Skipping Town

On Wednesday, I set out from Barcelona to make a roundabout journey home: Barcelona-Paris-Newark-Pittsburgh. I’m home for the holidays—all of them—to wait out a block of time for visa reasons. So I’m in Connellsville once again, after having nearly missed my flight from Paris to Newark—a delay in my Barcelona-Paris flight had me running through Charles de Gaulle, where, once I reached the corridor where my gate was located, I found Air France people looking for me, radioing the gate with walkie-talkies once they spotted a winded, frantically running American. It was a near miss. For my suitcase, packed carefully with my favorite clothes and all the postcards and mementos I’ve accumulated from my travels over the past few months, not to mention Andrew’s soon-to-be-fixed laptop and my favorite perfume, it was a total miss. At Newark, waiting at baggage claim for my suitcase, I had a sinking feeling that it may not have made it from Paris. I waited and waited until I was the last person w...

This weekend, Andrew planned a surprise trip—whose destination, this time, I didn’t find out until we’d been driving for about an hour in the car. We were headed to Cadaques, a tiny village two hours north of Barcelona, just below the French border, on the rocky coastline of the Costa Brava. The drive isn’t difficult until the last leg, which involves a winding, steep climb up the mountainside—with a steep dropoff to the side, and lots of sharp blind curves. It was enough to make me realize that I haven’t, after all, grown out of my tendency to get motion-sick. But we reached the town without incident. Our hotel, like so much else in Cadaques, was full of Salvador Dali memorabilia: photographs, prints, and Dali-esque artworks in the lobby. Cadaques was Dali’s home for many years, and it was where he met his wife, Gala—who had traveled to Cadaques from Paris with her husband, only to subsequently leave him for Dali. Cadaques is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in Spain or else...

The kitchen of our new apartment, though limited to a freestanding double-hotplate unit, a large toaster oven, and a microwave, has proven to be more useable than we initially feared. The hotplates are super-hot, boiling water in half the time as the gas stove in our old place; and though we can’t use them both at once—they’re too close together—we’ve made do. The toaster oven thing is quite large, which means we’ve been able to cook the holy grail of easy dinners: frozen pizza, which here in Barcelona are fantastically cheap and, surprisingly, delicious. This weekend, I decided to make chili, since Barcelona is—finally—a normal fall temperature, crisp and chilly (at least in the evenings; the afternoons are still warm enough for short sleeves). Recipe in hand, Andrew and I went to the supermarket at El Corte Ingles, since our small, local Condis market has a very limited selection of ingredients—if I would find chili powder in Barcelona, I knew, I’d find it at the Corte. Some of the i...

There was a lot to absorb in Marrakech—too much for one trip. Marrakech is too wild, too different, too surprising, too uncomfortable—the things I saw and felt during this first trip are still swimming around, undigested. I think perhaps they’re not meant to be digested, that the exhausted inside-out feeling I had when I got back to Barcelona was the point of going to Marrakech. It’s not a place I want to live, unlike, say, Amsterdam, whose canal houses and ridiculous charm are perfect for domestic fantasies; and it’s not a place ideal for relaxation, like the hidden cove beaches of Mallorca. In Marrakech, I was uncomfortable, sometimes nervous, often uneasy, and always aware to the point of absolute sensory overload. When I got back to Barcelona, I felt like I’d been away for weeks—Marrakech required the entirety of my attention, and I hardly thought of Spain at all while we were there. My mind was monopolized by other concerns: crossing the streets without getting hit by a motorbike;...

The night before we left Marrakech, we decided to have a home cooked couscous dinner at our lovely, four-room riad. The French riad owner, Michel, and all the other guests had stayed in for dinner as well: a French-speaking Swiss couple, who, thankfully, spoke English as well; a French couple; and two new guests, a French woman and her daughter, who’d arrived just that night. When the French woman came into the cozy, fire-warmed lounge for dinner, I thought I recognized her—but that was ridiculous. She was French; we were in one of hundreds of riads; we were in the middle of Morocco. But when I saw her again the next day at breakfast, the feeling persisted, and later in the day I placed her: she looked like the heartbroken downstairs neighbor in Amelie. We saw the woman in the street on our last night, as Simon loaded our suitcase into our airport-bound taxi. She wished us a good journey; we wished her a good stay. “I just have to tell you how much you look like an actress from Amelie,...

In warren of Marrakech souqs (small shops), which begins to the north of Djemaa el-Fna, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of stalls line the streets. Some are wood-lined, with elaborate doorways and luxurious interiors, but most are makeshift, little more than alcoves carved into rock. The narrow streets between them, some paved, some dirt, are covered in places by a haphazard “roof” made from tarps and sticks. Real Moroccan life is conducted in the souqs, which sell all the essentials of daily living: conical mounds of spices and herbs; jars and bins of apothecary supplies; all manner of dried foods, preserved fruits, and olives; tray after tray of Moroccan pastries, buzzing with bees and flies; bushels of fresh mint; freshly butchered meat; soon-to-be butchered meat. Pomegranates, fresh figs, onions, carrots, peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are piled in every available corner, sometimes sold by old women hunched over small blankets on the ground. Besides foods, the souqs also sell all manne...

We saw so much of Marrakech during our four days there; but had we simply stood in one spot in the Djemaa el-Fna the entire time, looking around, taking it in, our trip would have been no less interesting. Djemaa el-Fna is the main square of Marrakech, the throbbing heart of the city for both tourists and locals. Calling it a “square” is wholly inadequate and inaccurate: it suggests a certain familiarity, a certain refinement, and Djemaa el-Fna is anything but refined and familiar. Around the edges of Djemaa el-Fna are shops, cafes, restaurants, and small newspaper stands. In the heart of the square are donkey-drawn carts piled with dried fruits and nuts—dates, apricots, figs, almonds—and buzzing with flies. Interspersed among the dried fruit carts are glass-encased carts full of oranges, where you can buy fresh-squeezed orange juice (unless you’re a tourist with a wary Western stomach). At night, these carts multiply a hundredfold with the food stalls, some selling steamed snails, oth...

We arrived in Marrakech in darkness. From the window of the plane we could see the bright red neon Marrakech Menara Airport sign in French and Arabic; when we climbed down from the plane and walked en masse across the tarmac to the airport door, we could see the Koutoubia minaret in the distance—the city center. Inside, our passports were stamped; we found an ATM and withdrew hundreds of dirhams, the equivalent of about 30 euros; and then we looked around anxiously for our driver, without whom we’d have been stranded at the Marrakech airport. The city center would have been accessible enough by taxi, but our riad—a traditional Moroccan home refurbished as a guesthouse—would have been hidden forever in the warren of unmarked streets in the Marrakech kasbah. Fortunately for us, there he was, along with Simon, a guide/servant sort of person at the riad, with Andrew’s name and the name of our riad written on a bright red sign. Simon spoke minimal French and even more minimal English. He sh...