The day of reckoning

The twenty-four hours before the marathon are all about carbo loading. If your body hasn’t stored enough carbs before the race, it starts to do nasty things to itself in order to keep running. So most marathon events have an associated pasta party, where all the runners turn up and eat offensive amounts of spag bog.

We passed on the official festivities and instead headed to Colleen’s, where we were treated to our own private pasta party of homemade chicken parm ‘n’ noodles. Deeee-lumptious.

And just in case we weren’t quite carbed up enough, she and the girls had also baked a batch of marathon-themed red velvet cupcakes – each one topped with a little mile marker flag. I had to expend substantial amounts of willpower to prevent myself from eating five of them.

After such a glorious meal, my body was ready to collapse into a food coma. Happily, my hotel bed was so delightfully cushy that I felt like I was sleeping on fairy floss (a little less sticky, though).

Waking up on the flip, it was time for a good carby breakfast, giving ourselves at least two hours to digest before the race. That’s how Sean and I found ourselves at Denny’s at 4am on a Sunday morning. It was quite a scene.

The tables around us were colonised by all manner of glammed-up clubbing folk, some still singing along gamely to the early 90’s piped music, others staring groggily into their Grand Slam breakfasts wishing they’d headed home four drinks earlier. There are some situations where you can’t help but feel out of place, and ordering whole wheat pancakes and fruit at Denny’s dressed head to toe in running gear at 4am on a Sunday is definitely one of them.

At around 7, we headed to the marathon start line, near BC Place in downtown Vancouver. By the time the starting gun went off at 7:30, the place was buzzing with excitement. Sean and I had decided to run the first five miles together so we could get some action shots of each other. Here’s Sean looking calm as a pro, as usual:

As you can see, the man has legs like redwood tree trunks – so there’s only so long a vertically challenged person like myself can keep up. He set a cracking pace for the first couple of miles – my second mile was under 8:50. I can keep that up for ten or so miles, but definitely not for twenty-six! So about twenty minutes in, I shooed him off ahead to go kick some ass, and fell back to a more sustainable pace.

I distinctly remember that around this time, it occurred to me that there wasn’t any actually guarantee that I was going to finish this thing. I was going to have to run 30% further today than I’d ever run before – that’s not an insignificant jump. Six more miles is a big deal when your body’s already dealt with twenty. But I tried not to think about it and concentrate on the mile in front of me.

Around the three mile mark, the crowd lining the street started to get particularly vociferous. Then the runners several metres in front of me started to whoop and clap and go crazy. As I followed everyone’s gazes to the other side of the street, five skinny African dudes flew past us faster than you can say “Nairobi, Kenya”. Wow. I was in awe.

The frontrunners weren’t the only ones getting love from the crowd, though. I was amazed how many spectators were out on the course, even on such a rainy, chilly day. They stood valiantly on the sidelines with their cowbells and signs, dispelling the gloom of the grey skies by cheering on each and every person running past. Normally, I’m used to being ignored by race spectators – they read my name on my bib and realise there’s no way they’re going to figure out how to pronounce it in the short time that I’m running past them. But at least four unknown people yelled my name out during the course of the race, which has got to be an all-time record.

There were several signs that made me chuckle along the way. Special mentions go to:

1. The one that said “In my mind, you’re all Kenyans!” In smaller writing underneath was the clarification: “Some people are just more Kenyan than others.”
2. The one at mile 22 that read “26.2 is your bitch.” Given how I felt at that point, I can’t believe I actually had the energy to chuckle.

Somehow I remember very clearly the innocuous incident that became the most fateful moment of the marathon for me. Around mile 10, turning up onto Burrard Street, my left foot landed in a puddle. The part of my brain that hadn’t gone into meditation mode thought, “Hmmm. I wonder if there’s anything bad about having a wet foot for the rest of this race?” I was soon about to find out.

When your foot is wet, it slides around more inside your shoe. And having your shoe rubbing continuously against your foot for over four hours is bad news.

