Eventually we all settled down, weaved outselves into a contortionists
dream and went to sleep. About 4 in the morning, we were ripped out of
some kind of sleep as a conductor/train man walked in and not quite
shouted, but loudly exclaimed, "It is illegal to sleep!!". Because we were
jolted awake, we could make sense of nothing other than what was being told
to us...that it was illegal to sleep and we were sleeping so we needed to
stop. It took a couple seconds before we realized he was referring to
Bruce up on the luggage rack, and was trying to say it was illegal to sleep
up there. After the moments of confusion shared between us and the train
man, bruce climbed down, and the 5 of us attempted to share the cabin space
for the remaining 4 hours. Sleep did not come easy, but it didn't trail
our exhaustion by far, so we once again found ourselves in the utmost
uncomfortable positions, but slept nonetheless.

When we arrived in Marrakech that morning, we groggily alerted ourselves,
brushed our teeth, put all of our socks and shoes back on, and threw our
belongings back into our bags before jumping off the train into a newness.
We were off. Once again, we had no idea where to go, where we were
staying, what direction we should be heading in, but our normal 2-person
party had transformed into 5, so getting should have been that much easier.
In fact, it was quite easier becuase Bruce is a natural born leader person
who makes it quite easy for any other natural born leaders to take backseat
for a break. He, with the small map he had in his book and a 1.5 hour
stroll, led us to the city center where we found what we thought was the
tourist information center. Instead what he found us were two young
individuals who made it their personal duty to take us to the official
tourist information center. These particular two also decided the rest of
us must have been the scum of the earth, and gladly took only Bruce under
their wing. They barely spoke to us, and bruce being the golden child that
he is, went along between the two, while the remaining 4 of us sulkingly
trudged along like the unwanted stepchildren. Of course we laughed about
it the whole way, as we were glad not to have to make small talk that early
in the morning.

Once arriving there, we got what we needed, and headed off to find a
hostel. Morocco might have hostels, but what's the point in staying in one
when you can find actual hotels that are cheaper if not the same price. We
settled into a guesthouse hostel that had a rooftop view of the city around
us. And for the first time in nearly 3 months, I was once again squatting
over non-western toilets. Oh the flood of memories, the smiles, and the
joy that floods your senses as your positioned over a hole in the ground.
But in all fairness, the toilets in Morocco were quite clean, squatters or
not.

That night we decided to explore the huge market place not far from our
hotel, and were delighted to find the place bustling like mad. This, was
when it felt like we had stepped onto a movie set for Indiana Jones. Snake
charmers were there playing their music to piles of cobras that seemed to
sway to their commands. Of course when they stopped playing, what you had
was exactly that, a pile of snakes. gotta go. Next we walked across
trained monkeys whose owners were persuasive in getting you to take
pictures with them. Bruce and Marshall took part, while kim, richard, and
i were still keeping our eyes on whereabouts of the cobras. We walked
further into the markets to hear all sorts of trading going on, witnessing
the bright colors of all the clothing, food, jewelry, lamps, and hookas.
The merchants of Morocco are quite adminant, if not forceful, about the
goods they have in their shops that you just "simply must see. just look.
no buy. just look" I spent a lot of time explaning i could see just as
well from 20 feet as i could from 1 inch. One thing though, they are an
awfully smart group of people. Their ability to, at minimum, speak 3
languages if quite impressive. Their fluent in their arabic, their french,
and spanish. The majority of the shopkeepers can more than likely speak
business english too.

The markets are some of the most entertaining things I had participated in
on my trip around the world, and Morocco's markets ranked highly up there
in terms of "i could just stand here and look for hours at everything going
on around me" type of appeal. We spent another couple of hours looking at
performing groups, more animal charmers, fighting off beggars, and warding
off pickpockets. All in all, our first full day in Morocco not spent on a
train was quite amazing. We went back to our hotel, feasted on nutella and
flatbread for dessert, played more cards and went to sleep. The next
morning we were up and early walking around the city to kill time before we
would take a train up to fes, where we would eventually meet up with
marshall and bruce, since they had left on a 2 day safari that would take
them camping into the sahara desert. Kim, richard, and I enjoyed about 3
more coffees that day before we boarded that train, and enjoyed the 7 hour
journey to fes. I was excited to take a train that would allow us to see
the country, not to mention that there were only day trains to fes from
marrakech.

