Moving back to Switzerland

As the few of you who read the drivel I post on here will likely guess, there’s still some more Morocco stories to come. In fact, I have another 15 odd pages of tiny scrawly handwriting to type in and edit for your pleasure. But fear not, it will come. With pictures.

But in other news, I can happily announce that I have been back in Switzerland for a week or so now. There are both positives and negatives to this, and for fairness’ sake, I will list both.

Negatives:
- Switzerland is about as exciting as visiting your grandmother. Everything is fine, but strangely formal and people pinch your cheeks and coo and such, but you kind of wish you could be off somewhere else, even while you guess you’re glad you’re there.
- I live in a room—again—slightly larger than your average shoe box, with little possibility to escape and move into a real-person apartment.
- The cost of pretty much everything here could buy you a full meal and a nice hotel room in most countries I’ve been in lately.
- I’m sure pretentiousness is an additive to most food products and likely the water supply here. Everyone earns more than me and has a better job, and half of them aren’t too shy in sharing that—excepting my friends, of course—but the general atmosphere could be packaged and sold in small bottles as “snob genevoise.”
- An over-abundance of old women with bad dye jobs, fancy cars and/or fur coats, and small dogs. But that’s almost a positive, since it’s funny.
- Getting everything fixed / reorganized / reconnected / straightened out. Phone doesn’t work. Internet doesn’t work. Bike doesn’t work. Bank card doesn’t exist. Residence permit doesn’t exist. Etc. etc.
- Having to fight with the administration for everything. Bureaucracy is everywhere, and particularly the dreaded OCP, the Office Cantonal de la Population (i.e. the “Foreigner’s office” or your national equivalent) trusted with granting residence permits to unlucky foreigners. After my various experiences in Southeast Asia, and with, unsurprisingly, lots of friends who travel, I have learned that visas and formal regulations are no laughing matter.

A word, then, to the various of you—not that these people actually read this blog—who email me about living, studying, working, traveling, etc. abroad: don’t fuck around with residence restrictions, and put some effort into understanding immigration laws and foreigners’ rights and duties. Is there a difference if you enter overland or by air (in Thailand, Laos, and Singapore, yes; EU, no), can you renew your residence permit or visa, on a visa run if necessary (SE Asia besies Vietnam), or are you essentially screwed (the EU?)? Can you get out of a problem by paying? I say, and I emphasize this: Just because you want to live/work/study/whatever abroad, doesn’t mean you will be able to, particularly if you're organizing it on your own. Many countries have seemingly silly and unnecessary laws restricting foreigners, most egregiously the United States, who finds it amusing, perversely appropriate and not at all scarring to deeply interrogate whomever they feel like, besides profiling anyone of Arab descent or of funny skin tint, such as the deeply sketchy species of young Europeans visiting the love interest they met on their last exchange. But these laws are no lauging matter: you mess up in the wrong way, and you may lose the ability to ever visit a particular country again. You may be subject to fines (as I was in Indonesia for overstaying), or lashes (ostensibly in Singapore. I’ll let you know once I try it), or deportation (US anyone?). I’ve heard stories of Spanish people staying illegally in the US and traveling in- and out via Mexico, of outrageous fines in SE Asia, or a dual Canadian-Dutch citizen friend who was only able to successfully leave the EU on the Dutch passport because a Canadian one only grants you three months, and all kinds of things people do to be allowed to stay legally. Living in Switzerland, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of dealing with the incredibly complicated and not particularly foreigner-friendly Swiss bureaucracy, involves a stack of about twenty documents, including your resumé, a letter (in one of their official languages, none of which is English) stating what you’re doing and why, proof of financial means and/or a job contract, copies of transcripts and certificates (depending on what kind of permit), eventually proof of health insurance, sometimes a Swiss person who will sign for you…