About half an hour later, I was at the halfway mark, enjoying the peaceful greenery of Stanley Park. I was keeping up comfortably with the 4:15 pace bunny, and trying to avert my eyes from the male runners taking time-saving leaks right by the side of the path. (Bloody men and their god-given gift of convenience…)

It was here that I started to realise what stepping in that puddle meant. I was beginning to feel the unmistakable burn of a blister forming on the sole of my left foot. I pushed on, regardless. I’ve run with blisters before, I’m not completely soft.

The pain got progressively harder to ignore, but I knew I’d regret it later if I stopped or walked. So I grit my teeth and kept going. Mile 14, 15, 16 went by, and I still managed to keep up a decent pace. But by mile 19, the blister was starting to feel so full and painful that I thought it was going to burst inside my shoe. I slowed down to a jog and said goodbye to my dream of 4:15. Letting the pace bunny peel away from me was very, very, very demoralising.

Just then, I heard a familiar voice yelling my name from the sidelines. I looked up to see Colleen, Drew and the kids just ahead of me cheering like there was no tomorrow. They couldn’t have chosen a better spot. Seeing them there with their hand-painted signs and excited faces neutralised all my negative thoughts and simply made me happy. It’s hard not to smile when there are two little munchkins dancing around with your name painted across their cheeks.

A couple of minutes after that, I got another morale boost – I bumped into Sean. He was coming back the other way, and by all appearances was still going gangbusters. We high-fived, and then I was on my own again.

The last hour felt like about three. I was still running, but had slowed to almost a shuffle – my feet refused to get more than an inch or two off the ground. My left foot was in so much hot pain I felt like it was going to burst into flames. But. I. Wasn’t. Going. To. Stop. I was terrified that if I stopped for first aid, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to start running again. And coming this far and walking would be a waste of all the time and effort I’d put in to get to this point.

In the previous day’s Globe and Mail, I’d read an inspiring article about the Tour d’Afrique, a three-month, 200km-a-day bike expedition from Cairo to Cape Town. For the last hour I was grimly muttering over and over to myself the catchphrase of the riders in the Tour d’Afrique: “Every fucking inch. Every fucking inch.” I was tired and in pain, and only sheer stubbornness was keeping me going. There was a photographer around mile 23, and I look like a serial killer in all photos taken of me around this point.

At mile 24, I found myself running alongside a sexagenarian who was wheezing and grunting and groaning and panting so loudly and continuously, he sounded like a badly-maintained printing press. Obviously, the guy deserved bucketloads of respect – he was almost three times my age and still keeping pace with me 24 miles in. But I was too close to the end of my tether to have this guy groaning and  grunting in my ear for another half hour – I would have ended up turning around and strangling him, or pushing him into English Bay. So somehow, I managed to speed up just enough to shake him off. There’s been reams written on how much the human body has in reserve when driven by extreme love, anger or determination, but the motivating power of sheer irritation is highly underrated.

Mile 25 went uphill. Twisted, twisted fucking sadists, whoever designed this course.

And then, as I re-crossed the Burrard Bridge, I saw the sign saying “2km to go”. I could visualise the path to the finish line from where I was – I’d walked on this street before. Only ten or fifteen minutes of pain left, if I picked up the pace. I asked my body for every bit of juice it had left in it, and started to sprint. I didn’t really care anymore if the blister burst right in my shoe, because I knew there was a first aid tent right over the finish line, and I was going to be there really soon.

I have no idea where the energy came from, but my final mile was my fastest split since mile three. I overtook a whole lot of people along the way who looked like they were about to drop dead. I’d felt the same only a few minutes ago, but now I was going on pure adrenaline.  As I came into the finishing chute in 4:20, I heard my name over the loudspeaker: “And Urmila from Seattle is flying in for a strong finish…”

And then – finally, hallelujah, praise the lord – my chip beeped and I was over the line. It was done. I could hardly believe it. I was so relieved, so happy, so exhausted, that I lost my grip and began to laugh uncontrollably. It was a very weird feeling – I physically couldn’t stop myself from laughing for a full three or four minutes. I was laughing while one volunteer gave me my finisher’s medal, still laughing as another one wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and still laughing as I hobbled out of the chute into the food area.