We arrived in Fes after dark, and were greeted by chilly winds. What the
hell, we're in africa. Marrakech was a bit chilly at night, but this was
outright cold. So we found some quick dinner at a stall that served us
potato balls on bread with hot sauce and ran back to our hotel to eat, play
cards, and mercilessly tease richard into tears. We decided an early night
would be best, so we could get up and really explore fes. We were happy to
have 2 full days ahead of us to explore, as we knew that Fes had a gigantic
medina (old city), filled with winding narrow passages and tunnels that
comes with a warning label: Do not attempt to wander the medina on your
own, as you will supposedly get lost. We decided to wait to do the medina
until the following day and instead walked around the more local areas,
getting our breakfast materials (nutella, flatbread, and bananas) in the
market, before wandering off to god knows where.

This is when we ran into a little friend named, ah who cares I can't even
remember his name at this point. But, he was a jack of all trades kind of
guy. At 18, he's your best friend, your tour guide, but seemingly wont
take anything for his troubles. We were buying handmade pipes from his
friend, when he asked if we wanted a tour guide. We had said we weren't
interested, but he showed us around some of the relatively local areas that
night. He took us to the bathhouses, but most shockingly, we managed to go
down into the "dungeon" type pit where sat a man in front of a huge
furnace. This mans job, for 20 hours a day, was to shovel sawdust into
this fire that was located about a foot away from, in order to keep the
water in the bathhouse warm. He made about 50 dhiram a day (the equivalent
of €5, or about $6.10) which he used to feet his 5 children.

After seeing all these things we realized we would have missed if our
tourguide hadn't taken us, we decided later on that we wouldn't mind paying
him instead of some old guy who might lead us astray. But strangely
enough, he said he didn't want any money, that he does it for free. None
of us are that stupid that we believe anything is for free, realized
something would be coming later, but as long as we made it clear what we
were and weren't willing to do, we didn't feel we were stuck. So we made
arrangements to meet him the next day at 1 pm, but when we walked out of
our hotel at about 11:30, there he stood. Yes, freaky. It was also our
last day in fes, as we needed to board the night train back to tangiers to
take the ferry in the morning. We did want to make sure that we did as
much as we could our last day here. The day quickly became exhausting for
me because our guide couldn't speak any english, but was fluent in spanish
and other languages. So I became to official go-between richard, kim, and
i, and this guy. He had also invited us to his house to meet his mother
and his brother, and because we couldn't say no, we continued on, although
each of us had some pretty serious reservations and fears about doing this.

Once we arrived, we felt pretty guilty for assuming all the things that
could have been happening, when we were in fact, just having dinner with a
family. We met some of his friends, and after some time, left for the
winding passages the medina warned of. We were taken through stalls, and
then the catch sank in. It was dawning on us as we were being pulled into
shops, that his end of the deal was met if we purchased stuff in these
shops. Because it's not like you had to promise to do this, of course we
looked as if we were interested, but never felt like we had to buy
anything.

Then he took us to the tannery, where I would experience one of the worst
smells of all time. This was the place where they tanned all sorts of
different hides and dried them to make leather goods such as purses,
wallets, and all those other infamous moroccan goods. The smell was that
of liquid death and a putrid sweet smell of rot. It hit us like the scummy
walls that made this place. It was a maze of huge vats of color, slimy
walls, and wet floors that housed puddles of god knows what. Every step we
took seemed to drag us through cess pools of unknown bacterias and dirt. I
had to keep from gagging several times. Finally we ascended to the roof of
the building, where the view was nothing less than spectacular. The white
and tan rooftops of moroccan homes, the colored pools of dye, the desert
beyond the rooftops, the mountains off to the right, an overall warm color
cast over the city by the sun's particular angle, and most amazingly, the
early rising moon that combated the sun for our undivided attention. The
means definately justified the end in this case.

