Semana Santa

Easter in Spain is intense.  First of all, it's Easter Week.  Semana Santa.  As I recall, I was completely in the dark about this.  I just had some free time and it was cheaper to go to Spain and into Morocco than it was to go to Malaysia.  I didn't see much in Malaga.  But when I got to Tarifa I was shocked.  I'm glad I didn't know what to expect.

I wandered into the old part of Tarifa.  Through an ancient arched gate/fortress wall.  I had an obligatory coffee at a tiny cafe in a corner of a pedestrian only cobble stone street.  Not pedestrian only by virtue of the law, but simply by virtue of the paths being mostly only about 8 feet wide in most places, and with tight corners.

Due to the nature of such paths, you can't see more than 20 feet in front of you, and so there is a surprise around every corner.  I came around one such corner and the road opened up into a plaza in front of an old church.  Plants/weeds were growing out of crevices in this ancient building.  And people were milling around in their Sunday best, though I'm certain it was a Monday.

And then the horns.  As if ringing in the second coming.  And singing.  Quite monotone.  And hoods.

There was a marching band, and many people in what I assumed to be KKK costumes.  Cloaks and pointy hats covering all but their eyes, and that eerie, eerie music, and giant candles.  And then people carrying massive statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary.  It was all too much.  I was certain that I had wandered into a cult.  I looked around and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  None were as terror stricken as I.  It was a few days before I found out what was going on.

As I'm writing this, I remember that this must have occurred on my return from Morocco.  So I see this terrifying exhibit in Tarifa and then head to Sevilla the next day.  I was just reading up on Semana Santa and found that Holy Week is at its prime in Sevilla.

My hostel was in Carmona, I think just shy of an hour from Sevilla, so I headed there.  Quite a nice little place.  And thankfully my face had recovered from the burns enough to not strike fear into passers-by.  Carmona is probably smaller than Tarifa.  Medieval town most likely.  Everyone in town turns out for the Semana Santa processions.  At some point it was explained to me as simply a procession to remember the last days of Christ.  Less terrifying now.  Not a cult...well, not completely anyway...

This was certainly a town event.  The girls are in short skirts and the boys in suits.  The children in their communion best.  They carry around these balls of wax, that they've collected from Semana Santas past.  As the Nazarenos (the hooded ones, I just read this) pass by with their giant candles, the kids run up to them with their wax balls and catch the drippings.  Really took the edge off the fear I got when seeing all those hoods.  In Carmona the procession goes around the entire town.  They tote the giant statues of the Virgin and Christ all around with them.  The rest of the year the statues are on display in the church.

There was an incredibly tall German girl staying in the hostel and we went to a cafe to find some food.  There was only one or two in town.  Mostly they served sandwiches.  She managed to order something called Huevas.  We assumed it was just a misspelling of Huevos.  Oh no.  What she received was something that looked like a sausage.  An incredibly veiny grey sausage.  It was filled with grainy something.  And then I realized, it was fish eggs.   Fish egg sausage.  Oh god.  It looked terrible.  Something else I'll have to dig up a picture of.  She loved it!  Ugh, I'm sick thinking about it.

Back to topic.  In Seville I imagine there are several parades, or maybe just one that walks around all day.  I caught them in a few alleys, they don't stop, they just barrel right through.  Eventually you get used to the sight and it becomes quite beautiful.

Burning in Tarifa

At UCL in Belgium, the students get 2 weeks off for Easter Break.  Catholics.  So I did my Catholic duty and took off to Spain for Easter Week.  I think I ended up spending about a week in Spain, a week in Morocco and a couple days in Portugal.

What a trip.  I flew into Malaga.  It wasn't very nice weather, I wandered for quite a bit before finding the hostel.  Picasso hostel I think.  This hostel is where I met my longest relationship, the Cafetiera.  I learned how to make coffee with this shiny robot femme fatale.  Always perfect.  Met some aussie hippies.  The girl was born on Bob Marley's death day and felt like she was somehow attached to him.  I went to bed.  Next day I went to the beach with this Polish guy.  It was a grey day, probably only about 60 degrees.  But we went, in our bathing suits and laid on the beach.  Perhaps to prove the cloud/sunray thing?  Well, that wasn't the intention, but I did.  I got tired and bored, but he didn't want to leave, and I didn't know how to get back so I stayed.  The next morning, I was red from head to know.  Most likely 3rd degree burns.  On a sunday.  I walked to the pharmacy around the corner about every 30 minutes to hope it was open.  When it finally opened I got some aloe.  Nothing helped.  People were afraid.  I was glowing.  They wanted me to go the hospital.  There would be none of that.  I was going to Morocco goddamn it.

