If Tails Toulouse I Won’t; If Heads Marseille I Will

So I left Barcelona in the middle of the night. The rains had already started by then. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and ride out of it, but no such luck. By the time I got to Marseille, it was worse, God taking a dump on us, rain falling in sheets and wind blowing up a storm. We pulled in at six in the morning, I oblivious to most of the trip, though somewhere we changed drivers, probably at the Spain/France border. If Customs or immigration did anything, I’m not aware of it. They did upon arrival at the bus station in Marseille, running a sniffing-dog through the bus, regardless of the fact that people have already gotten off en route. The French police like to make a show of things, especially in Paris at the terminus of the route from Amsterdam. France is not sympathetic to any loosening of recreational drug laws. Alcohol is the drug of choice by tradition. You just don’t smoke joints by candle light and whisper “Je t’aime” in a breathy swoon. I guess it’s just not romantic. I don’t know why not. They don’t have any problem doing the same with cigarettes. I read today that France is the last country in Western Europe to outlaw smoking in public places. Four years ago the thought that any of them could do that was unthinkable. Ireland was the first, believe it or not, they of pub culture exported world-wide. So now cigarette smokers seek out open doorways in the train station like wi-fi scum looking for a signal. When they find them, they stand right in them, as though an open door were not a passage but an invitation to congregate. This was a conceptual problem already that smokers have co-opted for themselves.

Marseille has some of the cheapest rooms I’ve seen in a developed country in a long time, unheard-of prices like fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five dollars a night. Every room seems to have its own particular price, I guess based on square footage. That doesn’t mean they’ll have a shower, though, and if they do, you might have to pay extra for it. Thus the reputation of Frenchmen is confirmed by the system. We all knew they seem to carry a heavier bacterial load than most Westerners, we just didn’t know why. In France bathing is optional. Smells from laboratories sell well. When the first cheap hotel I inquired about told me there were no showers, I thought she meant there were no showers in the room, i.e. down the hall. She meant none, period. The rooms have sinks, though, so I guess you can take a whore’s bath, whatever that is, in addition to whatever else a guy might do with a sink, considering the crapper’s down the hall. I could use some help here, not being French, so I’ve considered offering a whore money to let me watch her bathe, but I don’t know if she’d do it. It’s probably too kinky. Those rooms don’t even have an electrical outlet, much less TV, or curtains on the window. Now if there’s something scarier than the fact that there are thousands of Frenchmen walking the streets in various stages of un-wash, which we already knew, it’s that they might be giving themselves a mop-job and whatever else over a sink by an open window while God and the whole world looks on. Better leave the kids home on that European vacation.

In North America rooms this cheap would have long been overrun by junkies or closed by order of the local government. Junkies don’t need showers either. That’s the way it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada. You can smell them coming. Apparently half our genes are devoted to smell. Now you know why. That leaves room for a lot of creativity in Evolution by the way. But the junkies in Van City don’t care about that; they have another concern. They also have their own district between the upscale part of Gastown and Chinatown. They roost like vultures, gravitating to the sunlight and surveying the terrain for easy pickings. Zoologists probably go there to study their feeding and mating habits, if they still have any. Marseille just has winos, good old fashioned bums begging coins for booze. I don’t know where they sleep, probably on the street. The cheapest hotels close their doors at ten, eleven or midnight latest. That’ll keep the riffraff out. This is a part of Europe scarcely known or acknowledged anymore, the old Europe, mostly southern and eastern, of poverty and degeneracy and petty crime, far from the tourists and modern development, wherever unemployment is rife and competition for scarce resources is fierce. A tourist concentrating on these areas could see Europe almost as cheap as anywhere in the world, certainly as cheap, or cheaper, than West Africa. This includes much of Portugal, southernmost Spain, southern France west of the Riviera and Italy from Naples south, in addition to most of the East European countries. Conversely the New Europe of budget airlines and capitalistic fervor hasn’t even scratched the surface here yet. There is no bus to Paris and the cheapest one-hour flight is four hundred bucks. So I’ll take the TGV. There’s no choice. International buses have cheap rates and traverse the country, but they don’t serve local routes. Welcome to France. Enter Sarkozy.

