Home of the Irish (Oct. 15-18)

I don’t know if it was the fact that they spoke English or that we were just really, really uncharacteristically organized, but this seemed to be the trip with the least amount of confusion and, therefore, the one with the least amount of funny things to relay to the readers of this little blog. Soooo I’m going to adopt a new kind of strategy here and talk about a few of the places we went in Dublin and the corresponding lessons on history we were given in that funny little accent of theirs.

Dublin Castle

The groundwork’s for the famous Dublin Castle were constructed by the Viking’s in the 800’s, but the Dublin Castle as we know it wasn’t officially constructed until 1204, though a fire burned it down in 1686. The ammunition chamber?? of the castle caught on fire proceeding to explode,  taking the rest of the castle down with it.  The castle was reconstructed but never returned to its natural state. Today it is used to host foreign ambassadors and as a meeting place for Ireland's president.  The tour was pretty entertaining. We learned that Margaret Thatcher stayed there in the 80’s but only at the insistence that they build a new bathroom for her (because she didn’t want to stay in the old kings bedroom).  One of the rooms had painings of all the ‘great’ Irish politicians, but one of those paintings was about 2 feet lower and partly hidden behind a door. The guide said that this was the portrait of the last holder of American territory (unfortunately I forget his name, but probably "Mc" or "O" something or rather) and upon losing the colony he came back to Ireland where he took his anger out on the people, ruling with a heavy hand. Today he is, to say the least, not the most popular of Irish figures and the tour guide had some pretty strong feelings about it even being up on the wall, stating that maybe if the handle of the door slammed into his face every time then he would be ok with it.  One of the most interesting parts of the castle was the tiny remains of a moat that used to run around it. In the 1300’s, with the Black Death sweeping the continent, it was decided to cut off the moat from the castle (before this point it had apparently run into the castle). It was though that water was the primary cause of the disease, so the taxpayers were granted custody on the inside while the non-taxpayers were left to rot on the outside. Well, it turns out that the cause of the disease was actually rats (and fleas were the vectors) and with the draining of the water the rats were trapped inside the castle. 60% of the population within the castle walls died within 2 years and, although the numbers don’t exist, those on the outside faired far better; the result: if you pay your taxes in Ireland, death will be your reward.

Chester Beatty Library

This library definitely wasn’t your common, everyday, "lets check out a book" library. There were two rooms, one dedicated to the beginnings of language and the other dedicated to the beginnings of the worlds most prominent religions (east and west) and each of the rooms contained some of the earliest, most important texts of those particular religions/languages. I thought that the “religion” room was amazing. It was divided into 6 sections, each focusing on the beginnings of their religion, and it was a great way of learning and seeing the relations that exist between them all. I was most interested in the eastern religions (such as Buddhism) and their appeal as a way of life. The higher being that they worship is within ourselves, it is our mental capacity, and through meditation one can rid the brain of all negative thoughts, freeing it to explore, to be truly happy and to help transmit that happiness, that positive energy, unto others. Islam, another religion that I want to learn more about, directly translates to mean, “submission” and that’s really what the whole religion is based on. Submitting to the will of god, to the command of god. Islam, Christianity and Judaism are essentially progressions of one another; Islam calls itself the most refined and flawless of the three because it is the newest. Although they see Christ as an incredibly inspired religious figure, he is not as important to their religion as Muhammad, the one and only true prophet.

Viking Museum

I have always had a kind of fascination/very limited knowledge of the Vikings, so I was pretty excited to stumble upon this little historical documentation. The word Viking comes from the Old Nors word “Vík”, which means bay, or inlet. The Vikings, renown for their sea faring abilities, first arrived in Ireland in the 700’s. They worshipped 3 gods, Odin and his sons Thor and Fey. It was said that if a Viking died a glorious death in battle he would go to an eternal party with Odin, but if the Viking died a calm and peaceful death he would forever remain in a cold, dark after place. Vikings rarely wore armor, but would dress in the way that they depicted the warrior god Thor – in bear fur. Before and during battle the Vikings were known for rilying themselves up as a way of inspiring fear in the opponent – the modern day word “bersurk” comes from this practice, derived from the “bear shirt” that the Vikings wore in battle.  The Vikings, due to the superior design of their ships that allowed for faster travel and superior docking, were known to be excellent traders. When the slave trade came around so many people came from the Slavic states that it is though that the word “slave” is derived from the word “Slavic”.