After we left the tannery, the three of us were somewhat itching to get
back to our side of town, and had to almost politely ditch our guide. He
was angry at us, and we could see it, but we did keep up our end of the
deal. He showed us around, and richard bought something in the tannery.
Hey, we were only backpackers, what did he actually expect us to buy? "yes,
i'll take 3 of those camel saddles please, and wrap them well!"
so we headed back to our side of the town, as we had gotten word from
marshall and bruce that they had arrived into town, and we wanted to see
them before we had to get to the train station. We caught a bite to eat at
this little stand where the cook looked exactly like a mococcan version of
louis, the french cook from the little mermaid. he was so excited to have
us in his shop, so we sampled a ton of things they had, including their
homemade donuts. In this restaurant, we met two guys (eunis and sumo) who
offered to take us to dinner, but we declined saying we had to catch the
train that night. We went back to our hotel to spend the remainder of our
evening with marshall and bruce.

Eventually they became tired so we headed to the train station to embrace
our 2 hour wait. Once we arrived, we settled into a card game and all of a
sudden, we were interrupted a voice, "do you mind i join in?", and we look
up to see the two guys from the restaurant. They had come to the train
station to see us and hang out before we took off. So our 2 person (mine
and richard's) game of asshole became a 5 person (we twisted kims arm into
playing) intense head to head combat survival of the 52-card fittest.
Before long we met another person who hung around and ended up boarding the train with us.

Once we finally got on this train, it was 1:50 am. We were busted tired
from walking around all day, and sadly realized this was the beginning of a
travelling nightmare. We had 3 hours on the train to sleep, until we had
to switch trains in the middle of the night. It seemed so cruel, because
what chance of sleep do you actually have when you're paranoid you'll sleep
through something like that. This train was far from being comfortable as
I couldn't seem to maintain any source of warmth. I was so cold the whole
time, until we arrived at the station we were meant to switch at. I hadn't
known the meaning of cold until we arrived there. We had about 20 minutes
to wait until we could board the second train, and here i literally froze.
I sat on a chair with kim and richard looking at me like i was grossly
overreacting, but I was just so uncomfortably numb with chills.
Finally we got on the second train, and smiled when we realized it was
heated. These smiles of course lasted only about 2 seconds when we
realized there wasn't a single empty compartment. To make matters worse,
any compartment that did have people, they were spread out sleeping to
leave us no room to sit in. We had already given up hope trying to find
our own space, and after about 10 minutes of racing up and down the
corridors to find somewhere we could sit, stumbling with our bags, overcome
with exhaustion, cold, misplaced and just irritated at the situation, we
just chose one where a lone man was sleeping. Basically he would just have
to move over. We sat down, and passed out until we arrived in Tangiers
about 5 hours later. Once we got to tangiers, we had to haul ourselves
from the train station over to the port, to catch our ferry. We made that
ferry about literally 10 seconds. Once on board, we ate the last of our
bananas and flatbread, which both me and kim would regret about 10 minutes
later.

The ferry over didn't have the opportunity to haunt us with seasickness
becuase we had been so excited in going, but coming back, we were tired,
sleepy, and not in any state to be faring the seas. I knew I should have
gone outside in the air, but I just had no energy to go outside, and
instead found myself running to the bathroom, in hopes of making it in the
toilet first. I did make it to the bathroom, but missed the toilet by a
second, and instead threw up in the sink. Obviously I couldn't just leave
it there, so I had to manually throw my vomit away. hey, if i had to live
it, you have to at least read about it. When i walked out of the bathroom,
kim ran into it, and by the time she came out, both of us just looked at
each other and laughed one of those delirious types of laughs that only
comes about in a shared misery with someone you love so much. When we
finally arrived in Tarifa, spain, we had a 2.5 km walk back to our hostel
to get our bags and kill a few horus, before boarding a bus to sevilla.
Was this bloody travel stint ever going to end? But I had a reward for
myself.

