Jamie Fehr

This was too wild an experience to not be publicly documented. My pilgrimage to Essaouira, Morocco for the Gnaoua Festival (Music Sample) began halfway through my fifth tour of Morocco in Rabat and while I had bothered to make a few plans about how things were going to happen, there was nothing very concrete. So it was no surprise to me when all my Moroccan friends who had talked about going backed out and what had existed for plans all fell through. I was on my own for accommodations and transport, normally not a daunting task for a seasoned traveller such as myself, it was just that this was a small city with a very limited number of hotels and transport options that was grows exponentially every year for this festival.

So it came time for me to decide if I still wanted to go and I decided that I make a go at it and see what could happen. I still had a possibility for accommodations, an american girl I had meet on the train Tangier offered me to stay with her some friends for the festival. I made the call and the result was inconclusive, but not being one to hesitate I went to the train station to get a ticket.

I already knew that trains were only available as far as Marrakech and after that I would have to switch to a bus. And I guess in the back of my mind I didn’t expect that there would be an available bus to Essaouira that night because I didn’t feel in the least bit shocked that my request for a first class passage to Essaouira turned into a second class passage to Marrakech.

What they hey? I thought to myself. Let’s go to Marrakech. So I boarded the train and got into a cramped un-air-conditioned cabin bound for the edge of the Sahara desert. There were some interesting Moroccans in the compartment who were very surprised to learn that I knew some arabic and made every effort to convert me to Islam. I declined as politely as I could.

As the train was pulling into Marrakech, I just couldn’t let go of the awe I was feeling. The scenery could only be described as other worldly. It was wicked hot (42 degrees Celsius or better) and the scenery reminded me most of some of the Mars photos I’ve seen. I had been to Marrakech before, but somehow this time was different.

And for the record I don’t think that Marrakech is a fun place to hang out in by ones self.

I went and found a cheap hotel without air conditioning or even a fan on noisy side street on one of the hottest nights I’d even experienced. I really didn’t think that hell could be much different. And early the next morning I went to the bus station to see if there was an available bus to Essaouira.  There wasn’t until nine that evening. I was ready to give up. I wanted to leave the heat and the uncertain state of lodgings for cleaner, cooler, quieter Southern Spain (I didn’t honestly think I’d ever utter those words in reference to Southern Spain), but an american guy and his girlfriend convinced me and some French/Moroccan to catch a grand taxi with them to the Festival.

It was on the taxi ride at the last possible moment when I got a text message from my acquaintance (really, to say anything more than acquaintance would be exaggerating) from the train that I could indeed stay with them for the two nights of the festival that remained. The only thing was that she wasn’t going to be there until the following day and someone I totally didn’t know was going to be there to let me in.

So I got to the apartment we all were going to be staying at and introduced myself to the group and realized quickly that I in every way an anomaly. Firstly, I was the only guy, secondly I was the only one that didn’t have a masters in something or other, and lastly I was the only one who didn’t know anyone else from a hole in the wall. The only common factor was that everyone was 24. Pretty random eh?

So in the end I did get to end the festival, the city, the beach, live Moroccan hip-hop music until four in the morning, fresh Moroccan khobz straight out of the oven shortly there after and just some beautiful sea-side summer weather. The only other really weird thing that happened was hearing my name called out while wading through a crowd of fellow concert goers only to find out that it was some Moroccan guy that I really didn’t remember. Yet he knew enough about me without me volunteering information that I accepted him as a friend and we hung the whole afternoon. He also tried to convert me to Islam but to no avail.

Wait. I am almost forgetting the strangest part of the trip. 

After leaving the festival I took an air conditioned bus (thank goodness, I almost never get to travel with A/C in Morocco) to Marrakech where I got to see the half of the Euro Cup game between Spain and Germany and then caught an overnight train to Tanger where I was going to catch the ferry into Spain.  