Positives:
- Everything works. Buses, trains, office hours, stores, whatever you want, it works predictably and efficiently.
- Sit-down toilets and hot showers. (Insert comment about me being posh here) These are things I can and do certainly do without. I adjust well to hardship, at least at this stage because I am young and poor and have no standards, so it doesn’t actually cause a problem that I hadn’t had a hot shower in weeks (months?), and such showers as I had mostly consisted of a bucket of tepid water. I can also acclimate to squat toilets and all that jazz, but don’t pretend you don’t enjoy these comforts—as much as I am sure you can live without them—when you have the opportunity or when you come back home. As with Singapore, Switzerland has reliable sit-down toilets and hot showers, but that is still “new” enough to be a luxury.
- Crisp evening air. Having not been much under 25 or even 35 degrees Celsius for awhile, I appreciate cool evenings and sleeping under heavier blankets, a particular delight taken from my childhood in the frigid Rocky mountains and a welcome change from sweaty nights of no sleep because the power--and your pathetic litte fan--cut off at 10 pm and it's blistering hot.
- Running again. Aside from the somewhat depressing fact that pretty much everyone I know here is training for the (half) marathon (insert instant inferiority complex), I am now running the slowest 5 k of my life, recovering both from ankle surgery last year and a solid bout of laziness inspired by cheap Asian food and constant over-30-degree temperatures, in about the same amount of time it used to take me to run 9 k. But oh well, I am running again, and thoroughly enjoy the smell of the fresh grass, the sight of the river, the flowers, and the overweight people with small dogs which all grace my usual running route.
- No longer meeting new people all the frigging time. I wanted to print up cards (“My name is …. , I do …, I live …, and I am traveling …”) to hand out and spare myself the effort. Traveling alone does not mean that you are alone, but rather that you have new people every day. Here I am happy to see familiar faces, and to catch up. I felt slightly like an alien at first, or at an awkward family / school reunion when you meet people you don’t really know and haven’t seen for a long time and they ask how it’s going and you kind of go, “uh…, welllllll, I went off and joined the circus and then got married to a Kazakhstani and then got famous as a bareknuckle-transvestite-fighter in Botswana….” And the other person kind of nods and says something noncommittal (“Ah yes, Kazakhstan, good times,”) and no one knows how to bridge the gap of several months/years. But you talk a bit, and the stories come out, and it is all good. I have to say that “my” Geneva people are some of the most awesome people I’ve met, and most of them have amazing stories of their own to tell, from slums in Kenya to bus accidents in Egypt, having the roof of their apartment collapse in Berlin, local transport in Ecuador or what have you. So there’s not much or any of the “one-upsmanship” that many people either add to travel stories (“this one time we were in Mexico and we were attacked by a monkey!” and the other person replies with, “this one time where we were trekking through virgin forest, avoiding the landmines in northern Laos, we spent five days on a monkey farm, teaching them to write Shakespeare and drive cars…” etc.) or that non-travellers think that we travelers intentionally add to our stories, as if it were a kind of condiment. No, the point of the story is not “this one time in Kenya,” but rather the story itself, and stop getting so hung up on the Kenya part.
- The fact that my move was relatively unproblematic. Moving to another country is always a pain: you need a lot of papers and documents and permissions (see above), but you have to get ahold of lodging, food, phone, internet, and transportation services, and you may not know where all of these come from or how to access them. Thankfully, as far as most of this was concerned, this move went relatively easy, both because I already know Switzerland and Geneva, and also because there was no language barrier (yes, let me see you try to figure out how not to get screwed buying a sim card if you speak no Arabic in Egypt. It's fun, let me tell you) - and I have friends who helped me out. Short summary, it more or less went well, and better than usual. Moving back is definitely easier than moving away (but I guess less exciting)
- Living in a country where the language is an exciting extra facet: my French can use improvement, and while day to day stuff is no problem, I see countless opportunities to expand and improve. Other countries (i.e. most of Europe) either speaks excellent English (also Singapore, much of Morocco), or spoke a language I wasn't even trying to nor had hopes of learning (much the rest of SE Asia). And learning a new language is one of my favorite parts of living abroad (plus the continued opportunity to speak the old languages. Try that in the US).
- The fact that the first round of my bureaucratic fight went pretty well. I managed to get someone nice AND competent, who said more or less was in order. I do not count my chickens, goats, small children, mutant aliens or anything else until it hatches, but at least I haven’t yet encountered problems (i.e. having to get a new visa from somewhere before I can apply for a residence permit, which was a distinct possibility) at this stage.
- Being able to go to bed before midnight, and not having the feeling you’re missing the “nightlife” (get real, it’s Wednesday).