By the food tent I found Sean, who’d blitzed the race in 3:46. I was so proud.

After some easily digested carbs, it was time to go to the First Aid tent to survey the damage. I gingerly peeled off my shoe to find my poor left foot in a total mess – the blister took up a third of surface area of my sole, and it was full to bursting with blood. To boot, I had painful mini-blisters on every toe as well. No wonder my foot had felt like it was going to explode for the last two hours. The whole thing was really quite horrendous-looking. (But look, Amma, I’m growing up! I didn’t post a picture of it on my blog!)

The doctor in the first aid tent packed up my foot in some gauze and told me to stay off it as much as possible for the next few days. (She didn’t have to tell me twice.) Then we hobbled back to the hotel. You know that stuff you read in biology class about adrenaline masking pain? It’s true. As the euphoria of the race started to fade, our bodies started reminding us what we’d just made them do.

Once we could bring ourselves to get up off our fairy floss beds and act in a civilised manner again, we walked to a nearby brewpub for our celebratory meal. I ordered a burger. With bacon. AND cheese. AND fries. AND beer. Oh, happy day…

It’s not every day you get to tick one of your life aims off your checklist. Eighteen months ago, I couldn’t even run seven miles without wanting to collapse. This year, I ran a flippin’ marathon. Boo-effing-YAH.

The road to Vancouver

I know this blog’s meant to be about my life in Europe and all, but the record would be incomplete if I didn’t write about my marathon in Vancouver. After all, if 99% of completing a marathon comes down to preparation, then you might say I really ran this race in Europe.

Like any classic sports movie worth its salt – Million Dollar Baby, Ladybugs (hey – Jonathan Brandis was way cool back in ‘96), my eighteen weeks of marathon training were full of ups and downs. Happily, it was mostly ups. There were countless mornings when I’d get to work after a run with so many beta-endorphins coursing through my body that my manager would take one look at me and say “Did you go running?”, in around the same wary tone as you would say “Have you been drinking?” On one occasion, I had to go jog up and down the fire stairs for a while, so the jumping beans would settle and I wouldn’t drive my colleagues mad. Runner’s high is not a myth, people.

Each weekend centred on a long run. As my training program peaked to distances that previously seemed unthinkable – 14 miles, then 15, 17, 18 – simply making it to my planned finishing point was a new PB.

I would plan my routes to take me through parts of Munich I’d never seen before, and discover new things to love about the city. (Like the building in the university district with a giant giraffe painted on the side. Omigawrsh.) Some days I’d end my long runs at a beer garden or pub. I don’t think there’s any way a glass of weissbier could taste better!

When spring finally came, it was a dream come true, a cherished reward for enduring months of dark, frozen mornings. I’d run through the English Garden or Olympiapark, with the crisp morning air tempered by the warmth of the rising sun. With each passing week there’d be more green buds on the trees and new patches of bright yellow spring blooms, with a backing soundtrack of birds swapping yarns about their winter getaways. There was a primal joy in training in shorts and t-shirts after months of alternately sweating and shivering inside warm layers.

-

There were also the mornings when it was 15 below zero and snowing sideways, and giving up the warmth of my bed and running 8 miles in the wind and the dark was the absolute last thing I felt like doing.

The worst day of training was the day I attempted my first twenty-miler, and I ran out of water early. By mile 17, I was on a snow-covered road in the middle of nowhere, exhausted, sore and dehydrated. When the road started to slope uphill, mentally I was toast. I sat down at the edge of the road and cried for a full five minutes. I finally peeled myself off the ground and kept running, but at mile 18, I started to get really painful leg cramps, and had to hobble and limp to mile 20, swearing and biting back tears all the way. There was a railway station at mile 19, but I had too much pride to stop.

When all’s said and done, it’s actually hard to say what I’m prouder of – finishing the 26.2 on race day, or pushing myself to train week after week regardless of the mood Mother Nature and/or I were in.