So I opted to go a half-notch upscale. For forty bucks and change net, I get some old European style with rough beams in the ceiling (including fake adze marks), a large bed, six stations of French TV, a sink, and… a bidet. I’ve got a bidet in my room, but no bath. Crapper and shower are down the hall, five euros to bathe. While I contemplate the ceiling beam right over the bidet and the multiple uses to which a nylon rain poncho might be put, I remember the scene in Tropic of Cancer (or was it Capricorn?) where Henry Miller’s American friend used the bidet to lighten his intestinal load to the chagrin of… well, everybody, but especially… the whores taking their whore’s bath. Now I’m getting the picture. Hey, I want my five Euros back! Even funnier was my architecture professor at Jackson State trying to explain the concept to the down home bloods who’d probably used outhouses during childhood. When he could get a word out at all between stifling his grins and muffling his guffaws, he called them ‘bidgets.’ I’d read Henry Miller so I knew what he was talking about, despite the bad French, but the rest of the class was lost. So we shared a bond there, derriere la scene, united in our imaginary knowledge of the ways of the world, while the peasants wallowed in their ignorance.

Marseille is a fast food paradise. That’s good considering that sit-down meals would be about the same price as the cheap rooms. I’m in the shawarma part of town, little Africa. If you want bouillabaisse, then that’s another quarter. Moroccans here seem right at home, sipping mint tea in sidewalk cafes, while their wives stay at home and do all the work, just like good little Tangerines back home, ‘the other TJ’. There are Asians here, but they seem fairly Frenchified, offering lunch specials with wine. The Vietnamese restaurants don’t even have pho’, the national dish, good old rice-noodle soup. Pizza is ubiquitous, and good. Kebabs and frites line every corner. The bakeries are to die for, of course. Me, I try to limit myself to fast food no more than once per day, not because of restaurant fatigue, but high carbs and boredom. So I cook noodles in my room and make sandwiches to order. The space between my window and the outside shutters makes a fine fridge, thank you. They have a combination cranberry/mango juice here, so all is right with the world. Kidney stones are in remission and I’m taking the TGV to Paris Sunday. I’ve got a wi-fi signal in my room, just by accident. Plan C just might salvage this trip yet. I’ve had visions of Marseilles for a long time. I don’t want to sound spooky like I had a premonition or something, because after all, I could’ve gone to Toulouse, but I think I always thought Marseille might be a part of France I’d like. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t really like, after all. For me to enjoy a place is to internalize it, know it’s insides until I feel like a local. What cathedral? What statue? Show me the produce section.

Fat Saturday in Barcelona

Carnavalistas took to the streets Saturday here in Barcelona for what is the biggest day of Carnaval here. For a big city, the parade is small town, hardly Rio or even N’awlins, but still fun, nice to ‘happen into’ spontaneously. If nothing else it’s nice to see the various communities show up in costume, Bolivians, Peruvians, Colombians, and even Filipinos. So now it’s a European trip, Africa just a stamp in my passport, a fistful of unconvertible money, and a mirage in my rear-view mirror. I guess it’s time to do a Joe-Bob-drive-in-movie-review style head-count denoument. Let’s see: there were thirteen days, two countries, two unsolicited parasitic guides, twenty-six approaches from ‘friends’, (at least) one stalker, one whorehouse, one live band, no alcohol, no sex (with anyone else), two physical attacks from inside, no physical attacks from outside, two hotels, two flights, one train ride, five taxis, two taxi over-charges, forty-two boobs (African women are not obsessed with covering themselves, even, or especially, on long train rides), and I only got lost once, late at night, in Dakar, got confused at a five-way intersection and proceeded off at a forty-five degree angle with a bounce in my step. That’s what one of the taxi rides was for. They usually know the way back if you’ve got a landmark. It’s also helpful to know the name of your hotel. So I guess that’s not so bad. It could have been worse. I could have been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. Actually I’ve hardly ever been robbed in thirty years and fifty countries, and all of those were in Latin America.

Africa is an eye-opener. From Bamako to Dakar you can pretty much go from one extreme to the other, from the most remote unchanging village culture to the brashest urban one, from a place that’s never really waken up to one that never really sleeps. Yes, there’s reverse racism, however benign and yielding. When an unsolicited guide latches on to you and takes you for a ride, literally, that’s a form of racism. When the train ticket office blatantly overcharges you, then that’s racism. They don’t do that to blacks, I assume, certainly not the locals. They probably don’t do it to fluent French speakers either. Interestingly enough, that’s the part of the world where Islamic jihad has been most prominent, virtually transforming the landscape back in the 1800’s at more or less the same time as the colonial powers were “scrambling” to claim the continent. This was the last prize in colonialism, long after most of Latin America had already won its independence and joined the community of nations as little brother to Europe. That ‘Islamicization’ and ‘Arabization’ continues to this day, spreading southward with the desert and investment funds from oil-rich Arab countries.

