel, we took a bus to the city center. Juliet’s balcony, the main thing people come to see, was already closed for the evening; we snapped a picture through the gate with other tourists and walked on. I’d put a map together with all the major plazas and ruins and stuff, all easy to reach by foot. Verona has a nice fortified castle and a Roman arena, the latter of which is still in use as an opera house. They seemed nice. We sipped adult beverages in the streets and found a place where the classy Italian dinner wasn’t too expensive, turned in at around midnight, and left by train in the morning for Bologna.

Bologna, City of Snacks

Bologna is a city I would come back to. I could even see myself living for a bit, which I can’t say about any of the other Italian cities I saw.

We had learned on the train that Bologna, being full of college students and not as obvious of a tourist draw as Venice or even Verona, was a great place to eat on a budget. So we planned our stay around snacks, and it was the right thing to do. We lunched at Osteria dell’Orsa, a busy restaurant staffed with cool young people who served us the best pesto pasta I’ve ever had on their outdoor patio. We went back again the next day.

Our AirBnB was tucked away right in the center of the city, just across the street from the Two Towers of Bologna, a pair of strange, crooked Medieval structures that provided occasion for me to introduce Jane to the word “jenky.”

In the afternoon we bumbled into the Archiginnasio of Bologna, an academic building from the 1500s that spent most of its life as a medical school and now lives on as a remarkably well preserved museum. It’s got a very Renaissance vibe with a hint of Hogwarts. Every inch of wall is ornately painted with what seems to be the Renaissance equivalent of a yearbook – large clusters of little badges with names and years and hometowns and professions, each representing a member of some long-ago med school class. It was really cool.

On our way back from the school we passed some of my favorite buskers from the whole trip, three young, seated guitarists playing upbeat gypsy jazz for an appreciative plaza where folks of all ages were just hanging out and enjoying the music and sunshine. It was a super cool scene.

In the evening we indulged in the concept of Aperitivo, a specific type of Italian happy-hour deal where you buy a drink (for maybe eight Euro) and they give you free access to a snacky little buffet. We peeked at a couple before settling, perhaps unwisely, on a highly rated one that turned out to be not quite what we wanted – where the other ones had delicate little Italian appetizers and small plates, this one was more like a cheap cafeteria – huge variety, and surely higher quality food than its American equivalent, but paling in comparison to our paradigm-shaking lunch.

Before leaving Bologna, we spent a night eating more classy Italian food (the best lasagna I’ve ever had) and drinking Aperol spritzes in the gypsy jazz plaza, watching the Italians walking and cycling by.

Rimini: Italy’s Florida?

Picture a beach on the east coast of Florida, the kind that doesn’t have a big name or any specific draw, but people come anyway because it’s the beach. As a result, this place hasn’t really made an effort to set itself apart; in fact, it’s hardly changed since the ’80s. Suntanned old folks and families with tiny kids walk up and down the main street, stopping at souvenir shops and ice cream shops on the left before stepping onto the beach to the right. There are people for whom a beach vacation gets old very quickly, and there are people who are happy to lay on the beach for a week and do nothing else. This place is for those people.

Italy has those places, and Rimini is one of them. We were here to take a break. Jane was in the middle of two weeks of vacation from work and ready to spend a few days relaxing instead of low-budget traveling, and the same sounded good to me. Rimini specifically was chosen at the recommendation of Jane’s parents, who went on a holiday there from Scotland in the early days of their relationship.

It was a great place in a strange, surreal way. We eventually discovered that if we took the bus a few miles up the coast and into the central part of Rimini, we could find an old Italian town with cool stuff and cool people in it, but apart from that, the area is just miles and miles of tacky, casual coast. Every street block has a little souvenir place, a hotel, a gelateria, a bar, and a pizza place. Every two or three streets you’ll come across an arcade or a clothing store. That’s about it. The other side is the sea.

Jane, amazingly, had found a hotel for 10 Euros a night, so we grabbed it for four days. It was called El Stupido Hotel, and that is a real fact. I swear I am not making it up. El Stupido Hotel exists in the world, and you can go there. It was the thing I will remember most from the land side of Rimini’s main street. The exterior was white and severely blocky, with bizarre splotches of black paint splashed across the upper facade. The inside was dark and open and startlingly empty. There was no receptionist/owner at the desk most of the time we came through, just an empty station across from an empty lounge room and an empty bar. Upstairs, dim lights rotated through a cycle of bold colors, bathing us in trippy blue or red or green as we climbed up the stairwell, also painted in “artsy” splotches, to our room, which had windows but no air conditioning and, inexplicably, a Red Bull minifridge that lit up when you plugged it in but didn’t seem to do anything else. It definitely did not refrigerate.

Our stay was cheap and hilarious and often creepy. We never saw other guests, and the only times we saw the manager guy, he was downstairs re-explaining to us in broken English how to lock the front door on our way out, or banging on our door in the middle of the afternoon to explain how we were locking the front door incorrectly. Our room ran out of toilet paper after the first day, so I went on a mission to find some more, since there was no employee around. Eventually I found an unlocked supply closet and grabbed some, but not before I found, behind another unlocked, unmarked door, an angry, barking dog, apparently alone in there. I closed that door fast.

Jane was a little spooked at times – the place seemed right out of a horror movie, so I don’t blame her. But for 10 Euros a night, and ultimately no murders, it was still a steal, and the relief of knowing that our days in Rimini were so inexpensive helped me to relax and enjoy it. If we’d been paying a ton for it, all the generic beachfront tackiness might have felt oppressive instead of charming.

Over four days we splashed in the water, laid on the beach, slept in, read books, played Guitar Hero at an arcade, ate tasty food aplenty, and generally enjoyed every bit of it. The highest rated restaurant in the area, according to the internet, was a pirate-themed place with a huge line that turned out to have the most mediocre food ever. We laughed about it as we ate our American diner food and listened to the middle-aged Italian bar band play classic rock covers, their pronunciation of English lyrics betraying their lack of English fluency. Apparently, in the miles and miles of identical streets, the effort of giving a place a pirate theme is enough to draw crowds from the whole region. Rimini!

One restaurant gave us free shots of Limoncello after our meal, and we realized we loved it. It’s like a sweet, boozy lemonade, almost too sweet but not quite. Late the next night we walked back to our hotel via the empty beach, finally sitting down against some grounded boats with a bottle of Limoncello we’d bought, talking for a long time about life and art and the things we love, ducking down when what looked to be a bicycle cop made his rounds.

