McCarthy's Casbah - Part VII

One of the curious features of Spanish  life is that people have 2 last names. Whereas in most of the world you are given one last name, typically your father’s, the Spanish have adopted the custom of honoring both your parents so if your father is called Butragueno and your mother’s name is Rincon, your last name will be Butragueno-Rincon. Combine this with the fact that many people still insist on naming their children after grandparents, aunts etc. and give them multiple first names, and you can see where this might get confusing at times.

If you look at Pablo Picasso’s life story, you will see his parents took this to a whole different level. His full name is.. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz Picasso. Try fitting that on a business card.



Picasso’s  father was an art professor at a local college as well as the curator at a local museum and in his free time he was also a painter himself.  Young Pablo had art and creativity thrown at him from the word go.
An often quoted ‘fact’ is that his first word was ‘Pencil’ and while this may or may not be true, it certainly is a nice annecdote to illustrate his aptitude for art. When Pablo was young still, his family moved around Spain, first to La Coruna and then Barcelona, where his father took up positions of increasing importance with art colleges. It is often mentioned that Barcelona is where Picasso really got into his art, and later in life he would often say that Barcelona was his spiritual home- a quote, I’m sure, the people at the Picasso Museum would rather see buried and forgotten.




He attended art school in both Barcelona and Madrid but he hated being told what to do so he spent most his time observing the city and going to museums.(I’d say me and Ol’ Pablo would have gotten along just fine)
As is par for the course in the life of an artist, he also spent prolongued periods in Paris. I won’t bore you with all the details about his various artistic periods or influences, because you can Google that yourself if you’re interested in that.
I looked up the Picasso museum online and found, to my surprise, that there are 2 in Malaga. The most famous one is the Museo Picasso Malaga, which has many of his works on display, and the lesser known one is the Museo Picasso Casa Natal. The art museum is where all the tourists go to see his works, so I decided to leave that until my next visit to Malaga and first get to know the man a little better by visiting the house where he was born and spent his early years.

On the ground floor, you can walk around an expo of some of his early work, mostly pen drawings and sketches. I was given a sort of remote control type device that, so I found after entering, you were supposed to hold to your ear and then press the corresponding button for each display you got to. The remote control would then tell you a little story about the display and what was happening in it, when it was made etc. There were some really cool weird drawings, but unfortunately you were not allowed to take pictures. I spent about half an hour walking around the room and when I got to the end, I noticed that the guard was explaining something to another visitor so I shot a couple of pictures with my phone.


Next up was the first floor, which was the actual house the family lived in, late in the 19^th century. I often find it just as interesting as art or other exhibits to walk around the place where people actually lived. The first time I was in New York, I visited an original Dutch farmhouse from the colonial days. This was, obviously, now also decked out as a museum, but it was the same building the family had lived in all those years ago, and it was much in the original state. I found it incredibly interesting to walk around the old farm where people had lived their lives and had gone about their daily business.
So it was now, walking around Picasso’s old living room, his father’s atelier and the family room. To walk in the rooms where one of the great artists of the 20^th century set his first steps, ate his dinners and arguably spoke his first words was a special experience that I’m not sure any number of paintings could have surpassed.  What made it even better,was what I found out at the end of the tour: Picasso had died only about a year before I was born.
This was an exciting new experience for me. Growing up in Holland, I was raised with art from famous Dutch painters and nearly all of them lived in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. While their art was admirable, their life stories were as much ancient history to me as the Roman empire or the march of Ghengis Kahn.
Keith Haring apart, I had never admired art from someone who had been alive at the time of the moon landing. With newfound admiration for Picasso, I now decided to have a look at his grave but was disappointed when the girl at reception told me that he was buried somewhere near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. I walked back onto the sunny square and sat down next to Picasso.
Or, well, his statue because there is a statue in front of the museum of him sitting on a bench, looking out over the square, as he would have when he was a little kid. I decided to have some lunch and went in search of a nice spot in the sun, wondering why Picasso never returned to Malaga.

[Author’s note: I did some research into this later and found that Picasso never returned to Malaga for a good reason. Picasso moved to France early in the 20^th century (most sources place this event around 1904) and pretty much enjoyed himself. If he ever considered moving back to Spain, this was prevented by 2 events: First, the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, and the country was split in 2 factions: the Nationalists, who wanted to overthrow the government and install a fascist state, and the Republicans who wanted to keep the situation as it was (democracy and all that). As time progressed, most of the country came under control of the fascist Nationalists, with the exception of some major cities (among them, interestingly, Malaga). With both sides bogged down in a turf war and no clear winner, something else happened: the Second World War.
Just before, and during, the second world war, the Nationalists, under command of one Francisco Franco, were backed by the fascist governments of Germany and Italy and, when the war ended, Franco and his boys came out on top. (The Republicans had been backed by Russia and, for some reason, Mexico)
As Picasso had politely rejected to join either side during the civil war, he could be quite sure that moving back to Spain would result in him being arrested, imprisoned and possibly executed for being an enemy of the state or whatever oppressive governments call people who refuse to do as they’re told. As you may know, Franco was finally overthrown in 1976 and normal order was restored in Spain. By this time, ofcourse, Picasso had died.]

I had an excellent lunch of tiny sandwiches with sliced fish and sundried tomatoes, and made my way back to the hostel by finding a shortcut through the North of the city centre and 4 bars with sunny patios. Back at the hostel I found an English guy I had been talking to the night before who was just about to go out for a drink with a couple of others. He asked me if I wanted to come along and ofcourse I did because beer, so I went to my room to re-apply my sunscreen and hobbled back downstairs.
When I arrived at reception, I found to my shock that Rottweiler would be among those in the touring party. In fact, apart from the other English guy, he was the only one in the party. Ah well, maybe he wasn’t as obnoxious when he got out of the hostel.