I guess I’ll have to go back. I still have over a hundred bucks worth of CFA francs and they seem unconvertible here in Spain. I’ll try again in France, but I’m not optimistic. Why would they have anything like a currency exchange booth in the airports departures area when you could deal with some scumbag in a dark alley outside instead? And we wonder why Africa is so far behind. It’s just one last little annoyance, something to stiffen my resistance at being defeated. Fortunately that same currency is used in many countries of Africa, so all is not lost. I could contact some guy named Victor whose name I was given here in Barcelona, but… naah. I doubt that Victor’s rates are very good. Do you see those little Google ads that crop up saying ‘Timbuktu- Know before you go’? I wish they’d come up before I went. And Timbuktu is supposed to be the expensive place in Mali, not Bamako. I guess rooms there are a hundred bucks a night minimum. Jeez… and to think I complained last year about paying thirty-five euros at midnight for an Arabesque room in Casablanca that the Figueroa Hotel in LA would only emulate for twice the price. It’s all relative to expectations and budget. Put me on an expense account and I’ll never complain again. All those people who love Mali must fall into that category. But Africa is a trip. Its people are one of the world’s three great races, in distinctness if not in sheer numbers. The others are the Asian and Caucasian, of course. What’s ‘Caucasian’ mean, anyway, caulked Asian? Chalky Asian? The term is a misnomer, pulled out of a hat some two hundred years ago and now we’re stuck with it. By accident it could be right, and people without pigment might have formed their original population pool north of the bottle-necked mountainous Kavkaz region. Who knows? Most sources now postulate about ten races or physical types total, almost half of them in the South Pacific region. Now what does that say about the patterns of human migration and evolution?

So now for me it’s Europe, Spain, wide boulevards and lively plazas, mercados y siestas. Most of the things I like most about Mexico can be found right here in Spain, except Indians and low prices. It could be worse, like in high season, but definitely pricier than the US, especially with Bush’s newer weaker dollar. The last time the dollar was this weak was the early 70’s. Hmm, I wonder, what did the early 70’s have in common with the current era? Once again, we’re caught between Iraq and a hot place. At least there’s Chinese food here, so I’m happy. Dakar had some, but pricey, even some Vietnamese washed up on the shores of Francophony. They probably wish they could go back now. So the trick is to find the Chinese restaurant with a buffet. I did, and so has every other construction worker in town. For no more than the price of an English breakfast here, you can get the full Chinese spread. Yes, there are the ubiquitous British ex-pats even here. Of course what they call ‘English breakfast’ here is really an American breakfast, with hash browns and eggs. A real English breakfast includes stewed tomatoes and baked beans with sausages and eggs. I guess it makes your spouse look more appetizing first thing in the morning. You wouldn’t believe the expressions I’ve seen on foreigners’ faces at B&B’s in the UK when faced with such a display. It’s not cheap, either, so most places, in London at least, go Continental-style now. But the buffet is what Chinese food is supposed to be, cheap and good and plentiful. A ‘Chinese table’ (full of food presumably) tends to be among the more expensive types of food in Thailand, strangely enough, considering the racial make-up of the country. Spain is not lo-carb capital of the world, so the choice is easy between starchy greasy Spanish food or all-you-can-eat Chinese food at half the price. That’s a lo-brainer. I’ve got a water boiler, so I could eat instant noodles in my room, add veggies to taste, but the noodles are a buck a pack here, same in Africa. In the US, they’re fifteen cents, same as Thailand. There’s no roast chicken in grocery stores here, either, my staple food. I even found that in Dakar, but not Mali, of course. Mali’s the real thing.