-

I learnt a hell of a lot about along the way about things like pacing, equipment and taking care of my body. You can get away with a lot up to a certain distance, even a half marathon. During the early weeks of training, I would regularly run ten or twelve miles without drinking a single drop of water along the way. (The lack of public drinking water in Europe annoys me in the extreme – don’t get me started!) But at some point, the distances start to be long enough for little things to begin mattering a whole lot.

After the debacle of the first twenty-miler, five weeks out from the race, I knew I had to treat my body with more care. I ended up getting a camelback – one of those really lightweight, close-fitting backpacks specially designed for athletes to carry water. The water bladder has a tube that hangs down along the shoulder strap of the backpack, so you can drink on the go. I started wearing this for longer runs, and it really did help. Not to mention that it made me feel 200x more hardcore and 100x more like Ann Trason. (P.S. I have no idea if Ann Trason wears a camelback while running. She is probably hardcore enough to just make water out of air, or something.)

I also started paying much more attention to what I was eating before my long runs. In the beginning, my nutrition was focused around getting down to my race weight, so I probably wasn’t eating as much as I should have. I got scolded by my colleague, a running veteran, who taught me that the stuff-your-face-with-pasta-the-night-before tradition exists for a reason. I tried to eat more of a “runner’s diet” from then on, and immediately felt a difference in my staying power.

But the best friend I made during these otherwise very solitary eighteen weeks was my trusty GPS watch. Sean (remotely training for the marathon with me in Seattle) had convinced me to buy one, but I was pretty sceptical of the concept at first. The idea of wearing a heart rate monitor and harnessing satellites to measure my distance and pace down to the second seemed like overkill to me – just another useless gadget, I thought.

But this gadget ended up winning me over – you can only improve what you can measure, after all. Having real-time feedback on my speed kept my intensity up on weekdays, and the prospect of hearing the next mile-marking beep kept me hungry and focused during two and three hour-long runs. And there’s virtually no end to the statistical fun a nerd can have with the data once it’s all aggregated onto a computer.

When it came time to run my second twenty-miler, my last and longest run before race day, I ran the hell out of it. I even had the legs to sprint the last mile, a far cry from the hobble to the finish last time around. I’d prepared as best I could, and it was time to taper and let my body rest before the big day. But that’s a story for another post!

Fun with German, Part 2

I figured it would be smart to split this post in two lest I unintentionally inflict or sustain any Repetitive Nerd Injuries by doing it all in one go. Here’s part two.

I mentioned in my previous post how you can find links between English and German all the time without even trying. I just noticed another one as I was typing the last paragraph. The Sound of Music was playing over my headphones and this lyric suddenly caught my attention:

Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken

I’ve never seen or used the word “ken” outside Sixteen Going on Seventeen, but I’ve known this song as long as I can remember, so I’ve always instinctively known what the word means. And just now, my brain did this: ken ---> kennen, the German word for “to be familiar with”. The world makes sense all of a sudden! Learning German as an English-speaker is like meeting your friend’s parents and suddenly seeing where all their quirks came from.

I guess it wasn’t too surprising to find all these links between English and German, but what did surprise me was how many links I found between Indonesian and German. That I wasn’t expecting. Indonesian is a real melting-pot of a language, a tasty sambal of Malay, Javanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and Dutch. As a schoolkid learning Indo, I immediately noticed all the Sanskrit influences, because I speak Konkani (sabun=soap, manusia=humanity, kursi=chair, perpustakaan=library…). Only when I moved here – actually, it was when I visited Amsterdam – did I start to realise just how many words Bahasa Indonesia has retained from Dutch colonial times. I don’t know Dutch, but it’s close enough to German that I recognised these:

• Kammer –> kamar = room
• Rauchen –> rokok = to smoke
• Rechnung –> rekening = bill/receipt
• Tasche –> tas = bag
• Rock –> rok – skirt
• Tante/Oma/Opa – aunt/grandma/grandpa

COOL!!!