And with that: good night.

Marruecos part 1: Madrid - Granada - Chefchaouen

Viva España: Madrid to Grenada to Algeciras

The whole point of taking the evening bus was so that A. could go to class, but she didn’t and we were still almost late. We had enough food to feed a small village in Africa plus the first day of a moderately-sized Indian wedding party. We proceeded to Granada without incident, except for the part of not being able to locate the Bolsilla de Santa Paula: particularly because it was a street and not actually a saint’s pocket.

Still rubbing the sleep from our eyes and arguing cantankerously about stopping for breakfast, we find a bus stop well populated by Asian tourists that we assumed it would take us to the Alhambra, but we and they were wrong, and it didn’t. I clutched my coffee like a dying person clutches the last piece of chocolate cake thinking happy coffee thoughts as we joined the ticket lines after the short ride up the hill. At 8h20 the lady sold us tickets for the 8h30 entry to the palace, and we galloped off over the cobblestones, dodging elderly tourists like walker-wielding obstacles.


View over Granada from the Alhambra

In barely two and a half hours we’d finished the Alhambra complex, palaces, gardens and all. It helped we were early, it helped we’d declined the audio guides, and it helped that the weather wasn’t too inviting, and that we were also not trailing small children. Still the Alhambra is gorgeous. It’s Moorish architecture, full of vaulted ceilings, mosaics, carvings and the beautiful arches that swept gracefully over fountained courtyards. If I’m ever rich and famous I’ll buy me a castle like that. Somehow, we imagined it would be huge instead of just big. It could have been Tuscany, for all we could tell. Perhaps we took the wrong bus?

Confronted with hedges the size of moving trucks, it’s easy to see the appeal. It’s like being a kid again, playing hide and seek among the labyrinthian trees. Imagine a hundred years ago, these hedges, these gardens. Orange trees and pomegranate trees are interspersed with flowers and hedges. A lumbering tour group of the newly wed, overfed and nearly dead obstruct the path, and we duck around the corner, and I admire a handsome Italian framed against the foliage – and soon we are free. There is a window in the gardens, set high in one of the many terraces and flanked by columns. From here, as from many places in the Alhambra, you can see the city spread gently across the hilltops. In the distance, the Sierra Nevadas; on the hill, a church; in between, pueblos blancos and new, ugly apartment blocks.

We spent the afternoon staggering from tapas bar to tapas bar. At one point, lost, looking the map, the stranger who stopped to help turned out to be none other than a childhood acquaintance. Small frigging world.

We sat on the bench in the sun. We’d just received complete and through advice on “Au Maroc” from the energetic Frenchman at the creperie on plaza de la universitad. The other half of the bench was occupied by a young Spanish guy, a future teacher looking (as of yet unsuccessfully) for a job, with friendly eyes and floppy hair, who wanted to know just why one needed the interrogative ‘do’ for the question ‘do you understand?’ and not just ‘you understand?’

I wonder how much a tapas bar represents the normal population – or what demographic thereof – in Grenada or elsewhere. It’s an undeniably social outing, but one which doesn’t perforce replace family togetherness.

Our attempt to get to Algeciras was doomed from the start. Direct bus, full. So we had tostadas and went for Málaga. Next bus was full, so we whiled away the time in an internet café where A. made friends with the shaved-headed Serbian involved in shady business in Barcelona. Finally, after a brief but notable delay near Algecrias, caused by the apparent but un-evident breakdown of our bus five minutes from the bus station, during which one grandmother complained incessantly, we followed a Moroccan couple and three Walesian hitchhikers (…into the bar, and the bartender asked, “what is this, some kind of a joke?”) to find all the ferries delayed. Thus: a nice night in the enchanting and beautiful little port town of Algeciras (read: it’s a shoddy dump with sketchy people. We stayed in.)


