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Fez Through the Window

Published September 25, 2009 Inspiration , Lonely Girl Loves , Morocco , Places Closed
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DSCN3272I arrived last night in the swarming, honking, neon-lit mess of life that is Fez.

The excruciatingly haggled taxi I shared with a mother-daughter duo from the bus station to the medina (we were accused of being “cheap like Berbers”—is racism usually an effective bartering technique?) deposited us at the gates to the 1200-year-old medina, what the guidebooks call the entryway back in time, into another world. After eight hours on a rattling first-class bus through plastic-littered landscapes and vast expanses of mountains, forests and fields, it felt like I had been belched into a place where millennia collided. I was swarmed in the frenzied, electric chaos of humanity—and, as always, I loved it.

I grabbed a room in the first cheap hotel I spotted, a simple space not much bigger than the double bed that occupied it. The wooden shutters were thrown open, revealing the light and noise, the smell of strange spices and the hum of motorbikes, the grit and life and incessant sea of people on the throughfare below. It didn’t matter that the threadbare room was only 80 dirhams (about $10) a night; I wanted it for those windows.

I knew it would be noisy (why one should always travel with earplugs), and I’m sure the novelty of the hustle-bustle will wear off, but so far, I’ve loved sitting hunched over my notebook on the lumpy mattress, staring out through the wrought-iron bars at the street—my own private perch, where I can spy like a secret, and take it all in.

I closed the shutters around 11pm last night, with stereos still bumping, engines groaning, dogs barking and cats crying and men shouting intermittenly. The glass of the shutters had been crudely painted over, so some of the street still got in, a thin illumination reminding me where I was. My earplugs only slightly muffled the medina din.

When I woke, I took out the earplugs and just laid, listening to the street as it arose, stretched, came alive. Birds shrieked in a high-pitched panic; a voice boomed from a loud speaker, wailed in prayer. Metal shutters rattled awake and voices called to one another; somewhere, a rooster crowed. I wiggled the warped wood apart; the smells of cooking meat and mint burst through. I sat and stared from my bed at the ancient city, its beaten streets and ashy rooftops, its sand-colored crumble of stone on stone, its endless passing of colored robes.

I had arrived in the heart of it, and was ready to join in.

Morocco: First Impressions

Published September 22, 2009 Culture Shock , Female Travel , Morocco , Places , Safety , Solo 3 Comments
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DSCN3259As I staggered off the Tarifa ferry, through the desserted port gates and into the quiet Tangier morning, I had a thought I’ve had before. It was the same thought I had as I first stared through a taxi window at the hazy Lima streets, when I first stepped out the Bogota airport, when I walked around big bad cities like Caracas and Mexico City. The thought is, “Oh. This is it?”

And I don’t mean it in a disappointed, anti-climatic way. The opposite, in fact. After all the hype, all the warnings and precautions, horror stories and wayward looks, my initial reaction to notorious destinations I’ve encountered is, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. Or so scary or different.”

Okay, I admit the squat toilet I used earlier in a restaurant bathroom was a little different. And I didn’t expect that hooded jellabas would look so curiously like clan robes. But, really—the intense cultural shock I’d been prepping for, again, didn’t hit.

My guidebook had prepared me to be inundated with pushy faux guides as soon as I left the port gates, to be lured into medina shops and held captive till I bought something, to be oogled and followed like a celebrity by sex-starved adolescents because I’m a solo Western female. Guess what? None of these things happened.

DSCN3241What did happen: I left the port gates, took a moment getting my orientation, and found the left luggage office. The clerk and I fumbled with mutally poor Spanish, and I left my backpack secure. I headed uphill, largely ignored by every passerby, and parked it at a cafe along the Grand Socco. I lazed, and have been wandering the Medina and Ville Nouvelle ever since. I plan on getting a coffee at the Beat-beloved Cafe Paris before meeting up with my couchsurfing host (only slightly concerned we won’t actually connect).

So far, the street harassment I so feared is, well, about what it is at home. Maybe less. A few young men have said hello in whatever white-person language they think I might speak; I’ve been the target of one gross kissing sound, and received one offer to be bought coffee. In short, Latin America still wins the prize for harassment, cat-calling and all-around-demeaning (but what kind of prize would that be?).  Attempts in Tangier have thus far proven half-hearted, generally good-natured and easy to brush off.

