If Only My Ears Didn't Feel Like They Had Cotton in Them

Now does the trip seem to get better as you go because you are seeing better things, because you have more to compare it to, or because you know you are getting nearer to the end? Whatever the reason it seems to have been continually getting better as I was in Lyon and now in Italy. I had a great time in Lyon visiting my friend and meeting all of his friends and just being able to relax for a few days. Now I am nearing the end of my first stop in Italy. I have been staying with relatives (ok, so the connection would actually take about a paragraph to explain with out confusing everyone so we'll just leave it at relatives) in Vistrorio which is near Torino.

I have been able to go hiking and sightseeing, eat all kinds of amazing food and try to learn Italian. Vistrorio is right in a glacial valley so there are an amazing number of beautiful views to take in. The only down side to that is the constant up and down with altitude and my ears still feel like they have cotton in them. On Saturday we had beautiful weather and got to see the Matterhorn while we were hiking and took a gondola part way up Chamois, one of the ski resorts in the area. Unfortunately today wasn't as nice and it rained and stormed for awhile but it was the first time that I had seen rain and heard thunder since I was back in Madison so it was actually very nice.

Tomorrow I will be leaving and heading East to Trentino to visit other relatives (more closely related but still, takes a while to describe) in a small town called Giustino. More fabulous updates as they come!

Learning French

So I've been chilling out in France for about a week now. I flew into Marseille last weekend and spent 2 nights with some Couch Surfers and got to see some of the citys festivals that weekend. They have a huge celebration for the Solstice with music and food everywhere. I took the train up to Lyon on Sunday and have been chilling out here all week staying with a friend. It's been great to just relax and enjoy the area I'm in and the people instead of rushing from place to place. I've also been able to do a lot of finalizing for the rest of my trip so I'll have less planning to do as it goes!

I now have an odd collection of Spanish, French, and Italian words, I never really know what language is going to come out when I try to say hello or thank you. Certainly makes things more interesting, I love hearing all the different languages too though.

With any luck I will have a few pictures coming soon, we'll see though!

The Half Way Point

Here we are with our last day in Spain. It´s hard to believe that I´ve really hit the half way point. 3 1/2 weeks in and 3 1/2 weeks left. We spent 3 nights in Tarifa after getting back from Morrocco, 2 more than we had planned on, but it turned out to be suprisingly difficult to figure out how we were getting to our next destinations and both ended up changing our ideas at least 10 times. Tarifa is the perfect place to spend a few days catching your breath and getting ready for the next journey. It´s a really small touristy town, but it´s also very laid back and quiet. People don´t come to Tarifa just becasue it´s Tarifa, they´re either coming from, or going to Morrocco, so everyone is trying to relax before they go or catching thier breath afterwards.

It´s right on the Med between Gibraltar and the other main port town to Morrocco (I´m totally blanking out on it´s name right now) and has a loooong gorgeous beach and lots of wind. I spent a number of hours on the beach swimming and laying out in the sun getting covered in blowing sand. With all the wind it´s popular for kite surfing too so that was pretty fun to watch as a few of them came closer to the more crowded part of the beach.

With the Euro Cup going on right now we´ve been able to go watch some Fútbol games at bars or resturants where the whole place is actually watcing the game, think the popularity of American Football but with less obnixious fans. Two nights ago we actually got to watch Spain beat Greece while we were out to dinner in Spain, now that was sweet.

We spent last night in Málaga and are doing a little sight seeing before we head to the airport this afternoon where we both catch flights to our next destinations. Brandon will be heading to Berlin and I´ll be heading to Mersaille. I lucked upon some perfect timing because Mersaille is having their biggest party of the year this weekend. They´re the oldest city in France so every year they have a huge celebration in thier historic district, should be a sweet time!

Back in Spain

Yup, we´re back in Spain. We went all the way from Meknés to Tarifa yesterday and found a hotel last night. We´re glad to be back in Spain and in Tarifa where things are a little calmer. We´re trying futily to figure out the next leg of our jouney up to France, there seem to be too many, yet not enough options. We´re excited to be moving on to a new country. I´m also particually excited to have a normal keyboard again. The Arabic keyboards down in Morrocco...not laid out so well for typing English...

Medinas, Souqs and Couscous

Our stay in Morrocco so far has been a whirlwind tour. We spent a night and a morning in the Medina of Tangier. A Medina is the old district of a city in Morrocco and is full of twisty allys, street vendors and people. Morroccan culture is certainly different than anything we've experienced so far. It changes as you ravel though it too. The north at one point was controlled by Spain so there is a lot of Spanish spoken and an overtone of Andalucian culture. We headed south to Casablanca the next day where it starts to change again. This pqrt of Morrocco, and a good portion of the south, had been under French control so a lot of French is spoken and there is a lot of French influence in the culture.

