World Travels

February 9, 2013

French Gastronomy and Bocuse in Lyon

Lyon is an amazing city for gastronomy, with more than 20 Michelin stars given to its local restaurants. Food experts and lovers alike have even come up with a special term to refer to a traditional Lyonnais restaurant, a ´bouchon.´ I ate at Leon de Lyon, but not being a fan of pork, mustard or foie gras, it was hard to choose a traditional plate. My favourite restaurant was Au 14 Fevrier, a Valentine´s day themed restaurant where even the bread and butter are heart shaped.

the French are really good at making cute little coffees

Lyon native Paul Bocuse first became a legend in France with his innovatie nouvelle cuisine, changing traditional French cuisine into something fresher and healthier. He is one of the most awarded and famous chefs in the world, and the Culinary Institute of America named him the Chef of the century. His namesake restaurant, Paul Bocuse, has fully booked reservations each night months in advance. There you can try his famous truffle soup, probably the tastiest but most expensive soup you could ever try. He also established the Paul Bocuse Institute, a prestigious culinary school where 10 other cooperative universities around the world send their most promising chefs to study.

Siggi, 2013 Icelandic candidate, and Þráinn, his coach and 2011 candidate

The Bocuse d’Or is a culinary competition, kind of like the Chef Olympics, held every other year in Lyon since 1987. It gets more and more popular each year, and the competition itself has grown to include chefs from every continent. There is a regional Bocuse comptetition held every opposite year to decide who the qualifying chefs will be (from Europe, Asia, and the Americas)  to compete for the Bocuse d’Or, and specially invited countries participate too (like Australia and Morocco).

sporting a chef hat at Sirha

The competition happens concurrently with the Sirha exhibition, a rendez-vous of all things restaurant related. Local chocolatiers and champagne makers offered free samples at their booths, and patisseries and cheese makers from all over Europe come too. We sampled our way through all the most delicious booths while 24 countries competed for the Bocuse d´or, until finally 2 days later, France was declared the winner.

For the first time ever, Japan won a medal with 3rd place. Iceland placed 8th, which is an incredible feat if you consider the fact that from a country with a population of only 320,000, we have the 8th best chef in the world. In 2011, my friend Þráinn from Iceland placed 7th, so we´re pretty consistent.

January 20, 2013

Beaches, Buzios and a Brazilian Wedding

the beautiful bride and the next brides to be

Click to see the whole Photo Album

I left the Mediterranean for Brazil and thought I was going from Portugal to something similar, but not even the language seemed familiar when I landed in hot and humid South America. The attitude and energy changed even on the plane ride over, the friendly flirtatiousness slowly oozing out of the beautiful Brazilians on board. I landed in Rio´s international airport at 9pm and thought it would be too late to get to Buzios, a beach town 2 hours away, but the first driver I saw when I walked into the arrivals hall was a guy holding a sign with ‘BUZIOS TRANSFER.’ I walked past him and went outside to feel the warm sticky air again, and parked directly infront of me stood the Buzios bus. I figured it was a sign, so I went straight to Buzios.

I didnt have the address where my friends were staying and my phone conveniently didn´t work, so I arrived at 2:30 am with my backpack and wandered around the streets unsure where to go. There were many people still out partying and my friend in Rio had said to find my friends at Pacha nightclub… but Pacha was closed. I decided to go to the busiest bar with the biggest crowd, and spotted my friend Matt almost immediately, sitting at the bar with a glass of whisky and a Skol beer.

We spent 3 days exploring the beaches around Buzios, one day by means of a sand dune buggy, which would have come in really handy the one day we braved a sandstorm to get some beach time. The day we were on Geriba, we couldn´t really lay our sarongs on the ground because they were buried by blowing sand within minutes, and so were we if we tried to lay on them. We sat in beach chairs that blew over if we stood up, and our umbrella functioned more as a wind shelter than as shade.

We returned to Rio to meet a group of travelers all attending Mara and Rich´s wedding, two friends of mine from New York City. Our first night together, we gorged on caipirinhas and meat at the Porcao churrascaria, while torrential downpours flooded the city streets and drenched us to the bone in the 30 seconds we had to spend outside to get in and out of a taxi. It kept raining the following days, with only glimpses of sun phasing in and out during the day, so you had to time yourself really well to benefit from Ipanema or Copacabana´s near empty beaches.