DSCN3236I’m also surprised by the dress of the women. I wasn’t expecting burkhas or even necesarily hijabs, but I’ve even seen some short sleeves—on the younger women, that is. I’m tromping around town in long sleeves, but I’ve seen many tourists in spaghetti straps and shorts. I have yet to see visible tattoos (does a knock-off Ed Hardy shirt count?), which I’ll take as a que to keep mine covered.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was for half the city to still be shut down for Eid (thus the killing of time in an internet cafe). The attractions I’d starred in my guidebook have all been closed, and I haven’t been able to find any open shops in which to buy better long-sleeve shirts in. I’m hoping for tomorrow.

As I wandered around the Medina’s narrow Medieval “streets” (some aren’t as wide as my arms’ reach), I came around a blind corner and narrowly missed walking dead into a hijab-donning middle-aged women. We paused, made eye contact; we both smiled and laughed, then went on our way. I guess this is the oh-so-frightening Morocco, Muslim, African and not all that different.

BYOB Debauchery: Spanish Botellónes

Published September 20, 2009 Culture Shock , Lonely Girl Loves , Offbeat , Places , Sobriety , Spain , Western Europe Closed
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DSCN3177The roar of voices rose from between the trees, out of the darkness and dirt. Scooters swarmed, freshly broken glass glittered in the dim park lights. Young girls teetered in impossibly high heels and boys stumbled, leaned their faces against the sides of walls as they pissed. And every person clutched a plastic cup.

When Spanairds sigh in disapproving despondency about ¨kids today,¨ they´re talking about botellónes. In a culture of late-night fiestas,  these youth-ridden BYOB binges stand out as particularly debaucherous.

Bottelónes take place in public, on the streets and in the parks; teeangers and early 20-somethings gather to drink, flirt, cause trouble, and leave a mountain of trash in their wake. Increasingly the subject of public controversy, Seville´s bottelónes are known to be especially raucous.

We passed one as we trod through Parque Maria Luisa on Friday during a once-a-year festival of museum open houses and cultural performances. (How Spanish is this?: museums are free to the public from 10pm-3am, and completely full the whole time.) September is festival month in Seville, when residents have returned from August vacations and the oppression of the heat has subsided; it´s also the beginning of botellón season. My couchsurfing hosts and I were walking over to Museo Artes y Costumbres Populares, where we saw a killer flamenco show, and the adjacent Museo Arqueológico, where a classical guitarist´s exaggerated facial expressions were more dramatic than an old guitar-playing friend with Tourettes (RIP, friend).

We passed what I was told was a typically trashy Friday night bottelón. It was like a rave minus the pulsing lights and techno music, like a sideshow minus the cars and firearms. Hundreds of kids filled the open space at the park´s entrance. Teenage girls were dressed to the nines to attire revealing even by Spanish standards, while boys puffed their chests and tried to impress each other, even in curiously effeminate clothing. My hosts spoke of the trash, piss and vomit the parties left in their wake, the shards of glass and tell-tale crushed plastic cups that city workers scurry to clean up the mornings after. (The next day, I passed through the carnage of another botellón, down by the river, and had to say, it was pretty gnarly.)

I smiled to myself as we passed by. I couldn´t help but feel that, if you swapped the heels for combat boots, and blush and blow-drying for heavy eyeliner and multi-colored dreads, it wouldn´t have been too unlike the Rocky Horror Picture Show or Gilman Street of my adolescence. Instead of being out in the open, though, we were relegated to the sketchy corners of the city, to alleyways, public restrooms, the stairwells of parking garages. I wondered if having to hide it—the violent pursuit of oblivion—somehow served to make ours worse, more seedy and powder-laced, more self-destructive and apt to end in institutions and death.

From between the park gates, I spotted a girl hoisted up by two friends, her arms drapped over their shoulders. Her head hung at a sharp angel; her heeled feet scuttled, dragged in the dirt lifelessly. Whether it´s a plague to Spanish culture or kids just being kids, I felt mighty glad not to be a teenager anymore.