Florence, Where They Hate Tourists

If Florence is any indication, Italian cities get more beautiful the closer you get to Rome. Florence is ornate and grandiose, with an epic green and white cathedral and beautiful streets and plazas filled with sculptures, many of which were probably famous – while wandering at night we passed by the museum that houses Michelangelo’s David, which boasts a scale replica at its front steps. My favorite sculpture was nearby, a giant golden turtle ridden by a turtle-riding warrior. Awesome.

We were staying at an AirBnB run by African immigrants called Aida’s House, at the top floor of an apartment building. The guy who showed us around spoke with a thick African accent, and I was constantly tickled that his verb of choice for lightswitches was “shoot” – “shoot the switch.” If you see me, please remind me to start saying that.

We had delicious sandwiches for a late lunch near our bed and breakfast, and as we walked and ate we kept hearing the familiar voices of Americans – students studying abroad, businesspeople. I hadn’t heard much of my own accent in Italy, not even in touristy cities like Venice. It was immediately irritating – the cafe was filled with the sounds of these teenage girls gabbing loudly about nonsense.

Florence was beautiful and obstinate in equal measures. After the sculptures and cathedral, the best pictures from that night came from the bridges that cross the river Arno. It was a beautiful night to walk. And yes, of course we had ice cream. But when we took a break from sightseeing for drinks and dinner, we found that any bar or restaurant with any proximity to a significant building was drastically overpriced. This was to be expected, but after being spoiled by the reasonable prices in Rimini and Bologna, we were a little begrudged. We finally ended up getting overpriced pizza and drinking beer in an Irish pub playing ’90s grunge music, which was just fine by us. It turned out to be a really nice way to spend the rest of our night, but we could have had that time at any Irish pub in the world. Jane made my night, but not Florence.

Florence left us on one more sour note. Scrambling to catch the right train to Rome, we found ourselves in the train station with just a few minutes to spare, having had no time to properly feed or hydrate ourselves. Jane went to find some medicine while I went to get snacks and water. We both had the same experience – waiting in line only to reach the front of the line and realize that we were supposed to wait in a different line and get a number first. Both lines had long lines, and it didn’t really make sense to us. What’s more, the employees talked to us both like we were idiots. I just gave up, while Jane reacted with a little proper Scottish rage and then also gave up, reuniting at the train emptyhanded. Maybe it was because of those loud American girls, but Florence was the first Italian city where we regularly felt like we were imposing on people who were serving us, or, worse, like we and all other tourists were perceived as a nuisance. Perhaps they’re right and we are, but it struck us both that only Florence made let us know it.

And then we were on a train to Rome.

Venice: They Accidentally Built It On Water I Guess

Unlike this wacky guy, Jane had a limited travel window, so we traveled together with a plan. From the airport in Trieste, Italy, we would take the train to Venice. From there, Verona, Bologna, Rimini, Florence, Rome.

Even though it’s not super relevant to the modern world, everybody knows about Venice. It’s the city with the canals, right? I’d heard that. Well, Venice makes a living off of the fact that you’ve heard that. Its strangeness is perfectly preserved, just modernized enough to function. If you live there, you’re either super rich or you belong to an old family that’s been there forever. But most people don’t live there; it’s a tourist hub – the kind that I’m okay with, because for the most part it’s kept its original charm intact.

It was only when our train veered off of the coast and thrust itself straight out over the sea, its destination far off in the watery horizon, that I realized just how marine Venice is. It isn’t waterfront, it’s actually in the water. No one told me that!

There are a few other canal-heavy cities out there in the world, but none are so thoroughly Italian. Which Italy, you may ask, and it’s a great question, because there are so many distinct waves of Italian history overlapping each other. Venice was founded during the decline of the empire, survived the dark ages, and flourished as a medieval and Renaissance city-state when that was the cool thing to be in Italy. Most of what there is to see is from the last 500 years, when it had its most prosperous times, amid the rises and falls that befall any European city given enough time. All this to say, the combination of Old Italian city and canal city is striking.

There are pedestrian sidewalks on the islands, of course, but no streets, no cars, no buses. To get around, if you don’t want to spend insane amounts of money to be chaufferred by an iconic gondolier, you wait at the vaporetto stop until the little water bus lurches up. Then you scan your ticket and hop on, sitting in rows of seats or standing on the deck, holding on tight as the vaporetto blasts its way over the water, clanking and groaning and splashing with exertion. Half of the passengers will be tourists – European, Asian, American even – and a few will be young couples having romantic moments. But the most interesting ones are the locals – old women with big purses and a tiny dog on a leash, a crew of tanned high school boys with edgy European haircuts and cool faraway stares, even professionals in business dress who somehow ride the vaporetto for their daily commute. Somehow, even though Venice is an intense hub of tourism and its property values are insanely, prohibitively high, there are still locals who seem to be living normal, albeit uniquely Venetian, lives. After you’ve people-watched for a few minutes and felt the mist of the canal on your face, the boat will unceremoniously slam into a dock, workers will secure it with heavy ropes, and passengers will step off onto dry land.

Everywhere you look, someone is doing a routine task in a totally foreign way. With no roads, no cars or trucks, of course a restaurateur has to transport two dozen wooden chairs by boat, out in the sun in his work uniform, stacking the chairs delicately on the little cargo boat’s shifting deck. And of course every restaurant spills out onto the sidewalk so people can drink their Aperol spritzes while watching the seagulls flapping and cawing.

However, Venetians haven’t worked out every kink in the system. Given the city’s inevitable success as a tourist destination, I guess they can’t really be bothered to. As we would observe in many ways in many Italian cities, “good enough” seemed to suffice in terms of public infrastructure, service, efficiency, et cetera. It hit us hardest on our first morning in Venice. We were staying at a hostel in Giudecca, a narrow island south of the main ones, supposedly a quiet place where lots of locals actually lived. We slept in, as I was still getting over my funny tummy from Spain, so it was almost noon when we got to our vaporetto stop, ready to explore the city. But there was nowhere to buy a ticket – no attendant, no machine, no instructions. Just a closed gate that required a ticket for entry.

There was, at least, a vending machine for tea and coffee. Jane is British and hadn’t had tea in days, so she desperately fed it a few coins, only to have the machine spit hot coffee into a paper cup that promptly dumped itself into the machine as she tried to maneuver it out of the jagged chasm from which it was presented to her. I’m amazed she had the strength to go on after that.

