Europe

Madrid, Spain and Fez, Morocco (May 2010)

| kiell

Daniel and I took the easy, clean and cheap Madrid Metro straight from the airport to the Sol station. We met up with our friend Edward, just in from Minnesota that morning, on the way up to the hostel where he had already made a reservation for the three of us. We spent the afternoon walking around the web of streets, winding out from the Plaza del Sol like spokes on a wheel in the El Centro district–populated by, in addition to the Spaniards and international tourists, monuments of soldiers on horses, angels overlooking the city, stately lions, naked goddess women slaying crustacean enemies, and Colonial style white marble-like buildings overlooking cobblestone plazas. Street performers scatter about the streets, string quartets and human statues (some of whom were deceptively still, others quite wiggly and not very statuelike), life size toy soldiers painted green to the eyelashes, bullfighters, human gargoyles, solitary cellists, and people in random costumes not doing anything (e.g., wearing a gorilla suit and having a cigarette, hoping for tips).

The city is quite lively, but not too noisy, due to the fact that most car traffic is restricted to a few main thouroughfares. The wind was strong and blustery, and the luminous-clouds-on-cerulean-sky contrast so intense, like your vision just got better. The city has a lot of nice parks, including the central Parque el Retiro with vast green spaces (mostly looking like you’re not allowed to sit on them) and a funny little station where pensioner Madrileños can sit on benches with stationary bike pedals planted in the red gravel at their feet and get in their daily exercize. At the heart of El Retiro is the Estanque, a smallish man-made lake with square cement shores and people on rented boats rowing away, teenagers splashing each other with their oars. The city itself doesn’t have a main body of water to it, as Ted pointed out, and it has a feeling like something is missing–there are certain parts of town where we would look out over a hill and expect to see a river or lake, but be greeted with a street instead. We ate picnics in the gardens of the Royal Palace, feeding bits of crusty bread, granny Smith apples and soft, bland queso fresco (fresh cheese) to those sparrows brave enough to approach us.

Madrid unfortunately doesn’t have as many free museums as London–at least, we didn’t know about them– but a lot of the more famous museums have a few hours a week where you can save your nine Euros and get in for free. We saw the Reina Sofia art museum during it’s free hours, which from the outside is a massive modern glass structure that could be a hospital with a lot of money and a creative architect, and from the inside a pleasant juxtaposition of clean windows, black glossy plexiglass and pocked, ancient looking stone floors and moulding. Its collection is impressive and very interesting; we liked the melamine board installation painted red to look like bricks, a clear plastic tube sculpture filled with lights and water looking like an aquatic roadmap on the floor, and a whole room of somber WWII-era ink drawings. The museum houses Picasso’s black and white masterpiece Guernica, flanked by security guards and art-viewers trying to take a good photo from outside the door of the gallery salon. In a glass case nearby are the studies that Picasso created in the making of the huge painting, arguably more interesting than the piece itself. We toured Museo del Prado, a staggeringly large collection of paintings and statues more classical and idealistic than the Reina Sofia’s modern collection, including Velazquez’ Las Meninas, considered by some art scholars to be the best painting in the world. An exciting anomaly in the museum is the room filled with Goya’s Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings), dark and morbid and fascinating.

Four days after arriving, we took the Metro back to the airport and boarded a flight to Morrocco. We arrived in the Fez airport in the afternoon, greeted on the tarmac by palm trees, a clear blue sky, and a mess of people clearing immigration, overwhelming the tiny airport’s staff. We didn’t want to take a taxi and had read that you could take bus 16 to the Medina, where we planned to stay, and walked out to the curb on the side of the road where we hoped the bus stopped, as there weren’t any signs. There was a man with a shaved head, a cream colored scarf and a velour suitjacket slung over his suitcase sitting at the roadside, and we shyly asked him in highschool French if this was the bus stop. He responded in English, and proceeded to give us advice on exactly how to take the bus to the Medina, chatted with Ted for the whole busride and even got off the bus with us at our stop to indicate where we should walk, and that we should turn left at the fountain plaza.

We ended up getting lost anyway, but were helped by numerous people along the way, including two young women and a little girl in full head coverings and floor length robes, policemen who gave me incredibly long and detailed directions in French, complete with hand gestures (of which I understood the words left, red and round), and a man who stopped us on a street to tell us that the road we were walking on didn’t go anywhere. I have to admit, from some of the other experiences we’ve had with advice on the road, my guard was raised and I was a little worried about someone trying to scam us or try and get us to stay somewhere we didn’t want to stay. My worries were totally unfounded though–people were genuine and just generally helpful.