The Jugular of Granada´s Street Art

Published September 19, 2009 Offbeat , Places , Spain , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe Closed
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DSCN3131Down a deserted stairwell in a steep tangle of stone streets, I stumbled upon the best street art in Granada.

Literally, I stumbled. The precarious passageway of unleveled rocks made walking an ankle-twisting, sole-bending venture. The vacant lots, abandoned mattresses and wafting bits of urban debris didn´t make the footpath a particularly picturesque one either. But I didn´t care; it was what covered the cement walls and old stone wells that fascinated me. Color-swarmed, vibrant and thoroughly hidden, I´d discovered the best street art in Granada.

This isn´t a difficult feat. The ancient city of intricatly carved Islamic monuments, mammoth cathedrals and labyrinthic streets is, in its modern-day incarnation, also a college town. Chicken-scratch tags and idealistic political statments irreverently adorn any paintable surface; Granada writers have a particular penchant for anarchy symbols, replacing ¨a¨s with the symbol at every opportunity. A crayon box of every imaginable color, the city is swarmed in adolescent scribblings that somehow add to the o ld-world ambiance; they seem to fit.

I decided to take a morning walk through Albaicín to the city´s center. My couchsurfing host, a thin Spanish girl in a black raincoat, had a quiet apartment in the Sierra mountains, a simple tiled space that´s view from the balcony was like a prayer. The building was  just outside the old city wall, a half-crumbled mass that arched down the spine of the steep terrain. Just on the other side was the city´s old Muslim quarter, cascading down the hillside towards the city center. Crumbling buildings mixed in with modest modern architecture, lining the zig-zag of cobbled streets with walls tall enough to block the wind and let in only a bit of the morning sun.

The layout of the streets is utterly random and unintuitive, so I gave myself a couple hours to wander the mile downhill. Small plazas punctuated the skinny streets, most of which were closed off to anything by foot traffic. It was a functioning neighborhood that gave a gentle nod toward the map-clutching, steep-grade-panting tourists that trcikled through: a couple stores sold postcards in addition to fruits and food staples, an internet cafe´s doors were locked for Ramadan. People bustled about their business—old men smoked and the women gathered in an arm-crossed group at a plaza´s market—and us tourists smiled pleasantly at each other in passing.

I maplessly meandered my way to an impressive mirador directly across from the Alhambra, where people posed for photos and looked out over the vast  city view. A slight grumble in my stomach inspired me to move towards the city center. Directionless, I decided to just make my way downhill until I hit a promising-looking street.

DSCN3134The streets I wandered got starker, more litter-filled than people-filled. Abandoned buildings and dirt lots suggested that restoration efforts weren´t the trend in this forgotten corner, perched on a precipice between well-visible, touristed neighborhoods. A steep stone footpath lightning-bolted its way down the hillside; I followed it.

I passed one of the old, gated-up wells that fill the Albaicín neighborhood. This one was covered in slightly different bread of tags, filled with crude characters and comical creatures. Turning a sharp corner, a mural-filled walls of air-brushed portraits and abstract colors stretched out in front of me. A stencil of George Bush with a blood-red clown nose appeared next to a telling tag: Albaicín Crew.

I walked up and down a bit, taking pictures and smiling at the refreshingly creative vibrancy. In one litter-strewn, forgotten footpath, tucked into the secret flesh of the city, I´d found the jugular of Granada´s street art scene.

Kimmo´s Culinary Quest in Madrid

Published September 17, 2009 Food , Lonely Girl Loves , Offbeat , Places , Spain , Western Europe 2 Comments
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Shopping for produce

Shopping for produce

Kimmo sighs a cloud of smoke and looks into his half-full pint glass. ¨I told her one and a half months, I´ll try it. Then,¨ he shrugs and manages a smile ringed with worry lines.

It´s one am, and we´re washing down the 4th night of Doña Antonia´s grand reopening at an endearingly tacky Irish bar in the cobbled heart of Madrid. The red plaid wallpaper and grime-covered Guiness mirrors seem to agree with Kimmo, who looks 10 years younger out of his white-starched chef´s jacket.