Someone who spoke English told us that a nearby tobacco store sold vaporetto tickets, so we went there to check it out. But they were closed, very closed, and not just a little “away for lunch, be right back” situation – they were closed until 3:00 in the afternoon. Yup, this little smoke shop seemed to be closed for most of the day. We walked the whole length of our island, checking out other vaporetto stops and gathering information, only to conclude that from Giudecca one can only buy tickets at tobacco shops, and somehow all of them are closed during the daytime. There was absolutely no way to take the only means of public transit off of the island for three solid hours unless you’d bought a ticket in advance. This would never fly in America. Not in the UK. Definitely not in Germany, or really anyplace else I’d visited so far, other than maybe Spain. But this was Italy, and the system was unapologetically ridiculous.

But we had a good afternoon, if a belated one. We took the vaporetto to Murano, one of the outlying islands Jane hadn’t visited on her last visit to Venice. It’s actually a closely packed series of islands, but much of it is residential. There’s one island that people tend to explore, and it’s known as a hub for glassblowing. There are lots of cool little shops selling the fanciest, classiest glass artwork, all smooth curves and brilliant colors, between which are interspersed the usual cafes and pizzarias and gelaterias of Italy. We sipped drinks at a table on the sidewalk and watch boats and tourists pass slowly by, a row of groomsmen take pictures on a bridge, happy children and busy shop owners going about their days. Of course we had ice cream. On a whim Jane stepped through door in a nondescript brick wall, which entered into one of the most beautiful non-cathedral churches I’d ever seen, San Pietro Martire. Venetian churchgoers prayed softly in pews and beside statues while we quietly awed at the vast, arching ceiling, ornamented in gold, and the walls housing enormous original Renaissance paintings. And there was barely a sign on the door. Italy!

Later we took the vaporetto to the main island and explored the San Marco area, effectively Venice’s city center. The Piazza San Marco, St. Mark’s Square, is the vast, beautiful main square, filled with people at any time of day or night, walled in by huge, sprawling buildings bearing hundreds of tall columns and arches. The square is big enough that two fancy outdoor restaurants with full, live, amplified jazz bands could exist simultaneously at opposite ends without occupying the same sonic territory.

Everything in Venice is picturesque. Something about the lack of streets, the abundance of canals and bridges, and the way everything is old and kind of crumbling and packed together but still colorful and proudly unique, lends itself to a rich aesthetic unity. Anyone could be a great travel photographer in Venice, I think. I didn’t have the chance, as I’d left my phone charger in Spain and hadn’t gotten a new one, but I borrowed Jane’s for the purpose of this post, and you’ll see she did a fine job. Instead of finding broad panoramic views, you weasel around little alleyways until you emerge into a wider square or a cool street or a bridge with a long view down the canal – always something new, presented as little vignettes. That’s how we spent our late evening, after passing the fanciest designer-fashion shopping area, passing quirky little Venetian mask shops and other oddities, ending up quickly in a quieter part of town, where streetlights cast warm halos over every little scene.

An accordion busker was playing “What A Wonderful World” in the peaceful silence, to a plaza all empty but for his song and a couple couples. It was a perfect scene in a city full of perfect little scenes. Jane tipped him gratefully.

Spain with Jane

My transit from Morocco to Valencia was a blur. Sandwiched between a couple weeks of travel with old pals and a couple weeks of travel with the cool new Scottish girlfriend, this little gap of time didn’t make a deep impression on me.

From the ferry docks at Tarifa, I took a shuttle to Algeciras, another port down just down the coast from Gibraltar. I got a decent haircut in a shopping mall from a woman who spoke no English, took a Blablacar to Granada, took a nap because I didn’t feel great, ate a big plate of patatas bravas, busked a bit, and spent the night in a hostel. In the morning I took another Blablacar to Valencia. The drivers were nice and the rides were smooth, but my tummy was a bit off – no appetite, low energy, mild fever chills. I spent the night in Valencia just resting (and writing this blog post, just to show you how far behind I’ve gotten in my blogging), hoping my head and stomach would feel better soon. It was like my body had been carrying on solely from the residual energy of my friends, and once I was on my own again, the exhaustion caught up to me in a rush. But all I really had to do was ride in cars and take care of myself, so the timing could have been much worse.

By now you’ve gathered that I’m content to keep my budget low. I had raised the leisure bar a bit while traveling with Andrew, Madison, and Drew, since reliable lodgings and good foods count for more when you’re sharing them with friends. For the new phase of the trip I was staying on that level – low budget, but not hobo budget. Jane had planned out a rough itinerary, booking impressively cheap hotels and AirBnBs ahead of time, while I booked the inexpensive flight we would take from Barcelona to Northeast Italy after a few days in Spain. While I was in Morocco, she was in Ibiza with friends, the first phase of her first holiday in a year. Now she was ready to recover from her exhausting party holiday, so it was all the more meaningful that she was willing to backpack and ride trains with me for two weeks. She’s done the whole backpack/hostel thing in Europe already, and she really doesn’t have to pinch pence, so for her to rough it in deference to my budget shows that she really likes me a lot.

 

Jane Armour took this picture

We had a very happy reunion in front of our goofy little Valencian hotel. She was worn out and I was feeling sick, so we didn’t push ourselves too hard to explore Valencia. When I felt up to it, I showed Jane the main attractions downtown, and in the evening we hung out in Ruzafa, the up-and-coming cool neighborhood south of the city center, and had some really nice tapas and drinks before my aching tummy sent us home for an early night. The next day we ended up in the same area and got some more snacks (dried mango and kiwi from a big food market, sangria and tapas in Ruzafa) before meeting our Blablacar driver to go to Barcelona.

 

Barcelona is one of Jane’s favorite places in the whole world. With its unique mix of Mediterranean leisure and multicultural excitement, old city and modern revival, the city is full of surprises. Every winding alley leads to something cool. When I was here with Andrew, Drew, and Madison, we were just getting into the swing of our trip and didn’t quite get the best out of Barcelona. But now it was Jane’s turn to play tour guide.