While walking back from the museum, I happened to stumble on a couple of tents that were part of a Viking reenactment. These guys are Ireland's equivalent of left-over hippies. I'm pretty sure that they still live like this on an every day basis, or at least they were just very convincing. One guy was making jewelry and it was actually really fun to watch him, sitting there with his tools from the 800's; I would have bought a piece... but I didn't, I guess I don't really know why. They also had a "battle reenactment" that they tried to turn into a comedy show. Let's just say it didn't work out too well.

Kilmainham Gaol

The final place we went was one of Ireland's most famous prisons (now a museum) - something the equivalent of the San Franciscos' Alcazar. It was said that kids as young as 8 used to go to the jail to serve labor sentences for crimes as petty as stealing a bite of bread. At one point, during the potato famine, the government announced an initiative that anyone caught begging would be immediately sent to jail. Well, being that jail was one of the few places where food could actually be found, it was said that as many as 9000 people occupied a mere 128 cells.

Alright, thats about all of the information that I can remember regarding this little island! Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to make it out into the country side or to the Cliff's of Moher, but I guess that gives a reason to go back in the future. Cheeros mateys

Moroccan Me Crazay! (Oct. 9-12)

(Rabat: by far the prettiest, coolest part of the city)

Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, New Zealand, England, Spain…. These places, though obviously different from Colorado, don’t constitute culture shock. If I thought that before, I changed my mind precisely 4 days ago. Morocco, a Muslim nation, is about 35 minutes via ferry from the Southern most tip of Spain – Gibraltar (a place with a wealth of history that my Dad could tell you much more about than I can). Despite this short distance, Morocco is as stark a contrast to Spain as you will find. You leave the beaches of Gibraltar (where it is common to see women but not their bathing suit tops – not that I ever look or anything, it’s just what people tell me…) and arrive in Morocco (in a city called Tanger) where it is almost a rarity to see the full face of a woman, and never any other skin aside from her hands. I mean you see this on TV all the time, but actually being there, right in the middle of it, is a completely different experience.  In Spain, as you all know by now, the nights really don’t get going until 11 or 12 pm and alcohol is almost a way of life. In Morocco everybody is in bed, or at least in their house, by, at the latest, 9 pm and alcohol is forbidden according to Islamic law. The streets are cleared out, aside from the vast amounts of trash that litter the ground as though the use of trash cans is looked down upon, the house is quiet and everybody is in bed or headed in that direction (I guess that this shouldn’t be too big of a culture shock to me, being that it is what happens at my home – where 9 o’clock is pushing it - but for some reason it seemed to me a very odd concept). To sum things up, I guess that it is easiest to say that Spain is by far the most liberal country that I have ever been to and Morocco is by far the most conservative.

(above: ridin' some llamas! 

right: the house, apparently a typical muslim house)

The first two nights we stayed in a home stay with a Moroccan family in the capital city of Rabat. This experience was one of the most revealing and mind opening  of my life. Sure, there are the little things, like a literal whole in the ground that serves as a toilet, which is in the middle of the shower, which makes up just about all of the bathroom. There is the food – a big bowl of kuskus or chicken or spaghetti – that is placed in the center of the table from which everybody eats using their right hand only (its very bad manners to use the left). Lunch and dinner are also strictly for eating, not for socializing – the only conversation we engaged in focused on how to get the coke from one end of the table to the other. Then there is the house itself, which was actually very beautiful. From the outside it looks like nothing, but the moment you step in it opens up to a big courtyard type structure with four pillars shooting up towards the ceiling. From this room there are five other rooms that branch off: the kitchen, two living rooms (which have built in sofas lining each of the walls) and two bedrooms - our room was the only one with actual beds – the others just had the sofas that doubled as beds. (There was a second level to our house, which another family lived in.)

The thing that impressed me the most about this new culture, however, was how open everybody seems to be. We had many discussions with Moroccan students and each time they made a point of saying how they never judge people based on race, color or religion. Who knows how true this is actually is, but based on the actions of the people around us it seemed to be the case. We went to some small, rural cities where we had to be the first Americans that the people had seen in a long time, if ever, yet they treated us as if we were as normal as the calls for prayer that you hear five times a day (the first one is at 4 in the morning). They never stared, never seemed to be talking behind our backs, and if they spoke to us it was to welcome us to their country and ask how we liked the tea (which was delicious, and full of sugar!). Another thing that impressed me about the Moroccans was that, at the minimum, they know at least 2 languages fluently (Arabic and French) though the majority that we met knew either Arabic, French and English; Arabic, French and Spanish; or all of the above. In our host family the two brothers (whom were 26 and 32) spoke all 4 languages more or less, but the mother only spoke Arabic; either meaning that multilingualism seems to be a rather new concept or that it is something that more men learn than woman.