The bachelorette party was held inside Leblon, a shopping mall full of bikini and lingerie stores of which each and every one we visited. The wedding was held at Villa Riso, a regal mansion located in the rain forest near Sao Conrado. The lack of sunshine was well received by all the guys in suits and tuxedos, who would otherwise have never made it without sweating through all their fine clothes. Mara was the most beautiful bride I´d ever seen, including every cheesy wedding magazine and bridal model you could compare her to, and the lights, cameras and action constantly surrounding her confirmed I wasn´t the only one thinking that.

The wedding ceremony was held in the chapel, and the reception followed in a big atrium, and I´ve never imagined so many white flowers and yellow roses possible in one place. The champagne flowed all night, with caiprinhas and whisky as bountiful as the salmon and sushi being served all night. There was an entire room of candies and deserts, served in roses, and every woman received a pair of Havaiana flip flops half way through the party to ensure she stayed on her feet dancing the rest of the night.

When the energy in the room started to slow down just a little bit, we didn´t even get a chance to notice the emptying dance floor because a band of 20 dummers overtook the room with such sound and rhythm that noone could stay sitting down. Everyone rushed back to the dance floor and let the drum vibrations move their hips, and before we knew it, an hour had passed and we were still jumping up and down to their contagious beats without even remembering how tired, full, or drunk we had just been feeling.

January 12, 2013

Portugal, no. 99

I left Morocco and immediately missed the women’s flowing garbs, the way they could flick a finger or shake a shoulder and the layers of colourful cloth would swiftly return to the right places. I missed being surrounded by the sounds of a foreign language, where almost nothing had become familiar enough to consciously process. I missed the intensity of the heat the sun rays gave off during the day, and the number of stars you could see at night in the cold void.

the roof of the monastery

But Portugal welcomed me with other things I had missed: the joy and hype of the holiday season; the cosmopolitan buzz of a busy European city; the familiarity of a language I could almost get away with communicating in; and of course, the free flowing hair of women in all different shapes, sizes and fashions who allowed me to blend in almost anonymously. My touristy goals had changed now too; instead of seeking out markets, deserts, and horses, I wanted museums, castles and restaurants. I had traded mint tea for searches of Porto wine, visits to mosques for catholic churches, and hunting Gnawa music for live Fado.

Torre de Belem, built in the sea

Lisbon is a huge city, larger than I had ever expected, and I still dont have a clear sense of space the city fully occupied. I stayed and visited things only near the centre (Baia Chiado), Parque Eduardo VII, and the notorious Alfama neighbourhood. My last night in Lisbon also deserved a visit to Bairro Alto, the nightlife district, where arriving at 9 pm made you think you were certainly in the wrong place. But it was just the wrong time, and by midnight all the streets were full of dancing people, music and cheap mojitos.

bridge to redemption

My best friend from Iceland came to celebrate New Years with me in Portugal. We rented a car in Lisbon and drove first around to the unwalkable highlights of the city, including Basilica Estrela, Torre de Belem, and the UNESCO world heritage site Mosteiro dos Jeronimos – a Hieronymites Monastery built in an impressive late-Gothic architectural style. We drove south over the ponte 25 de Abril, a bridge which looks a little bit like the Golden Gate bridge taking you from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro, since a Cristo Redentor statue just like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer stares down at you as you near the other side.

a welcomed countryside view

We spent a few days exploring the way south and the Algarve region, stopping in Sines and Sagres, and driving through the  Alentejo & Vicente Coast Natural Park. The journey of driving along the coast and through small farm towns was a highlight on its own, and the names of all the places we stopped I’ve forgotten, but the general impression of peace and tranquility of all those places combined has stayed with me. We also spent a night in Albufeira where the off-season effects were easily noticed by the empty highrise hotels and resort pools, and paid 15 euros for a family sized hotel room with an 8th floor balcony.