I’d already seen a lot of the major sites, so we were able to skip some of the essential tourist stuff this time and just have fun. Sometimes I feel like my summaries of Spain are just “sangria and tapas” over and over, so I won’t go into the culinary details, but coming back to the city with a cool girl lent a new warmth and thrill to the lifestyle. But I was still feeling sick – nothing dramatic, just regular bouts of discomfort and frustration – so we were never able to stay out for too long or get too comfortable. So while Barcelona has endeared it to me, I still feel like my best visit to the city is yet to come.

In my last post on Barcelona I wrote about the amazing cathedral we visited, La Sagrada Familia, a modern architectural model. This time we visited the old Gothic cathedral, The Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, another place that’s very special to Jane. It’s been thoroughly eclipsed in fame by La Sagrada Familia, and as a result, it’s remarkably free of crowds. It’s tucked away in a densely built part of the old city. There’s still a plaza out front like you’d expect, but compared to the other one, there’s just not a lot to see from the outside. But you should go in anyway.

On the inside it’s not breathtaking in the usual way, but special in its own. There’s a dark chapel that reminded me of the one at Montserrat, with glittering statues and black woodwork and so many candles, shrouded in silence. But even better is the atrium just outside, walled in but open to the sky, where trees grow and garden greenery enshrouds plaques and statues, and ducks splash around in a babbling fountain, marching and quacking like they own the place, which they really seem to. This is a softspoken cathedral, one where you can stand for hours listening to the ducks chatting and watching sunlight dapple through the leaves. It’s a cathedral where you can sense the abiding presence of the divine without it being hammered into you by imposing artistic statements or marred by the weight of the Catholic church’s checkered past.

That evening we took a bus up to Tibidabo, where a small mountaintop amusement park overlooks the city. They have some roller coasters and bumper cars and stuff, and, in typical Spanish fashion, it shares space on the mountaintop with a small cathedral, topped with a humongous statue of Jesus coming in for a hug. We rode the Ferris wheel and got an even better view of the city, its broad tapestry of yellow lights stitching their way into the horizon, ending abruptly at the swallowing, black void of the sea.

 

Jane Armour also took this photo. And the next one.

 

 

 My budget and the late hour kept us from riding all the rides, but we made sure to hop onto the big carousel before we left. I think that’s the biggest smile I’ve seen on Jane’s face to date.

 

It hardly seemed like any time at all before we were in the airport and I was arguing with the Vueling Airlines employees who wanted to make me check my banjo, in its soft case, as baggage, where it would surely be obliterated, even though the airline who sold me the tickets had a policy allowing instruments like mine to stay in the cabin. It was very tense, and mild language barriers didn’t help, but we got through it, and soon Jane and I were flying over the glittering Mediterranean to Italy.

Marrakesh, North Africa

We left Essaouira on a sunny afternoon – after leaving the Mediterranean coast, I don’t think we saw a single cloud in Morocco – and embarked on the three-hour drive to Marrakesh. On the outskirts of the town, where the buildings thinned out but people were still everywhere, we saw a young Moroccan dude standing by the roadside, waving his index finger at oncoming cars. Hitchwiki‘s page on Morocco had prepared me for this – Moroccans hitchhike using their index finger instead of their thumbs. We made the decision in seconds, and Andrew pulled over to pick the hitchhiker up.

His name was Faical. He was a college-age dude from Marrakesh who spoke passable enough English to explain that he had casually hitched to Essaouira for the weekend and was heading back home. We happily took him in, and for the next three hours we had a friendly Moroccan to make conversation with. Faical was as curious about us as we were about him, but the language barrier made progress slow, sometimes painstaking. At times he would seem to understand us perfectly, responding coherently and thoughtfully, but then we’d say something to his utter bewilderment, or he would say something in clear yet nonsensical English, so matter-of-factly that I felt like my grasp of the language must be slipping. But we were all having fun.

We dropped Faical off at his neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Marrakesh, where instead of having suburbs or farmland around it, the city just tapers off into barren desert. This was our first trek away from the ocean, and indeed, Marrakesh seems to make no sense. Apparently a river feeds it, but we never saw the thing, so it just felt totally absurd that such a dense, sprawling city could exist in such a miserably hot place. It was late afternoon when we started nearing the city center, and the heat was sweltering.

We had been warned about Marrakesh. Just as Tangiers was a place to take care, where naive tourists were seen as easy pickings for all kinds of shady entrepreneurs, Casablanca and Marrakesh were popular with tourists and densely packed, notorious for petty crime and bad deals. Marcus, who had lived in Rabat and traveled all around Morocco about seven years ago, had said it was annoying but not particularly unsafe, but I’d also heard my mom’s review of the country – she and my dad traveled in Morocco in the seventies and had to cut their trip short because the begging and hassling were so exhausting to them. And Marrakesh that phenomenon’s infamous epicenter.

As in Essaouira, we had used our AirBnB app to book rooms in cross-promoting hostels, and as in Essaouira, we realized only when all promising roads led to dead ends that our hostel was in the medina and we would have to walk. This time it wasn’t dramatically walled in, but everything was pedestrian only. Andrew was a hero to us all, valiantly maneuvering the Kangoo through frustratingly pedestrian-only roads and roundabouts, but to no avail. Eventually a Moroccan dude on a bike pulled up to us and asked if we needed help. We explained that we were looking for someplace to park so we could walk into the city center. He told us to follow him and immediately pedalled off in the other direction.

Andrew sprang to life. Imagine the theme from Diddy Kong Racing playing as Andrew gunned the engine after this blazing fast cyclist, always disappearing around a corner as we swerved around cars and carts and hapless pedestrians in an exhilarating and utterly pointless display of Andrew’s stunning reflexes, honed by thousands of hours of slack-jawed video gaming as if his whole adolescence was a training ground for this exact moment. Maybe it was. It was really quite impressive how Andrew managed to keep our guide in his sights without killing anyone or destroying any property, even as one block turned into two and we realized this guy was taking us halfway across the city at this breakneck pace. We all took turns trying to persuade Andrew to slow down so as not to cause an international incident, but he could not be dissuaded. Someday he’ll have told every grandchild he knows about the time when he lived out one of those “chase the NPC” video game missions in real life and aced it on his first try. “What were video games?” the cyborg grandchildren will telepath to him. He will smile condescendingly.

It was a bit of a buzzkill when, upon finally pulling into a parking area, our guide demanded money, then frowned at what we gave him and demanded more. If he wanted us to feel indebted to him, he should have done the negotiating beforehand rather than masquerading as a friendly passerby. Maybe that was some super American/western thinking on our part, or maybe we were just standing our ground, but we didn’t like feeling swindled.