(old roman ruin: Chellah)

By far the most local, authentic experience we had was the hammam – a Muslim bath house.  The hammam is comparable to a sauna in the United States; comparable in the sense that it makes you sweat, everything else is a little bit more strange. There are three rooms going from coldest to hottest and the idea is to sit in the hot room (something like 51 Celsius, which I would say the equivalent of in Farenheight but it just sounds too hot) for 15 minutes then move to the medium room where you can either chose to wash yourself or hire somebody else to do it. Three of my friends and I, thinking that it was probably one of those rare, once in a life time “opportunities” decided to hire somebody else to do it. Communicating this proved to be very difficult and eventually a worker arrived who was able to translate the following sentence to us in his broken English: “Who here wants the old man to rub them down?”  I don’t know if anything has ever sounded more awkward in all my life, or actually was more awkward, but we went ahead and did it anyways. The old man was indeed old; he had at most 4 teeth, was wearing underwear and nothing else, was incredibly hairy, but could scrub the body like nobody’s business. He had us lie down and then took a coarse rag – comparable to sand paper – to our skin and went to work. By the time it was over I had rolls and rolls of dead skin pilled up at the edges of my limbs – on my hands, my ankles, my feet. I think, that with the loss of dead skin and sweat combined, I lost a minimum of 5 pounds that night, and I’ve definitely never felt so clean in all my life.

                                                                    (Mausoleum of King Mohammad V: side note; not like by many, his son, the current king, is far more popular - helping the poor, a big problem in Morocco)

Another very interesting part of this weekend was a conversation we had with a couple of Moroccan Peace Corp volunteers. They have both been in Morocco for about a year and you could tell how excited they were to be talking in English to Americans in what probably was the first time in as long as they could remember.  It sounds like it can be some lonely work at times, imagine landing in a completely foreign country such as Morocco, then driving for 2 days to about as remote a village as one will find where you will be spending the next two years of your life. It makes me reconsider how “hard” I think it is being in Sevilla, Spain for a year. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those guys. I’ve considered the Peace Corp before and though I don’t want to rule it out I don’t think that I could do what they’re doing, maybe a village in South America, but a middle of nowhere place in Morocco is just a little too “middle of nowhere” place for me.

On the third day we went to a one of these middle of nowhere towns and had lunch with a local family. It was like one of those places that you can find in South America where the chickens out number the dogs, which outnumber the cats, which outnumber the people. Lets just say that an afternoon there was sufficient for me. After that we drove to a village called Chefchaouen, which was by far my favorite place in Morocco and probably one of the most beautiful places I have been. It is way high up in the mountains and a river flows right through the town where you can find kids jumping off rocks, ladies doing laundry and people simply enjoying life. The town itself is a maze of narrow streets, barely wide enough to walk in, much less fit a car, and the buildings are all some shade or another of blue or white. It really was an incredible place and I would love, if the opportunity ever presents itself, to go back there someday. Soccer jerseys were also 6 euros there (or 60 duran) as compared to 60 euros in Spain, so lets just say I put my newfound purchasing power to some good use.

The one thing that Spain and Morocco both have in common: Neither have the DENVER BRONCOS!!! The best team that this universe has ever known. My goal here is to, by the time I leave, have this city, or at least my house, decorated in the Orange and Blue (or should I say brown and, like, a very odd yellow) that represents the everything that this world should be.

¡Aqui Estoy! (Oct. 2-4)

¡Hola Todos!

Man, I got off to such a hot start there on those blog updates! I think I was somewhere along the lines of 5 for 5; 5 weeks, 5 blogs. Thats 100%! Rather than look at these past couple of weeks as losses, however, which would put a dent in that rather pretty percentage, I think I'm going to take them as though they were by weeks. And really its only been one by week. Or maybe one and a half. But anyways, here I am! And I have stories! The more time off the more stories generated! Jajajajaja

