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LISBON-
MARRAKECH-
BARCELONA
2004
PORTUGAL:
Tides and Tiles
MOROCCO:
Into Interzone
Medina Medina O Let Me Sleep
Like Prozac in the Desert
The Chicken Thieves
1001 Guides through Fès
Chilling in Chaouen
SPAIN:
Ruining of the Bulls
MOROCCO
(video)
color, 4'22"
June/July 04
View/Download:
Quicktime-
240x180, 8.8 MB
[ PHOTO ARCHIVE ]
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Algeciras - Madrid - Barcelona / Spain
10 - 14 July 2004
A Dress So White. Madrid.
The ferry from Tangier arrives in Algeciras at almost 10 p.m. Unfortunately by this time the travel desks are all closed and unlike Sebastiano, who I hope to accompany on the bus to Madrid, I have no ticket. This presents a bit of a problem.
We go out to the bus depot, or shall I say the section of the parking lot outside the ferry terminal where all the buses are congested into one area amidst hundreds of other confused travelers, mostly non EU-Passport holders, as I am led to believe by the sheer madness I had to witness going through the passport control in the station.
No one seems to know what bus is going where, including the drivers, curiously enough. I notice large groups of people loading their giant boxes and bags and kitchen sinks and godknowswhatelses into one bus, only to then unload it and go to another bus and reload it. Chaotic clusters of families drift the parking lot between buses calling and shouting and wailing to one another in languages that are for the most part incomprehensible to me.
I finally manage to locate the bus that should be going to Madrid, but I'm still not sure as the sign in the front window of the bus lists such a dizzying array of city stops all over Europe that I am convinced either the passengers are wild masochists or the drivers are. Or maybe both. Or perhaps the bus just starts driving with a full load of people that don't speak Spanish and just keeps driving until the driver decides he wants to go to one of those cities, but not all. I try to do the mile-math in my head and figure out that if any of these passengers really are taking the bus to Stockholm -- via Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastian, Bordeaux, Lyon, Milan, Basel, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Copenhagen -- I sure hope those giant bags they are packing into the bus contain all the diapers, soda, cigarettes, and candy bars they will need for the next straight 56 hours of bus torture.
Fortunately I'm only going about seven hours, to Madrid. But I still don't have a ticket. The bus driver doesn't speak English but with some help I manage in Spanish to talk him into letting me on the bus. To put it in simplest terms, the bastard extorts 60 euros cash from me when we both know full well the ticket officially only costs about 30 euros. But there is no other way to be on a bus before 9:30 the next morning. I have no idea if there is a night train to Madrid, or if it would've already left yet, nor what it would cost. And the idea of sleeping in the train station in Algeciras and killing a night there sounds more painful than just paying the man his bribe to let me on the bus which Sebastiano already has a ticket for. You win some, you lose some. At least I will be in Madrid in the morning. And it should be fun, in a mad kind of way, to take this crazy bus in the middle of the night half-way across Spain.
Alley View. Madrid.
The bus arrives in Madrid early in the morning and we take the subway to Sebastiano's apartment. The city is warm and beautiful, seems alive but not hectic. In fact, it's quite calm in his neighborhood even just a few short blocks from a rather touristy part of the downtown. We go to a café for an espresso and breakfast pastry.
Madrid is fantastic. A much cooler city than I had anticipated actually. I'm sure a lot of that was due to the fact that I was staying with locals and had people I knew in town to spend time with. It always makes an enormous difference.
I spend a lot of time walking around, either with Teresa and Sebastiano or on my own. The sun shines bright and the city is a lively show of color, architecture, automobiles and bodies on their way everywhere.
I go to the Prado museum to see the works from Hieronymous Bosch there, and don't spend much time in other sections of the museum. I do a walk-through tour of just about every room, but it is really the dark surrealistic genius of Bosch that captures my attention. There is also a Salvador Dali show happening at the Reina Sofia, plus a nice special exhibit of Roy Lichtenstein. It's great to get to be so close to so many small Dali paintings that I've seen countless photos of over the years... and to finally be able to see their every brushstroke.
At the Reina Sofia I do some sketches from Picasso's Guernica- always one of my favorite works from him, and I'm happy to get to see the actual work for the first time. The museum guards don't seem to be delighted by my wanting to sit there on the floor and draw, and this doesn't surprise me. Museum guards always seem to give me a hard time when I want to sketch from the works, or even just sit there and write into my journal. Soon it's time to go anyway as I plan to meet Teresa for lunch and have to dash off into the sun-baked streets to get back to the apartment.
It's so great to walk through all different neighborhoods. To be shown around by my hosts. They take me past all the nightlife, all the street cafés and courtyard bars. I really like the tapas bars too. The first one I go to is unbelievably loud. Spanish singing and shouting and conversation at ridiculous volume levels. It was a lot of fun any which way, and everyone there, including the waitresses and the cooks seemed to be having a great time.
Best... and Closer. So they say. Madrid.
Downtown Cinema. Madrid.
Color and Texture. Madrid.
My favorite part of the day is probably coffee and breakfast. Sebastiano and I go out in the late mornings to find a little café and pass the time in the shade -talking and reading newspapers, slowly enjoying the summer weather there in the Spanish capitol.
(After getting back to Berlin I watch all the Pedro Almodovar films that I haven't yet seen, back to back, one night after another, and it's really something for me to see Madrid again in moving pictures, brought to life in Almodovar's insane stories.)