There were two girls staying in my room that left that morning.  They managed to forget a french book and a white gauzy shirt from J. Crew.  That white gauzy shirt saved my life, if not only my vacation.

I left Malaga for Tarifa.  As I remember, Tarifa is the southern most place to take a ferry over to Morocco.  So I took a bus from Malage to Tarifa.  I had a small MP3 player with me that held about 20 songs.  I got tired of some them pretty quick.

Tarifa is a small kite surfing town.  So the shops that exist, exist to please the kite surfers.  The wind is outrageous.  Chicago has nothing on this place.  I was literally afraid for my life walking early in the morning.  "American tourist dies after wind throws her through kite surfing store"

There is an old town and a...regular town.  The regular town looks older than old town.  Probably only because it has very little life.  In true Becka form, if I enter a town that practices Siesta, I will arrive in the dead middle of it.  The hotel will be closed, the sandwich shop will be closed.  And so when I entered Tarifa's "regular town" I thought it was a ghost town.  Eventually it came alive, as well as it can, I checked in and went for a walk.  I survived the wind.

Meanwhile, by this time, my face is starting to...monstrify.  I tried to take a photo.  I'll look for it later.  I was bright red.  Unnaturally so.  And it was starting to scab in places, and even peel.  By the second day it was fully peeling.  I ran into some people at the grocery store that I met in Malaga.  They were concerned... and afraid.

I tried not to think about it, or I would have died of embarrassment.  I remember trying to control the peeling in the train from Tangiers to Marrakech.  Monster.

..on that subject..

The last two posts mentioned urination, so let's continue in that vein....ugh, pun recognized but not intended.

There was a small festival in the small town of LLN.  A couple of friends had an apartment close to the center.  Let me tell you, it took 20 minutes to walk from one of town to the other.  Yet that was too far.  Goldfish syndrome.  Too far to walk to pee.  So we used their apartment.  And we found a piece of paper and wrote "Urination Station" on it and taped it to the door.

While travelling through Ukraine by bus, we would stop at bus stations that seem to have been out of use for years.  But they were still used as the meeting place, and still they stopped for 10 minutes to allow restroom breaks.  The "restroom" at one of these stops was a small concrete box, about 10x15 ft.  Inside on one end was a concrete divider about 4 ft deep, for "stalls", no doors of course.  There was a massive pit shared by these "stalls".  The pit was just shy of the walls, so it must have been about 6 feet wide.  This was the toilet.  Naturally, this strikes fear in the hearts of anyone, as one wrong move and you are inside the pit, bathing in raw sewage.  As such, many had taken the opportunity to simply defecate in the room itself.  Several piles of feces, like so many decorative lamps scattered through the room.

- some words on Belgium, or at least parts therein

In 2006 I was studying, retract, "studying" at the Universite Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.  The school came about when there was some disagreement between the Catholics and the Protestants at the University in Leuven.  Leuven is in Flanders, which is the Dutch northern part of Belgium.  They tend to be on the Prod side.  The agreement ended with the Catholics getting the boot.  And so in '69 they acquired some farm land in Wallonia (the French side).  A town was built in the valley.  There is a 2-3 level parking garage which the town is built on top of.  One escalator comes up on one end in front of the grocery store and inside the small mall area.  The other comes up in front of the movie theatre on the other end.  Who's idea this was, and how the hell it got approved, I'll never know, but it works.  The train pulls up just next to the town.  Due to the instability of such a design, the town is by necessity cobble stone.  You can't go a day without seeing at least one cast in this small town, most likely the summation of beer and cobble stone.  Cars are only allowed to drive in the town during a one hour period in the morning to make deliveries.  There are few trees.  Dogs defecate on the street.  A lot.  But not as much as the student population pukes.  The students seem to party Sunday through Wednesday.  They go home on Thursday to get food and clean clothes and then come back to party.  No one goes to class.  Only foreigners.  Instead of one day for studying before exams, they get two weeks.  During that time, they stay up days on end reading the books they haven't touched since classes started.