We finally made it to the Medina’s Bab Boujeloud gate, which is cradled by tall limestone walls with hollow windows, punctuated at strategic intervals by minarets. We spent the next few days exploring. The walkways are narrow and winding, with enough curves and switchbacks to be generally counterintuitive, but still fairly relaxing to walk in– it’s actually the largest car-free urban zone in the world. I have heard Fez’ Medina compared to Jerusalem in the way it looks, and it certainly did feel more Middle Eastern than African. Women wore clothing in varying coverage levels, from some women with long shirtdresses but no head coverings to women covered head to toe, including black gloves and a veil.

Wandering the markets of the medina is a pretty intense sensory experience. We were surrounded from every angle by vendors with their fares laid out on the cobblestone walkways–zucchini, cabbage, onions, lemons, carrots, avocados, melons, strawberries, eggplants, oh my. Stalls with dried figs and dates exploding out of burlap sacks, green and black and kalamata olives, pickles, cashews, sunflower seeds, dry grains and beans and pasta. Butchers with huge cuts of meat on display in the open air, a grotesque camel head hanging by a ruff of skin on it’s neck, tongue hanging out, flesh and spine exposed from behind, live chickens and pigeons tied with yarn to their cages, squawking and screeching and generally making a ruckus. Brightly colored leather products everywhere–shoes, bags, pillows for the floor. Stalls with shampoo, soap, instant coffee, water, soda. Jewelry–earrings, ornate bracelets, giant necklaces, rings with colorful stones, even an ivory pistol. Everything apart from the butcher shops smells of ripe fruit, cumin, sandalwood, thyme, fresh mint, donkeys, rose petals and tanned leather. People all around speaking French and velvety Arabic, bits of Spanish and English peppered in. And the cats! There are cats and kittens everywhere, slinking in the streets, camped out on pallets of produce, baskets of garlic, velour pillows originally intended to be jewelry displays, begging for steak tagine and couscous at the tables of the numerous outdoor restaurants. Cats screamed and mewled outside our guesthouse window, prowling the overlapping corrugated metal roofs below our room. A rooster nearby had a broken internal clock, and despite its earnest and persistent cock-a-doodle-dooing attempts, couldn’t make the sun come up at 2:30 in the morning. On one of our last nights in Fez, I woke up at 4:30 am to the eerie cacaphony of the Muslim call to prayer, interspersed with the rooster crowing, dogs baying, and the occasional honk of a truck.

I ended up getting stuck inside floored for three days with food poisoning (I think it was the chicken pastilla, a savory pastry dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon–maybe it was made from one of the forlorn pigeons in the market). Mohammed, the proprietor who worked at Pension el-Kasbah every other day, tried to help me. He checked in on me while I was in our room and face-down in the toilet, advising that I only drink bottled mineral water (um, yes), and even went out to the market for me, coming back with a cone of graphing paper filled with one dirham worth of cumin (approximately the size of one of those green-topped spice jars at eleven cents US). He explained that it was Arabic medicine, which when swallowed dry by the handful and chased with water is apparently supposed to make tummies better (he taught by example, tossing back a handful himself). I was sick enough that it only helped for about an hour and the result was unearthly green when I saw it again.

On the third day I was sick, Mohammed brought me to his home where he lived with his wife, mother, sister, and neices, only a 2 or 3 minute walk from the pension. Through a four foot doorway and up a winding set of stone stairs, we entered a tiny apartment, with a dining room full of a low table covered with a plastic tablecloth, a kitchen, and a lounge with a TV off to the right, which someone thoughtfully changed to an English-language crime show for me. I sat with the littlest girl, maybe 3 or 4 years old, with soft curly hair, milky skin, intense big brown eyes and rotten baby teeth. She was brave and friendly, kissing my hand, climbing on the couch next to me, trying to feed me blobs of orange marmelade from her sticky little fingers (I figured, what the hell, I was taking incredibly strong antibiotics anyhow). Mohammed had gone back to the guesthouse and I couldn’t communicate very well with the women–the mother only spoke Arabic and I still couldn’t speak French so I couldn’t understand most of the lively conversation flying back and forth across the table–but the little girl spoke the universal language of Tickle (she started it). For dinner, they fed me corn bread and another, thinly layered bread, olives, marmelade, olive oil and soft cheese, with sweet milk tea and coffee. We ate on the table without plates, them urging me, “Mangez, mangez!” (Eat, eat!) I still couldn’t eat very much, but it was nice to be cared for like that. A little bit of on-the-road, substitute mom time.

