marksouthbend's insane travels

Huelva
I'd just like to get excited about simply telling stories in this journal.

Greg has joined us, and tonight is our first night away from Malaga, and it was our first day riding trains with him. So a lot of what was going on today was showing Greg how we do things. A couple of the more fun things to show or tell him were how we look for a place to sleep, i.e., climbing up a giant unfinished wooden boardwalk and when you get to the end, alying down. And another thing I took particular joy in informing im of was when we picked up an unopened bottle of water off the side of the street and began drinking. he was like "where'd you get that?" And the answer was "oh, that happens sometimes..."

I've been feeling slightly ill for a couple of days now, but I did enough stuff last weekend that was so far outside of my normal routine that it's hard to know what to blame for the illness. I did have rather close interactions with Barbary Apes in Gibraltar. Gibraltar has a big rock to hike up, whose fame somehow reached me in the United States, and halfway up the rock is the only place in the European Union where real apes are naturally found. So many people visit these apes that they're rather tame and rather skilled thieves. You go up there and like 30 monkeys hang out with you waiting for the chance to steal your food, and you put up with their constant plotting for the chance to hang out with them. Carl was really bold and brave about getting close to the monkeys, but the pictures on my camera make me look more bold and brave, just because Carl takes better pictures of me than I'm able to take of him. So, I did have wild, or at least not pet, monkeys taking food out of my hand, and one sat on my shoulder and pulled on my ear and liked me enough to make sure I was properly groomed and give me a monkey hairstyle. As we were walking back down from the apes, Carl reported feeling nauseous, and then proceeded to vomit an alarming amount. He felt very sick, and it lasted a couple of days. I still felt fine when Carl was coming down with monkey plague, so I was able to help him get home.

Gibraltar was just the last stop for Carl and I on a crazy safari weekend. It wasn't a real safari, but we did go to Africa. We went to Tangier, Morocco with another volunteer at the Malaga Media Center, Brian. Brian only stayed one day, and it was the day we followed all the advice we'd heard and used a tour guide. Just as we got off the ferry from Algeciras, Spain to Tangier, we were accosted by a well-dressed fluent English speaker offering to be our tour guide for as long as we stayed in Morocco. An hour hadn't passed before this tour-guide pimp passed us on to a man he called his "brother".

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