Upon exiting the car we immediately felt sweaty and parched; the heat in Marrakesh was on another level entirely from Spain and the Moroccan coast. We followed our maps toward the hostel and found ourselves crossing the big central square, Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was like something out of a story. The square itself was vast and packed with people; you could never see far in front of you through the crowd. So you would slip through in your general direction of travel until something distracted you.

There were a lot of the usual Moroccan diversions we’d seen elsewhere – juice bars, restaurants with pushy hosts, vendors of crafts of all types – and a whole menagerie of spectacles we had not yet seen. There was music everywhere, from Berber stuff like we’d heard in Essaouira to all sorts of African drumlines to snake charmers playing their reedy flutes. Entrepreneurs showed off their chained monkeys for tourists; I felt a bit guilty even acknowledging them, knowing that the only reason I hadn’t seen something like this before was that my culture has made up its mind that that stuff is unethical (with the exception of circuses). The big takeaway was that Marrakesh isn’t just the big Moroccan city. We’d seen those. This was something else. Marrakesh is a North African capital, a cultural hub, a place where everything interesting or marketable from the whole region comes together to shake its feathers for the tourists. That’s why, even though Marrakesh is hot and loud and intense and a little more dangerous, I still remember it fondly. A traveller really gets a lot of spectacle for their buck. The best of North Africa is there on full, raucous display.

We were almost through the thick of the crowd when we thought we saw a pair of preteen boys fistfighting with a crowd around them. We didn’t stay to watch, but we all exchanged incredulous looks. Jemma el-Fnaa was another world.

We turned onto a busy market street, then onto a slightly less busy market street, then into a deserted alley, where our hostel was supposed to be. We had somehow found two conflicting names and part of an address, but none of it was helpful, as only half the doors on the alley had numbers or words at all, and none of them had the number or name we were looking for. We doubled back, then tripled back, growing more and more concerned, splitting up into pairs and quadrupling back. But eventually someone must have knocked on an unmarked door and gotten lucky, because soon our host was ushering us into the hostel.

It was a really cool place. There was an open-air square in the center of the building, with a first-floor lounge, a couple floors of balconies and rooms, and a rooftop terrace with comfy furniture and a little kitchen. The rooms were clean and cheap, at somewhere between 10 and 20 euros per guest. Our host, a young, hip-looking Moroccan named H’Mmad who seemed to live there, explained that he was just starting the enterprise, and he was doing everything he could just get the word out about it. He was a generous host, giving us maps and tea (it’s a Moroccan thing to pour the tea from as high up as possible) and talking with us awhile on the rooftop, which had a serious Agrabah vibe.

Faical had offered to show us around in the evening, so after a quick rest we headed back into the square to meet him. On the way we stopped to take a closer look at the boyfighting ring. It was exactly what we’d feared. I don’t want to assume those two boys boxing without gloves were helpless victims – maybe the whole thing could be viewed as an admirable display of capitalist entrepreneurship – but I know these things can get dark, so I assumed the worst. Madison takes good pictures, and he seized his opportunity, sneaking his camera up surreptitiously for a quick shot of the spectacle. He wasn’t sneaky enough. The older boy who passes the hat and collects the tips (bets?) for the fighting ring was on him in a second, not letting him leave without paying for the picture he took. He reluctantly coughed up a few dirham, and we walked on in the sobering reality that we’d just financially contributed to the boyfighting ring.

We met Faical by the police station on the side of the square. The first place he took us was a little street sandwich place where you can get what amounts to a Moroccan sloppy Joe (delicious) for barely $1 USD. We felt like kings. Without a clear agenda for our exploits, we let Faical take us wherever he thought was cool. We ended up south of the square in the Kasbah area after a longer-than-expected walk – the language barrier with Faical was still difficult – drinking delicious smoothies and listening to Bob Marley while Faical told us about his life as a nursing student. The area was cool. Alcohol isn’t impossible to find in Morocco, but it’s definitely not ubiquitous, and nightlife is very different when alcohol isn’t at the center of it. People still go out to smoke and dance to music and eat, and the clubs we walked by had all that, but the feeling was different. Andrew was a lot more curious about them than the rest of us, and in retrospect I wish I’d overcome my travel fatigue a little more and latched onto his nighttime enthusiasm. We headed back to our hostel before Faical was quite done with his night, thoroughly worn out after exploring both Essaouira and Marrakesh in one day.

Our host cooked us breakfast for a few extra dirham, and it was delicious and copious. We shot the breeze with him and his friend before heading out to meet Faical one last time on our way out of town. He had offered to take us to a hammam, a kind of traditional Moroccan bathhouse. We didn’t really know what to expect, but it was a chance to do a particularly Moroccan thing with a true Moroccan, so we were all in. It took us half the morning to decipher Faical’s cryptic texts and figure out where he was trying to meet us, so we were a little frustrated when we finally met up – we had to drive back to Tangiers that afternoon to get me and Madison back to Spain the next morning.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I’m not sure how what we experienced differs from whatever extravagant hammam tourists without local hitchhiking guides end up at. It was dirt cheap, for one thing, out on the edge of the city, with only the most local dudes inside. Here’s the concept, to the best of my knowledge: Morocco is hot. Bathing in cool water is somehow not the obvious solution to the problem of the heat. Instead, you walk into a tiled, skylit sauna where the floor itself sears your little baby feet, and fill up several buckets with absolutely scalding water. Then you have a seat on the floor and dump that water all over yourself. There are some nice spa elements, as you use little pads to exfoliate your whole body (Faical had said we should wear nothing, but everyone was in their swim shorts, to our chaste Western relief. I guess that’s what he meant). Then we rinsed off and repeated. There was a little soapy stage, and at one point we each let Faical twist us around on the ground and yank on our limbs and give us a brief little back massage with his feet – a vulnerable and strangely squishy experience that made perfect sense in the context of what was going on.

We kept expecting the next step to be the cool-water rinse-down phase, as we were sweating like dogs and not really feeling clean or refreshed at all, but it never came. At the end, you just dry off and put your clothes on. I guess the idea is that, like a rough massage/limb-popping, the relief comes from the fact that when you leave the hammam, you aren’t suffering anymore. The heat outside is the refreshing cool stage. I’m not sure any of us would be enthused to do it again, but it kind of made sense, in a bizarre way.

