The Saga: Part Two; In Which We're Exhausted... No, Really

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, to pick up roughly where A left off...

We were scheduled to fly out of Istanbul the next morning at about 7:00. After checking the ticket approximately 1,000,000 times to be SURE that we had the date and time right, A and I set one alarm for 3:30 and another for 3:35, (we really didn't want to miss another flight) and went to sleep. Although I was completely exhausted (I know we keep going back to that, but seriously, it was really, really bad) my traitor brain managed to wake me up at about 1:30 that morning whispering "What if neither of the alarms goes off?" "What if we're so tired that we sleep through them?" "What if on the 1,000,001st time I look at the ticket, I realize that really we're supposed to leave at 3:00, not 7:00?" and so on and so forth. Eventually, I gave up trying to get back to sleep.

So. 3:30 rolls around, A gets up, we gather our things and head for the airport. It all seems to be going smoothly until, as we're waiting in line to check our bags, a passport control worker comes up to check our ticket and our passport. After asking some standard questions about where we're going and what we plan to do there, he informs us that, as we don't have visas into Morocco, we have to be out within 90 days. We were aware of that and planned to work around it by either getting an extension from within the country (which we've been told we can do) or by making a day trip to Spain (or wherever) and coming back with a fresh 90-day allowance. Both seem to be pretty common solutions, we certainly aren't planning on over-staying our visa, so no big deal, right?

Well, according to this man, we cannot be issued our boarding passes until we show him our tickets out of Morocco, bought for within 90 days of the current date.

Now, keep in mind that at this point, besides being (surprise!) completely exhausted, we had also just spent massive amounts of money on four plane tickets to Morocco (two for each of us), plus two train tickets, two bus tickets, a hotel stay, and numerous taxi trips - none of which we had budgeted for at all*. Hearing that we were going to have to buy two MORE plane tickets was really more than either of us could handle at that point. But, if it was that or not being able to get to Morocco...And it wasn't like we could just hop on a later flight, because we had grabbed the last two seats available until Sunday.

Fortunately, as far as either of us could tell (no one we talked to spoke particularly good English, so we're still only about 90% sure) all we wound up having to do was make a "reservation" for a ticket, which didn't actually cost any money. They seemed to be much more concerned with the piece of paper formality than anything else, but it was still a pretty enormous scare.

We were, however, able to land in Madrid without incident. From there, we had a 9-hour layover that morphed into a 10 1/2-hour layover because of delays, but we safely landed in Casablanca at about 7:40 (Casa time) that evening.

The flight itself was absolutely beautiful; we took off just as the sun was beginning to set, which let us watch it slowly go down as we flew over Spain. Unfortunately, we were somewhat nervous throughout the trip, because we had to get through passport control, grab our luggage, pass through customs, and get to the airport train all by 10:00 or miss our transfer to the night's last train heading to Rabat (where we're living and where we had a hotel for the night.)

Last time we flew into Casablanca, passport control alone took well over 2 hours, so we rushed there as quickly as we could. Luckily, it went much more smoothly this time, and even though the airport was packed, we were able to get all our things and make it to the train by 8:40 - plenty of time to catch our breath before the 9:00 train out.

Thrilled that we had made it through so quickly and grateful that we should be able to so easily make it to Rabat, we settled back to relax and wait for the train to come. We waited. And waited.

At first we joked about how silly it was that we had expected the train to be precisely on time - had we forgotten how Morocco worked?

At 9:15 I heard a couple angrily complaining in French about how ridiculous it was that the train still hadn't come. Moments later, they stormed out while saying they would just take a taxi. I chuckled to A about how they probably wouldn't do very well in Morocco if a 15-minute delay bothered them so much.

At 9:30, I started needing to go to the bathroom, but didn't want to leave in case we missed the train.

At 9:40, I finally decided to take the chance.

At 9:45, A and I tried to reassure each other that the train to Rabat would almost certainly be running late, as well, and we should be just fine.

