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! 

Feliz Cumpleaños Lauren

Last Monday was Lauren's birthday. Lauren loves birthdays. Not just her own birthday, but anyone's birthday. She loves to plan the parties, decorations, cakes, gifts-everything, so there was a lot to live up to and a lot to be done to give her a proper birthday party in Panama. Luckily I had some help from Molly and Jess (the other girls that work at the hostels with us) and some guests. Two guys who had been staying here for a while went to Panama City for the weekend and called to see if they could pick up anything in the big city that we couldn't get on the little island here. Well of course no Latin America fiesta is complete without the likes of a piñata, so I told Eric and Dusty to pick up one, preferably in the shape of a dog because as we have all come to know, Lauren hates dogs (cats, dogs, household pets, and most any other animal for that matter. But she loves children, so she does have a soul!) and the sheer joy she would get from beating the crap out of a dog piñata would probably be birthay present enough for her. Plus Lauren LOVES candy, even the crap candy-I think it was because she was deprived of it as a child- so that's like two birthday presents in one. So the boys went all out on a birthay shopping frenzy and bought a piñata, pin the tail on the donkey game, birthday hats, birthday masks (eye masks with clown like noses that in the end nobody put on because they were too scary), balloons, candles, and a pink Tinkerbell "Feliz Cumpleaños" banner that I had to confirm for Eric right before he put up did in fact mean Happy Birthday in Spanish.
While Dusty and Eric set up the decorations, I had to finish carrying out my "brilliant" idea of making alfajores, an Argentine dessert that consists of two cookies with dulce de leche (a caramel like substance) squished in the middle. I considered it brilliant when I first thought of it because Lauren and I both studied abroad in Buenos Aires and would often get nostalgic for all things Argentine while traveling. I found a recipe for making dulce de leche from scratch, which didn't seem too hard. All you needed was a gallon of milk, four cups of sugar, some baking soda and a little vanilla. Easy enough right? Well, not when you're using a Latin American stove that has no proper heat gauge and something that should take an hour to make ends up taking four. I started boiling the milk and mixing in the ingredients at around 10 a.m., but then I wanted to take Lauren to lunch and go with her to the beach for her birthday, so Molly graciously offered to take over. Molly did not know what she was getting herself into, though, (nor did I) and 4 hours later when we came back from the beach, the dulche de leche had just barely formed the right consistency and was ready to be taken off the stove. Molly had slaved away that entire time standing in front of the hot stove in 90 degree heat stirring the milk and sugar mixture until it hardened into a thick brownish goo (stirring constantly the whole time, as the recipe called for, or else it would burn). I got back and apologized profusely when I saw Molly sweating bullets and looking just a bit pissed off, but she must have been on too much of a sugar high from sampling all of the dulce de leche because she merely said "I haven't left this kitchen or this vat of sugary milk for four hours and I'm covered in sweat. I'm going to shower. Lauren better damn like dulce de leche." I truly was grateful to her.

But the dessert was still not done. I had to make the cookie part for the alfajores. I also had to do this in one hour and with 10 other guests who decided to all cook dinner together at the same time in the hostel's confined kitchen space. I cannot convey how much I sweat that day, well I sweat everyday honestly, but this day in particular, what with the stress of getting everything right for Lauren's birthay, the cooking, the crowdedness, etc., I had to mop up my brow with a rag every five minutes. Anyways, some minor alterations had to be made to the recipe (we didn't have baking powder, we only had half of the cornmeal it called for because I noticed halfway through pouring the cornmeal into the batter that maggots had eaten through the bag, oh well, plus 350 degrees F on an oven in Panama is not something easily guestimated even if I could read what the knob in Celcius). But after some minor pan burning and smoke coming out of the oven, the cookies turned out not only edible, but actually pretty tasty.

The celebration turned out great, and I think it exceeded Lauren's expectations. We had fish and salad for dinner, homemade white sangria to drink, alfajores and brownies for dessert, followed by a game of pin the tail on the donkey and some piñata bashing that Lauren managed to take down in well under 5 minutes. It was quite best one of the funniest nights we've had here in Bocas. Lauren said it was the best birthday ever, but I think it might have been the sangria talking.