When the train arrived in Spain I had only a half to get from the station to onboard the ferry, not a lot of time, but I still managed to make friends with a hurried Moroccan man who also desperately wanted to catch the eight o’clock ferry. I boarded the boat with him and as we were looking for good seats a hawaiian man randomly starting conversing with me and I shared a little bit about where I’d been and he where he was at.

He told me he was traveling with an Egyptian man who was living in Spain and that they had been seeing his friends. I said that was nice and continued to talk with my newest Moroccan friend. But then I saw this Hawaiian guys egyptian friend and realized that I had met him before on a small and far away Mediterranean Island over a year ago. I got out of my seat and gave the man a hug. That’s just how good of friends we are.

So I spent the morning with those two and they gave me a ride from the port in Tarifa to Malaga. I was really grateful for that, but it really is a small world.

Before you begin reading any of this truly harrowing adventure I would like to assure you that this story does indeed have a happy ending. I can say that because it’s my own story, it happened to me and I am currently living it’s happy ending.

While the stories setting is given away in the title it really begins much sooner than that at my first airport on the long and arduous but above all, cheap, journey from my hometown in Northern Alberta to my destination in Southern Spain.

I arrived at the airport rather promptly at a dreadfully early 4:30 am. After arriving at the check-in counter I was immediately informed by a rather flustered looking check-in counter clerk that one of my original four flights was cancelled. She claimed however that she had worked it out by finding a second flight from Chicago to Boston, that left only an hour later, leaving one hour for me and my bags to catch our connecting flight out to Dublin.

That was all well and good, an hour would be ample time I thought to myself and quickly made my way through customs, security and on to the aircraft for a very uneventful flight.

Upon landing in Chicago I was immediately filled with dread. It was dumping snow and the cloud ceiling was incredibly low. Conditions were far from ideal for flying. I’m never going to get out of here, I thought to myself. In the terminal I busied myself with sending emails and sorting photos and before long, it was time to board my next flight.

When I got on board the pilot came on the PA to assure everyone how fortunate we were as this was one of the few flights that was actually leaving. I breather a sigh of relief but was then quickly cautioned by another passenger that we hadn’t left the ground yet. He was right, moments later the pilot came back on to say that they had encountered a mechanical failure and that they were getting the maintenance team on it right away.

Any delay in the flight ate into precious minutes that I needed to make my next connection and before long 50 minutes was gone and we were yet to leave the ground. It seemed nearly hopeless. The maintenance team did a hard reset on all the planes electronics which solved the problem plane was de-iced and anti-iced. After which our flight took off a full hour (59 minutes, officially speaking) later than scheduled.

Yes, I was biting my nails. A few minutes would be enough time for me to get to my next flight but not nearly enough for my bags to do the same. That was a reality I was willing to accept.

At this point I think it hardly worth mentioning is that I didn’t make the connection in Boston. There wouldn’t be a story if I did. My hopes were officially dashed in the air when the pilot shared we would be landing a full half hour after my connecting flight had departed.

What next? I went to the Aer Lingus counter in the international terminal, as the were the carrier for my connecting flight. A helpful, young, Irish sounding lady greeted me there and informed me that it was not Aer Lingus’s responsibility to make arrangements for me, but rather United Airlines, as they were the ones who got me there late. She then offered to reschedule my flight for following day if if I wanted, just in case things didn’t work out with United. I said I would very much like that and found my way over to the United Terminal to see what they were going to do for me.

Apparently they could do nothing. The counter closed at 7:00 p.m. and it was then 7:15 p.m. and while I was able to find an ticketing employee there she told me to come back tomorrow. A 24-hour layover in Boston it was and I grudgingly accepted that reality.

In no way desiring to spend my next 24 hours in Boston Logan Airport I connected myself to the internet and found a cheap, out of the way hotel (Lord Wakefield Hotel) which ended up costing me more in taxi rides to and from than what the actual nights stay was. You live and you learn.

Waking up the following morning feeling well and refreshed (the hotel having provided me with complimentary toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant) and realizing that I had a full 10 hours until my next flight I decided to tour downtown Boston for the morning and part of the afternoon.

Details gratuitous to this story removed.

