My Blog Thing

 So, I’ve just got back from a week in Fez in Northern Morocco and it was grand! 

Now, I could go on about the architecture, the weather, the food etc, but I won’t – I just want to mention one thing:

 One night we were eating at a outside restaurant just inside the main gate of the Fez Medina.  For those who have ever been to Fez, you go through the Bab Jeloud, and take the right hand fork (the least dark alley) and it’s there on the outside corner.

It was run by a very cheerful bloke who spoke no English and little bits of French, but it didn’t seem to matter and the food was cracking and really cheap…..but what was more was what was going on around us.

Sitting next to me was a bloke smoking and sipping a mint tea, which isn’t unusual.  What was unusual were the numbers of blokes sitting down next to him, having a quiet chat, handing over cash to him, then leaving.  After a while we realised that he had a massive crate of lager under the table, and the blokes were buying cans of lager off him and scurrying away to wherever to drink it.  This is in Fez, the home of Moroccan Islamic Orthodoxy where alcohol is very strictly the preserve of the rich tourist in the swanky hotels and looked down upon massively.   We seemed to have sat ourselves in an unofficial pub 

He kept this up all night, god only knows how much beer he had under the table but he kept on giving it out and must have made a fortune. 

On the table across from us was the guy who owned the restaurant and his mates.  They were drinking wat looked like Coke, but then we noticed that every now and again they were filling up there galsses with something, then hiding it in a tajine (conical casserole dish type thing)….it took us a while to realise they were drinking vodka and coke, and a lot of it.  The funniest part was that the bottle was taller than the lid of the Tajine, and so the lid was finely balanced on top and nearly fell off a few times.  Obviously there is only one god, and Allah is his prophet, and god is everywhere, except just there, under the tajine.

The guys were getting proper steamed, and the owner was getting a little unsteady and kept barging into people and sitting down too hard on his chair so it tipped dangerously.

At the end of the meal I paid, and I told him (honestly) that I thought his food was the best I had ever tasted in Morocco.  Not that this was what I said, itwas more a mime of me going all over Morocco and eating, and being in a state of near euphoria when I tasted his food.  It took him a while to get it, but when he did he shouted out lots of stuff in Arabic and grabbed hold of me and starting kissing me (in the European way……but not French…if you know what I mean).  He then hugged me really hard and kept touching my face, by which time my British sense of personal space flared up and I beat a hasty retreat…….but it was nice, and better than in England when they probably spit in your coffee when you tell them everything’s fine.

Great Country…………….the craziness of Africa with the coffee of France……there isn’t many better combinations      

I must say, whilst commuting for 4 hours everyday has its downsides (like, losing 4 hours of my day every day) it does have some bright points.  My hatred of bus drivers has now been fine tuned to an almost fanatical obsession with:

Their constant rudeness

Their lack of any comprehension of how their driving might affect the health of those using the bus.

The constant lack of change, like a large magnet passed over the depot and removed coins of all amounts, leaving them with a hundred 20 pound notes and nothing else……which of course is my fault!

However me being an optimistic soul, I now view these things with less irritation and knowing smile – like the smile you might give when someone pushes in front of you in an airline queue, but you know that they’re the one who’s going to have a routine cavity search.  I’m sure bus drivers will get their own one day, and although I don’t believe in any gods or anything like that, I can’t possibly believe that they could just pass away and get away with it.

However the number one high point of using public transport is the vast potential for listening in to other people’s conversations and just being generally nosey……this is an example of that:

Yesterday there was a girl and a lad both from
London, they didn’t know each other but some how fate had thrown them together.  She was young (19 ish?) and she was on her way to
Leeds, to audition at Gatecrasher as a dancer.  This was a really big deal, she used to be a good dancer until she had 2 kids, but now they had grown up a bit (!!!!!!) she could get back into it.  Gatecrasher apparently pays its dancers really well, which is why she’d come all this way, as ‘why else would I bother coming up here’

This is where I knew it would be worth listening to.  Picture the scene.  This is the stopping train between Sheffield and Leeds, taking hard working northerners back home and takes in Meadowhall (the shopping centre that seems to have the status of a city, and apparently is a great ‘shopportunity’ – see what they did there!), Barnsley and Wakefield, basically a tour de Yorkshire, and this girl is about to rip into the north…….brilliant 

She started on a well worn subject…..sandwiches

‘I mean innit, when I go to a sandwich shop, I wan’ it in a bun, but no, they ‘av a breadcake, I mean what the bleedin hell is a breadcake innit?!?!’   ‘ I don’t want a cake, I want a sandwich’

And she kept on with the food references

‘and when I ask if there’s somewhere I can get some tea, they point me a café (Kaff) or summat, I mean naaoh, I don’t want my dinner, I want a cup of tea, is that too much to aask???’

At this point her companion, a southerner who’d been in the north long enough to know the dangerous game she was playing, began to look and sound very uncomfortable.  His platitudes became quieter, he edged across on his seat…he tried his best, but failed.

I won’t go into lots of detail but she went through the weather ‘I mean its so cold innit, how do people live up here’, men, ‘and is it just me, but are all the men thick’ (I though that particularly ironic) and bizarrely, the lack of continental pastries. ‘back home I can get a croissant, a Danish, anyfin, but here all I get is an iced bloody finger….AN ICED FINGER?!?!?’

Needless to say by the time we reached
Barnsley (which when it was announced she annoyingly imitated as ‘Baaaaaaarnslay’)  everyone was right annoyed and someone asked her to keep it down, which she did but not before a shrieked ‘how ruuuude’

If the bloke had been talking like that, he would have been dead by
Wakefield. 

I just want to get one thing straight, the picture above is not of me (I’m far more haggard and over worked than he is!).  The picture is merely a symbol, a symbol of the industrial strength of the north.   Some might say it’s an outdated symbol that clings desperately onto past glories…….some may have a point! 

For more on the north, see the ‘Northern England’ link  

Hello everyone!

 Welcome to my blog!!!  I’m new to all this stuff so you will have to bear with me in terms of it becoming an exciting and enjoyable experience……but don’t worry, if you persevere it’ll become much more rewarding than I know you’re finding it at present!

 This blog is partly in response to my friends who have swanned off abroad for their Electives (see ‘electives’ section) and regale their audience with their experiences in far away lands (you can see two of them on the right hand side)

 Well I’m here to prove that despite being here in good old blighty, and in the industrial powerhouse that is Sheffield, good fun can be had and bizarre situations can be uncovered at every turn!  I’m also expecting this to be an educational experience for those I know who hark from the South…I’m guessing that a lot of them thought Yorkshire dissapeared along with Atlantis and Babylon all those years ago.   

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