casablawrence
Before Ivan left for Europe, I told him I demand that he send me lots of pictures, and he promised he would. So far he's more than met that promise: two weeks into his initial travels through Spain and Morocco, so far I've received 49 photos from him. The first several were almost exclusively selfies in front of landmarks, but he has since moved into more commonly taking photos of interesting things on their own -- which means he has unwittingly kind of saved me and my desperately low backlog of DLU photos to use in the middle of these entries. Particularly as he's gone through Morocco (specifically Chefchaouen and Fes, evidently two very beautiful cities), I've gotten a lot of great photos.
This two-week tour by rail through Spain and Morocco got off to a rocky start, plagued with health problems and people on the tour he can't stand -- including a woman he thought was a great friend at first but now he's not even talking to her. He says she gets obnoxiously drunk every day, even in Morocco, which is pretty embarrassing. He also got sick. But, once he got into Morocco, his spirits seemed to have lifted considerably; he sent several photos of the stunningly gorgeous hotel he stayed in, in Chefchaouen. I have no clue how to pronounce that.
Anyway, he arrived in Casablanca today, which he seemed very excited about yesterday but has found himself disappointed in it. He wrote to me on Facebook Messenger this morning, I hate Casablanca. It sucks!! And later he wrote, About the ugliest city I have ever seen lol. He said there is "NOTHING to do here" except visit a "supposedly famous mosque that I've never heard of," but that's not scheduled until tomorrow, "so now we are all just sitting on our butts the rest of the day." When I said, "You can't even go for a walk anywhere interesting?" He wrote back,
Noooo, it's super rough
Packs of unemployed young men wandering about that our tour guide warned us about
So then I looked up Casablanca on Wikipedia. Turns out it's Morocco's largest city by far, with over three million people! I had no idea it was so huge, and have a hard time believe there's nothing interesting there -- or even a safer area of a city that large. I mean, surely the tour organizers know more about Casablanca than I do -- the closest I've ever been to it would be, well, Boston -- but still, it sounds to me like they dropped the ball with this stop, if it's that dull and uneventful in a city that notable and historic. It strikes me as very strange. Anyway, his next stop is Marrakesh and that's where the tour ends; he'll head further on toward Eastern Europe after that.
Yesterday right after work I took myself to see the French documentary Faces Places, conveniently playing at the Uptown on Lower Queen Anne, which takes me like ten minutes to walk to from work, at 4:45. It let out at 6:30 and I caught a #2 bus instead of waiting for the #8, rationalizing that I'd get home earlier even on the longer bus if I left now rather than waiting another eleven minutes for the 8. Boy, was I wrong: by the time the #2 had gone through heavy rush hour traffic downtown and finally reached my stop at 14th and Union on Capitol Hill, it was about 25 minutes delayed. The #8 is often slow going up Denny Way, which is never quick, but at least it would have bypassed downtown. I don't think I'll ever do the #2 during rush hour again, fuck that shit. At least I was warm and dry and was able to read my library book for a while. Shobhit kept pestering me via text about my progress, which was a little annoying.
He did have dinner ready when I got home, though, which he made by adding rice and beans to one of the four sample Indian meal packets I brought home from work yesterday, which proved to be unusually flavorful. I just had more of it for lunch here at work today. We watched the previous night's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as I ate (Shobhit had already eaten), which I had to do after Patton Oswalt kept tweeting about how amazing another segment on Tuesday night's episode was, when he was backstage waiting for his own panel segment. It turned out to be regarding Jennifer Lawrence's segment, during which Colber breaks out real (or was it? I'm choosing to believe it was) booze and Jennifer Lawrence takes several shots and gets a little tipsy. Honestly I would hardly call it "the most incredible" panel segment ever, but it was pretty entertaining and it was worth watching.
So then I went to the bedroom to write the movie review, after which I came back out to watch two episodes of the first season of Roseanne with Shobhit before going to bed.
[posted 12:27 pm]