Porto on the Duoro

Finally we retraced our steps north through Lisbon and all the way up to Porto, where the climate changed from Mediterranean coastal sun to a grey rainy environment devoid of leaves on their trees. Porto was more charming that way somehow, since I had started to wonder about the reality of a cold December. We ate at the most delicious restaurant, Restaurante Rito on Rua Antero Quental, where we ate bacalhau and all sorts of pork meat with house wines and fresh olives you could never pay enough money to find in Iceland.

New Years eve was incredible, since we stayed only a 100 metres from the Liberty Plaza where all the events were happening. A concert stage blasted happy Portugese and Dancy brazilian music until midnight, when a champagne shower of hundreds of bottles covered the whole crowd and a 10 minute firework show shrouded Porto’s city hall in smoke. The nightlife street was only a couple blocks away from that so we went in and out of bars who don’t charge a cover but it’s a 5 euro ticket to leave if you can’t prove you spent at least 5 euros at the bar. On New Years day we took a cruise up and down the Duoro river, looking longingly at the Porto factories covering the south bank, but did make it to Calem to wine taste.

 

January 8, 2013

In transit through Spain

Teatro Romano in Merida

I wanted to go from Morocco directly to Portugal with a ferry but the schedule around Christmas Day only had ferries to Algeciras. You can see Spain from Tanger, where Africa and Europe are only 15 km away at the closest point, and the ferry is only supposed to take 35 minutes. But, the boat leaves half an hour later than its supposed to, and passengers disembark one by one in Tarifa where lonely backpackers are obviously suspected for drug smuggling. So once all our bags have been ripped apart and our bodies patted down, you take a bus from Tarifa to Algeciras, with a view of Gibraltar rock in front of you and Morocco on your right the whole way. Take in the one hour time change, and the trip from Africa to Europe takes about 4 hours… but I didn’t feel I had gotten very far since Algeciras was full of cafes with Arabic speaking men drinking coffee. Not a Spaniard was in sight, probably because it was Christmas day, but the only two things open were the bus staion and an internet café, so I managed to make it to Seville on the only bus.

Filippo, the magnificent panini maker

I couchsurfed with an Italian in Seville, and his Moroccan friend came over, and they were the two strangers I shared Christmas night with. We drank Portugese beer and made paninis on his mini George Forman grill, so it was a very non-religious, international evening. The next day there were no direct buses to Portugal, so I made my way through Merida where I could change buses for a connection to Lisbon. I had 3 hours in Merida which I expected to pass without much excitement, but I found out Merida was a gorgeous town full of ancient Roman ruins. A Roman bridge, a Teatro Romano and a fort overtaken by African Muslims in the 14th Century provided beautiful grounds to wander around and dream about what this city was like 700 years ago. Since it was December 26th, the streets were full of eager shoppers trying taking advantage of the post-Christmas sales, and I started feeling very grateful that there was no direct bus that morning, or else I would have missed seeing this happy little city I hadn’t known existed.

Merida

After 8 days in Portugal and celebrating New Years eve in Porto, I needed to get to Barcelona. I thought it would be easy to bus it all the way across Spain, but again there were no direct buses so I had to connect in Madrid. I decided to take a day bus from Lisbon to Madrid, and an overnight bus from Madrid to Barcelona, but Jan 6 is another big holiday in Spain so there were no seats left on the bus to Barcelona. I didn’t find this out until I was in Madrid, standing at the bus ticket counter, and the next 12 buses were full so I was forced to enjoy a night and half a day in Madrid, unregretfully.

Kings cake

I stayed in the gay neighbourhood and drank beers with my Parisian friend, and the next day we walked through Puerta del Sol and Plaza Mayor to take in all the festive markets and enjoy traditional cake for the Kings holiday.

Plaza Mayor

In Barcelona, I met up with a British friend I met at Burning Man 3 years ago and hadn’t seen since. He lived in a huge flat with 2 other British guys, a French Guy, and a Spanish girl in the party center of Barcelona, and we joined them for a typical Saturday night out in Las Ramblas. We went to a club called Apollo, and after I walked 5 metres into the bar, I spotted a guy who looked exactly like a friend from Iceland. I thought about how funny it would be if I went up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and excitedly started telling him in Icelandic how happy I was to see him, when I realized it really actually was him, and he was with 6 other Icelandic people. Small world.