Rottweiler said he knew a great Irish pub, so we made our way into the city and, after passing 3 other pubs that could not bear his sign of approval, I found myself back on Plaza Merced, about 20 yards from the door of the museum I had visited earlier in the day. The English guy (not Rottweiler, the other one) was in need of a job and money so he spent some time discussing his CV with a manager. He ensured her that his family was originally Irish and from Cavan, a feature that probably meant as much to her as if he had said that he had relatives in Iryan Jaya, and eventually sat down in the sun with me and Rottweiler. To open conversation, I thought I’d tell them about the museum next to the pub but it soon became apparent that they weren't interested. The English/Irish guy was fine with talking about travel,  Ireland and football so found a willing conversational partner in me. Rottweiler only wanted to talk about England. No matter what subject came up, he managed to turn it into something that was better in England, better because England didn’t have it or worse because it wasn’t English. After I finished my pint, I escaped by saying that I was going to the beach. The English/Irish guy apologised later that night for Rottweiler’s behaviour, which was unnecessary because he had been fun to talk to and needn’t issue apologies.

That evening,  I walked into the common room and heard Rottweiler barking at the receptionist on duty. People in the room looked at each other in annoyance and incredulity. Would this guy never stop? His next sentence answered that.
“I’M LEAVING TOMORROW!!”
I’m not going to exaggerate here by saying that people fell into each other’s arms as if they were East Berliners crossing into the West for the first time, or war veterans reunited with their families after a long and dangerous tour of duty, but there were definitely a couple of fist bumps, one high five and the hiss of a beer can opened in celebration.
Yes, the beer can was mine.
The next day was the last full day in Malaga for both me and my new Dutch friends. While I had a comfortable afternoon flight back to Dublin, they had to be at the airport at 5.30 or some such so had to get up, well, even before that. We agreed to go out for dinner that night and then went our separate ways for the day. I spent my last day in Malaga in the way I like the place most: Doing nothing much. I sauntered the sunny streets and squares of the city centre. I had an ice cream at Casa Mira, and then another one. I had some tapas at a place near the Museo Picasso and then retired to the garden of El Pimpi, just around the corner, where I spent an hour in the sun, drinking cold beer and eating olives. I went to Plaza Uncibay and sat outside the place that sells 5 bottles of beer for 3 Euros. I lazily whiled the day away and absolutely loved it.
Dinner that night added to my feelings that Malaga was a great place. We had dinner at a restaurant just off Plaza de la Constitucion and I had some of the best paella I ever ate. Combined with 2 pints of San Miguel and a rum for dessert that was so generous I thought I’d be charged for a triple, my total bill came to about 15 Euros. What an amazing place!
We went back to the hostel and had a couple of beers in the garden. My friends went to bed around midnight so as to catch a couple of hours of sleep before going to the airport so we said our goodbyes. Just as they left, some others came back, so I continued the conversation with them, and when they left, I decided I’d have one more beer and then go to bed.

I woke up because I heard muffled conversation and people walking by with luggage. I opened my eyes and found my friends were back in the garden. Why were they back in the garden?
Why was I STILL in the garden? What time was it?
It turned out that I had dozed off during my final beer and had slept on a couch in the garden for a couple of hours, and my friends were now ready for departure to the airport. Hmm, okay then. Good thing it was still 24 degrees outside.
We said goodbye again and I retired, this time to my bed.

I reluctantly packed my bag for the final time at around 10, said my goodbyes to the staff, promising to come back soon, and then departed.
I don’t want to leave.
Towards the end of any trip, I always start to reminisce about the places I went, the things I saw and the experiences gained. 
As I sat on the train to the airport, I thought about Gibraltar, and what a strange place it is. Their weird money, their monkeys, their rock and the surreal experience of feeling you’re in England while you’re 20 miles from Africa. What a strange geographical oddity and anachronistic left over from colonial days.
The train pulled into the Aeropuerto station and I emerged from the airconditioned underground station into the warm Mediterranean air. I looked back at the city and saw its modest skyline in the distance.
I don’t want to go.

After customs and security, I planted myself at the bar of O’Leary’s, one of the best airport bars in Europe. For no reason that is apparent to me, they decided to deck out the main airport bar here as an American sportsbar. More specifically, a Boston sports bar. The whole place looks like your less than 2 blocks away from Fenway Park or the Boston Garden. Not an inch of wall space is left untouched. Between the pennants, banners and flags, you stare into the eyes of Larry Bird, Tim Wakefield and Tom Brady. There are Stanley Cup ornaments, Red Sox bats and a wall chart detailing when exactly trophies were won and why Boston is the greatest sporting city in the world. As you walk out (or in) you are greeted by the broad, cigar-filled smile of the inevitable Red Auerbach.
As I took all this in, my mind drifted back to Tangier.  I had no idea what Tangier was going to bring and, to be honest, I was sort of overwhelmed by it. Pete McCarthy said that after a week there, the city had grown on him and, by the end, he actually started to enjoy it.  Tangier was a great experience but I’m not sure if it is a city that I would actually start to enjoy fully at some point, in the way I enjoy Boston or Lubljana or Melbourne. I had seen what I wanted to see, experienced the city for 2 days and that was pretty much it for me. I can’t see myself returning to Tangier in a hurry. The poverty, dirt and especially the incessant approach from guides, beggars and other people out to get your money had become a bit irritating towards the end. Still, I am intrigued by the Arab world for some reason, and I want to see more of it. Which I find strange, to be honest.
The things that mostly come to mind when thinking about the Arab world are that they take religion very serious, they generally have a somewhat strange view on the rights of women, and they don’t drink.
If you asked me to make a list of things that I dislike most, this is pretty much the list I would come up with. Still, I want to see more of it. But what part? I ordered another beer so that I could properly contemplate this.  I went over a map of the Arab world in my head and found that travelling in this part of the world can be something of a challenge. I have always been fascinated by Lebanon, somehow. Maybe it’s because they were constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons in my early childhood, like Ireland. Going East from Morocco, you cross the following countries: Algeria (civil war, extremism and agression against westerners) Tunisia (extremism) Libya (civil war) and Egypt(civil unrest, political instability and extremism) are too dangerous and all off-limits. Jordan and Lebanon are stable and open to tourism, but given the fact that they are surrounded by the horrendous war currently raging in Iraq and Syria, I think I’ll pass on those too for the moment. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, alcohol is illegal. Not frowned upon, like in Morocco, or “Just go to the bar in the basement and we’ll pretend that you’re sober” easygoing like Dubai- ILLEGAL. As in drink-a-brandy-and-end-up-in-jail illegal.
I ended up with the consideration that it would have to be the United Arab Emirates or Turkey.