Yes, I too wonder frequently how I manage to stand up straight with all this totally useless knowledge sloshing around my brain.

-

I will leave you with my five favourite German words.

1. Ohrwurm – This word is brilliant – there’s no one-word equivalent in English. It means “the song that’s stuck in your head”, but if you break up the parts literally it means “ear-worm”. Cute!
2. Aufgepimpt – Classic Denglish. It’s the German word for “pimped out”.
3. Vorkuhila – This is the German word for “mullet”. What’s quintessentially German about this word (apart from the fact that there seem to be a lot of people with mullets in Germany) is that it’s a contraction of “vor kurz, hinter lang” (short in the front, long in the back), which is an exact description of what the hairstyle is. This language does not mess around.
4. Klugscheisser – The one reason I like this word is that it’s the only insult I know in German. The literal meaning is “clever shit”. Basically you’re calling someone a smartass.
5. Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz – As I mentioned earlier, Germans like to put lots of small words to make a bigger word with a very exact meaning. That’s great, but sometimes the poor dears just don’t know when to stop. This monstrosity means “Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law”, and is actually the name of a real piece of parliamentary legislation passed in the German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania ten years ago. In case it’s too much of a mouthful for you, you can always refer to it by its abbreviation: RkReÜAÜG. Oh, those goofy Germans.

Fun with German, Part 1

I’ve always loved languages – I think that’s probably part of the reason I ended up writing code for a living. So one of the real joys of living in Germany for me has been learning German.

Deutsch is the fifth language I’ve tried to formally learn, but up to this point, learning languages had always been a completely theoretical exercise for me. Although I studied Indonesian for seven years at school, each planned class trip got cancelled due to the political upheaval in the ‘90s, so I still haven’t been! This is the first time I’ve been able to really immerse myself in a language, and that’s made it all the more satisfying.

I’ll never forget how much fun I had on my first trip to the supermarket in Germany. It was like jumping into a virtual reality computer game version of my German textbook. And reading your washing machine manual is so much more interesting when you have to figure out what a wasserhahn (literally, “water chicken”) could possibly be.

To me, Deutsch feels intuitive and nice in a lot of ways, and frustrating and weird in others. For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a completely and unashamedly nerdy post comparing German to all the other languages I’ve learned. So here goes.

Danger: Grammar geek-out ahead. Syntactophobes, beware.

German nouns have case, which doesn’t feel unnatural to me after studying classical languages. When you’ve had to memorise the twenty-four forms of each noun in Sanskrit (eight cases, plus  three numbers – singular, dual and plural), German’s four cases and two numbers feel pretty manageable. A lot of it is just recognising and repeating patterns, and absorbing the exceptions as you go along.

Gender is another fun adventure in Deutsch. In languages that have gender, once you move beyond the realm of people (boy, girl, man, woman), the assignment of gender to nouns is pretty much completely arbitrary. Some languages make it easier than others. In Latin, for example, you can tell the gender of most nouns from their ending  (there are certain suffixes like –a or –as that are always feminine, and others that are always masculine or neuter).

In German on the other hand, aside from a few benevolent exceptions (thanks, –ung!), there’s zero way to tell. The word for “door” is feminine (die Tür), but the word for “gate” is neuter (das Tor). (Oh, and just to make it trickier, the word for “girl”, mädchen, is neuter.)

There’s no particular logic involved, you just have to know your der/die/das. At first the idea of having to memorise the arbitrary genders of hundreds of nouns made me wonder if I should just throw in the towel and buy one of those lame electronic translators. But then I remembered that nouns in my mother tongue, Konkani, also have gender, and I use them without even thinking. So it’s just a matter of time before I get there with German… right? (I hope so, anyway.)

No, the thing I really wonder if I’ll ever be able to get my head around in Deutsch is the evil, evil phenomenon known as the separable-prefix verb. I swear these guys are the sneakiest SOBs I have ever met.

