A Few Things That Make Me Happy

After being home for more than two weeks (my longest stay in the country since May!), I've come to honestly enjoy the US again. Before I came back, both while in Latin America and Europe, I was dreading being not only back at home in my small town in Connecticut, but being back in the US in general. I realized, though, that I took some things for granted while being away. Here is a list, in no particular order, of the things I most enjoy about being back in my homeland:

1. Hot showers
2. Using toilet paper
3. Target
4. Running outside without being looked at funny
5. Tabloids/E! News/Bravo/any entertainment gossip guilty pleasure
6. Cheese-any and all kinds
7. My bank and the use of a debit card almost anywhere-not having to pay $5 every time I need cash really cuts costs
   
8. The Daily Show
9. Rush hour commute-at first I wanted to curl up in a ball instead of being thrust up against the metro doors in DC and NY while loads of people tried to jam into the tiny subway car between the hours of 7-9 a.m. and 4-7 p.m.-even though the next train would be along in one minute-but after a few times I started to look forward to the business people in the business attire, and the standard unspoken code that one must ALWAYS stand to the right while on the escalator so people can walk by on the left
10. My clothes, my glorious clothes! Now I am not entirely superficial nor fashion-obsessed in the least, but living out of a backpack for 8 months, wearing the same three shirts and one pair of pants day after day after day can REALLY get to a person. When I got home the first thing I did was kneel down in front of my closet and go over each and every article of clothing and thank it for being there and apologizing for having forgotten about it. Picking out what I want to wear has become the best part of my day because it's like I've acquired an entirely new wardrobe without having to spend a cent!
    

Mo-ROCK-on

So after getting back to the US and saying hello to friends and family after 6 months of traveling in Central and South America, I got the traveling bug again and 2 weeks later flew to London to visit friends from my time studying abroad in Mexico. My quick week-long European getaway turned into a month overseas with Africa stirred into the mix when my Australian friend suggested we hit up Morocco since flights were so cheap from Europe. Ok, done. So after a great 10 days in London with friends, I took the train to Paris for a couple of days because I had another friend there. I really loved Paris though it was FREEZING! in the mid to high 20s during the day, and I was outside seeing the sights all day! But it was well worth it, it was amazing to see the Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Moulin Rouge, the Seine, Champs Elysee, and the other great Paris sights. And of course the food! Within my first 5 minutes of getting off of the metro I saw 3 women with baguettes. The cheese aisle in the super market overwhelmed so much, I had to take multiple photos. I gorged on nutella crepes made from street vendors, and had enough wine to suffice me for the next week in alcohol-scare Morocco. Parisians were really nice too, despite my built-up stereotypes prior to coming. While attempting to get my bearings after getting off the wrong metro stop, a woman came up to me and offered me help. I was worrying a lot about my lack of French before going to Paris, and since my friend wasn't going to be around until the next day, I had to get by my first night in Paris without her. But I found it to be a really English-friendly place and I got by just fine, even managed to pick up a few key phrases from my French friend Jerome while in London (only the vital ones like where is the toilet, can I have water? how much? etc).

On Monday morning, I flew from Paris to Milan and had a 7 hour layover so I got a few hours to roam around the city. Milan was pretty cool, I had some pasta and gilatto and bought some chocolates, very yummy. I stumbled upon this massive cathedral that was built in the 13th century that was amazing, and then went to Teatro alla Scala, which was some famous theater where a lot of opera is performed, to be honest I had no idea what any of this stuff was, I just wandered around and literally found these sights and saw tourists with cameras so figured they must be important touristy spots. Anyhoo, I met my Australian friend Emma (who I met abroad in Mexico and until New Years hadn't seen for a year and a half!) back at the Milan airport for our flight to Fes, Morocco later in the day and at around 7 pm we got to Morocco! It's so different than any place I've ever been! The stop signs are in Arabic! (They speak Arabic, Berber-some indigenous tribal language that's similar to Arabic I think) and a bit of French, so Emma and I have been managing to get by with the little French I picked up in my 3 days there, Spanish (since for some reason everyone thinks we're from Spain) and English. I learned how to say thank you in Arabic, it's "shukhan" or something like that. The people here are pretty nice, though a bit sketchy at first because the men wear these big frock-like coats with hoods, but they're just their way of keeping warm as it is only in the low 50s during the day and drops to freezing at night (not the best fashion statement if you ask me, but whatevs, their call). It's definitely not that cold in comparison with Paris where my toes almost froze off it was so cold, but for Moroccan standards it's bad, hasn't been this cold since the 70s I guess. The country is 99% Muslim so most all women wear head scarves and you don't see any in cafes or restaurants, or walking alone with men. It's very different in that sense than any place in Latin America I've been too. But it the markets remind me of Mexico, they have a plethora of handicrafts and fun foods to try. Me and Emma had 3 pots of mint tea each yesterday, they use real mint leaves and pour hot water over them and add a bit of sugar, so nice! They're big on cous cous and a dish called tajine, which is basically a stew and you can get it with different kinds of veggies and meat.