Kimmo, Matt and I at one time all worked for the same 5-restaurant company that encompassed, at varying times, 3 SF-Chronicle Top 100 restaurants. That is to say, we´ve all been well-indoctorinated with the Alice-Waters-inspired culinary philospohy of organic, locally sourced ingredients. Ours paths have crossed for one heavy-skied Sunday in Madrid, where Matt, some friends and I feasted on the kick-ass creations of Kimmo´s new menu. It was one of the best meals I´d had in awhile.

But, apparently, Madridanos don´t share our American enthusiasm.

¨Madridanos,¨Matt tells me, ¨aren´t very discerning diners. It´s more about atmosphere than the actual food.¨ Kimmo nods in semi-forlorned agreement.

A recent transplant from the Bay Area culinary scene, Kimmo´s been trying to reconcile his California-cuisine sensibility with Madrid´s affection for over-salted sameness. It´s been 6 months, 3 restaurants, and so far, it hasn´t gone splendidly.

Listening to Kimmo´s qualms and Matt´s frustrations, I begin to realize that culinary values and expectations in California are wildly different than those in Spain.

Matt, an ex-bar-manager turned handle-bar-moustached vagabonder, has been frustrated with Spanish service and quality for the past 7 months. Kimmo, a sweet-faced Scandinavian socialist who´s vowed not to die in either the US or Finland, has been struggling against the low standards and unadventurous expectations of Madrid´s diners and restauranteurs. A chef by trade, he´s been hired as the head chef and sole cook of the newly reopened Doña Antonio near Plaza Santa Ana.

Kimmo´s creative menu includes untraditional dishes like mussels with chorizo and garbanzo beans, a sort of inventiveness valued in the Bay Area. Put the same old things on the menu there, and you can bet on your clintele steadily plummeting. In Madrid, it´s the opposite. For the 4th consecutive night, Kimmos´s watched nervously as potential diners sip on coktails (he insisted on expanding the beer and wine bar to include mojitos and caipirinhas), peruse the menu, look confused, and leave without ordering.

¨When it comes to tapas restaurants, the kind younger Madridanos go to,¨ Matt says, ¨I usually don´t even have to look at the menu. They´re pretty much all the same.¨

The increasingly anxious owner of Doña Antonia wants a more typical menu; in the previous day´s blow-out, Kimmo conceeded to including bravas and croquetas on the menu. ¨She tells me,¨Kimmo says of the owner, ¨ ´You can do them your way.´ But no one in Madrid wants to try lemon aioli. And they haven´t even heard to romesco!¨

Another problem Kimmo´s encountered is that modern Madridanos seem to have no familiarity with the Spanish cuisine he learned in the States. Filet of fish with romesco? No go. Paella without seafood? Won´t fly. Additionally, the organic craze has far from set in. An almost nauseatingly hip trend in the US, the inherent taste superioirty and sustainable sensibility means nothing in Spain. ¨There´s no idea that you might want to spend more for better ingredients. I can´t say, ´The meat is expensive because it´s organic.´ They won´t care; they say, ´Find it for cheaper.´ So I have to try to cook with rubbery arugula, carrots that don´t taste like carrots.¨

Kimmo´s decided to give it 6 weeks. He´ll do what the owner wants: put the typical dishes on the menu and try to make the best of less-than-optimum ingredients. Will he eventually conceede and adapt to the Madrid way of dining, or will he maintain his high standards and continue the seemingly impossible struggle to raise diners´expectations, lower their inhibitions and up the ante of the Madrid tapas scene?

There´s no way to know, not now. But tonight we can kick back in the thickening smoke creeping through the psuedo-pub as the crowd thins and the evening grows damp and heavy, and let it all go. Afterall, tomorrow´s Monday, Kimmo´s one day off.

In Search of Banksy: 30 pounds and 48 hours in London

Published September 16, 2009 Budget , London , Offbeat , Places , Street Art , Subculture , Tips , Western Europe 4 Comments
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DSCN2994There´s nothing like a good ole map-less search for illegal art through the streets of a foreign city to get you off the tourist track.