In English, we also have the concept of adding a prefix to a verb and totally changing what it means. For example, “to pose” has quite a different meaning to “to compose”. Similarly, you can add a prefix to a German verb, for example “hören” (to listen/hear) can become “aufhören” (to stop/quit).

Quite straightforward, you would think. Just a simple matter of vocabulary expansion, right? But the plot thickens when you find out that for many prefixed verbs in German, the prefix acts like a sulky toddler and always trails back at the end of the sentence.

Example: Ich höre mit dem Rauchen auf = I’m quitting smoking.

Basically, it’s not enough to know what aufhören means. When someone says a sentence like this, you have to follow along the entire sentence, and then they say one word at the end that just changes the meaning of the verb and causes you to have to go reparse the entire sentence in your mind. It can be really confusing. I wonder how many busking backpackers have travelled through Germany and thought someone was telling their friends to listen their the music, when they were actually saying “quit it with that music!”

I have to say, though, that on the whole, being a native speaker of English is quite a boon when you’re learning German. English is a Germanic language, so there are literally hundreds of words that are instantly recognisable – I/Ich, shoe/Schuh, house/Haus, chair/Stuhl, meat/Fleisch, better/besser… the list goes on. It means you can understand a lot of words by context and instinct that you may not have picked up on otherwise.

Since starting to learn German, I’ve noticed little things in English that surely must be a result of their common roots. Like the fact that back in the day when people used “thou” (which sounds quite similar to “du”, by the way), they would say “thou seekest the truth” or “hast thou forsaken me?” In German, the verb will almost always end in “-st” when the subject is “du”.

Of course, English has simplified a lot over the years and moved further and further away from German. We don’t say “willst thou order the Baconator or the Double Junior Cheeseburger Deluxe?” anymore. (Actually, I may be the first person to have ever uttered that exact sentence.) But these days the two languages are slowly starting to meet in the middle again – this time, with German absorbing more and more English. The word for mobile phone in German is Handy. At work, everyone refers to the overhead projector as the “beamer”. I’ve seen ads in the subway advertising deals for “Internet Surfen”. You really cannot escape Denglish living in a big city here.

I’m sure there are a lot of purists out there upset at this bastardisation of the language of Goethe and Kafka. I guess they can only rest assured (or not) that there’s always the option of relaxing their troubles away at the nearest Wellnesshotel (spa).

Taking care of business

My little old apartment in Munich has several quirks. It’s in the attic, for starters, so the ceiling is all slanty. My washing machine is in the kitchen, and it spin-dries so vigorously that the plates drying in the dish stand clatter. Every square centimetre of the floor creaks, and just this evening my kitchen tap exploded off its fittings and hit me in the head while showering me with a cold spurt of frothing water. Oh, also, every window in the house except the bedroom is curtainless. HELLO, WORLD!

But nothing in Heim Der Urmi compares, in terms of sheer weirdness, to the toilet.

Here is a cross-section of a normal toilet (you’ll have to excuse my crappy MS-Paint skills). You do your thing, it falls into a deep pool of bog water, you flush, you’re done.

And here is what my apartment toilet in Munich looks like.

As you can see, there is a shelf separating the opening where the water flows in from the outlet where the water flows out. This is where all your business lands. The shelf is dry, and it’s only a few inches from your butt.

The negative consequences of this design are manifold. Firstly, it smells bad. Secondly, each time you use the bathroom, you have to stand there and flush up to half a dozen times just to get things moving. In the worst case, you actually need to steel yourself, make a ball of toilet paper, and give your poop a nudge in the right direction. And as you can imagine, being a dry surface, it’s an absolute beeyotch to clean.

When I first moved in, I thought there was maybe something wrong with the toilet. Perhaps it was something to do with my water pressure being low from living on the top floor of an old building. But then I noticed other toilets with the same bizarre design. It seemed that this shelf area was meant to be there, and it was meant to be dry.

Why, Germany, why? You’re the nation that gave us the automobile and the Christmas tree. How could you have allowed such an ill-conceived monstrosity into the world? Ok, I suppose you did also invent the Fahrenheit scale. I guess no-one’s perfect.

