So here I am once more sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a plane.  Nothing very exciting since I am only returning home from spending a weekend in Melbourne with friends.  Not that I am saying my friends are boring or the weekend was bad, quite the opposite it’s just that I’m not really sitting here after having been out of the country or waiting to leave the country.

Sigh.

Someone posed a question on the thorntree discussion forum about a week or so ago regarding how many hours people spent sitting on planes when travelling.  An interesting question I think but I am not sure anyone truly had an answer.  Hmm I’ll have to check back since it’s been a while since I checked that thread.

Still it is an interesting question.  Particularly if you broaden it to encompass different categories like

1. How many hours spent in airports waiting for planes?
2. How many hours getting to and from airports?

Well anyway I’m sure you get the idea.  I’ve seen lists on some travel websites that detail all the different forms of transport, planes, busses, taxi, tuk tuk, boat etc etc and that at a glance I tend to find interesting as well.  Hmmm maybe I will have to include a section on the site detailing the different forms of transport.

One of the things that struck me about this weekend is that I managed to go through the equivalent of, give or take depending on country, the amount I’d normally budget for one week in 3 days.

I am struggling to work that out really since it did not include transport or accommodation costs just food, alcohol and entertainment.  Of course I normally end up travelling in cheaper countries and I guess this underscores for me that Australia is kind of an expensive country to travel in.

Do not get me wrong Melbourne is a great place to visit and go out in with quite a bit to see and do.  If you haven’t been there go for it, it’s an amazing city.  Just do not expect to save much money while you are there!

One of the places we went to was a little place called Ginger.  Ginger in case you didn’t know or you are interested is a cocktail bar (272 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne).  It is a great little bar with fantastic relaxed atmosphere and friendly staff.  The guys behind the bar mix up a relative storm of cocktails for their patrons and the end result was a delight to the taste buds. 

Price wise they are fairly standard for what you can expect to pay for a cocktail in most bars, so another words for two cocktails do not expect to come out with much change from $30 and it would be safer if you had $40.  Still it was a great little place and well worth it.  If your out to splurge and want something a little different from the average Pub head out to Ginger!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of tinkering with the website in the last month or so and I realised that while I intended to put up regular updates on my progress with the site well, that just has not happened.

So what have I been working on?

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If you have clicked on the Coming Soon box you will know that my next trip is to Thailand in October/November with a good friend of mine, Cass.  You’ll met her at some point hopefully before we go since one of her tasks is to post something in the Journal.

That really is as far as the planing for the trip has gone.  Other than we will fly in and out of Bangkok.  We will spend most of our time up north.  At least a couple of days on an island or a beach type area, well it is Thailand, one kind of has to spend some time near the beach.

There are some things I just do not get.  One of them is spam.  Set up a website and the sheer amount of different types of spam you get will take a rather abrupt rise.  referrer spam, trackback spam, email spam.  It reaches ridiculous lengths.  I was getting 500 odd referrer spam a day.  It was becoming an almost daily routine, check the referrer list and mass add the referrers IP’s to the blacklist then mass delete.

I seem to be having a lull in referrer spam at the moment.  I have no delusion that it will last I am sure the little s**ts will find new computers to use and they will start up once more.

Then the other day I noticed a steep rise in the number of trackbacks.  After looking at them I realised that they were not genuine trackbacks but similar to the referrer spam.  Yet another thing to check and delete.  Sigh.

Then of course there is the email spam which I am sure any of you with an email address has encountered at some point.  Still 100’s of spam emails to wad through and delete becomes a little much after a while so the whole mass blacklisting and mass deleting has happened.

So if you have sent an email, I hasten to add a legitimate one, that I have not answered I do apologise.

If you are one of those leaches who participate in spaming, what can I say that is not impolite?  Not much.  Go away and find someone else to annoy.  No I do not want to buy pills from you, no I do not want to visit your sick porn site, no I am not going to send you my banking details so you can transfer money from an approved bank loan that I did not apply for…Not that I think this would work on the type of individual who would participate in spaming. 

For those of you about to set up your own website get ready for an obscene amount of spam in various formats to enter your life.