With a whole three hours to take off, I made my way quickly back to the Aer Lingus desk.

In short order I discovered that things weren’t as they seemed. As I was making my way to the desk I noticed that my flight was scheduled for an hour later than what the day previous’. Making a two hour layover in Dublin one. Thoughts of Deja vú were racing through my mind. Then again, how bad could an extra day in Dublin be?

When I finally did speak again with Denise at Aer Lingus she informed me that I was not scheduled for that flight due to the short layover and arrangements were made that I was to fly out on Lufthansa in less than two hours. I was already a little edgy from having been walking out in the cold and snow of downtown Boston for hours but when I was informed of what I needed to do in the proximate two hours, it was nearly too much: First, I needed to switch to Terminal C and confirm these arrangements with United, as they wanted my old paper tickets and were to print new information, then I needed to come back to the terminal I was in to retrieve my bags from Aer Lingus, then I was to to proceed to the Lufthansa check-in Counter on the other side of the terminal, and then I needed to clear security with it’s line stretching all the way back to where this race was about to start.

I took off running but was constantly being delayed by bad instructions and large, confused asian families. And after a blur of activity I found myself, a half hour to take off, having only just gotten to the check-in counter. All I had to keep me calm was the assurance of a really good natured Lufthansa employee who told me that although I was the very last person left to check-in for the flight that he was going to get me on the jet.

10 minutes went by. I was still waiting for a boarding pass.

10 more minutes went by and I was still waiting for a boarding pass. The lineup for security was still incredibly long.

So finally, with only a few minutes to spare I was handed a boarding pass with my seating situation upgraded to executive class. My friend from Lufthansa then ushered me right to the very front of the security line and to the very front of what was left of the boarding queue. Wow.

When I got on the airplane I was greeted by acres of leg room and my choice of water, orange juice, or champagne. I did most Christian/Missionary thing I could think and celebrated with a small glass of superb champagne and ever since take-off the flight attendants haven’t stopped feeding me.

It’s going to be hard to go back.

With my tale at it’s conclusion, being told in the most dramatic way I could muster I would like to state that the most probable moral of this story is to check-in really late. You might get bumped a class. Yet for some reason I don’t believe this to be true, I would think it more likely that your flight would get re-scheduled.

With a mere two and a half hours left until landing in which to get a nights rest, I would like to thank Denise from Aer Lingus and an A. Ramcharan from Lufthansa for all their help in keeping my sanity and would like to add that United is comprised of incompetent and lazy employees. Sorry if that’s you, my opinion is incredibly biased.

Update: Map of the Adventure.

Maybe the biggest travel challenge I have ever faced was the one I experienced on December the 9th 2006. I got dropped off in Seville near the city center to do some sight seeing and then for the night I was supposed to find my way back to the house of Paco and Chelo (Paco was my boss during the conference I was at from Dec. 6-9th) in a little pueblo called Umbrete to spend the night.

Paco gave me instructions on how to get to their house and Chelo gave me a bus schedule but somehow I knew that this wouldn’t necessarily be an easy trip. To get there, I was to catch a Pueblo bus either at 20:30 or 22:30 and get off at a certain stop, ask someone for directions, and just end up at there house. It all sounded great and good but I then already knew that was not going to be an easy task.

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To those of you who do know some spanish, you might be a little confused over the title. The first word sé is normally a form of the word saber which means to know, but in this instance I am using the imperative form of the verb ser which means to be. Be Good! quite literally. I’d like to think of it as the spanish command for behave, but I really doubt that that’s correct. How I had really wanted to title this story was with the Plautdietsch expression Pos Ahp! However I really don’t know how it’s spelt but I do know that’s what my parents would’ve told me had this story been about me back when I was a child in Canada.

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It’s late and it’s not getting any earlier. I already walked a full block past my house on my home this evening without even realizing it. As you all may or may not know my heritage is mennonite and tonight I was a disgrace to my people.For those of you who are familiar with mennonite circles you may heard this joke:

Q: What’s the problem with sex?
A: It might lead to dancing.