At 10:00, I saw a group of men come back from talking to someone at the ticket office. They looked very upset, but I could only pick up bits and pieces of what they were saying.

At 10:10, another group of men came and began spreading the word that the train wasn't coming. Everyone who had been waiting got up to leave.

Most of the people were flooding the ticket office trying to get refunds, but A and I were just focused on trying to make it to the transfer station in time to get that last train to Rabat (which was supposed to leave at 10:45.) We didn't even know whether it was still running, but we were pretty desperate not to be stuck in another foreign city for another night.

The station was so crowded that it took us another 10 or 15 minutes to make our way out to the taxi station. At first we tried to get a taxi to the train station, but we pretty quickly realized that we almost certainly wouldn't make it there in time. At that point we were so exhausted that we decided to just take a taxi all the way to Rabat.

Fortunately, Moroccan taxis are affordable enough that the 1 1/2-hour or so trip was "only" about $85. Unfortunately, we're broke and that's still a lot of money. Anyway, the complications continued as we began driving through heavy fog that made it extremely difficult to see more than a few feet ahead of us. Moroccan drivers being Moroccan drivers, that made him slow down to maybe 70 MPH. Anyway, the complications (sorry, "adventures") continued when we arrived in Rabat. Our hotel, Dar Alia Riad, was actually a riad (basically, a mansion that's been converted into a smallish hotel) set in the center of the medina. Unfortunately, the medina can be difficult to navigate even in the daytime, and it is almost impossible to drive through. Fortunately, I had very specific directions regarding where to have the taxi driver let us off, and exactly how to walk to the riad from there. 

 Seriously, don't try to drive a car through here.

This post is so excessively long, even for me, that I'm splitting it into two parts. 

Next Up: Silly J! Why would you expect things to start being simple?

* Can I just take a moment to once again thank everyone for their extraordinary generosity at our wedding? Seriously, as bad as things were, they would have been much, much worse without all of your help. Thank you so much.

The Saga: Part One; A('s) Perspective on Our Travails... Err... Travels (Part One)

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, J's given you a bit more background on why we're on a completely different continent than we're supposed to be. That leaves it up to me to tell you how we got there (unless J decides to chime in on this too).

There's no reason for this to be here except that we took it in
Turkey, and we thought it was fun. Not sure what Nas
means in Turkish, but I'd like to think it means "Rocket."

We left our apartment at about 8:30 PM on Monday night. We were, upon leaving, completely exhausted. J was exhausted because a bad bed combined with a ten mile trek the previous day had left her in some of the worst pain she's had in quite some time. I was exhausted because while J was busy packing and cleaning, I had spent much of the day out and about running various errands. Well, I didn't actually run, but I walked a great deal.

Anyway, so we're exhausted. Not realizing that we would be moving to Morocco within a month of arriving in Turkey, we had backed five bags. All of those bags, now repacked (with two of them filled with expendable items, because we weren't sure what our baggage allowance was), had to be loaded into a taxi and taken to Ankara's main train station. The loading isn't so bad, but everything in between is not fun. J had two large rolling bags weighing in at about eighty-eight pounds. I had two rolling bags and a duffle bag which weighed in at well over a hundred pounds. I only managed by putting the duffle onto the larger rolling luggage, which put a hundred pounds on one arm. Oh, and yeah, we both had back packs with our laptops in them too.

Seriously, an amusement park with rides and everything.

Right at the beginning, Turkey started to get its revenge on us for leaving. It was sad to leave our apartment, and as if to add insult to injury, the Ankara train station is located across the street from an amusement park. Seriously, an amusement park.

We waited a few hours at the station, then were able to board our train: the Ankara Express. It's a sleeper train from Ankara to Istanbul, where our flight was (there didn't seem to be a whole lot of traffic between Turkey and Morocco, and we were happy to get what we did). I slept fine, but I woke up around six in the morning, and J barely got any sleep at all. When we got to the station, we broke our fast with a couple bagels. So we were tired and underfed as we dragged our bags off the train and into a taxi.