December 25, 2012

Morocco: Part II

The police officer never showed up at my hotel, but my taxi driver took me to Tafoukt and I could see right away that it wasn’t a tourists hotel, but a stopover for locals passing through the bus station right beside it. When I signed in, I was the only person in weeks who wrote in roman letters, all the previous guests writing right to left in Arabic. I worried about getting a tourist price for a room, but the quote of 30 dirham (less than 3 euros) seemed about as cheap as it could get. The rooms more closely resembled prison cells than hotel rooms, with cement walls, small barred windows higher than eye level, and a bare bed equipped with something that kind of resembled a pillow.

I didn’t care to spend too much time there, so left my bag and wandered out to the busy street scene. I found a couple of snake charmers who had a hard time controlling their snakes, so after one almost escaped into the audience, I carried on. I was only walking alone for 5 minutes before the hotel guy who checked me in found me, and insisted on escorting me through the town. Everything that I stopped to look at he asked the price and asked me if he could buy it for me. I said no over and over, but was also trying to buy a few things, but he would not let me pay, so in the end he bought me two bangles, 30 minutes of internet café time, a bowl of snails (to eat), a coca cola, and a dinner of tangine. This was two or three times more than the price I paid to stay at his hotel, so I expected a large bill when I checked out, but instead he baught me a coffee and croissant for breakfast, escorted me to the grandtaxis, waited for it to fill, and made sure I paid the right price.

my little slice of paradise

I got kind of stuck in a small city called Abaynou after sunset because the hotel I planned to stay at was fully booked. I wanted to bathe in the natural thermal baths in the town but they too were closed only for Moroccan families. I stood at the entrance of the hotel with the guard wondering outloud what to do, and a jolly French man emerged from a truck parked a few metres away.  He stole the attention of the guard and they started talking about some lost guy he was waiting for and that this guy was on his way, on his way, coming any minute. The truck was pulling a horse trailer and I figured out that the guy was lost on a horse, and the French man was waiting for them to drive them home. I asked the French man if he had more horses, and where he was headed once he found the lost guy. He had a farm with 20 horses about 1 hr away, on the coast, which was also a hotel, and I immediately invited myself to it. He said fine, so long as he helped me find the lost horse and rider, and about 1 hr later they appeared out of the dark and we loaded the sweaty horse into the trailer.

riding with Youssef

We arrived almost 2 hours later at Ranch les 2 Gazelles, and in the total dark I could just hear and smell the horses surrounding the grounds. I was given the key to my room and then dined with the staff and planned my next day. Me and the lost rider would take 2 horses and try to find the right trail he never found, and it would take 5 hours through the mountains, 32km, through the heat of the day. We had the most extraordinary scenery, riding through remote rural villages and passing donkeys loaded with this and that, and enjoyed the satisfying feeling of being in the middle of nowhere, but in the end we found the trail and survived with the help of 2 fresh water wells on the way to keep our horses from exhaustion. The next day we took two crazies to the beach and galloped them over the dunes and through the wake of the waves, and it was almost impossible to leave after that, not only because I had found paradise, but because hitchhiking from this random farm took a few hours.

I got picked up by a younger Frenchman and his Guinean friends, who were probably more uncomfortable with picking me up than I had been to hitchhike. They were more than safe, and started worrying about leaving me in the next town, so wouldn’t let me out of sight until I had found the right bus to my next destination.

the grand mosque at Casablanca

I was going next to Casablanca, where I found a couchsurf host that didn’t seem to be interested in a girlfriend or marriage, and he turned out to be wonderful. He was Moroccan but lived in Paris, smoked like a Parisian, and was incredibly intelligent. We had the most interesting conversations that lasted for hours, days even, about music, economics, poverty, prostitution, existential philosophy, and love. I was supposed to leave after 2 days, but I dragged him with me to my next 3 stops: Rabat, Asilah, and Tanger. It helped that he spoke Arabic, and beside him, people also started to assume I was Moroccan, so my last week of travel in his care seemed mindless after the struggle of backpacking around solo in southern Morocco.

the camel charmer

I made many other friends, through horses and camels and surfing, and in Taghazout I met all of the above. Abrahim and his 3 yr old mare waited with his dad and two camels to sell some tourist a photo or a ride, and in the end I was sitting on his camel wrapped in his head scarf having pictures taken of me by his phone… it’s a strange sensation when you become the tourist attraction and people who live of the tourist dollar refuse your money.