We got our bags, brushed our teeth, washed our faces, and excitedly
discussed how we would take a shower once we had arrived in sevilla and
found somewhere to stay. The first real shower in over 5 days. We had a
quick one each in one of the hotels we stayed in, but with no hot water,
when i say quick, i mean about 15 seconds. But before I could rejoice in
the finality of this neverending day, we had a bus ride, walking around
another city aimlessly with heavy bags on, until we could find somewhere to
sleep. But the worst was over. we had gotten from morrocco, africa, to
spain, europe. So we got back to the bus station in Tarifa, and decided to
kill our time by a trip to the grocery store for food. By this time, both
kim and i were ready to do some serious fooding.

We left richard at the station, and when i say station, i should clarify.
What i mean is a roadway with a few bus huts surrounding it. We invested
in a huge baguette, a jar of tomato sauce, a jar of green olives, a raging
hunk of feta cheese, a 2 L of diet coke, and a bag of some imitation
cheetos that struck our fancy because they had boos and hooty-hoos (ghosts
and owls) on the package. Talk about good eating; we ate those ghetto
pizzas and drank that whole 2 L like it was noone's business. We still had
about an hour to kill, and i decided to indulge in what i had promised
myself hours and hours before hand. My guiding star, my motivational
factor had been the promise that since i had been nonstop cold and tired
for so long, dirty and unshowered, hungry and seasick, that once we arrived
back with our bags at the bus stop, I would lay out in the grass and sun
for whatever time I had left until we had to head onwards. And I did
exactly that. Only after some hidden bathroom tactics behind bushes or
course.

Finally our bus arrived, and we boarded to head to seville. When we
arrived in Seville, it was already dark, and once again we had no idea of
where to go. We sorted ourselves and found the city center. From this
point on, we lost in the battle of finding a hostel. Apparently seville
only has one hostel, and its way on the outskirts of town. We found out
that the smaller hotels were also around the same price as a hosteland
figured we'd much rather have our own hotel room than share in a dormitory,
and checked into the van gogh hotel. richard had a flight to still catch
that night, so he hung out with us until our goodbyes. When we arrived
back at our hotel, both me and kim knew that the most greatest reward would
still be to come. showers.

You have no idea, the serious joy a shower can bring when you haven't had
one in so long. When your clothes smell akin to the homeless man you
befriended, when your hair looks like an oil painting as kim's hidden mass
revealed when she removed her hankerchief, when your haven't been at an
appropriate body temperature for a week, when enough dust and dirt exists
on your skin that you look a healthy shade of tan, and your body is
starving for the sensation of hot water to regulate it's whackness, that's
when you love a shower like you love your mother. I waited to go second
becuase I love the torture of anticipation of a good thing. The look on
kim's face when she came out of the bathroom, only reminded me that I was
in for some good times.

I have never, in my life, had a shower more thrilling than this one. Not
only was the water pressure the most amazing thing, but the endless supply
of hot water, in a shower that was so clean, was too much. I just stood
there for ages, soaking in every ounce of warmth and freshness that I had
been craving. I washed my hair about 3 times, scrubbed my skin until I was
red as hell, and emerged feeling like I had shed 10 pounds of nast.
Standing in the small misted up bathroom, while I brushed my hair, i
recollected over the geographical accomplishments of the past 24 hours.
From Fes, to Tangiers, across the straights of Gibralter, to Tarifa, to
Seville, by 8 overnight hours in a train, 1 hour on a ferry, 2.5 km of
walking, another 3 hour bus ride and another hour of situating ourselves in
a new city, we were showered, clean and ready to sleep. We settled into
bed, laughed and joked at our self-inflicted misery, and welcomed the sleep
in two of the most comfortable beds in the history of the world.