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This is a short story centering around a recent encounter at the local supermarket. It was a mostly average Tuesday (That is Tuesday Oct. 31st, Halloween was still hours away) morning, mostly average except for that in the last two and a half months I had only been out buying food once. The time had come to make the official three supermarket food run that happens every now and again around here.

The first stop was at ALDI’s. Not much happened there. I wanted to buy eggs but they were out so I had to save it for the second stop, LIDL’s. We got to LIDL’s and I proceeded to fill up my coworkers cart with food that I intended to buy (I didn’t have the euro coin necessary to unlock my own cart). After not much time at all I had found everything that I was looking for except for those eggs that weren’t at ALDI’s, so I ditched the group in search of some precious huevos(eggs).

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This story starts the morning of October 10th, it was our first morning in Vienna, and experience had taught us that luck favors the well prepared. So we decided that wanted to get the train tickets for the next leg of our journey as soon as possible. So that very morning we went to buy tickets. The Westbahnhof train station was right beside our hostel and on our way to the sightseeing. So there we were, explaining to the ticket salesman how we wanted five seats on the October 12th, 2006, 6:30 am direct train to Venice. Our message got through and no small amount of euros later (At least for me, I didn’t buy a Eurail pass) we had tickets in hand and we were off.

Now, the actual sight seeing in Vienna is a different and somewhat interesting story, but this rest of this particular story continues very early on a thursday morning just after checking out of our hostel. We travelled on foot from the hostel to the train station as it was only a three minute walk and arrived a full half hour before our train was supposed to leave. Upon arrival at the train station I noticed that our departure wasn’t on the departure board, but it didn’t seem to be that import of a detail as in normally that early in the morning hunger was was the only thing guiding our group. We headed on over to the stations bakery and proceeded to buy some food and then headed over to the platforms. It really didn’t take long to realize that our train was nowhere to be found.

Next logical step, ask at the information booth.

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This is a short story about me being a patriotic Canadian in a foreign land. It all starts with the Camino de Santiago and ends with the sad departure of my good friends Ian and Mayca. But the actual event, the Fiesta Post-Camino 2006 happened on the night of Saturday September the 16th 2006.

I hope that you have read my write-up about the Camino de Santigo, it’s pertinent to the discussion at hand not because I am going to refer to something from the article without explaining the context, but because had I not done the first event, there would not have been this second one.

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Last Thursday (July 6th, 2006), I went to see Cirque de Soleil live in Málaga. And while the show was pretty exciting, you really need to hear the whole story.

It all started with some posters downtown that piqued my interest and led me to query my co-workers on their stance about seeing the show.

Beth and Kirsten agreed to go with me, we determined that it had to be during the week and that it had to be thursday night, because all the other evenings had world cup soccer. The next step was to order tickets, and I thought the internet would be a great place to do that.

I found the website for the show, and on the site was a little bitty that said something like for english customers in Spain call +34 602 252 263 to order tickets (oh yes, the site was in english). So I called the number and no one there spoke english. I understood that there would be someone tomorrow who would be able to help me, but I am North American and I wanted tickets now.

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I was not yet asleep late last thursday night when I was suddenly startled by a loud bang, followed by silence, followed by four snappy and progressively louder, earth shattering booms. Surely the end of the world had come. Wait I should start this story from the beginning.

Last Tuesday morning I was walking back to work from a very productive and intensive spanish lesson, when a car pulled up beside me and a window rolled down. It was several of my co-workers and they wanted to know if I wanted to go the market in Puerto de la Torre. Of course I did. I am a bachelor and as such I frequently let my stock of food stuffs dwindle to nothing, and that day I was desperate to put some food in my house.

Gwynn was driving, and while it was a long and exciting 2km drive from where we started to where we were going, that’s a different story for another day, we got to Puerto and found a parking spot. As a group, we walked to were the Tuesday market in Puerto was supposed to be, but instead found only carnies (slang for people who work at carnivals) and trucks hauling rides.

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