The ride from the train station to the airport was not a pleasant one. There are a great many cars on Turkey's roads, and their taxi drivers seem to be correspondingly aggressive. I was alright, but J's motion sickness was bad by the time we got to the airport.

Once we were in the airport and looking for the line to check in, we noticed something peculiar about our tickets. In the US, we show everything in AM and PM. However, the Europeans, always out to have more practical measurements, keep counting up to 24:00. So right now, I'm writing this at 21:53. Well, we realized at the airport that our tickets did not say that we would be taking off at 1:35 PM, but at 1:35. It was only then that we realized the check in counter opened at 22:35 the day before.

We don't really have many photos from this portion of the
trip. So here's the train station. Gar means station.

 We were crushed. We were supposed to be at our hotel in Rabat within just twelve hours, and now we realized that we didn't even have a valid plane ticket. We were exhausted, J was nauseous, we had no ticket, and we had no place to stay. Just going on was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done. I would say the same for J too, but she’s faced a lot more problems in her day and she’s a lot braver than I am. Speaking for myself, I had to fight repeatedly the urge to break down into sobs. We had invested a great deal of time, effort, and money to get as far as we had, and now we were faced with the prospect of putting in a whole lot more.

Fortunately, the airport we were at provided free internet, and we were able to strategize our next moves. We booked a hotel, looked up bus schedules, and a two hour bus ride and a one hour taxi drive later we had all of our things settled in a hotel room for the night.


Still not many photos from this part of the trip. But look! The
Turkish flag. This kind of thing was everywhere. One of the
things J and I wanted out of the trip to Turkey was a better
understanding of Turkish nationalism. While we didn't really
get to talk to any Turks about it, we definately got a lot of
graphic examples.

I just want to stop and say at this point that I’m married to one of the most fantastic people in the world. I was on the verge of breaking down like a three year old and sobbing, and I had gotten sleep in the past three nights. I was fully recovered from the taxi ride. I was barely functioning, and I was in much better condition than J was when she looked up public transportation in Istanbul, booked our hotel, and found us a flight for the next day for only a mildly bank busting fare. She did it because she’s done almost all of that kind of work for all of our trips, because she’s one of the most capable and hardworking people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. The fact that she did it in the state she was just goes to prove that she’s also the strongest person I know. I would say I don’t know what I would have done without her there, but the truth is I never would have made it so far. I am the luckiest man in the world, and I don’t mind telling you either.

(Note, when I read the preceding paragraph to J, her response was, “Suck up.” Can I just say that I also married the funniest woman in the world, as well)



Look! Another Turkish flag! And yes, I was
very tired when I wrote these captions. Why
do you ask?

So anyway, J got us a hotel five minutes from Istanbul’s other airport (the two are almost as far apart as you can get in Istanbul, they’re literally on separate continents). It goes without saying we were tired, but I’m going to say it anyway. We were very, very tired. It was in this context that we read the note on our hotel mirror, that while the tap water was fine for brushing teeth, it was not drinking water



That would have been fine, except that the hotel charged five Turkish Lira for a half liter bottle of water. For context, a half liter is about the size of bottles in the states (maybe a bit smaller, I’m not sure), and five Turkish Lira is about $3.30. To give that further context, the same bottle would cost .35 Turkish Lira in the grocery store or .50 Turkish Lira almost anywhere else.


At this point, I want to say something about greed. Greed is charging ten times the retail value of an item essential for human survival, and then telling your guests that they are not allowed to bring in their own food or drinks. Greed is charging more than 13 dollars, dollars mind you, for a can of Red Bull. Greed is charging a price because you can, and it, like other degrading evils is best met with nonviolent protest. In our case, nonviolent protest consisted of going to the shopping center across the street, buying two 1.5 liter bottles for one Turkish Lira each, and then thoroughly hydrating ourselves with the banned items in our hotel room.

Just writing all this out makes me tired, so, on that note I’ll end for now. I’ll complete the rest of this saga later.