Where’s Megan?

I took another train ride up the east coast to a town called Puri (also the name of a delicious fried bread, relation unknown). It’s famous for a huge festival, Rath Yatra, coming up later this month, where enormous chariots are carried through the streets, filled with people. Read the rest of this entry »

From Kerala I headed east and crossed the mountain range known as the Western Ghats. Riding a bus through mountains is always a mixed blessing – you trade frequent panics of careening off the edge for the incredible views.
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First off, sorry I haven’t updated in awhile. The computers here are in worse shape than I expected, so it’s not entirely my fault. So quit bugging me! 🙂
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First, some background: Many cities in Morocco have two parts: a medina and a ville nouvelle. The medina is the old city where markets, shops, and food stalls are found in a maze of winding streets or, more accurately, alleyways. These medinas are surrounded by a medieval-style wall, and outside of which is the ville nouvelle, which is a more modern-style city built by the French when they occupied Morocco.
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As I took the ferry from Spain to Morocco, I was mentally preparing myself for the touts, scams, and “fake guides” I’ve heard all the warnings about. I arrive in Tanger, and these turn out to be comparatively minor problems, and easily dealt with – “No thank you”, repeat 5 times.
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Spain is divided into several distict regions. Madrid is in Castilla, Barcelona is in Catalonia (and has its own language, Catalan), and the area in the southwest of Spain, where I spent my last week or so, known as Andalucia.
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I´m a little behind on my updates here, but I´ll try to remember the important bits. My first, very brief stop in Spain was a town called Figueres which is known for one thing – the home of Salvador Dali. I had exactly enough time to hop off the bus, run up the hill to the museum, run back to the train station when the museum closed, and hop back on the next train 3 seconds before it started moving.
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Ah, Paris… such a short time (1 day) yet much to do. I arrived at 6:00 am from London (via bus-boat-bus), and set out to see everything in Paris in one day. I totally failed, but did manage to see a few highlights:
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To get a good idea of what the college towns of Cambridge and Oxford are like, just imagine what Lawrence would look like if KU had been founded, not 100 years ago, but nearly 1,000 years ago.
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Here are a few more things of interest when I was in London. There’s a place in Hyde Park called Speaker’s Corner, where anyone can get up and talk about whatever they want, while people listen…or not.
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