[Author’s Note: When back home, I discussed this with my cousin Raymond, whom I consider to be a bit of an expert on the subject as his wife is Turkish, and he recommended me to go to Istanbul]

I was woken from my Arabian Nights by a loud ping on the PA system and one of those announcements that you can never understand, which reminded me that I had a plain to catch. I drowned the last of my pint and headed for the gate.
I want to stay.
As the plane taxied to its take off position, my mind was elsewhere. It was not in the plane on the runway. It was on a sunny terrace on the Plaza Merced with a cold beer in its hand.
With the city fading below me, my considerations reached the final stage of travel evaluation, something I always ask myself;  The Big Question- Could you live there?
For Gibraltar and Tangier, this was a resounding No.

Gibraltar is too small and isolated. It would be like living in small town or on an outlying island. I would get incredibly bored within a couple of weeks.
Tangier, as I said, is a bit too chaotic, poverty stricken and unregulated for me.  That, and the absence of pubs, would drive me insane.

I looked out the window one more time, to catch a last glimpse of Malaga before it disappeared from sight. I love the place. It’s such an easy going city. The people are friendly, the food is fantastic and they have great beaches that you can use year round because it’s always sunny and warm. On top of all that, it’s dirt cheap. You can have a great lunch for 5 Euros, beer costs next to nothing and you can rent an appartment for the price of a room in Dublin.
 
Could I live there?
Yes.
And at some point I actually might.

The reason I’m not moving there now is not Malaga. It’s Dublin.
I’m still too hooked on Dublin to leave. I’m at home in Dublin, more than I have ever felt at home in Holland. I could not say goodbye to the city and the friendly people. I couldn’t bear watching the Dublin football team on a laptop screen rather than from the stands in Croke Park. And I definitely couldn’t walk away from my favorite restaurants, all those great pubs, and the friends I made.
I couldn’t leave that all behind.

Not now.

McCarthy's Casbah - Part VI

After another excellent night’s sleep and another fine breakfast, I packed my bag, paid my bill, said my  goodbyes and walked out into the medina. It was only about 9.30 but the hustle and bustle was starting again. I promised several shop owners that I would come visit their shops later, knowing that I wouldn’t be back for the forseeable future,  and made my way onto Grand Soco. I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the bus station.When I slammed the door close, he looked at me with a pained face and then at the door. I looked at the door too and found that the window was hooked inside the car at a precarious angle. Sorry ‘bout that. I didn’t know your taxi was falling apart.
I shoved the window back in it’s place and we were on our way. It was relatively quiet on the streets (even in a place like Tangier people rather do as little as possible on Monday morning) so we made good progress until the driver stopped to let someone in the back. They spoke a couple of words and the driver then went out of his way to drop our new passenger at his destination. A couple of coins exchanged hand and we were back en route to the bus station. The taxi dropped me off at what he said was the bus stop for the ferry port, I closed the door very carefully this time, and he went on his way. I looked around and could not see any other obvious tourists. A timetable wasn’t on the shelter either and just when I was trying to figure out what to do next, I was approached by another taxi driver. “Tangier Med?” he asked hopefully?
I wasn’t planning to take a taxi all the way there, really. “I take bus” I informed him, which, as expected, led to his reply of “Bus leave 5 minutes. Next: 1 hour”.
Great. So according to him, the bus just left and it could be a good long while before the next one. He was probably making this up to get a good fare to the distant port but, then again, I couldn’t tell for sure since there was no time table. There were no other tourists here either and I didn’t want to risk waiting here for too long and, literally, miss the boat.
“How much” I asked him?
-200 Dirham!


As luck would have it, that was the exact amount of Moroccan money I had left in my wallet. I had intended to spend it on tax free booze on the ferry but I might as well just spend it on a taxi ride.
My ride was a sand colored Mercedes that, at an estimate, rolled out of the factory around the time Duran Duran were topping the charts. The dashboard looked like the interior of an American dive bar. It was full of random, unrelated objects to the extent that the dashboard itself was hardly visible anymore: small mirrors, a Hawaiian bobbing head doll, a sticker of a French castle, a scarf of Chelsea football club, a strain of Christmas lights and a lot more. It all looked very cosy, but as the driver spoke little French and no English apart from the financial side of things, I didn’t dwell on it.

We flew through the countryside and I spent most of the time reading my book. What I did notice, was that people regularly tried to flag down the taxi. This was mostly near building sites where people were trying to get.. elsewhere, I guess. As this was a serious intercity taxi, he ignored them all and the distance to the port evaporated quickly. What a strange place, where people had to get back from work by hoping that a taxi would appear, then stop and then accept what they were willing to pay. We arrived at the ferry port, I gave the driver my last Moroccan money and went inside. While in search of a window where I could acquire a ticket for the boat, I found that I had no European money left either. This sucked because that meant I couldn’t get a  beer on the boat. I went to the window for my ferry company and was again accosted by a Moroccan who wanted to help. As I was still not quite au fait with this whole idea of people constantly trying to do things for you that you could easily do yourself, I decided to re-apply my technique of speaking Dutch to him, as this had had the desired effect on most people in the city. I gave him the Dutch equivalent of “Go fuck yourself” and.. yes, ofcourse, he spoke fluent Dutch.

This wasn't him though.