Call it my guide to ¨spending less and seeing more¨: extend your flight connection from an hour and a half to 48, crash with a family friend in Brixton, and set out on a scavenger´s hunt through one of world´s most expensive cities for illusive works of a notorious street artist. Arm yourself with nothing more than a transit day pass (5.6 pounds), a scribbled scrap of notes from a Banksy locations website, no guidebook or map, and a long-time London resident down for the quest. You´ll trapse through the heart of the city, through 2 ethnic neighborhoods, 2 gentrified hipster havens and an unabashed tourist trap; take 4 tube rides, 3 buses and walk an estimated 5 miles; pop into 2 galleries and 1 museum; sip cappuccinos on a roof-top cafe (2 pounds), munch on Jamaican patties at an Afro-Carribean market (2.5 pounds), and down some killer dal at a Pakinstani restaurant (17 pounds, with hella leftovers). You´ll venture down abandoned tunnels and crumbling back alleys as you tour the city´s sweet, tender underbelly, swollen with bright colors and pealing wheatpaste. And all for less than the Lonely Planet shoestringer budget.

Bristol-native Banksy has become synonymous with street art, his satyrical, subversive large-scale stencils offering poignant and humorous statements on politics, culture, capitalism. While his pieces have popped up in cities around the world (an apparent traveler himself), London is one of the hotbeds. The ephemeral nature of street art makes finding his work a kind of wild goose chase.

DSCN2972New Zealand native, world-travler and 30-year London resident Dave served as my gracious host and personal guide extraordinaire. We began at the Waterloo tunnel, once a Eurostar passageway, once abandoned, now a designated graffiti area. None of Banksy´s work remains, but lots of other bright colors and politized stencils fill the surprisingly clean, un-urine-smelling underground area. We rambled along the brown, gurgling Thames to the Tate Modern, sister museum to the Tate Britain, one of the museums hit in Banksy´s guerilla art hanging. We checked out the excellent Futurism exhibit (which warrants its own post), making use of Dave´s free +1 entry.

Our search took us through two once-funky, now-trendy gentrified neighborhoods, the Angel and Old Street areas. We passed a crosslegged girl working on a legit piece on the exterior of a hip nightclub, a one-time poppin gay bar that was ¨the perfect mix of seedy and interesting,¨ Dave sighed in bittersweet nostalgia. Amid the antique stores and vintage shops of Angel, we at last found a Banksy. Preserved under plate glass like the Mona Lisa, I posed next to the children pledging a Tesco shopping bag (of course, I forgot my camera cord at home, so you´ll have to wait for the proof).

DSCN3006We found another Banksy on a quiet sidestreet off of unabashed tourist trap/hipster hangout Brick Lane. The first half of the blocks we walked were wall-to-wall Indian restaurants, with pushy male touts outside jostling for patronage; I think they´d find more success if they employed the Latin American method and used smokin hot girls in skimpy clothing. The street morphed into uber-cool bar and pub land, and that´s where we found the most street art of our mission. My favorite was a collage of corporate logos composing the now-commodified famous image of Che. The Banksy we found was several blocks from the hubbub, a painter sitting next to a large yellow flower. The words ¨vandals found vandalising this vandalism will be prosecuted¨ appeared right beside the large spray of paint covering the stencil´s face.

One of my visit´s sub-missions was to find one of those Cockney ATMs; while that searched proved unfruitful, it did bring us to bomb-ass Tayab, a Pakistani restaurant doing a cafeteria-style smorgasborg for Ramadan. I wisely stocked up on minced meat pastries for my next day´s flight, as well as enough leftovers for a spicy breakfast.

DSCN3018Another culinary and culture highlight was our next morning´s stroll through the Brixton Market, the pulsing heart of the Afro-Carribean Brixton neighborhood. African flags and fabrics, produce-selling mom and pops, Bob Marley tapestries, Obama t-shirts, Rasta onesies and pot-leaf-adorned everythings filled with multi-block indoor/outdoor bazaar of bad-assedness. There wasn´t a single corporate logo in sight, and as I sipped on a Buffalo-milk cappuccino and watched passerbys, I couldn´t help but feel my 48-hour powertour had provided me with a pretty good glimpse of the London in which locals live, graffiti-adorned, cumin-scented and throbbing with life.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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