The landscape is beautiful here, full of rolling hills and white adobe buildings and houses. Fes is pretty cosmopolitan, and seems pretty rich. The poverty here doesn't seem jarring in the slightest and everyone is friendly and happy, though of course they can be aggressive to us tourists and have called out to us in French, Spanish, English, etc while Emma and I just pretend to be from Finland. Though when we did this yesterday and pretended we didn't speak English, some guy gave us shit and asked us how could we not speak English when it's the most popular language in the world! I mean what if we really didn't speak it!

I can't wait to see what Marrakech is like, we've heard it's more Moroccan, and more of a city than Fes. What me and Emma are really looking forward to are the 70 degree weather and the hammans-Turkish baths-there!

Bocas Flood 2K8

Today is the first day I've had access to the internet or a phone in 4 or so days. The archipelago that Bocas del Toro makes up has been hit by torrential rains, perhaps a tropical storm..? Who knows, since we have no access to the real world on this island. It started raining about a week ago, which was fine because November is the rainy season and usually it will rain for a couple of days and then be sunny for 3 days or so, then go back to rain. So we were waiting out the storm, ready for it to turn sunny again, when Friday morning I trudged through the pouring rain at 8 a.m. to open and hopefully find dry refuge in the Mondo Taitu Hostel when I found myself splashing through water all throughout the hostel. It had been a long night the night before, so I was a bit too tired and overwhelmed (and maybe still a little drunk) to do anything about it. I opened the rest of the hostel smoothly and then just sat at the desk and looked around in utter disbelief. Forty-five minutes later Daniel, one of the owners, came downstairs and by this point the water had risen. He took one look out the back door and started running around freaking out. Apparently this wasn't normal and hadn't happened the whole time he's been in Bocas, which is four years (I later found out from one of the cleaning women that this hadn't happened since 1991!). Usually when one looks out the back door of the hostel he or she can find the street, a house across the street, a dock that goes off of the backyard of said house into the sea. But not this day. Instead the ocean was literally at our doorstep. There was no road, kids were paddling canoes in the road. There was no cutoff to where the ocean ended and the flooding of land began. It was wild! By 11 p.m. when Molly woke up the water inside the hostel was ankle deep. And it wasn't just sea water, water had come up through the toilets, it had seeped up from under the concrete floor, there were pieces of food, wrappers, and other discarded items floating in the water.

  Shot out of the back door of the hostel 

It was time to take action. Daniel and the cleaning ladies grabbed brooms and pails and started pushing the water out of the hostel through the back door. All of the guests were up by this point, had checked out early, but had no way of getting anywhere so the flooded hostel became a great resource for people funnel their pent up frustration and giddiness through. Everyone started grabbing any type of scooping device they could find and were bent over shoveling the water out of the hostel. We had Israelis making pancakes in the kitchen who then started to bang on pots and pans and stools singing some Hebrew jingles to entertain us. People started dancing along while sweeping out the water. When we had gotten most of the water out some Spaniards started detailing out plans of how we were going to use surfboards and pieces of wood to keep the water back. It was definitely a united effort on all fronts.  

My feet in the gross water ahh!

Later the rumors start about what is actually going on: a tropical storm, a hurricane, just heavy rains that are flooding the island because we sunk 30 cm because of the earthquake that happened a couple weeks ago. For the past 3 days there have only been 5 people in this 56-person capacity hostel, it feels like a ghost town. Meanwhile over at our sister hostel, Heike, since there is nothing to do on this island when it's raining and there is no way for people to leave, it's ridiculously loud and crowded. The roads on the mainland that connect the port town to the rest of the country are washed away by landslides so there is no way to travel by land. The river at the border with Costa Rica flooded out the bridge that connects the two countries. The airport here was people's only hope, but it's been closed because of the weather for the past 3 days. We still don't know what is actually going on, but there's still water everywhere and today is the first day that it hasn't rained all day in over a week. We're slowly but surely pulling ourselves out of this rainy depression. It's Thanksgiving soon! I'm supposed to go off to Colombia the day after, but who knows if/when I'll really go!