Fortunately, it was quite noisy in the terminal, so he hadn’t heard me properly and started talking to me in strongly accented Dutch. I would have guessed that he had lived in Antwerp or thereabouts and he was very happy to help me with anything I needed done. After a minute or so, I walked off with some excuse and went in search of an ATM. When I found an ATM in front of a currency exchange office, I checked inside and was informed that, yes, the machine only gave out Moroccan money but I could ofcourse exchange it inside for a small fee. I politely rejected the chance to pay 5 Euros to walk money from  an ATM to a desk 4 yards further and went to the waiting area for the bus. 

While I sat there, waiting for the shuttle, I contemplated my days in Tangier and was in 2 minds. I had found it a very interesting experience and it was good to have been in a place that was so categorically different from anywhere else I had ever been.  I found it fascinating to be there, in a culture that was so different from Ireland or Holland or the USA. I had gone to Tangier mainly to chase the steps of Pete McCarthy, who himself was chasing Terence McCarthy, the alledged Prince of Desmond. I just could not get my head around why someone would move from Ireland to a place like Tangier. Sure, he had left Ireland to get away from the negative publicity that surrounded his claim to the throne of Munster, and Tangier, as I said earlier, is an excellent place to escape from view. You could get off the boat in Tangier and live quite comfortably without ever being seen again. But why Tangier? It was poor, dirty, chaotic and disorganised. Interesting as my days had been, I would have gone insane quite rapidly if I found myself living here. Maybe that is what happened to all those mumbling people on the street, begging for scraps. Maybe they had come to Tangier with the same intention as me and wanted to leave after a week or so, but just got sucked in.
I was woken from my day dreams by the honking horn of the shuttle bus that was ready to take me to the ferry. Whatever Terence’s reasons were, I hope he’s happy.

This is Terrence McCarthy, on the right of the picture, with President Robinson of Ireland and her husband, in 1996.
If you are interested in reading more about the McCarthy Mor, you can follow This link

Please keep in mind that this is just the opinion of one researcher and not necessarily the complete story.

Arriving at the ferry terminal, I noticed a tax free shop that might come in handy in the resolution of my cash problem. Even if they didn’t have an ATM (or one with Euros) I could probably still use my card there to buy something to drink for on the way over. While I walked in, I was called on by an employee of the ferry company. He asked me if I was on the 13.15 ferry and when I confirmed that this was the case, he urged me to hurry as it was time to get on board. I looked at the time and found that it was only 11.45 so even if I was off by an hour again, I still had over 20 minutes and the ferry was no more than 50 yards away. I walked into the shop and found a shelf full of beer. Score!

I picked up 2 cans and found, to my annoyance, that they were warm. When I told the shop assistant this, he pointed out a big fridge at the other end of the shop which contained nice cold beer. I picked up 2 cold cans and went to the till. “5 for 5 Euros, sir!” I was told. I said I only wanted 2 and he could charge me 5 Euros for the 2 cans if he had to. This, I was assured, was not a possibility. The ferry employee now came to intervene, and grabbed a plastic bag, went over to get 3 more cans of beer and handed them to me. I paid by card and then was urged onto the concourse by the same ferry guy. Immigration control this time consisted of a man in a high visibility vest sitting on a stool under a big umbrella. He stamped my passport without looking at it so I made my way towards the ferry. The footbridge onto the upper deck had already been retracted, so I made it onto the ferry by way of the car deck. What the fuck was going on here?


Not a lot, it turned out. I arrived in the bar and had a look at the clock. 11.58. So I had had the time right and there was still more than an hour to go before sailing time.  All the shops were still locked, the bar was empty, apart from me and the bar man, and what ferry staff was there were pertinently doing nothing. I put my book on a table and then set out my 5 cans of Kronenbourg behind it.
Great, the ferry man had grabbed 3 warm cans of beer to complement the 2 cold ones I had already.

I opened my first cold can and focused on my book, the excellent 'Notes from a small island' by Bill Bryson. This book, accidentally, was chosen by the British public in 2003 as the book that best captured the essence of life in Britain. That’s quite an achievement, if you consider it was written by an American. 
It IS incredibly funny though. I’ve read it 4 times now and, even though I know the jokes and even when they’re coming, it’s still a joy to read. The first time I read it, I was on a train from Eindhoven to Enschede in Holland and I laughed so hard that I fell off my seat on 3 separate occasions. One girl, sitting across the aisle, even asked me for the name of the book so that she could order it when she got home. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s hilarious.

My first cold beer was now empty, and the clock had advanced to 12.30. The footbridge had been reconnected (or possibly just connected) and every now and then a couple of passengers would come in. They all sat at the front so maybe they wanted to get a good view of the sea. I opened my second beer, and last cold one, and went back to my book. After waving off some strange looks from fellow passengers over my sudden and apparently unprovoked outbursts of laughter, I finished my second cold beer and was now faced with 3 cans of warm beer. I certainly wasn’t going to carry any extra weight on my way back to Malaga, but drinking luke warm beer wasn’t a very enticing prospect either.

A lightbulb lit up above my head when I saw a girl walking behind the bar carrying an ice bucket. After explaining that I wanted ice cubes and not ice cream, I walked back to my table with 5 plastic cups, 2 of them full of ice cubes. I took one empty cup, put 3 or 4 ice cubes in it and then poured some of the luke warm beer over them. This cooled the beer down sufficiently to make it agreeable for consumption, and I would then poor the cooled beer into another empty cup, repeat the process and end up with 1 cup of suitably cold beer. As the cups were small, I had to repeat this process twice to turn 1 warm can into 2 cold cups of slightly watered down beer, but it worked and gave me something to do while waiting for the ferry to depart. The ferry left on time and I spent the sailing time by reading and playing with my DIY beer cooler system (I had to go back twice for fresh ice).  By the time we reached Algeciras, I had had 5 cold Kronenbourgs for the price of just over 1 can of beer on the boat so I actually saved some money too.