Sorry.  End rant.

Essaouira to Marrakesh

Ok so this entry is a little late on being put on the journal, by about three months to be honest. I did mean to do it earlier but that whole falling back into life at home thing kicked in and before I knew it not only have months passed by but the year has ticked over. Since so much time has passed I really wasn’t going to put up this entry. Then today for some reason I changed my mind and decided to at least put something up here. At least to show that yes I did go to this town.

What can I say about Marrakesh that has not been said by others in many different form and forums? Probably not much, if anything.

Marrakesh seems to evoke extremes in people’s point of view. People love it or they seem to hate it advising people on how dangerous it is or touristy or any other number of complaints that could probably be said about many cities around the world.

My view? I loved it.

Djemma el-Fna

Djemma el-Fna is what I really came to Marrakesh to see. I’d read so much about it before I came here and I wasn’t disappointed. Yes it was touristy but honestly I can not see how people could be shocked at that one if they had even bothered to read up about the place before they arrived. So yes you will find lots of tourists, after all Marrakesh is one of the gateways for Morocco. Still you will see local tourists as well which in some ways is kind of refreshing. One of the giveaways that this place is not just totally set up for foreigner tourists is that everything is in Arabic including the street entertainment.

At night the square comes alive filled with smoke from the street stalls, calls from the from the food stalls trying to entice you to eat at their stall intermingling with local musicians playing and singing, story tellers deep into their tale to an enthralled ring of spectators. Medicine men sit quietly waiting for customers, fortune tellers, dancers, water sellers, snake charmers, the list goes on and through it all you wander part of a heaving crowd.

Eating at the food stalls was great. You could and should wander through the stalls. You can see just about anything that is on offer to eat at these stalls all being cooked fresh in front of you. You can snack, getting bits and pieces from a variety of stalls to make up your meal or park yourself at a stall that takes your fancy and people watch, that is entertainment all in itself.

Souqs

I was in Marrakesh, the end of my trip. It was time to shop. Do not get me wrong. I am not really a shopper at heart, that is probably why I leave the whole shopping thing until last. That and not really being interesting in hauling purchases all over the countryside. So you are not going to get an enthralling description of the Souqs and everything you can buy in fine detail or the details of a mad last minute dash in to buy up the markets before leaving. After all I had time. Lou was doing a three day cooking course, which she highly recommends if you have the inclination and the spare cash and the time when you hit Marrakesh.

I spent a bit of time during the day wandering the Souqs and the shops out on the streets getting a feel for the cost of things. I’d been told by many to avoid buying anything in the Souqs as it was inevitably more expensive. Personally I did not find that to be true. Ok so you have to bargain a little harder in the Souqs, but hey that is half the fun. That and there is just something about bargaining and buying in the Souqs, there is just more atmosphere or something.

One stand out moment was after a few days and I finally jumped in to make a purchase, I brought a leather bag for a friend. I was just walking away from that stall quite happy with my first purchase when the guy selling shoes just down from the bags caught my attention and asked if I needed some shoes to go with the bag. I laughed and pointed to my boots and said no I did not need any more shoes.

He didn’t even blink before replying “Yes madam you do. You need 365 pairs of shoes. One for every day of the year!”

Then the bag seller chimed in with “Yes and the bags to match!”

They laughed, I laughed. That was the Souqs for me. That banter with the sellers as you wander through. The little man who ran after me brandishing his bag the price getting lower and lower without me even trying. It is just not the same in the regular shops.

Other Stuff

Now we went to see a variety of things around Marrakesh, but you guessed that didn’t you? After all we were here for about a week. I’m not going to list them all. It was the usual stuff one does when you go to a place. You know old former palaces, gardens, museums, tombs etc etc.

Still there was one stand out we went to Chez Ali. Lets not leave any doubt about this yes, in no certain terms, it is very touristy. Still we had a great night. Amazing food, bottle of wine and a seemingly endless stream of locals singing, dancing and playing instruments parading past our table the night ending in a pretty expressive display of horsemanship.

All up as I said I loved Marrakesh and I thought it was a great way to end our five and a half weeks in Morocco.