We saw our friend from the bus, whose name was Abdel, a few more times. He invited us to contact him if we ever go to Paris, where he lives, and gave us his email address. On the bus on the first day, Abdel told us that while Paris was one of the most beautiful places he had ever been, Fez (his hometown) was the friendliest. And I have to agree with him– the people in Fez were overwhelmingly kind and definitely went out of their way to help us, total strangers. Early on, after we bartered the price of our room down to an affordable price, Mohammed had agreed to the rate on the condition that we give him a souvenir from America. On our last day I shot a photo of him and a few of his family members, and left him with a pen from Jorgensen Financial Services in Tyler, Minnesota before leaving for the airport.

We got back into Spain for a few more days, and got to experience the trademark Madrid bedtime: never. The country had won a world cup finals game (this was in early May), and feisty fútbol fans roared in the streets until about 10 the next morning. We also went to a free midnight showing of a Monet exhibit, which was a perfect way to end the European/North African leg of our trip. The next morning we saw Ted off to Minneapolis and caught our own flight to Lima.

London and Stansted, England and Oslo, Norway (April 2010)

| kiell

London overwhelmed our noses in a frenzy of scents: cool, clean air, pink and white flower trees blooming in grassy parks, everything moist from spring rains. We took the Tube’s Picadilly line to King’s Cross, and after making our hostel beds took a walk through the neighborhood, visiting community gardens with painted plywood cutouts of children and a playground (something we hadn’t seen for a long time, and it seemed kind of strange). Kebab shops and pubs lined the street, old red brick buildings, or painted black and white wooden facades facing statues in the road, red double decker bendy buses barreling past.

The most striking thing about being in London was how easy it was to be there. Everyone spoke English, we could read the signs. It was shockingly clean. No one really needed anything from us, for us to buy something from them–our wealth was insignificant and relatively small. No one stared at us. No one approached us upon leaving the airport or hostel, offering a rickshaw or travel agency services. We were blissfully ignored.

We took a walking tour of London, checking out the sights that everyone sees: Buckingham Palace, mounted guards, a glimpse of 10 Downing Street (where Gordon Brown resided when we saw it but not at the moment I write this post), Green Park, and the London Marathon which happened to be the day after we arrived. While it was nice to blend in and pretend to not be a tourist for a while, it was also a relief to take a guided tour and see sights without having to research or plan–something we hadn’t really done at all yet. We even learned a few things! For example, did you know that the Queen owns a gold-plated Nintendo Wii, and that her favorite game is Wii Bowling?

Since money was (is) getting pretty tight, we walked all over the center of London instead of taking the subway, and ate picnics from Tesco grocery–baguettes with feta cheese and crisp apples, milk from a tiny jug. We gorged ourselves on art, visiting the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery, the Tate Modern. We even splurged and saw a live performance of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, the musical (about two drag queens and a male-to-female transwoman crossing the Australian desert in a bus); while the dialog wasn’t quite as punchy as the movie, the costumes and dance routines were pretty fantastic.

On the day we were flying to Oslo, we checked out of our hostel and walked about two hours to the Victoria station across the center of London. We caught a bus to the Stansted Airport, about an hour out of the city, got there early and waited around until we could check in, checked in and cleared the passport/visa check counter, and began going through security to wait at our gate when the security officer did a double take of our boarding passes and cheerily said, “oh, you’re flying tomorrow!” I started to panic before assessing our options–it was incredibly frustrating because I’ve had a few major, moneysucking, screwups and roadblocks with air travel. I nearly missed my flight out of LA in February after being forced to buy a ticket on the spot to leave New Zealand before being allowed to board the flight, then I bought a ticket from Christchurch to Auckland to see Daniel (not realizing I had inverted the cities until I checked in at the Auckland airport). Now this, only half an hour after I had started writing the India blog post which started with “After more than two months of traveling, we think we’re getting a bit better at it.” Crap. Daniel kept me calm and we decided to stay in Stansted for the night. We walked two more hours to the center of town.

Stansted itself was actually very pleasant, beautiful and quaint with cobblestone roads and little brick homes surrounded by blossoming lilacs and various flower trees which looked like they were covered in a blanket of floral snow. And the weather was fantastic. It really felt like England, moreso than London did. We stayed in a hotel built into an old house, with sea-blue walls and starched white sheets, and wifi that worked if you laid on the floor with the laptop right up by the door. We had a picnic the next day on a lovely little public footpath (which we found purely by accident) nestled between a creek and the train tracks, which felt surprisingly like being at home near the Minnehaha creek. We were definitely both starting to feel a little homesick.