My Self Invented Cooler System (Patent pending)

Back on European soil, I walked to the nearest ATM to ensure I had actual cash in my pocket again. When I had booked my ferry trip, I had taken an early one so as to facilitate getting back to Malaga at a reasonable time. On the way down, the bus had taken 2 ½ hours to get to Gibraltar and then from there it was another 40 minutes to Algeciras. The time difference meant that I would arrive at Algeciras bus station at around 4 and then I had to hope that there was a service to Malaga within a reasonable time. With a bit of luck, so I calculated, I could be back in Malaga at around 8PM.

As it was, I had several bits of luck. First, the ferry arrived slightly ahead of schedule, and then I flew through the ferry terminal and customs faster than expected. When I arrived at the bus station, I found that a bus for Malaga was leaving in 20 minutes. This gave me just enough time to buy a ticket, make use of the toilet facilities (I’d had 5 cans of beer on the boat, after all), buy a sandwich and a bottle of water and get on the bus. Best of all, and I did not realise this until I saw a sign saying MALAGA BUS STATION, it turned out to be a direct bus, that did not stop at Marbella, Fuengirola and all those other places along the way, thereby shaving about one third off the travel time. I was back on the streets of Malaga at 6.30 and presented myself at the Oasis hostel comfortably before 7.

I know it sounds stupid from someone only arriving in the city for the third time, but it felt like coming home. I was welcomed back with open arms in the hostel, was given a bed in the same room I had been in the week before and was once again a happy man. 

After a quick shower, I went back to reception and ordered a cold beer. While I was enjoying my beer and having a chat with one of the hostel staff, a shout of “AH WELL NEVER! FORGET IT!! NO WAY!”  pierced the relative tranquility.

Ah, shit. Rottweiler was still around.
Rottweiler was what we would call an FEB, or Fecking English Bastard. Before you accuse me of trying to fit in with the Irish, or making a political statement, this is not the case. The man just happened to be English. And a bastard. He had arrived at the hostel 2 days before I had left for Gibraltar. I had named him Rottweiler because of his striking resemblance to Rik Mayall’s neighbour in Bottom. Rottweiler had a shaved head and piercing, dark, ratty eyes. He was permanently dressed in a white undershirt, brandless tracksuit pants and heavy sandals. His upper body was covered in badly executed tattoos of the type you’d expect to find on a sailor in the 70s: several crudely drawn naked women, a spiralled cobra, a barely recognizable Chelsea FC crest and much more. He looked, in short, like a man who was in charge of the shooting gallery at a travelling carnival.
He had checked into the hostel the week before with the idea of basing himself in Spain. Why he had chosen the hostel as a base of operations was unclear to everyone as he spent his days complaining about the exact things that make a hostel a hostel: He had to share a bathroom. People would come in late at night. Or get up early in the morning. There were always people around, all the time. They took showers when it was his time to take a shower. They had dinner at times when one should retire to bed, or breakfast at times when you should be out and about. He basically hated everything hostels stand for, so why he chose to temporarily live in one was anyone’s guess.  Probably the cheap rates.

I went to the garden and found my new Dutch friends had returned from Seville that same day, so we had a couple of beers. Then I whiled away the rest of the night walking the streets of Malaga, stopping for a drink here, and a bite to eat there. When I got back around midnight, I was asked if I wanted to come to the beach the next morning. I politely declined going to the beach because I had something else in mind: Malaga’s most famous son.
By high exception, this was not a football player. Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, and I wanted to get in touch with the world famous painter and his life story.

McCarthy's Casbah - Part V

As the night wore on, a big hooka pipe emerged and someone proceeded to set up the pipe for a smoking session.
It took forever to properly prepare it. The bowl was packed in tin foil, which was then pierced in many places with a cocktail stick.  The smoking materials were carefully unwrapped and likewise pierced with mathematic precision. The mouth piece was taken apart and a slightly different one assembled. Disposable plastic covers for the mouth piece were then handed out and finally smoking could commence.
All this hassle surprised me. In my drugtaking days, you simply stuffed the bowl full of weed, held a lighter to it and that was pretty much all there was to it. This was a lot of work to get stoned.

Having grown up in a country where using drugs is nothing special, it is always fun to see people from other countries enjoy smoking stuff they can’t legally get at home, especially when you decline to join. An English girl looked at me aghast and said she thought it was ‘so strong’ of me not to smoke with them. I had to explain them that it’s not strength or determination. I just don’t do it anymore and because I grew up doing it all the time, I feel in no way left out or as if I’m missing something when others do it and I decline. I have beer, you see.

The conversation followed along the lines of all long inebriated hostel conversations- people tell where they’re from, where  they’ve been and where they are going next. 2 Australian girls had been on the road for about 2 years and had, perhaps surprisingly, spent half of that in England. A Swiss guy who had just joined us was trying to travel around Morocco but when he had attempted to leave Tangier the day before, the taxi he and his mate were travelling in had crashed into a phone pole, leaving the driver in hospital, his mate needing medical treatment and him, miraculously, unharmed apart from a bit of a sore back. When the police came to look at the wreckage, they took them back to the station to sign off some form and had offered them to stay for dinner. Taken aback somewhat by the strange invitation to join in a buffet at an African police station, they had accepted and were treated to, as he said it, a meal that could have fed a small army. Bowls of salad and cous cous were set out, together with baskets of fruit, platters of chicken and rice and bowls of yoghurt. The biggest surprise though, came when dinner was over and one of the officers of the law proffered a lump of hash the size of a baseball, which he had confiscated from a tourist and now put up for general use. Sensing a trap, our Swiss friend had kindly denied the opportunity to smoke it but when the cop rolled up a joint himself, he eventually gave in and got stoned with the police. What a strange and fascinating city this was.