In Casa we met up with one of my old friends who is studying there for the summer. We spent the night and morning in Casa before jumping the train again and heading down to Marrakesh where we are now. They were having electricity problems with the tracks so what should have been a 3 hour trip took over 6. In the end we made it to Marrakesh jsut fine and are staying at an awesome little hotel with a huge tiled courtyard that has orange trees and tables to sit at. We spent today shopping in the Souqs, which are the huge marketplaces in the Medina. It's suprising how similar a lot of the stalls are and how similar a lot of it is to the import shops in Madison. We didn't make too many purchases but we have been eating good food and relaking in our courtyard. We have a few more days of Morroccan adventure planned before we head back up into Europe.

Now Thats Some Good Shit

Over the last weekend at the farm we got to do a little sightseeing and exporing with our other WWOOFers. One of the guys lives in Malaga so Saturday afternoon we drove to the coast and swam in the Mediterranean for the first time, swiming in saltwater is so cool, you're incredibly light. Its the only way I can float on my back without my feet sinking like rocks! After getting some delicious pizza we went to this huge benefit concert to raise money and awareness for the slave trade in Mauritania. Think outdoor Madison kind of concert with an activist/hippie crowd but 5 times as big. There were 4 bands that played and a "sideshow" of an qcrobqtics troupe doing different things during the time between bands. By far the coolest thing we had done on our trip so far. This small French band called Caravan Palace was freakin awesome, they were like a funk swing band from the future, absolutly wild. The first band was a hip hop fusion which was pretty cool and the last two were both Flamenco Fusion which is the popular genere of music for a lot of our age group in Spain. Its pretty interesting but can get repetitive after awhile.

The next morning, after sleeping till noon because the concert went untill 4am... we drove up to a Natural Park and ate our picnic lunch and went hiking. The mountqins of Andalucia are gorgeous, it's all reminiscent of the Sierra Nevads in California (which suprise suprise, the mountains qre called the Sierra Nevadas) or of parts of Colorado.

Our last day of work turned to be rather interesting and messy. For whatever reason they decided that it was the right time of year to stock up on thier manure for compost/fertilizer. Yup, I'm sure you all guess what that meant... The boys had been doing most of it getting chicken poop but that afternoon the 4 of us got dropped off at the side of the road with a big pile of bags to shovel horse manure. This starts out as just shovelling up the piles into bags that the farmer has piled next to the road, but as those piles dissapear you have to start digging under the hay trying to find the older piles. Fuuuun stuff, by the end of the afternoon we were quite good at determining what was "good shit" and what was "bad shit"

Needless to say our stay on the farm was good even though we cut it a few days short and left Tuesday morning. We hopped a series of busses and made our way down to Tarifa where we caught ferry to Tanger, Morrocco. That, will be anohter post though.

WWOOFing at Caña Dulce

I´m sitting here watching the time on my computer tick down at the internet cafe so I may not be able to do the last week of travling justice in this post. After leaving Quéntar last week we had a hell of a time getting all of our bus connections out to Coín to get picked up by our WWOOF hosts. I can never remember exactly what WWOOF stands for, it´s something along the lines of World Wide Organization of Organic Farmers. What it is is an organization of organic farms and the like that take volunteers for weeks at a time in exchange for room and board. Brandon an I have been at a Permaculture farm near Coín for the last week with the couple who live there and 2 other WWOOFers. It´s called Caña Dulce because of all the invasive cane surrounding it that they use in a lot of their furniture and bulidings. Our project for the last few days has been cutting cane to build a fence around on of their gardens...it is truly amazing how much cane that fence eats up. It´s not a farm so much as it is a sustainable living ecosystem. The couple that live there built it and have over 600 varietys of fruits, vegetables, and plants they grow throughout the year. They teach courses on Permaculture (basically sustainable agriculture) out there also. There are a number of seperate small buildings that make up the area so it´s a lot like living outside or being at camp with going between different buildings and areas of the farm. We´ve also done a lot of gardening and cleaned out the kitchen which is an outdoor patio coverd with a roof and cane and vine walls so that we could paint the concrete floor. We´ve done a lot of hard work but it´s been good to do someting physical. It´s been really good for us to be able to decompress from those first few days and get our bearins on what we´re doing next.

What are we doing next you ask? Going to Morrocco. We´ve met a numebr of people who have told us a lot about things to see there and one of the women we´re WWOOFing with was just there so we´re pretty excited.

I´ll be updating more about this last week when I get a chance in the next couple days.