We flew into Oslo/Rygge, successfully this time, greeted by a cold rain and incredibly low cloud cover on the tarmac. We took the hourlong bus into Oslo, arriving late (in retrospect, Ryanair was not the right choice for this trip, since all these bus trips pretty much negated any cash we’d saved on ticket prices). My dad’s cousin Karen graciously picked us up at the bus terminal, took us home and fed us open-face sandwiches on hearty bread before we went to sleep.

In the morning, we had breakfast with HansErik and Christina (my dad’s dad’s brother and his wife) in their apartment, open with warm wood floors and a nice book collection. They fed us bacon and eggs, hot black coffee, wholegrain bread, grapefruit juice, and anchovies (which we passed on). Through a little wooded area we walked to the bus stop and rode to the center of Oslo and they showed us the city. We walked along the edge of the fjord, where chilly-looking fishermen were selling their catches from the decks of their boats, while kids skateboarded in the plaza, and a statue of FD Roosevelt overlooked the waterfront (we learned that Norway’s royal family lived in the White House during WWII, and that FDR upheld Norway as an example of how the US could improve). Nearby was a castle that is now unused except for visiting purposes, which was once surrounded by a moat that has now been converted into a street which is full of electric cars. Oslo, like London, is much more steeped in war history than you’d ever see in the US, for obvious reasons, in both public and private ways. HansErik took us to the red wooden house he and Farfar grew up in, pointing out the cellar door where they evacuated to when the war started, and told us how the older neighbor boys who lived downstairs rode their bikes to check out the nearby site where the fighting was happening.

The city itself was pretty, clean and surprisingly walkable, with modern and historical buildings mixed up together, hills with fashionable shops, populated by people looking effortlessly well put together and street musicians playing accordion and hammered dulcimer. We got to see buildings designed by HansErik, who was an architect, and by his daughter Alessandra(Sandra) and her husband Lars, who practice the same profession–it was kind of neat to feel related to the city like that. We had Indian food for dinner with HansErik, Christina, Sandra, Lars and their son Gustav, and returned to the young family’s apartment after dinner. It was high-ceilinged with a modern, open layout, warm yellow wood floors, and a low table with Moroccan floor cushions. Daniel played on the computer with Lars and Gustav while the rest of us talked, and the later the night went the more I fantasized about coming to Norway to study architecture. It was a great night.

The next day we went to the FRAM Museum, housing the ship on which Amundsen traveled to Antarctica during the expedition which reached the South Pole successfully for the first time. Amundsen was Norwegian and the country is pretty proud of him; they seem to have a lighthearted sense of ownership of the continent, complemented by Svalbard, which has the northernmost town and is a part of Norway. It was fun to read about the expeditions, successful and otherwise, and to realize that less than a hundred years ago no one had ever been to the South Pole. Today you can get there by having a job fixing computers, fueling airplanes, or washing dishes, without having to mount an expedition and risk getting yourself killed. We went to the Vigeland sculpture park, which was interesting but got a little boring since the sculpture is all by the same artist–I think Minneapolis’ sculpture garden is better, but I might be biased. The park overlooked the cemetery where my great grandparents are buried, and we stood for a while on the hill watching the ocean clouds which, to a midwest girl, seemed unreal and more beautiful and contrasting than clouds at home, no matter how many times I saw them.

That evening we had dinner with Karen, her husband Ronnie, and their two children at their home, and Nina, the youngest of HansErik and Christina’s daughters and her two children. Karen prepared salmon sashimi with sprouts, soy sauce and wasabi, a green salad with hand-roasted pine nuts and avocado, steak and roasted potatoes. They live in the house the three women grew up in (another beautiful dwelling–I wonder if all homes in Norway look so good?), which is the same house my dad and his brother stayed at when they visited Norway as kids. We had a great evening, and I only wish that we had been able to stay more than two days.

Everyone was so friendly and kind, and we got along with the whole family really well (I have to admit I was worried before we arrived that they wouldn’t like us or that something would go wrong)–it was so nice to be able to make that connection in person, and we simply wouldn’t have been able to travel to Norway if they hadn’t been so generous to us. At one point during the evening HansErik asked me how it felt to “be a part of the clan.” It felt good.