Steve and Suse from Sydney (whom we'd met about two weeks earlier in Morocco) show up in Madrid with another rental car. They had left Morocco a few days ahead of us and were driving around with a rental car in southern Spain.
In the heat of the day we spend much of the afternoon sitting around the cool respite of the apartment. With the blinds half way down and the thin curtains pulled in front of the windows the apartment is a comfortable temperature. Steve plays some songs on an old acoustic guitar, and it's a great, friendly, relaxing atmosphere, feeling very home away from home.
Walking the Streets at Night. Madrid.
That night I need to head off to Barcelona on the night bus. My flight back to Berlin is the next afternoon. I debate about taking the train or the bus and then end up deciding for cost and timing reasons the best option is indeed the bus. I pack up my few things after we all have dinner at two different tapas bars, and then I head alone on the subway to the station.
Each new city I see I always appreciate getting to experience the city and it's people via the public transportation. I love walking the subway halls and looking at the advertising, the construction, the clothes people wear, watching how they walk or run. Seeing what is for sale in the vending machines. Listening to the announcements and watching the locals as they converse. Here I am trying to follow parts of conversations, listening to the soft lispy Spanish spoken in my surroundings. Usually I don't even focus on words, instead just letting the conversations flow like songs, the voices just another instrument, music for my senses.
I arrive at the station a good forty minutes before my departure and when I find the bus I'm actually the only person standing there. But five minutes before the scheduled departure everyone seems to show up at once with all of their insanely large suitcases. The bus fills up. And then we head off into the night for Barcelona.
It seems everyone on the bus is yapping on a mobile phone, pretending to sleep, or listening to the on-board music channel at full volume with the cheap earplugs they've distributed. I think I'm going crazy, trying to read, trying to distract myself from the all the racket and just calm down and hope I might get some sleep at some point in the night.
My reading light doesn't even work so I end up holding a small flashlight between my teeth while I read my new but already tattered copy of Der Spiegel until I finally have to say something to the guy in the seat next to me. It's two a.m. and it would be great if he would turn the music down on his earplugs (at first I was convinced there was a speaker on the panel over our heads) and/or to finish up his loud Arabic conversation with the guy two seats ahead of us. Yes, he's blaring music into his ears and carrying on his loud dialogue. He is aghast that I should ask him, however politely, to knock it off and let some of us get some zzz's.
His English is worse than my Spanish; we are both probably making fools of ourselves arguing between the two languages, but finally a few other people on the bus seem to agree that it's time to sleep and so they chime in filling in the holes in my Spanish justifications for quiet time. Loud Man eventually nods, turns off his music, says a few more words to his mate over the seats, leans his head against the window, closes his eyes, and is snoring like a happy pig in slumberland in less than five minutes.
For me, it's another one of those travel frustrations that is so absurd it's more funny than maddening. Somehow, miraculously, with the soothing lulling of Strangeways, Here We Come in my own ears, within another ten minutes I fall into dreamless sleep.
I wake in the early morning light as the bus is just working its way into the city limits of another Spanish metropolis. Barcelona! I'm tired and feel groggy but know it will be hot and sunny and with a good espresso in my system and the anticipation of the sea I will soon be fully awake.
I take a series of subways to a stop near the shore, traverse some funky streets and past the ubiquitous fountains until I find a café. Barcelona seems strange to me, different than I expected it. Perhaps being alone there detracts from my ability to relate to the town fully, but I don't feel as comfortable or enthusiastic as I hoped I would. Or maybe I am just too tired, or already thinking about being back in Berlin that evening. It's hard to keep focused on the present with thoughts of the past weeks or my anticipation of home fighting also struggling for space in my mind.
JPM en Barthelona.
The palm trees and the weather, the wide streets and the traffic, remind me oddly of Miami or Los Angeles. And also here most people are several shades darker than I with their perpetual tans. I've always been a bit mistrustful of places where the weather is almost always good and everyone dances or drives around in their expensive sunglasses and ruling-the-world mood pretense.
Hell, it could have something to do with spending most of my life in places where the climate actually changes and includes inconvenience, much like life, a fair amount of the year. I decide not to think about it too much as I know if I start to imagine I am in L.A. I will taint my mood and positive experience here. And I recognize I am falling once again into the trap of comparing one place to another instead of just seeing it as its own individual locale.
Ah yes, but the beach is great. There is a light surf rolling onto the shore, the sand is so warm under my bare feet, slipping like hot grains between my toes. The air is fresh and the sky a beautiful clear blue. The water is clean and the ocean mist works a wonder on my sinuses. Beach chairs and umbrellas speckle the shoreline. I take an unoccupied one for my own, strip down and change to my swim trunks with my thin towel wrapped around me, put the remaining things on the chair, jog down past all the pale tourists and topless, tanning Barcelonians and make my way into the sea.
The water feels great on my skin, washing away the bus ride like a good morning bath. When I've had enough, I leave the sea and rinse in the open shower up on the beach, then go back up to the chair. I lay it back and recline myself to let the sun dry the water from my body.
I have time to read for a while under the shade of the umbrella before putting my clothes back on, shouldering my pack and finding my way back to a subway to go to the Barcelona airport.
The flight is painless, in fact pleasurable, as I am numb with awareness of the moment. The plane's engines are humming, this metal tube with wings is gliding smoothly through a cloudless sky, I am returning to a city I love after four intense weeks through three new lands.
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