While smoking drugs with law enforcement officers in an African country might score high on the ‘what the fuck’ scale, the best story of the night came from an American guy who had just joined us after a day of sight seeing. He appeared to recognize me somehow, even though I had no recollection of seeing him before. After a couple of minutes, we managed to piece together that he was the guy who had occupied the top bunk in the Gibraltar hostel , and in the process had nearly crashed it.
He had quit his job as a banker (always a good idea) and had been travelling through Europe for the past 2 months, taking in 20 countries before he crossed the Gibraltar Strait into Morocco. Things had mostly been going according to plan on his trip, until he reached the shadier parts of Eastern Europe. While travelling through Moldova, the poorest country on the continent, he had decided to take a detour through Transdnistria. Transdnistria is a self-declared independent republic in the North East of Moldova. They declared independence around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, even though the rest of Moldova wouldn’t have it. The Republic of Transdnistria didn’t care and introduced a constitution, passports, currency and, as breakaway states tend to do, built an army. They set up border control posts, created a flag and commissioned a national anthem. They are, effectively, their own country.
The only problem is that nobody recognizes them. Not  a single UN member could be bothered to accept them as a country, not even countries that like breakaway states, like Azerbaijan, or the ones that want to be friends with everybody, like Palau. Transdnistria stands at the bottom of the pile when it comes to recognition with 0 countries accepting their existence, leaving them even below The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which used to occupy this spot with 1 recognizing country (yes, that is Turkey).

So you can imagine that they are a bit testy when it comes to foreigners, which is why embassies and consulates generally advise against going there.  Our friend, however, had thrown caution to the wind and decided to go anyway because, really, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, what could, and evidently did, go wrong is that corrupt officials in breakaway rebel states tend to take the law into their own hands, which is something that makes Westerners (and especially Americans) vulnerable to the concept of ‘Bribes’.   He was stopped by a police vehicle for allegedly breaking some traffic regulation and ordered to pay a fine of a whopping 1000 American Dollars. He was escorted to the nearest ATM but refused to hand over money so was taken to  a local police station, effectively held hostage, until he paid. He managed to convince them that he would not pay as he did not have sufficient funds and if they held him much longer, he would be late in returning his rental car, and the car rental company would send the Moldovan police after him as they were aware of where he had gone. The threat of Moldovan law enforcement encroaching on their precariously defended territory seemed to do the trick and he was let go after paying a smaller fine which just happened to be the exact equivalent of the amount of money he had in his wallet.
My stories of getting drunk in the Bronx seemed very tame all of a sudden.



As the night wore on I got hungry, so I popped my kebab in the oven, which caused a flurry of kitchen activity among the others who were also hungry, most likely from all the smoking they had done. This sudden influx of the munchies resulted in a table full of food, in which everybody was invited to share. That’s the upside of hanging out with stoners.
I helped myself to a plate of cous cous and salad on the side of my kebab and both were excellent. During dinner, the nightly wail of the mosques started. It suddenly occurred to us that there were quite a lot of mosques and several of them were really close. I tried to make out where the nearest one was, but because it had gotten dark quite suddenly, I couldn’t be sure.
I sure was happy that I wasn’t roaming the medina in this darkness.
The wailing gave the whole scene a very exotic feel. Here we were, people from all corners of the world (literally- if we counted Maria to represent Africa, we had people from 5 different continents around the table, only Asia was missing)  sharing our experiences of travelling around the world. For 2 days, we were friends because we were staying in the same hostel and, like most people you meet this way, we would probably never see each other again. Still, the atmosphere was great and everybody seemed quite content with their temporary friends. This is one of the reasons why hostels are a million times better than regular hotels.  I went to bed a happy man.

I woke the next morning after one of the best nights of sleep I’ve ever had in a hostel. The bed was comfortable, the room quiet and dark and I was generally in a relaxed frame of mind, possibly because I had spent the last couple of hours before bed inhaling purple smoke.
Today, I was going to chase Pete McCarthy’s trails so I wanted to get going early. I had a casbah to visit!
I walked to the breakfast room and found that a very lavish breakfast had been laid out for us. It consisted of different kinds of flatbread, jams and spreads and was accompanied, like everything else in this part of the world, by several pots of tea.

After a long breakfast session and a hot shower, I made my way outside. Despite the early time of day (it was only about 10.30), the medina was bustling with activity. Shopkeepers were out setting up their wares, while mobile food vendors took up positions on street corners. The first throngs of tourists were already making their way through the streets, while suppliers drove small karts through streets that were only slightly wider than their vehicles. I managed to make my way through the medina without attracting too much attention, except ofcourse for Mozes, who greeted me with a well meant “Hey what’s up, Paddy!” and then I was on Petit Soco again. This is where Pete McCarthy was supposed to meet the McCarthy brothers from Belfast, as they were staying in a pension on the Rue de Poste.
I had asked Maria where it was and she had pointed it out on my map. It was a side street of Petit Soco, so I couldn’t go wrong. And ofcourse, like Pete McCarthy, I couldn’t find it. I walked around the small square and checked all the side streets but it simply wasn’t there. I have since developed a theory that the Tangier hotel industry uses this street as a running joke to fool gullible tourists who try to find their way around. Come to think of it, when I asked Maria about it, she supressed a smile on her face. I bet she is calling some other hotelier right now, as we speak.

“Yeah, Mustafa? Yeah it’s Maria here from the Melting Pot. I just had another guy from Ireland looking for the Rue de Postes!
No seriously.
I don’t know, he’s probably trying to find it now, haha.”

Not having found the Rue de Postes, I made my way to Grand Soco, where the market had already started again. I would have estimated that the population of Tangier is in the millions. It was so busy everywhere, it was unreal. 
Vendors were already loudly praising their goods everywhere and people were out in force.  I observed the spectacle for a while and it confirmed what I had noticed the day before. Though half the people on the street where selling stuff, nobody was buying. One guy was selling fake brand sporting bags (Nike, Adidas etc.) for next to nothing. He had a couple of models on display in the middle of Grand Soco and every minute or so someone would walk up to him and enquire about one of the bags. He would then proceed to show them all the features, like that the zipper actually worked, and look at the prospective customer hopefully. The customer would then look the bag over, turn it inside out, or perform some other durability test and then point out some minor discoloration or a stitch that wasn’t 100% straight, put the bag down and wiggle his index finger at the salesman while making a face that resembled a man who has just realised his mouth is full of lemon juice. It went like this for all items on display throughout the square. A customer would have a look at a belt or pair of sunglasses or whatever, finger the item for a while and then put it back before walking away. How this economy works is beyond me, but I did not witness a single sale until I got to a food market later in the day.