Morocco has been one of the only countries where people have been more concerned about my money than me, not trying to rip me off but actually trying to save me money or pay for me. It was hard to appreciate, since it creates a strange sense of suspicion. But, over and over people proved to be giving their best hospitality without expecting anything in return other than your friendship and a promise to return one day for more hospitality. So now I owe a lot of people a lot of visits, and my favourite Moroccan in Casablanca still has my Berber hat I need to return for.

December 25, 2012

The Holy Land at Christmas

Even if you’re not religious, everyone has heard of the Holy Land, including especially Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Everyone also knows about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, although one or the other may not be recognized by some, and it seems impossible to have an opinion on the matter without being considered anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. The most confusing thing is to have both Israeli and Arabic friends, despite what religion they practice or if they even identify as Jewish or Muslim, since the Holy Land is also filled with Christians and atheists. Then there are also Arabic Jews, like the Yemeni’s who have a huge presence in Israel, and the Christians are divided between Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholics from all over Europe, North America and the Middle East. The land is considered holy by all these groups, but slight differences in beliefs and customs still make some hate eachother with a vengeance I’d never thought religious groups could tolerate.

the Western Wall

the Western Wall

Despite the tensions and daily threat of terrorism, I still felt uneasy with the extreme Israeli security. I was questioned and searched both on my way in and out of Israel with utmost scrutiny, as if I had already been targeted as guilty of something dangerous but neither of us knew what. Traveling by public bus and walking around the pedestrian streets, I crossed paths with visibly armed civilians and 18 year old female soldiers carrying M16’s, yet Palestinians were stopped, searched, and detained if they even had so much as a kitchen knife on their person. I was never sure if people could see I was a tourist, or if they suspected I’d be Israeli or Palestinian, but so much artillery out in the open never made me feel safer. The Israeli police and soldiers, who are everywhere, especially in Palestine, would sometimes have their guns pointed on my from barricaded roof tops where I saw nothing but deep down the barrel of a rifle. It was always unclear who was protecting or who was suspecting.

the fortress of the Tower of David at night

the fortress of the Tower of David at night

Jerusalem is primarily in Israel, although East Jerusalem has a Palestinian town that you can only enter through a checkpoint. A part of touristy old Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, is a shrine that Muslims control, but still you have to enter through an Israeli check point and I couldn’t enter because it was the wrong time of day. I could visit the 19m high West Wall, the only part of the Temple Mount complex left standing and thus considered the most holy place in Judaism.

empty Shuhada street

empty Shuhada street

I was also allowed to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Bethlehem, the burial place of Abraham who both the Jews and Muslims consider a fore-father. The building around it is split in half between a Mosque and a Synagogue, and both entrances are controlled by Israeli’s, similar to the whole city of Hebron which the tomb is located. Its a city of 11,000 Arabs surrounding a fortified settlement of 500 jews protected by 1,600 Israeli soldiers. Still the Israeli’s control where the Palestinians can walk, open shops, worship, or run businesses, and the old town of Hebron and Shuhada street, once bustling market places, are ghost towns today.

a checkpoint in Hebron

a checkpoint in Hebron

Only in Tel Aviv was the city free of checkpoints, but instead there were random searches by security guards to enter any public spaces like bus stations or markets. Besides that, the city felt like a bustling neighbourhood in Manhattan, or a Mediterranean sea-side town filled with artsy cafes and high-fashion shops. It was amazing to me it was the same country as Jerusalem, a city plagued with constant terrorist attacks and an uneasy feeling of racism and religious strife. It was even more hard to believe that Palestine doesn’t exist to many, in a place where there were clear boundaries and lines drawn between them and the others, even as extreme as an 8m wall being built around the West Bank. Its not even possible to enter the Gaza strip, making it seem more of an intentional prison than a part of Israel. But who am I to judge, when much of the world still doesn’t understand, so I certainly couldn’t wrap my head around any of it, although something about it all seems very very wrong.