Madison had to catch a flight out of Madrid, and I was going to meet Jane in Valencia for a couple weeks of romping around Spain and Italy together, so that hammam was really the last hurrah for the two of us. Andrew would take us all back to Tangiers and drop off the Kangoo, and then he and Drew would spend a few more days exploring the country by other means before ferrying back to Europe themselves. We blitzed through a Moroccan grocery store to restock on snacks and water. I wanted a plum, so I tried to buy one, but the cashier wouldn’t ring it up and just gave it back to me. I guess he was giving it to me for free. I took it and he didn’t stop me, so he must have been. But I have no idea why. Ever cryptic with his passable but not fluent English, Faical’s only explanation was, “You’re not in America anymore.”

The drive back to Tangiers was hot and long and tolerable. We listened to music out of the one hissily working speaker and played our usual word games to pass the time. Our AirBnB in Tangier was truly the worst, mixing problems we’d seen in other Moroccan AirBnBs (unreachable host, eventually being let in by some acquaintance of the host, a severe lack of toilet paper) with new problems (no wifi, a terribly moldy bathroom), and our dinner was just the wrong balance of price and quality – high and low, respectively. Andrew, bedraggled from days of driving, went off on his own personal odyssey to find alcohol while we ate. He came back as we were finishing, even more haggard and disappointed than before. No luck. Madison and I said goodbye to Drew and Andrew the next morning and rode the ferry in tired silence, watching Africa disappear into the misty horizon.

 

Essaouira, Morocco’s Best

To get from Rabat to Essaouira by car, you drive parallel to the Atlantic coast for five to six hours – closer to six if you miss a turn bypassing Casablanca (we’d mostly heard it was terrible). The highway north of Casablanca is long and straight and well maintained, but once you’re south of it, the roads get narrower and dustier, and steady car traffic is replaced more and more with weird, cobbled-together vehicles and donkey-driven carts. The road slows down to pass directly through small villages thick with sun-darkened, robed Moroccans carrying wares and supplies between stalls and carts and small shops. For such remote places, there are lots of people out and about in these little bustling community centers. I saw far more donkeys in a couple days than I have in my entire life, shepherds running flocks of sheep along the side of the road like after-school cross-country practice.

In the long, empty spaces between the villages, we’d sometimes see Moroccans so isolated it defied our reasoning – men staring at cows, young children just sitting and staring into the hazy emptiness. What did these people do all day?

We arrived in Essaouira at dusk. Low buildings buzzing with animals and pedestrians rose up to the high stone wall that encircled the medina. Lurching slowly through the swarming streets, we realized we would have to park outside and enter the medina by foot to get to our hostel. We finally dealt with the car and entered a tiny, dark archway that led us into a quiet, dimly lit street. I’ve written about narrow, winding roads before, but the backstreets of Essaouira took it to another level, cramped and mysterious, painted with the night’s shadows.

The proprietor of the hostel greeted us, a scraggly guy whose smile was missing some teeth. He gave us a map and pointed us toward some good food, and expressed some interest in jamming when he saw my banjo. We never got around to that, but an hour later we were having delicious chicken tagine and couscous and drinking mint tea in a quiet restaurant. We explored the medina some more afterwards but didn’t stay out too late. Driving six hours wears you out.

In the morning we went out for breakfast, finding a little cafe that did tea and coffee and crepes and a full Moroccan breakfast, which has lots of bready things and also tea and olives. But the highlight of the morning was a busking street band that came by and played a song for the cafe’s outdoor patrons. There were maybe six of them. The music was driven by a primitive, fretless, picked banjo-like instrument and a one-string bowed instrument, both looking handmade and precarious. Half of the players played percussion, hand drummers and the obvious MVP, a guy playing a little metal disc, mounted on top of his head, with drumsticks. The song was fast and loud, complex polyrhythms supporting call and response vocals and aggressive bowed melodies. We were happy to tip them when they finished, and the one banjo-like thing, communicating mostly with hand gestures, inquired about my instrument  – I had brought the banjo with me, just in case. I pulled it out of its case and we played a few notes back and forth, to the evident delight of him and the whole band.

Madison took this picture

There was a lot to see and do in Essaioura – surely things that were also in Rabat, but more accessible here. Essaioura felt much more relaxed than Rabat or Tangiers. There were tourists, sure, European and even American, but much less of Rabat’s pulsing urban intensity. Everything was walkable and cheap, and the crowds were manageable. We spent most of the day exploring. We found the beach almost by accident, climbing up some ersatz steps into a ragged gap in the city wall, covered in trash and smelling of all kinds of gross, to find a spacious, beautiful shoreline covered in shells and birds. Kids played behind us, throwing rocks at each other, while we waded in the waves, stepping out on an old, eroding stone pier to look back at the walled city behind us.

On the other side of town was the harbor. You’ll smell it before you see it, a powerful stink of fresh fish guts and decomposition. Young laughing boys jumped off a bridge into the water while older men gutted fish in huge piles, all the while being swarmed by hundreds of seagulls at once. I’d never seen so many, and they were frenzied, filling the air with the sounds of their shrieks and beating wings as their bloody beaks dropped bits of fish into the roiling water below. We walked past that spectacle, past grounded ships of all ages and colors and states of decay, to where active fishing vessels floated busily, filling every inch of visible water. Fishmongers monged fish everywhere, and between their stalls fishers trimmed and folded their nets and busied themselves with whatever else fishermen do at midday.

A low wall extended into the ocean at an oblique angle to the shore, dividing sea from harbor, cushioned somehow from the brunt of the violent waves by a long pile of big stone jack-shaped things. Drew and Andrew and Madison climbed out on them while I played banjo, gathering a small audience of Moroccon teens for a couple songs.

Then we headed back to the docks and had a fishy lunch. A restaurant was built into the sea wall, and chefs were cooking metal racks loaded with tiny fish on a smoky outdoor grill and serving them right there. Andrew bartered the owner down to a price of maybe 150 dirham for three of us to have a big salad and three racks of seafood. It was great meal – fresh as could be, shrimp large and small, with some meatier type of fish served whole. We left a huge pile of bones and scales and eyes and shells in our wake.