Barcelona is pretty nice, especially down here in ‘Las Ramblas’. This is the maze surrounding the old original city. It’s not as Byzantine as the old Jewish quarter in Seville, but yeah, you could get lost in there. It’s called ‘la Gotica’, so I guess Goths are more organized than Semites. There’s lots of Gaudi architecture surrounding the city, of course. What I like here now are all the human statues lining the ‘Las Ramblas’ pedestrian thoroughfare. I first saw these last year in the Canary Islands, humans dressed in historical garb of choice, poised like a statue, unmoving, tip jar conspicuously placed, quite convincing. Well by now they’ve multiplied like mushrooms in Mississippi cow shit, so there are dozens on this one strip (in February, mind you), but mostly uninspired, just elaborately costumed, standing there hardly even striking a pose. There goes the neighborhood. Coincidentally I’ve found a park bench on the same strip where I can get a wi-fi signal (carefully monitoring the birds overhead), so I’m a regular now there, too, and quite the novelty apparently. Yesterday a tourist came up and asked if he could take my picture. No tourist has asked to take my picture since I ate noodle soup with the little bald-headed hill-tribe girl twelve years ago up in Sapa, North Vietnam. We were a cute couple, but that hardly counts, since geeky Vietnamese tourists do little but take pictures when they travel, mostly of each other. Well, my mama didn’t raise a fool, not many anyway, so today when I go back out to use wi-fi I’m going to take my hat off and place it conspicuously. This could be a major career move. It’ll be short, though. Tomorrow I go to France. I thought about doing a day trip to Andorra just to put another country under my belt, but… well… stay tuned.

Abortion in Africa! Blame it on the Stones!

You gotta’ have a good headline. Pain! Misery! Anxiety! Get it right here! The good news is that readership’s up. Apparently people can appreciate my misery more than my metaphysical meanderings. At least it’s nice to know that if I lay dying, blogging it for the public, I might achieve in death what has always eluded me in life. Maybe I should do a webcam? Death can be a good career move. There are other disadvantages of course. So as I sit on the cusp of a severely mutated trip, praying for divine intervention, I guess it’s time to pause and reflect. What went wrong? In a word, everything. There’s probably a reason I’ve avoided Africa so long, especially the heartland, even if I couldn’t verbalize it. I still can’t, because I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the African reputation for aggressiveness and violence. But I’ve seen nothing like that, just maybe a little excessive aggression from the sales teams. Maybe it’s because I don’t especially like rap music, and extrapolate that into a general avoidance of modern black culture. That ignores the fact that there are many other genres of African-derived music that I DO like, especially the ones that they themselves tend to like at the source. I hear more rap in Thailand than I did in Africa. Maybe it’s all too close to home, home being Mississippi, Mississippi being the heart of the old South plantation slave system, that being one of the more disgusting periods of human history, in direction contradiction to the general trend of things gradually improving over time throughout history. Now I’ve never disavowed my connection to and affection for Mississippi and never will, nothing personal to it, and that’s the whole point. An entire era got wrapped up in something it couldn’t move past, and the more hopeless it became, the tighter they held to the old ways. We all know people like that, don’t we? Countries are no different. South Africa certainly wasn’t. That is what God invented 2x4’s for, beating some sense into the intransigent.

That is why democracy is good, because small units are better suited for evolution. Does that make sense? The dinosaurs are all gone and will never come back, beneficiaries of a sparsely inhabited world that is not likely to return. The largest mammal during that time was scarcely the size of a rat. They weren’t more powerful. They were more adaptable. Obviously democracy is slow and cumbersome, “the worst of good systems, the best of the bad ones,” a mighty dictator being able to accomplish in one sweep of the pen what a democracy might take years debating. But who knows whether that dictatorial edict will be ultimately good or bad? Aren’t a bunch of little mistakes ultimately better than one colossal one? Sometimes the best offense is a good defense. That’s usually the way I work, gradually insinuating myself into situations while always leaving multiple exit options. The one-trick pony is at a career disadvantage. All this is by way of saying that you have to remain flexible, adaptable, even if it means foregoing life’s biggest prizes. I don’t know what role fame plays in human evolution, natural or cultural. I do know that when somebody posts photos of himself in battle fatigues and then proceeds to systematically slaughter innocent people just because it’s there to be done for the sake of the evening news and Warhol’s dictum, then something is wrong. The problem is that I can’t just write them all off as crazy. The problem is that I DO understand them, as they stand on the brink of being and nothingness and decide to take the big plunge. This is a human condition, but particularly an American one, it seems. This is the price of individualism. This is the price of ‘believing in oneself’ to the exclusion of everything else. Religion is about believing in something bigger, whatever it might be, father figures optional. This is the price of fame. People get hurt.

