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.