That day in Essaouira was my favorite part of our Moroccan road trip. In an otherwise thrilling, strange country, Essaouira was especially beautiful, particularly friendly, and not as stifling or overwhelming as some other places. It was like a little oasis. As different as the culture and lifestyles in Morocco may be, in Essaouira, with a couple days of acclimation behind us and the tension of big-city tourist-scamming reduced, we felt free to relax and enjoy the warmth of a beautiful seaside town glowing with life. I’d like to come back and eat all the food again, maybe go out on a boat, definitely jam with those musicians.

Into Morocco; Morning in Rabat

A bus took us from Seville to Tarifa, the port town on Spain’s southernmost tip. The ferry across the strait of Gibraltar was a little less cushy than the ones I took in the UK, but pretty much the same. We dozed and listened to things in our headphones, or did some more last-minute research while we still had European cell service. We had made an online reservation to pick up a rental car in Tangiers and drive it around Morocco, and Andrew was worried. The internet said that the Avis car rental place was in a specific commercial area of Tangiers, but there was no address anywhere, and our phones weren’t able to call Moroccan numbers. Andrew’s exasperation peaked when the customer service person at Avis’ US headquarters confirmed our reservation but was just as perplexed as Andrew about its location – even Avis didn’t know where this Avis was.

Most Moroccans speak French or Arabic, with Berber mixed in in more rural places, but in a busy town like Tangiers, everyone whose profession involves squeezing money out of tourists speaks fluent English, and they’re good at what they do. We had been warned about this. Taxi drivers swarmed us as we searched the docks for an ATM to get some Moroccan Dirham (about 10 Dirham to 1 US dollar), and we struggled to not seem confused or desperate as we desperately asked if any of them knew where the Avis at the Tangier Free Zone was. Drew was giddy with excitement to haggle, so he and Andrew took charge of the negotiations. We really were desperate – it was getting late, and if we didn’t make it there and get our car, we’d have to stay in this crummy town overnight and miss a day of travel.

A taxi driver offered to take us to the car rental for 100 Dirham, half of what the first had offered us. We figured out later that that still wasn’t a great price, but it was worth it to us. We crammed into the old sedan as he lurched and swerved down a wide, thickly congested thoroughfare with chaotic roundabouts and a very loose concept of lanes. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic about half the time, during which every driver, ours included, honked constantly, uselessly, as if the jam could be cleared by pure spite.

Our driver stopped just inside of the commercial area, at a Hotel Ibis. He kept repeating “Ibis” back to us when we said “Avis.” We weren’t convinced that he couldn’t tell the difference. But Drew disappeared up the road, and he came back with good news a minute later. I still have no idea what fluke of physics allowed it, but somehow he’d caught a glimpse of the small Avis sign in the distance on our way in, through intervening trees and buildings. An hour later we were all packed up in our dated Renault Kangoo (not the car we’d reserved), ready to hit the road to Rabat.

Initially anxious to drive in Morocco’s chaos, Andrew’s confidence recovered quickly. Highway driving is about the same wherever you go, and Andrew found a perverse rush in navigating the city streets. It was like a video game, cars swerving and honking as they flowed between lanes like water. At one point we passed a long, high wall with heavily armed soldiers posted in pairs every hundred feet or so. It wasn’t clear what they were guarding, but seeing assault weapons out in the open like that was surreal. A couple times the road crossed through military checkpoints, where armed soldiers stopped cars under the crisp red and green Moroccan flag and slowly waved them through. We held our breath even though we had nothing to hide.

We got into Rabat after dark. We had expected Madison’s phone to be able to roam there, but it wasn’t connecting, so our only tools with which to find our AirBnB host were my offline map app and some old texts. Our host had told us at the last minute that he would be traveling, leaving his friend to meet us, but we weren’t able to make contact with either at first. We parked at a McDonald’s, where Drew and Andrew stayed to use their wifi while Madison and I looked for the apartment. The correct street was dimly lit and empty, buildings numbered only occasionally. Taking our best guess, we entered an unlabeled apartment building behind a kebab restaurant. There were no lights in the spiral stairwell, so we used our phones as flashlights and climbed the five or six floors until we found an apartment with the correct number. No response.

We regrouped at the McDonald’s, messaged the host’s friend again, and finally heard from him. He met us on the street minutes later, a young artist dude with a beard and long dreadlocks. Madison and I actually had found the correct place, but he had been out. Turns out there were buttons to turn on the stairwell lights everywhere, we had just missed them. Now, in the middle of the stairwell, we could see the most rickety, clattering -elevator I’d ever been in. It was a lot of fun – Drew and I rode up with our host and carried all the bags while Madison and Andrew tried to figure out how to park on the streets. They later reported having a long exchange with a parking attendant who spoke no English or Spanish, reaching an impasse until random pedestrians stepped in to translate for both parties. We heaved some big sighs when the Kangoo was parked and we were finally in our flat.

Rabat was pretty cool, and I recommend it. We didn’t have a lot of time to hang around, but we liked what we saw. It had more character and more life than Tangiers, which had felt pretty grim, and it had much less of that city’s tourist predation. Our host recommended us a really nice Middle Eastern restaurant where we had some amazing food (and mint-lime smoothie things) for less than we’d paid for our cheapest meal in Spain. We loved it so much that we came back the next day for lunch.

In the morning we explored the medina, the vast central market within the walled old town. It was a wild mess of sensory overload. Narrow stone aisles wound a sloppy grid through the place, packed to capacity with stalls and modest industry. Some streets hawked nothing but jewelry and clothes, handmade or factory spun or thrift, Eastern and Western. Dozens of others brimmed with food stalls selling exotic fruits, fresh loaves of bread, meats cooking on smoky, delicious grills, and stinking, bleeding piles of fish fresh from the Atlantic. Behind the stalls, tailors and barbers and all kinds of other craftspeople worked their trades in dark rooms. Stray dogs and cats were everywhere, wretched looking, tucked under carts and stalls, curled up in nooks and windows. The whole medina was their bathroom.

On the far side of the medina we ran into our host (technically our host’s friend), who invited us to see his studio. He works in a little artisanal commune on the medina’s outskirts, tucked away in a tiny room packed with his projects, listening to The Doors and focusing on his craft. Sketching with pencil and following with brightly colored paints, he paints and polishes traditional Arabic designs in vivid color and impossibly fine detail on handcrafted wooden pieces, all by hand. We were genuinely impressed by his pieces.They aren’t that expensive to buy, but getting a little wooden chair or mirror frame across the Atlantic multiplies the price many times over.