So I bit the bullet. I split. I just got on the plane and split. I bit the same bullet I had just dodged, pain. I had just gotten over the bout of gout, when the kidney stones struck, screaming for attention. You don’t take this lightly. I’ve passed a kidney stone or two before, and it’s no fun. Even if it’s just a warning call, not the real thing, you don’t take chances. You certainly don’t plan a butt-breaking two-day overland trek back to the most primitive part of the world. The flight back to Mali would be $300 and still commit me to an unchangeable Air France flight back to Europe, or I could just pay $500 and catch a flight to Europe immediately, booked and paid online from the privacy of my own computer, and then take it from there, Europe, next day. So I did. Like the old saying goes, “better Expedia today than AirEvac tomorrow. That’s what my mother always said; didn’t yours? Okay, that’s not true. No, I had a mother, but she never said that. She said lots of other things, though. We used to keep a running greatest hits collection of her prophesies and witticisms. She used to say, “A dollar is a dollar.” I remember that one. She didn’t know Jack, at least not Jack Free. She didn’t need to. She knew everything else. Mothers are like that. They offer love at low interest with multiple repayment options. Now I have a Thai mother-in-law. She makes me spicy food that comes back to haunt me.

So I booked a flight on Iberia and left within a day, just one-wayed it outta’ there. I considered Algerian airlines, change planes in Algiers, just to put another country under my belt, but thought better of that idea. You don’t take chances with health. So I bought a ticket to Paris, and hopped off in Madrid. This is the privilege of traveling without baggage, jumping ship when you like, as long as no flight segments remain. The airlines don’t like it. I don’t like some things they do, or the trains either. The Eurail pass is an outright rip-off. I’ll tell you how to cheat that if you want. The Dakar airport has all the charm of Guatemala City’s and the Air France food was better, aubergines and potatoes braised with chicken in a light Dijon sauce, but Iberia was okay, the milk run to Africa through the Canaries. Sunny Spain sounds better than cold rainy Paris any day, and my Spanish is much better than my French if I need to negotiate my existence with some doctor who looks like Billy Bob Thornton with a Bolivian miner’s light on his forehead in a lesser-known Cohen Brothers’ movie. I know, I feel like a wimp, but when it hurts to fart, and I almost passed out from pain after a sneeze, then we need to hedge bets. Let’s make this clear: it’s not the fear, but the pain, that I succumb to. At fifty-three years old and counting, time is the greatest asset. So now I sit in a hotel in Barcelona, to which I immediately came from Madrid. You’ve got to have priorities, and I’ve already seen Madrid. My main regrets are that I really haven’t seen the entire scope of Mali, and I didn’t eat the mumbo gumbo in Senegal. I was working up to it, eating the local baguette sandwiches regularly, not the tourist ones, but not the goop over rice. The Senegal sandwiches were certainly better than the Spanish bocadillos, rather dry crusty affairs. I ate a lot of cheese sandwiches in Senegal, too, dodging the bacteria, but that’s not what I go to Africa for. I go for the goop.

Then I got hit by the calcium deposits. I even drank all the icy stuff on the train coming across and never got sick. Maybe I’ll return to Mali some day as conquering hero of the music industry. Who knows, maybe next year? The visa’s still good. But for now I’m just trying to salvage a trip, so guess I’ll check out the north of Spain and south of France. If I can’t afford it in February, then when can I? The stones have stopped hurting so much by now, so I’ll deal with them later. A doctor might say something I don’t want to hear. I’ve got a trip to salvage after all! I’m even missing the French language, like I was finally ‘getting it’ after all these years, though it’s nice to be in a country whose language I can speak, when in pain. I never minded the Francophony in Africa, anyway, just the cacophony. At least Africa doesn’t seem so exorbitantly expensive now, compared with Europe, as it did compared with America. We’re still not back up to fifty channels on TV, though certainly better than the one or two we were down to in Africa. You can drink the water! Hopefully cranberry juice will cost less than five bucks a liter. That’s more than gas, I think. Now I know what’s wrong with Africa. It’s just too bloody expensive for what you get. That’s a bullet that’s hard to bite.