Entrée au Maroc

We decided to head to and through Ceuta—the Spanish enclave—rather than Tangiers, to save ourselves some time and the hassle. The ferry embarkment proceeded without problem, and we spent much of the ride taking the micky out of other passengers, with the desperate hope that none of them spoke German – but these were Americans, so I doubt it. Americans, as is widely known, do not learn foreign languages.

“The bus to the border is the Number 7. It costs 75 cents.” With our packs on our backs, looking somewhat muddled and confused, a man standing behind us interrupted our thoughts. Not only did this man know everyting there was to know about the bus and the border, he even took us to a money changer and deposited us at the bus station. “Remember: Number 7. You see number 9, you don’t go. You see number 7, you go.”

Ceuta, the Spanish enclave carved out of Morocco, is understandably a mixture of Spain/Europe and Morocco/North Africa. Distinctly Mediterranean, rougher around the edges, but with far more flair than Algeciras. The people look north African, the cars are Spanish., and across from the bus stop are the remnants of the old fortress: imposing battlements jutting out of the blue water. A construction worker dangling into the canal waved as he saw me taking pictures.

The border: the end of the line and we all pile out. Everyone’s on foot, most people don’t have baggage and anyways we’re pretty much the only northern European-looking people there It’s several hundred yards/meters to and through the border. A tall fence blocks off the ocean; to our right, the hillside. Cars and lorries are variously parked along rough lanes of concrete barriers. A chain link fence sometimes cordons off the pedestrians from the cars, and we trudge along behind large headscarved women and packs of young men. As our “guide” from before described it, we were “walking from Europe to Africa.”

Apparently pedestrians and cars were checked at the same guardposts, but there didn’t seem to be anything approaching a queue or any kind of order. Only once we were forced to go through a little gate to the side. The actual stampring process was uncomplicated but took awhile, seeing as how they were likely using the same computer system for the last hundred and twenty years. Two bored-looking functionaries with large moustaches like small furry animals and some kind of stinky incence typed mysterious numbers into a computer system apparently running DOS. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, and ma salaama! A further bored-looking guard wanted to see in my bag, but came disinterested after he heard I spoke French. “Vouz avez des armes?” he asked me. Do I have weapons? Do they ask this question to everyone, or only 20-something female white backpackers?

Taxi to Tétouan cost 120 DH, prix fixé. Our driver had blue eyes and spoke Spanish, but wore the Arab striped kaftan and deposited us at the bus station with little commentary. Tétouan was not the sleepy little town I’d imagined, but rather a big, sprawling thing, outgrowing its borders like a giant jam smear. As soon as we entered the station, we were accosted by an ostensible employee with no teeth who pretended to be insulted that we were anything but thrilled with him forcing his ‘help’ on us, and helpfully interrupting our consultation in every possible language he knew. Anyways, it was noon, and apparently the next bus was at three (a likely storey, but okay), but he disappeared and magically reappeared with three Frenchies (were they on special, buy one get two free?) with whom we shared the taxi.

They negotiated the fare (40 DH per person, and we split the cost of the sixth seat), and squeezed into the back. “En effet, la sixième place, où est-elle?” I asked, as A. was practically sitting in my lap. Our “guide” wanted backsheesh, but I let the French guy argue with him and contented myself with sucking my gut in and trying to make my hips smaller to accommodate everyone. The ride was spectacular: rolling hillsides, farms, fields and animals, and with a chain of fog-covered mountains to our perpetual left. Little villages dotted the landscape here and there, and it was all as pastoral and bucolic as a 16th century Dutch painting. The driver drove like his car was on fire AND someone was trying to steal his bobblehead, dodging lorries and busses as if in a slalom. I contemplated the screw—what remained of the door lock—the missing door latch and the screwdriver jammed in apparently to keep the window from falling down, and wandered if anything was keeping the door shut as we were thrown around the corners and I against the door.