December 15, 2012

Morocco: Part I

Djemma el Fna by day

I’ve been in Morocco for a week now, but every day it feels like I’m getting further and further away from home. The lone road south to the Sahara has felt like a never ending journey, and knowing that I have to turn right back around and come back north once I get there makes me not really want to get there. I started in Marrakech, a city that I imaged to be something like Cairo or other great Arabic cities, but was pleasantly surprised by how small, inviting and colourful it was.

Adams guiding me through the souks

I spent my first day wandering into town alone and was met by a Senegalese man named Adams. He was tall, thin, and dark as night, but I welcomed the male company to guide me through the maze of souks we ended up hopelessly lost in. He helped me bargain for the right prices and towered over me like a guard from unwanted harassment, and visited two palaces with me also for his first time. We sat on the sidewalk for some fried bacalou and eggplant that Adams argued should have cost 50 euro cents, not 60, but I didn’t care – it was delicious and cheap and the toothless woman who served us provided endless entertainment every time she tried to speak the Berber neither of us could understand.

spices for sale near the medina

The medina, the walled- old town, was a labyrinth of narrow walk ways, sometimes covered, sometimes barely wide enough for a donkey and his carriage to pass, and always required you to move out of the way for motorcycles zooming past. The buildings rose up on each side of you, in shades of pink or beige, totally sealed and shut from outsiders. But once you entered a building, it always opened up to a sunny courtyard, the source of their light and fresh air, proving they weren’t as dark or secret as they seemed.

Taghazout, where i found camels and a horse on the beach

As I traveled south, through Agadir and onto Guelmim, I took grand taxis between towns. The grand taxis aren’t any bigger than the petite taxis, but their routes are longer, a hundred or more kilometers, and they don’t leave unless they have 6 paying passengers – two in the front seat beside the driver, and 4 in the back. It’s always a struggle to strategically plan which seat you take and beside who you sit, since you have to choose if its more comfortable to be squashed against the hard door and have window access or be sandwiched between two people who may be hard or very soft (which usually means too big). I always got suckered into being squashed between the women if there were two, and their many layers of flowing cloth always spilled over me and their chatter across me kept me both comforted and stuck. I once got unlucky and sat beside a man who insisted on pivoting to face me with his arm around me and his stinky breath breathing down my neck asking me incessant questions. After 20 minutes of this I asked the taxi driver to stop and he thought I wanted to get out there and then in the middle of a mountain pass, and I started to explain I just wanted to change seats but the two women already knew what was wrong and had started shifting for me to get sandwiched between them. They held my arm and smiled knowingly, and then yelled at the man and the taxi driver for the rest of 1 hour drive.

Moroccan mint tea, always poured from great heights

In another grand taxi, I thought the woman wanted to take me home with her, but she just wanted me to get out of the car to hold my hands for a moment, muttered some words, nodded her head and bowed many times – Im still not sure what the gesture meant but it was nice. In the last grand taxi I took, the 300km long haul to La Ayoune, I shared the backseat with 3 very large Saharan women, which meant I was only left with half an ass cheek on the seat and could only lean back if I lay on one of their breasts. Thankfully we stopped halfway for a lunch break and I was summoned by one woman to walk down to the beach with her to share her lunch. We ate bread and tangine and oranges, and sat in silence taking in the sight and serenity of the polluted beach around us. She showed me the henna on her ankles and arms, and jingled the bangles on my arm in an approving way. When we returned to the grand taxi, the other woman took turns walking up beside me and just standing close in a protective motherly way, and they also jingled my bangles. One sprayed me with 10 or more sprays of perfume, all over my neck and arms, which may have meant I stank or it was just a normal thing to do after we’d eaten.

All of these run ins would have been so much better understood if I could speak Arabic or Berber, but I still enjoyed the game of experiencing one another without a common language. My Arabic has still increased from 3 words to about 20 words, all of which have some in handy at one point or another for me to need to learn them. The administrative language is French which meant I could always talk with police men, which turned out to be useful for the many road checks we got stopped by. The more comfortable and cheaper bus refused to take me the last 300km to La Ayoune because of the road blocks, since foreigners always warranted unwanted attention by police officers.