Beyond the medina and a thin ring of old walls and buildings with Arabic spires and pointed arches lay a vast graveyard, and immediately behind it the Atlantic ocean. It was a broad, strange view – thousands of pale gravestones, hemmed in by short walls, all strewn with garbage and broken glass, and then the beautiful beach, dots of people swimming and sunning in the distance. Standing above it all in the bright sun, with the rush of the medina behind us, it all felt utterly foreign – beach, cemetery and market, familiar concepts, but unspooled before us in ways we’d never seen before. Rabat was not the strangest or most beautiful place we would go in Morocco, but after Tangiers, which we were too busy and defensive to really notice or appreciate, Rabat was our first real taste of this bizarre, exhilarating country. We were sweaty, thirsty, and totally awestruck.

Granada, in the Heart of Spain

Blablacar is a ridesharing community/website/app where drivers can sell passage in their extra carseats – kind of a more casual, long-distance version of Uber, but more conversational. I’d heard about it a few times in other countries where hitchhiking was working so well that I wasn’t interested in an alternative, but in Spain Blablacar really was the best way to get around.

We left Valencia in pairs, Drew and I in one Blablacar and Andrew and Madison in another. We rode with Ramon, a middle-aged Valencian who spoke solid English and was all smiles all the time. He treated us to a little rest-stop Burger King and left us near the center of Granada. Andrew and Madison left Valencia an hour later, but their driver, an off-duty police officer, drove blazingly fast and dropped them off closer, so they arrived at our AirBnB first.

Ramon called the neighborhood we were staying in, Albaicín, the “Gypsy neighborhood.” It was an old part of town, on top of a hill, all steep and twisty roads too narrow for cars. Some streets gave a broad, beautiful view of the white, sunlit city and the plains beyond. Others were tight and claustrophobic, opening into festive plazas where restaurants’ outdoor seatings spilled into each other cordially.

I don’t know a lot about Spanish history, but I learned some there; Granada has a way of piquing the interest. Over the centuries, Spain’s rulers have included the ancient Iberians, the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes, the Moors, and the Spanish Christian society that launched Christopher Columbus (whose permission was granted in Granada), with little groups like Gypsies thrown in to keep it confusing. The resulting tapestry of cultural remnants feels distinct from anyplace else in Europe. On our first evening there, the main thing we did was get drinks and tapas (in Granada, a round of drinks always comes with free food, to our delight). On the next day we explored. In the city center, past the cathedral, there’s a street market that evokes the colorful chaos of the Moroccan medinas we would see later. Most of wares felt like the kind of stuff I remember from Tex-Mex Tijuana, cheap leather and jewelry and souvenir trinkets, nothing too unique-looking, but it was cool nonetheless.

I broke off from the group for a bit to see if I could do any busking; the streets around the market were studded with performers, something I hadn’t seen yet in Spain – Barcelona and Valencia have some tight restrictions on busking, and I heard enough horror stories about instrument confiscation by police that I didn’t take any chances. But Granada was much more relaxed. I wandered a bit and tried a few spots, then wandered off to try to find a haircut. I was long overdue, and I was really feeling it in the heat. But to my dismay, every barbershop I found on my map was closed for the summer holiday. How the country functions at all is beyond me.

Where Barcelona is Catalan but feels more global, and Valencia reads like a scaled-back version of the same, Granada feels deeply, purely Spanish (in all its aforementioned complexity), less muddled by tourism and the cultural melting down that accompanies it. We had paella and sangria for lunch and explored Alhambra, an old, sprawling fortress/palace/castle complex that’s grown and survived through Roman, Moorish, and Christian use. It’s at the top of a steep hill, and by the time we got up there, we were dusty and pooped. Furthermore, we didn’t feel like paying, and it seemed like another of those things where we would have had to book our entry in advance anyway, so we just explored where we could. We came back down on a road that curved around the back wall of Alhambra, and Andrew and Madison had an idea. There was a path that branched off to the side, up a hill, blocked off by an old wooden door, locked. A wall about the height of the door extended from the door, blocking the path until it swerved uphill. They climbed up this wall to see if it went anywhere. I took a power nap on a thick cement bit that served as a railing but also a bench. After a while, Drew hopped up after them and I went off to take another stab at finding a barber.

Andrew and Madison found me busking near the market later. They had found a back way into a garden area and from there had gotten into part of the Alhambra, a part that you’d have to pay for normally, without getting caught. Drew never found them, but we managed to all find each other again by evening.

We had dinner in several rounds, having drinks and tapas various different plazas around Albaicín. At our third stop, a flamenco band was busking for the crowd. There were two main singer/dancers, clapping and stamping and whirling as flamenco dancers do, all powerful, aggressive movements and fierce looks. Behind them I only remember guitar and cajon and 3/4 timed handclaps, and spontaneous shouts, but there were some other instruments too. The guitar player wore a ratty suit and a scruffy beard, and a woman with blonde dreadlocks was singing in a wailing, feral cry, as intense and intimidating as the faces and steps of the dancers. We were enthralled. I could see why I hadn’t made a lot of money busking there – they were getting free shows like this every night. We all wanted to tell them how impressed we were, but we were too scared. Their performance was so intense, so confrontational, it was hard to see them as anything but.

The next day we took another Blablacar to Seville,all together. Our driver was a young guy in a Superman shirt who loved American movies. We were all laughing with bewildered wonderment when he showed us his favorite road trip soundtrack, a compilation CD of American TV show theme songs. We stayed in the AirBnB flat of an Englishman who, as he was giving us our keys, told us that his wife had just given birth in the last few hours, and he had to go rush back to the hospital. What a guy. We had a nice Spanish dinner, and then Drew wandered a bit while I busked in the restaurant area and Andrew and Madison went to see a football game, Seville against Barcelona. Seeing a good European football match was a box Madison had been determined to check off.

Seville seemed neat, but it fell victim to an awkward spot in our timing. Granada had given us the main thing we’d missed in Barcelona and Valencia, with all their big beach city thrills – a feeling of being immersed in another culture. Really, they’re great, and I was excited to swing through them again with Jane later in the month, but in many ways they feel more generally Mediterranean than Spanish. Granada is unmistakably Spanish, and it would leave a strong impression on anyone. Seville, sandwiched between that experienced and our tour of Morocco, was just a pleasant little placeholder. I couldn’t even find a barber, so I’ll let someone else make a case for it. Go to Granada!

Madison took this picture. That’s Alhambra.