Tonight, after several months of putting up with this decidedly ahem, crappy design, I finally learned the method behind the madness. I was informed by my friend Julie, a long-time expat, that this was the way that Germans in past decades used to keep an eye on their health. The shelf provides a surface to clearly examine one’s stools for irregularities in consistency, shape, colour, and so on. Mystery solved!

To be honest, I have no idea how to read my stools. Is it like reading tea leaves, or reading tarot? Maybe there’s a course I can take at the local community college. I’m constantly amazed by how much less squeamish and prudish people seem to be about their bodies here. Kinda cool, really. I wish I were less so.

Où est la piscine?

So, funny thing happened the other day.

I wrapped up at work and set off from the office, as usual, on my bike. It was a bit nippy, so I had my hat and scarf on. I streamed peacefully down the bike lane, enjoying the evening air until I arrived at the bakery that I pass each day, halfway between work and home. I stopped in and grabbed some bread to go with what I was making for dinner. I was thinking some nice, simple, toasted white bread would be perfect.

And so out I walked with a nice baguette, tossed it in the basket of my bike, and continued on my way home.

It took me about 25 seconds to realise what I was doing. I was jauntily riding a red city bike down a dedicated cycle lane paid for by highly-taxed Europeans, wearing a beret and carrying a baguette in a paper bag. For about 10 minutes, I was Bret and Jemaine in Foux de Fa Fa.

(I would be so freaking obnoxious in a French supermarket.)

I would make the following minor tweaks to this scene to make it just perfect:

1. I would be able to speak French
2. I would have dress sense
3. My scarf would be streaming out horizontally behind me in my jetstream
4. I would be a smoker. Actually, I’ll leave that one be.

Life’s a beach and then you dye

(Rest assured: today’s slightly cryptic corny pun will be explained.)

Weeks after returning from Morocco, my feet still have the stripe of a sandal tan across them from wandering around the windswept seaside town of Essaouira. It’s a daily reminder of what a wonderful (but far too short) time I had there.

The central part of Morocco is not as well-serviced by trains as the north is, so bus is the only way to get from Marrakech to the necklace of seaside towns that drapes Morocco’s central Atlantic coast. When we went to the bus terminal to book our tickets, we were told that we could only book our return journey to Marrakech once we got to Essaouira. We soon realised that this was because the bus company keeps track of reservations by crossing off seat numbers in a single big bound notebook. And how could we possibly book seats for a bus whose big notebook was 150km away? Duh, silly westerners.

Our bus left Marrakech’s French quarter on a sunny afternoon, and we gazed out the window as we passed the palm stands of the swish neighbourhood of Palmeriae, kilometres of olive groves, and the towering forest of cranes cranking out new construction on the outskirts of the city.

Soon, we were out in the countryside, which spring had transformed into an aesthetically pleasing palate of colours. Low-slung mud-brick villages were scattered among lush fields exploding with yellow blossoms. The sky had that uninterrupted, dominating presence I’ve only seen in Alberta and Montana. Punctuating the gentle slopes were plucky palms and the odd flock of sheep. And no matter how tiny or remote the village, there was always a group of kids playing soccer in a field somewhere. It was a bit like watching a feel-good FIFA World Cup advertisement.

The only thing spoiling my bucolic trance at this point was the tinny bus radio spurting generic Beyoncé/Sean Paul/Lady Gaga songs throughout the three-hour journey. Why? Why?!

Finally, the bus came up over a crest and I got my first ever glimpse of the Atlantic. The sunset was turning the whitewashed walls of the medina bright orange as we pulled into the bus station at Essaouira. Porters milled around the cargo hold with metal barrows, waiting to relieve travellers of their loads – the town has a vehicle-free medina. The barrows looked big enough to hitch a comfy ride in. This guy was using his to catch up on some zzzz’s.