Our next day was the only day we had in seville, as the following day, we
had an early morning flight to catch to barcelona. It didn't take us long
to realize that seville spain wasn't our type of city. Thank god we hadn't
sacrificed time in morocco to spend here. It's a beautiful city, with the
most amazing church I have ever seen in my life, but was too uppity and
higher class than any backpacker is really looking for. It's a vacation
spot for those who like to shop in real stores, see a beautiful churce, and
just stroll around feeling important. We enjoyed our time there, found a
fantastic family run little stall with some amazing spinach mix and dhal,
and ate our hearts out, until we just walked around more before calling it
a night. went to sleep, and the next morning woke up and boarded our
flight to barcelona.

It felt like we had done so much in spain already, and still had barcelona
to contend with. We had been told by everyone we had met, that barcelona
would rock us raw, and that it was such a fantastic city, that we were
quite excited to get there and spend our remaining days together partying
it up hardcore. That's the amazing thing about travelling, you always love
what you are doing, becuase it is so different than what you were just
doing. Everythings feels like a reward to the "chore" you just
completed...and i have to say..its not really a chore, now is it?
i really want to stop typing right now, but something inside tell me to
just keep on pushing through at least Spain, and then i can come back with
the rest of it. so fine, here we go. Barcelona!!!

We arrived into barcelona, and we felt refreshed and ready to go, new city,
new day, new itinerary for madness. Only to get from the airport outside
of barcelona, to the city center was a real pain in the ass. It took us
about an hour to do so, and its something that should and seems to be
pretty straightforward, but it wasn't. Once we finally arrived, we were
trying to get in touch with the guy that was putting us up as we didn't
want to just show up at his address with talking to him, but with no luck.
so we found an subway/internet cafe and decided to at least get ourselves
fed and sorted, and then we'd try his phone again before we'd just head to
his apartment. we arrived at his place, which he shared with a tattoo
parlour, and were told we could leave our stuff if we wanted. So we
ditched our heavy bags, and took off to just explore to waste time. When
we arrived back to his place, he still wasn't there, but we did meet
another girl he happened to be hosting, Amber from Canada. We ended up
hanging out with Amber for the next 3 days, until we decided to leave this
guys apartment for alternative housing.

His roomates weren't took keen on him having guests and instead of talking
to him about it, they instead took it out on us by giving us nasty looks
and talking to us as if we were retarded. Our first few days in barcelona
weren't what we were expecting..where was all the amazing times that were
meant to be had? where was the exciting life? cuase all we had found
ourselves in the middle of, was a non-welcoming apartment, with a host who
seemed more interested in pairing us off with his repulsive egotistical
friends. Once we found our new housing, we were quite happy, and the real
barcelona we were meant to experience seemed to find us. awesome
nightclubs, squat parties, random artists we befriended, fantastic food,
great dancing, amazing people, and just an all around great time, including
time to squeeze in harry potter and king kong, as well as the sightseeing
we did.

We ended up having a fantastic time, and although the first 3 days in
barcelona sucked bigtime, we lived our last three days like it was 6, so
the mission felt accomplished. But i would severely pay for that
accomplishment that morning we had to leave. With only 30 minutes of sleep
from the night before, we were meant to get to the airport, but of course
had such a problem doing that. It took us a little over an hour, with 5
changes in trains, each one taking us only one stop before we had to switch
again, so there was no time to rest. I was so tired, and could barely stay
awake, even though i was standing upright on these trains..we finally
arrived at the airport and checked in.

I had a good 45 minutes to sleep at our gate before we had to board. I
looked around and saw that there were plenty of available seats to sit in,
and i choose a section where i was alone, to just close my eyes, sleep for
whatever time i had, and just enjoy the peace, until some jerk decided to
literally throw himself into the chair directly next to me. He was so
violent in his actions that I was ripped out of sleep, quite to my
annoyance, and at this point had no patience and yelled something rude to
him, pointed to the vast amount of vacant seats all around us, and got up
and moved to the other side, served him with about 5 minutes of dirty
stares, and went back to sleep. We finally boarded and I was asleep before
the stewards even closed the door, and didn't wake up until our plane
touched the irish runways.

We had arrived, safely back in Ireland; the date was now December 20th. I
had one more day with kim before she headed back to the states, and another
week to experience my first christmas from home, and just rest up a bit,
before I was off to scotland for new years.

good times...