This past weekend I made plans to go to Granada. And this time I actually made it! (I don't know if I ever mentioned it in the Almuñeca blog, but I was under the impression that we were actually going to Granada then, which never exactly happened.) My friend Marco and I took the train there on Friday afternoon and came back Sunday morning. The train, if it were the same one I took to Madrid, would have taken about an hour, but being that they reserve those old fashioned, cargo looking trains that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once plundered for the shorter excursions, the trip was about 3 and a half hours. Bus and car are about the same length of time though, and trains allow for reading and writing so I would chose them any day. We arrived in Granada at about 7 friday night and fortunately, or so I thought, I had written down the directions/bus numbers that we would take to our hostel. When I pulled them out and started walking towards the bus, however, mi amigo Marco looked at me as if I were crazy. I mean, who uses directions to get to a desired location in a city in which they have never been to? I guess I liked his spirit though so i put them in my pocket and we proceeded to walk. Not only did we not know where we were going, but we didn't even bother to look at street signs; I guess we just assumed that some force was guiding us or something. But, as we would find out, such a force did not exist. We walked in what we later discovered was the completely opposite direction for about 30 minutes, but it was a fun way of seeing the other part of the city and we were in no hurry. When we knew we were close we decided to use the directions and this is what they consisted of (the final part, at least): "Big wooden door on the right". Maybe if we were in New York or something such a description would have worked, but its a little bit less helpful when all the doors are relatively big, and most definitely wooden. We started off at the biggest of the wood doors, which turned out to be somebody's house, then we attempted to decipher which of the four wooden doors on the street was the most wooden, if that is at all possible - for one wood to be more wooden than a corresponding piece of wood. (Wooden/wood is looking like a very odd word now, after writing it so many times. Test it, after the 6th time it starts to look really funny.) Anyways, that attempt failed as well - it was some sort of meat factory or something - so we turned to the smallest and least wooden of the four doors and, obviously - I mean it probably should have occurred to us sooner, that was the hostel.

The next day we had tickets to the Alhambra - one of the seven man made wonders of the world, also, as we would soon find out, one of the seven most complicated and confusing things of the world. We had tickets to the 8:30 entrance (each ticket gives you half an hour to enter the Alhambra, so we had from 8:30 to 9:00) that I had printed off of the internet. When our turn came up, feeling relatively proud of ourselves for making it on time, we were turned away because we were supposed to have exchanged the internet ticket for one that they give at the front. Ok, a little bit frustrating, but not too big of a deal, I mean, how hard can exchanging tickets be? Well, I guess it depends on if your a distance runner or not, because it was like running a marathon. At a full out sprint. In sandals. Ducking and weaving through people the entire time. Which reminded me of football. Which I miss a lot. We had to run up one hill, only for them to tell us that we were at the ticket office for purchases, not internet exchanges, so we had to run back down the hill and up the one on the opposite side, were we discovered that, although this was the actual entrance, the exchange office was back down, then up and around behind where we were. So we ran again. By the time we got to that office it was 8:51. Fortunately, they took us to the front of the line to exchange our tickets and we somehow made it just as the second hand on my watch was about to force that big hand to change the hour. (A fancy way of saying it was almost 9:00).

The Alhambra was well worth the run. It was originally built by the Muslims and later conquered by the Christians, so it retains aspects of both religions. Although its technically a castle, its much different than one would imagine a castle to be. Each room is beautifully and uniquely decorated witch Islamic scripture covering the walls. It is a very open structure with many courtyards and outdoor walkways leading from one room to the next. In what I thought was the prettiest and most unique room it is said that a Christian leader hosted an extravagant dinner party in which he killed all his guests. Right before dessert none the less. Probably not quite what the guests had in mind when they received the invitation. There is a winter part to the Alhambra and a summer part, or "vacationing spot" in which there are gardens are everywhere - probably similar to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, though I have never been there. In my opinion what makes the Alhambra so beautiful, so majestic, is its location. Granada itself is impressive to take in. Its reminds me a little bit of Aspen, only its an actual city. Mountains rise up on all sides and then unexpectedly drop down into far reaching valleys which the highways shoot over, painting a sort of futuristic looking scene amidst an old, muslim founded community. The Alhambra looks over all of this and gives one an amazing view from all angles.

Wow, this has been an excessively long post. I guess that I felt as though I had to redeem myself a bit but I'm sure everybody is getting a little bit tired of reading this. Or maybe I'm just using that as an excuse due to the fact that I'm getting a little bit tired of typing, but to sum things up, we wrapped up our tour of Granada by visiting the Catedral of Granada and the Arabic community that is on a hill side close to the Alhambra.

I'm going to try to get back to this again this week to put up pictures and give a brief update on life at school. ¡Hasta luego!