I walked past the city’s main cinema and had a look at the programme. Ofcourse, I didn’t understand a thing of it because I don’t read Arab, but it was fun to look at it and wonder what the hell those posters could be saying. Though it was the grandest cinema in town, it looked as if no maintenance had been done in a good long while. Come to think of it.. the entire city looked like it could do with a lick of paint. It is a well known fact that port cities tend to be a bit rough around the edges, which becomes clear if you compare places like Liverpool or Hamburg to more fashionable places like London or Berlin, but Tangier took it a bit further. The whole city looked as if the maintenance department had taken the afternoon off a couple of years ago and had never come back. Nearly every building had paint peeling off the walls, window sills hanging at precarious angles and gates held together with duct tape. It was, in short, a bit of a mess, to be honest.
After walking around for a while (and still not spotting any additional liquor stores) I decided to go for lunch. Most places had special offers for 2 or 3 course lunches but I am not a big eater, especially when it’s very warm. In the end, I settled on a place called Café Europe. It looked like I had imagined a Moroccan restaurant would look like, so this qualified as pretty much the first thing I was right about here in Morocco. I was guided to a table by a friendly waiter who then proceeded to set the tv for me. Thanks to the global reach of Sky Sports these days, I could now sit down here for lunch in Africa and still not miss the very important League 2 match between Portsmouth and Burton Albion. I ordered a beef tajine and an orange juice, which presented me with the unprecedented situation of having lunch while on holiday without a beer. The waiter brought a basket of bread and, some time later, my tajine. The tajine was great. The meat was juicy and spicy without being overly so. I used the bread to mop up the food and the sauce and it tasted wonderful. The orange juice was easily the best I ever drank without the addition of vodka and, about an hour later, I walked out the door very satisfied and only about 4 euros lighter.

Burton Albion won 2-0, by the way.

Back on Grand Soco, the open air market was still in process. I walked across it and made my way in the direction of the casbah. I had developed a way to avoid guides by doing 2 things: I only took out my map inside shops. This way you don’t stand out as a dumb Westerner who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Another thing I had resorted to was something I had read in the McCarthy book. The McCarthy brothers from Belfast had found that, though most guides were reasonably well taught in English and French, it spooked them  when they were addressed in Irish and they would back off and leave them alone. As I don’t speak Irish, I tried it with Dutch and it worked quite well. I had figured it might backfire due to the large number of Moroccans that live or have relatives in Holland, but it worked a charm. When addressed in Dutch, most guides looked uncertain and when I kept on rattling in that arcane language they did not speak, they soon gave up.
The casbah was at the far end of the medina, but rather than trying to make my way through the medina, which would almost certainly result in me getting hopelessly lost, I decided to walk around the outside of the medina and approach from the back entrance. I made my way there by way of a food market. It again seemed that everyone was selling but no one was buying.

What also stood out, was that most stalls were selling only one product. While I am aware that most market salesmen are specialised in one product group (cheese, poultry, cakes etc) most of these people were selling one very specific thing. One guy was sitting by the side of the road with crates full of pommegranates. He had hundreds of them. He sold nothing else, just this one type of pommegranate. Another man, who had a more permanent stall, had filled it with thousands of eggs. Again, every now and then someone would walk up, gaze at the eggs as if judging cakes for a baking competition and then walk off again. It must be very frustrating being a market salesman in these parts. 
I was now on the street that led to the casbah, but noticed to my alarm that what the map hadn’t shown was that it was a very steep street. It was much steeper than the hill in Gibraltar so I took my time walking up. I walked past the lawyer’s office in front of which Pete McCarthy had been fleeced by one of his guides and was actually surprised that I found such a minute detail from the book. The reason I found it, is that it is close to the casbah entrance which was were I ended up now, bathing in sweat. This was it, the reason I had come to Tangier. When I walked in to the casbah, I was approached by a man who was carrying a large glass of orange juice and seemed to have time on his hand. The first thing he said was that he was not a guide. I believed him: he looked like he had recently showered and his clothes were too clean to be scampering as a guide. I took a couple of pictures and went inside.
It was basically more of the same I had seen in the rest of the medina, with the exception that it all looked a bit better maintained. There were  a couple of cool buildings, with the same type of mosaic tiles worked into the design as I had seen in the hostel. Apart from that, it was more craft shops and narrow alleyways. After a while, I’d seen enough. It was just more of the same, and besides that, there was another important thing on the agenda today:
it was the Sunday of the All Ireland Hurling final.

You may point and laugh at me for being in a place as exotic as this, and then spend my time watching a match that is taking place 50 yards from my front door(literally, I live right next to the stadium where the final takes place) but as a sports enthousiast in Ireland, the All Ireland Hurling final is something you simply don’t miss. I walked back down the steep street outside the casbah entrance, which was much more enjoyable than the way up, and made my way through the markets again. The poverty was really astonishing here. There were so many people begging here that it really struck me now how good we have it in the rich West.  I’m used to urban beggars and assorted homeless people asking for money for a cup of tea (=cider) a sandwich(cider) or the bus  home (cider) but it was different here than in London or Dublin. In Europe, those people are nearly always under or around 30 years old. Here, a lot of beggars were of advanced age.
All of a sudden, I noticed many men older than my father, who is pushing 70 himself, sitting on the street holding up their hands and begging (literally begging) for small change. This shocked me. In Europe, the homeless people who don’t die young of addiction or complications related to living on the street are generally taken care of by charities who make sure they are placed in homes or shelters at some point to ensure they have some sort of dignified old age. Obviously, no such system was in place here, judging from all the folk of retirement age who were still out on the street to  scrape a very meagre living together. It was really unsettling.