A few words on the parties.  Each department has a "Cirque".  This is like a co-ed fraternity.  They have silly hats and lab coats.  The hats are covered in various pins and the labcoats are decorated with things relating to their department most likely.  From what I remember, each Cirque had a party a certain night of the week.  And they all had their own place to have these parties.  Small concrete rooms usually.  One large place, Casa, was manned by a Cirque each Thursday.  They rotated.  If there were bathrooms here...or anywhere in town besides my apartment, I didn't see them.  And they certainly weren't used.  If you were dancing at a party and needed to vomit, just do it there.  Pee?  Why bother moving when you can easily just pull it out right there!  Outside?  Who needs a tree, just squat in the road!  The clothes you wore to Casa you never wore again, except maybe another Cirque.  They were completely unusable for any other function after one hour in these places.

I went to one Cirque and found it necessary to urinate.  I am not Belgian.  So a friend and I took to the street nearby and parked it amid some bushes.  After taking care to hide our bums, we exited to find 3 Belgian girls dropping trow right in the middle of the street, in a line, on a hill.  By the time we realized what was happening it was too late and we were dashing up the hill trying to avoid the yellow streams.

From Vientiane to Vang Vieng

Shel and I took a bus from Vientiane, Lao to Vang Vieng.  We spent the morning before taking in an amazing Buddha garden.  As I recall, an eccentric man had commissioned artists to make statues portraying Buddha in any manner they saw fit.  The stranger the better it seemed.  We were the only ones there for most of the time and when we decided to leave we stopped at a noodle stand just outside.  For as bored as I got of noodle bowls, there are several stories from our trip concerning them.  In this particular noodle bowl I found a tiny purple octopus tentacle.  Quite beautiful, but I'm not interested in eating something with the consistency of microwaved shoe leather, and so passed it to Shel.

And so we got on our bus to Vang Vieng.  With some hesitation I'm sure.  Vang Vieng is a fraternity paradise.  I can get to that later.  My intention here is to tell about the trip there.

There are plenty of new looking tour buses in use in Lao, but I think we were on one of the more common broken looking buses you would expect.  I seem to remember it being white with some green stripe.  Metal racks on the top.  No aircon.  Oddly, I think we may have been the only Farang (foreigners) on this bus.

We drove through Vientiane, a rather dull and dreary city.  Almost modern, but just not quite.  And buildings turned to mountains and street lights to trees.  Shel nods off at some point, as do I.  And I wake just in time, to glance out the window, and see that roughly half the road has fallen off down the mountain.  Right in a curve.  The entirety of our lane for about 20 feet had just fallen down the mountain.  And the bus driver just swerves around it and continues on.  Thankfully we didn't meet anyone in the turn.  As I had just woken up, I thought perhaps I imagined it.  But was lucky enough to take the same road back a few weeks later and confirm it hadn't been repaired, much less marked.  I didn't tell Shel till after we arrived if I remember correctly.

We stopped in a village of sorts for lunch.  A sandwich stand and a buffet.  Most went for the sandwich stand.  I went for the buffet.  Probably not the safest choice, but I survived, and certainly enjoyed it more than a sandwich.  After eating, I stepped out back to use their squat.  When I exited, a small boy came up and asked for money, usage tax and whatnot.  I told him that I'd just eaten in the restaurant.  It's not as if he understood.  And if he did, who's to say that that allows usage of the toilet facilities?  He realized I wasn't going to pay and set about killing a chicken for the evening rush I'm sure was coming on.  (I'm just remembering that this occurred on the trip from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang when we took a small mini van of sorts.  But considering I may never talk about that, and most likely there is little to tell, I'll leave this here.)

And then, A flat.  Thankfully there is a spare, and within the hour we're back on the road again.  Not before peeing in the grass and taking hitchhiking pictures.

It starts to get dark and we're trudging along.  Until of course the bus becomes trudged out.  Another flat.  It's dark now and we've already used the spare.  We're quite close to the town, so people start calling their friends (yes they live in bamboo huts, but no one is without cellphones these days).  We wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Eventually either the bus gets going or they send another one, or we hitch hike.  I can't remember exactly, but we arrive at the bus station.  The mulberry farm hostel was meant to be 3km down the road.  We can walk that right?  I had my pack inside of a duffel bag.  For some reason I didn't think it was necessary to take it out and put it on.  So I'm trying to carry it down the road.  In the dark.  It's starting to get tiresome.  After probably a kilometer a song tao pulls up and gives us a ride.  He drops us off at the 3km point where the 2km driveway is.  But he doesn't charge us.  Surprised and thrilled and renewed with hope for humanity we walked the 2k down to the hostel.  Where of course they were out of bunks but we got a room for 3 with the most amazing view.  Of course, like everywhere there were mosquito nets, so mine was rendered useless yet again.