the woman I shared lunch with

The last police check was just outside La Ayone, and the police officer asked some basic questions and walked away with my passport (which is always cause for cold sweat). He returned and let me grab the passport, but wouldn’t let go unless I told him what hotel I was staying at. The greasy smile by which he asked me this made me sure it wasn’t part of the routine police check, but I still felt I had to answer him. I couldn’t lie either because I didn’t know the name of any other hotel or if there even was more than a handful of them, so I told him ‘Tafoukt’ (which means sun in Berber) and he said ‘Of course, I should have guessed, since you have no sun in Iceland now’ and winked. (to be continued and pictures added later…)

October 24, 2012

Southern Spain, Sangria and Sunshine

In my search for more summer sun, I took advantage of a return flight voucher from Icelandexpress. I used it in October not only because it was expiring soon, but because there had been rumors of the airline going under. I had a week off school, a “reading” week, so I decided to justify the trip by reading on the beach in Alicante.

a perfect place to read

Alicante’s city center is a stones throw away from the beach. And its  a proper, sandy beach with chairs and umbrellas to rent, right beside the main bus stop. On the other side of Plaza del Mar is the harbour, parked full of yachts and sailboats, one of which was supposed to be my first couchsurfing host place. I had to meet the Spanish sailor at 9pm in the Regatta Club, but instead a strange fireman approached me and asked if I was Katrin. He had replaced the sailor, who was stuck on a boat in Amsterdam, and asked if I would like to join him for dinner and crash at his place. I accepted his dinner offer first.

We had red wine and tapas to our hearts content, eating course after course and I slowly decided he was couchsurfing material. But, this was before I found out he lived in an apartment undergoing construction. This is partly due to my Spanish not being fluent enough (he didn’t speak english) and partly due to me thinking he was joking when he said “my apartment’s kind of a mess, but atleast it has one light and one running water source.” The light was a spot light, and the water hose came out of a hole in the wall where the shower would eventually be built. There were no doors or finished floors, and one huge open space where a window was still missing, but because he lived on the top floor, he had 2 beautiful rooftop balconies. And, most importantly, he had an extra mattress and a pillow which I could get a good nights rest on.

sunset from the top of el Castillo

I spent my couple days in Alicante wandering around the beach and the old City Center, and finally made it up the massive fortress that looms over the city and sea. The Castillo de Santa Barbara is a castle that changed hands between the French, Spanish, Moroccans, and maybe even British, Im not sure, but I don’t know who figured out how to build a castle at the top of a cliff in those days, somehow get overtaken or invaded, and then add on even more castle to the cliff, before the overtakers were overtaken. I could barely get up there without guards or guns pointed at me, but luckily my next couchsurf host had a car and a free evening to catch the sunset from the top with me.

Villa Joiosa

I traveled north with the local tram, an above-ground subway-like transport that can’t quite be regarded as a train. It takes you along the coast all the way to Benidorm, where I was headed, and stopped half way at Villa Joiosa. Its a colourful little walled village, also on the beach, with only sleepy dogs and old ladies to be encountered on the staired and narrow streets.

In Benidorm, I barely saw anyone else but elderly, half-burned British people and a handful of European students. The beach was lined with highrises, and the streets were tourist shops and tapas bars followed by more tourist shops and cheap tapas and wine bars.

Benidorm

The beach, or beaches rather (there are 2 long stretches divided by a peninsula) were beautiful, packed with people. Apparently the hundreds of tourists sunbathing now didnt compare to the thousands normally packed like sardines on every square inch of sand from June – August.

the art palaces

I made it further north and a little away from the coast to Valencia, the second largest ERASMUS University student town in Europe (after Bologne). I couchsurfed at a very international house, with a Brasilian marine biologist, a Spanish architect student, and a Hungarian linguist. We hung out for 3 evenings (I stayed 2 extra nights) despite it being midweek, finding lots of other students to enjoy nights out and cheap wine. They gave me a bici card so I could use the public bicycles to get around (Valencia is so much bigger than I thought), and I rode along the river canal park that surrounds the old city, past the Art Palaces, all the way to the beach a few kilometres away, and even through the old city center, zig sagging through the pedestrian only streets that wind around old churches and cobble-stoned squares.

cats in Tabarca

My last night back in Alicante, I couchsurfed with an architect who lived on the 10th floor of a beachfront apartment, with a 180 degree view through floor to ceiling glass walls. He is also a diver, and had just spent 2 weekends in Tabarca, an island off the coast of Alicante that I took a 1 hour ferry to visit. The island has been overtaken by cats, and all the so called inhabitants leave when summer is over, so it was mostly me, some cats, and the seagulls braving the wind and some strange sort of African dust storm prematurely darkening the day.