The riad we stayed at in Essaouira was as amazing as the one in Marrakesh. There’s a line in the Morocco Lonely Planet saying that the term “boutique hotel” seems invented for Morocco’s riads, and I have to agree. Many of these old villas were tucked away forgotten in the back alleys of Morocco’s medinas for decades, neglected to the point of falling down. As the Moroccan government started to dole out generous tax incentives to foreign investors, European couples looking for a sea-change started to buy up these old ruins and restore them to their former glory, reopening them as B&Bs.

Each riad has its own feel to it, imbued by the taste of its owner. In this case, the aesthetic was Berber-meets-rainbow-abstract-art, which I loved.

Early the next morning, we ventured out before dawn to watch the sun rise over the medina. In the tiniest of back alleys, shop owners were picking up the day’s supply of fresh bread right out of the clay ovens of local wholesale bakeries. At the fishermen’s docks, the old sea dogs were having a smoke and getting ready for a day out on the Atlantic. Mountains of tangled netting sat between the rows of colourful, upturned boats waiting on shore.

Essaouira’s fisheries aren’t what they used to be – nowadays, the town lives off the tourism brought in by its World Heritage-listed medina. and the crazy Atlantic winds that draw kitesurfers from around the world to its beaches.

But at one point, the Mediterranean’s most powerful people – Numidian kings, Byzantine emperors, Roman senators – had their eye on this isolated little coastal fort. Why? Because the foam-drenched rocks along Essaouira’s shores were (and still are) home to a unique species of shellfish that were unwittingly worth their weight in gold.

Tyrian purple, that quintessential colour of nobility since classical times, comes from the secretions of a small predatory sea snail called the murex. Ten thousand snails produce little more than a gram of purple dye – enough to give a single robe just a trim of violet. Until I heard that fact, I never truly understood how extravagant it was that Cleopatra had the sails of her royal barge dyed purple.

(And now that you’ve read all that, you can go back and look at the title of this post again, and roll your eyes properly this time.)

But back to the present day, and our early morning walk around town. Essaouira is, as I mentioned, a walled city, and one of the cool things you can do is walk along the old, cannon-lined ramparts facing the Atlantic. You breathe in the fresh sea air, get rained on a little bit, and laugh at the little stray puppies play-fighting over bones. And thereafter, have The Star-Spangled Banner stuck in your head for the rest of the day: “O’er the raaaamparts we watched…”

At lunchtime, we headed for the row of fish grills lining the beach end of Place Moulay Hassan, the main square that faces onto the fishing harbour. Here, a mediaevally-themed sign erected by Essaouira’s “Professional Association of Grilled Fish” states the going price for a seafood lunch.

We wandered past the stalls and solicited prices from each of the vendors. There are half a dozen employees at each stall who rotate between working the barbie and stealing potential customers from neighbouring grill stands.

It’s a cutthroat business – there isn’t really much differentiating one stall from the other in terms of the food served. (That’s why, like the stall holders in the souks of Marrakesh, the grillmeisters of Essaouira have swotted up on as many languages as their brains can hold. The guesses as to my mother tongue tended to follow this order: “Buenos dias? Bon jour? Namaste? Salaam alaikum? Hello?”)

The competition’s great if you’re the customer, though, because for a paltry $5 or so, you are served up a feast of delicious grilled fish, seafood, salad and bread (and some stalls differentiate themselves by throwing in a bottle of Coke).

It’s hard to explain what I liked so much about Essaouira. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought it would be a touristy, beachy town, but the beach wasn’t actually that appealing – it was so windy, day and night, that walking there was more forced exfoliation than relaxation. There aren’t a lot of traditional touristy sights to see, and the medina doesn’t have the bustle and excitement of a big Moroccan city like Marrakech. No, what makes you fall for Essaouira is its relaxed, coastal vibe – the chilled outdoor cafés, the rustic, tumbledown buildings, the merchants pushing their barrows around the car-free medina like they’ve done for hundreds of years, and the friendly smiles of every single person you meet. All the while, the sun is ducking in and out of clouds like a confused meerkat, and the unending breeze bends the skinny palms in Orson Welles Square. Life just moves at a different pace around here.