Friday, February 16, 2007

My friends of course we have hot showers by Sunny Shervey. Editing and creative insight, Alexis Youngs

It's amazing how friendly everyone is when you're a tourist. I never knew how many friends I had until our team started our vacation from Spain to Morocco. Nearly every person I met, or didn't even meet but made eye contact with, actually in most cases just walked by, greeted me with, hello my friend (and then proceeded with telling me what they want to do for me because we are such good friends).

So it’s Sunday, and our team is trying to get from Spain to Morocco and we have to take a ferry to get there, however Mother Nature has ideas to spoil our plans. We go to the ferry dock and see that due to "hurricane level wind gusts" no ferries will be going to or from Morocco and Spain for the day. A bit disappointed that our Moroccan vacation is getting cut down by one day, we turn around and start looking for a good hostel. We find one shady looking place, and decide to stay there (there will be more posts about Hostel Marrakech, but I feel, rather strongly, that this is the most important post, and due to my lack of ambition with blogging, I fear the others may not make it on, so I want to start with the best).

After a long night of walking in a tsunami for food (raining really hard, no restaurants or stores open), our team heads back to our hostel for a good night’s sleep. It was colder inside our hostel than outside, so the ladies push our beds together to absorb body heat. Needless to say, we wake up in the morning, still damp from the previous night, and shivering. Before we checked into the hostel our new friends promised us there was hot water. In eager anticipation, Alexis and I decide to check them out because we tend to “manifest into nastiness” much quicker than other members on our team, so to honor them, since they have to look at us, we think, “we should shower.”

Because the place is a bit shady we go together and decide that one person can just wait in the bathroom while the other is showering to make sure no one else comes in. When we walk into the bathroom we are greeted by the potent smell of urine, and the floor has about 2cm of standing, brownish water, just waiting to be stood in. Alexis starts getting ready for the shower, it’s pretty standard, (hose out of the wall, with the shower head at the end, so you manually hold it over your body to clean you) and she gets in. I’m standing in the bathroom wondering if it’s possible to blow smoke rings with your breath, you know when it’s so cold outside you can see your breath? So anyway, Alexis turns on the shower and some chunks of ice fall onto her feet (it wasn’t really that cold, but I’m guessing the water was only a smidge above freezing levels).
We come to a standstill. It is clear that we need to shower, but who knows if we will be able to shower in Morocco. What should we do? I’m reminded of the time we arrived in Croatia after 28 hours of traveling to get there, and after finding our apartment with the water heater turned off we took the plunge and endured cold showers. Alexis and I decide to just tough it out and shower, surely it can’t be any worse this time.


We look at each other and decide it’s go time. Alexis stretches her head and neck (I don’t think in normal circumstances it’s possible to stretch your head, but it happened this morning) as far away from her body as possible (we decided to just wash the hair – no use risking hypothermia just to put dirty clothes back on). She lets some icicle water trickle on her hair, and starts getting the shampoo ready. I am holding the hair dryer, trying to dry out my shoes from the night before and realize this could be a perfect heating mechanism for Alexis while she is showering. So I stand outside the shower and point the nozzle towards Alexis, she showers in record time, and then does the same for me.


Using a towel the size of my hand to dry off, we get ready and start brushing our teeth. At one point one of our guys, hearing the hair dryer and assuming we were presentable, knocked on the door and cried, “Housekeeping!” in a shrill voice. “Can I come it?” “No!!” we reply, with panic in our eyes. All of a sudden my eyes start burning and I start smelling something horrible. I look at Alexis. “Did she do this?” I ask myself. I turn towards her and can see she’s asking the same questions about me. “Did you-” we both say simultaneously. “NO!” we laugh out at the same time. See, the thing is, the smell was so much worse than a typical, I’ll say it, fart. But how do you turn to someone and just ask straight out, “Did you just crap your pants? Do you have wicked bad diarrhea? Do you need a doctor or a change of clothes?” We never figured out the origin of the fumes but pretty soon we got ourselves out of the room, out of the hostel, and eventually, out of the country.