Chefchaouen is apparently the weed capital of Morocco, and as soon as we get out of the cab someone was already pushing. We declined and trotted off after the Frenchies. Their hotel was nice but full; the one next door was confusingly priced: 50 DH/person for a shared private room or 70 DH per person for a bed in a dorm, and had only one room for one night but could maybe let us sleep on the roof. No, thank you. So we ended up at the hotel we had wanted to go anyways, where the quixotic owner insisted on his broken German and we on our respective Spanish and French, which he spoke considerably better.


A doorway in Chefchaouen

Apparently the square around the castle thing is a giant tourist trap. We’d heard about a couple of recommended restaurants, but the directios were useless so we wandered out of the square to find something, anything – and ended up at the recommended restaurant anyways! There we met three girls from the Basque country in Spain, and after lunch we migrated for tea and coffee, with a mixed Spanish/English/German discussion on pretty much everything.

Besides the marijuana, Chefchaouen is renowned for its beautiful blue medina. The walls, the stairs, everything is painted a stunning and varying shade of cobalt and azure blue, so after sending off Las Españolas we wandered about until we found some shoes and some picnic snacks for dinner.

I guess you could say I didn’t get much out of the first / only full day in Chefchaouen: right away I was hit with a fantastic bout of Funny Tummy / Touristas / whatever you want to call it, and was as feeble as your grandmother without her walker. It didn’t help that someone yelling in Russian, which subsided briefly after I pounded on the wall with my fist, interrupted both the night before and the early morning. Honestly.

Anyways, the whole “being sick” thing resulted in me looking as if someone were pulling my teeth without anesthetic while I turned a lovely shade of green. It was like high school biology all over again. I got to schlep myself up and down the medina, culminating in the crowning moment when I “redecorated” the pavestones in front of the café. Being sick, at least this kind of sick, is like walking around with a very heavy blanket. Everything is a huge effort, and sometimes the edges get fuzzy. It could have been the dates, or the olives, or more likely just a random fluke. I’d made it through most of Asia with no problem, so I guess it was my turn.

We met Las Españolas for lunch and tea, which means they had lunch and I had nothing, looking about as green as my mint tea. We took our tea at the smaller plaza within the medina. From somewhere, loud Arabic pop music was blaring, and somewhere behind us, a backgammon or cards game progressed loudly, eagerly followed by a crowd of young men. We sat outside on the square in the sun with the other tourists (as a side note, that’s a good way to spot a tourist at a hundred yards: tourists sit in the sun, locals in the shade), including a pack of Argentineans who communicated with walkie talkie and insisted on filming strange things. Everywhere young men. The plaza was picturesque and almost empty. The young guy seated on the step stood out starkly against the whitewashed walls, and we sipped our over-sweetened mint tea.

As expected, I slept away the afternoon, and the evening, and well into the next day like a drugged puppy at the pet store. How to tell I’m sick: I sleep for fifteen hours straight. However, this is a poor diagnostic tool as this feat is nothing special for your average university student. Because Las Españolas had helpfully fetched our bus tickets the night before, we had time to meet for breakfast before heading to the gare routière.

Up behind the medina, through twisting alleys where the day before we had seen three tiny newborn kittens, carefully watched over by several respectively tiny children (“ils sont nos chats!”), up behind the tourist shops I suppose the residents live, though it’s hard to tell if the place isn’t simply one giant tourist bazaar. Signs of inhabitants exist; there are alleys with no tourists, some smelling of dank water, but most or all as lovely; and by the river, a dozen women stand bent over buckets doing their laundry at the metal stands built for this purpose on the banks. They ostensibly have washing machines at home, but as water is so expensive, they prefer to do the washing there.


Another typical Chefchaouen shot