[Author’s Note: While I thought the poverty was at times shocking in Tangier, I got a cold shower when, a couple of weeks later, back in Dublin, I spoke to someone in a pub who had travelled through Morocco earlier in the summer. He had travelled to the South of the country and informed me that the Northern part was ‘quite civilised’ in comparison to the South where people were REALLY poor.
I don’t want to go to the South.]

I made my way back to my favorite liquor store (the only liquor store) to supplement my beer stash for the night. The same man was behind the counter when I walked in and the look in his eyes when he saw me betrayed great surprise on his part as to how I could possibly have depleted my stock so quickly. He didn’t ask questions though. Money is still money, even if it is made through the sale of morally questionable substances.

With a new black plastic bag, I made my way to a take away restaurant I had walked by earlier. It was really hot in the city and I was sweating like a pig. I ordered a couple of sandwiches with assorted fillings and, while I was waiting, was drawn to a fridge full of soft drinks. One bottle filled with an orange liquid stood out as particularly refreshing so I told the guy at the counter I would have one of those as well. I had big hit and it tasted like heaven. I drank the entire bottle in one long gulp and felt refreshed like never before. This stuff was good. I resisted the temptation to have another one because my food was ready. Now armed with a bag of beer and a bag of food, I made my way back to the medina, adequately  supplied for the rest of the day. After  a short stop to say hi to Moses who, surprisingly, didn’t have an awful lot to do, I was back at the hostel well in time for the final. This conveniently gave me enough time to take a shower. Even though, in heat like this, it only gives relief for the duration of the shower, a splash of cold water on your head goes a long way.

I made my way to the roof and found no one there. While this was not great for conversation, it did mean that the bar laptop was not used as a jukebox which left it free for me to watch the hurling. I checked the time and found that I still had time to sit in the sun for a bit before the game began.
After some 20 minutes of reading in the sun, and really enjoying a cold beer, I switched on the website I wanted to watch the match on. When it sprang to life after a moment of hesitation, I saw 2 players in a heated debate and the referee trying to break them up. What the hell was this? Around this time, I expected to see the President shaking hands with the players, or perhaps hear the national anthem, but a look at the game clock revealed that we were already in the 20^th minute of the game.
This sucked. How the hell did this happen? Who changed the starting time? More importantly, who was winning? I won’t bore you with further details of the match because most of you probably have no idea what hurling is, but it was an excellent game and, like the previous 2 years, ended in a draw. Replay in 3 weeks.

I made my way back up to the roof, where I found 2 German girls who looked a bit jetlagged. One was staring at a spot on the wall and the other kept dozing off. When I managed to establish a conversation with the one that wasn’t constantly falling asleep, I found why they were a bit off: they had hitchhiked (yes, hitchhiked) from Trier in Germany to Algeciras in the space of two and a half days. I have since looked it up and by road that is a distance of around 2300 kilometers. It would be quite an achievement to make this trip in 2 days if you had your own car, but hitchhiking all the way to Algeciras in that time span was a near miracle. She did confess that they had gotten quite lucky in Belgium. After they were dropped off by someone who had driven them there from Trier, they were quickly picked up by someone who had to be in Valencia or thereabouts, which meant that they were nearly there,  in the grand scheme of things. Still, they had hardly slept in in the past 60 hours so they could really do with a bit of sleep. After half an hour, they both gave up trying to keep their eyes open and went to their room.  I read for a while, enjoying the sun while it was going down over the mediterranean and dozed off myself only to be startled back to full consciousness when I heard people talking in the bar. I went down to see who was there and found an American guy and a Scot from Aberdeen.  The American was travelling around Europe and surroundings without any bigger plan, but the Scot told us he was trying to live off the grid for a while. He had no registered address back in Scotland, a bank account in Belgium and had no e-mail, Facebook or other web-related accounts that would allow anybody to trace his moves. He carried the most basic of mobile phones, pre-paid and unregistered ofcourse, and was now travelling through Africa. I could see why he would come to a place like Tangier. It is an easy place to slip off the radar. When someone tells you a story like this, you assume that he is either on the run from the law or just really wants to get away from it all. He was friendly and funny so I assume he was doing the latter because he didn’t look like a criminal. He was explaining to the American how you could easily get small quantities of hash across borders. The idea was simple enough: get a small ball of hash, dip it in olive oil and the roll it in shrink foil that has also been treated with olive oil. You then close off the package and swallow it. Nobody would notice it, you couldn’t OD off it as you might when swallowing balloons of cocaine, and when you get to your next destination, you’ll have a nice smoke waiting for you. I just don’t get this sort of thing. Why would you go through all this trouble of preparing, packaging and swallowing, just to get a quantity of hash that will get you stoned for about 10 minutes? Not to mention, to get your minute kick, you will have to dig it out of your own shit first.
Judging from his enthousiastic explanation of the process, he himself was quite happy with it. The American seemed unconvinced.  Our Scottish friend had enough stories to keep us entertained for a while and also told a tale of when he was somewhere else in Africa and, for some reason, decided to bury his backpack somewhere in a forest because he had to take a 10 mile walk into a city to arrange something at a consulate and didn’t want to carry the heavy bag around. To no surprise of any of us, when he got back 2 days later, his bag had been dug up and all his possessions had disappeared. As the night wore on, people joined and left again and just when our Scotsman went out for a bite to eat, the guys I had been hanging out with the night before returned from a day at the beach. One English guy was quite unnerved from walking through the medina at night. He said he was happy that they were in a group and that one of them was a guy from Chile who worked in the hostel and knew his way around. He said it was near pitch black dark in there and the only light came from the occasional candle in a house, or the light in a workshop. At one point he had not even noticed someone who was within arm’s reach. I could see what he meant. In some of the narrower alleys it was dark even during the day. It was now dark outside so it must have been like walking through a mine at this time of night.  With our group re-united, we talked  away the hours and after I finished my final can of Flag beer I called it a night. I donated my guide book on Morocco to the German girls, who had just risen again, and went to bed. I had to get up early in the morning. I had a ferry back to Europe to catch.