Concert in Plaza des Toros in Murcia

My last night in Spain, me and Dani the architect packed his car full of friends and roadtripped to Murcia, where we watched an open-air concert in a bull fighting ring. The headliner was Wilco, an American band, and a ridiculously good rock n roll Spanish sensation I still don’t know what his name was. I kept day dreaming about how days and centuries before, this ring was used for a matador to death dance with bulls, and now we stood there under umbrellas in the dark jumping around  to great music. Imagine trying to predict that kind of future to a Spaniard 300 years ago…

September 22, 2012

New England to Long Island

I basically spent all of May to September in the countryside and highlands of Iceland, depriving myself of temperatures over 20`C, with the exception of a few heatwaves that passed thru. I tried to go to Poland in August to soak up some sun, but Warsaw and Gdansk only offered overcast skies and 16`C. Before the sheep round ups, an event that officially marks the end of summer, and inevitably chasing sheep in the snow, I got away to Boston and New York for a week, and finally got me some heat.

Boston

I’ve been to Boston, but had never really been to Boston before. Stopping over and passing through never really made me stay to visit, but now my one and only college roommate (and best friend) lives there and gives me plenty of good reason to visit. She’s a smarty pants – doing her master’s at Harvard – and all sorts of mature after leaving her St. Marks Place party apartment in the East Village for a 2-storey house with a backyard in the quiet neighbourhood of Somerville. She gave me a tour of Cambridge and the campus, and barely had enough time to sleep between her endless studying and me nagging for her attention. We ate clam chowder and schmoozed her classmates at a Happy Hour that she organized since she was running for a position in student

Ursula & I at Harvard

politics (which she won). We met up with some other Semester at Sea alumni and reminisced about life on the ship and traveling the world together. I also entertained myself by meeting other friends I knew in Massachusetts, going to the beach, and shopping for the things I can’t afford to buy in Iceland.

I rode the train from Boston to Penn Station without sleeping my last night in Mass, and emerged from the underground a few blocks away from Times Square, dazed and confused. I was suffering some serious culture shock – 4 months of open spaces and more horses than people, to a city corner with more cars and lights and faces than I had seen all summer. I had to reprogram myself to function in the chaos, get an orientation of place and direction, and walk on without looking totally lost. The overwhelment was exciting, it was as if I was in New York City for the first time, like a kid in wonderment sensing all the colours, smells and sounds in high definition.

New York city was sunny and humid, stickiest underground where the intricate web of subways and walkways  intermingle below the streets and avenues of yellow cabs and pedestrians. It took some time to become familiar again, but I never felt guilty of sticking out since everyone and everything seems to fit in to the city puzzle somehow. All the peculiar fashion and unintelligible languages I passed made me feel less foreign, and a weekend trip to Long Island was like becoming part of the ‘in’ crowd.

the beach in Montauk

My friends from the city rented a house together in Montauk, spending every weekend there during the summer. A lot of people do this, but after Labour Day weekend, mostly only locals are left, with the beaches and nightclubs all to themselves, with the same warm weather lasting a few more weeks. We indulged in the sunshine by sailing around the hamptons, sitting on the beach, and drinking cocktails poolside. We went to an art gallery to see a photo exhibition and tasted beer from the Montauk  Brewing company. The warm nights we spent barbequeing on the patio and dancing like crazies on the empty dancefloors. It didn’t matter, since we were always a big enough group of people to have our own party, and our expressive (and excessive) dance moves took up a lot of space.

the dancing crew, sailing

Montauk was a special place – a surf town with alternative and creative culture, mixed with an artsy, upper-class eliteness you can’t get quite as friendly with. Its a slow and spread out place, with a beach or harbour always a stones throw away, but enough forests between that deer graze along the road, barely shying at your headlights. You need a car to get around, and a lot of money to eat or do anything there, but I’m so grateful for the friends I had to share this little piece of paradise with me.