Frequent travelers with short arms ALERT

This post is about frequent travelers with short arms alert, and no, no photos to show this time 🙂

Travelling has its problems.

For example, I would love to be teletransported to my destination and avoid long waits at the airport, and above all to avoid the drama of the moment when they weigh the hand luggage, you precious, swollen backpack with the cameras and computer inside. Sigh. That is how I got my gray hairs. 😦
While I understand that there must be a difference of times according to the geographic location of my destination, and I accept the fact that often there is a different currency and  also the language is not the same, honestly I can not tolerate the fact that the electrical outlets in each country are so different as well as the voltage. WHY? WHY in hell can’t people make them all the same, what is the problem?
No comments about the fact that in some countries you have to drive the car on the other side of the road and do the round abouts the opposite way. I have removed that trauma from my memory.
I also find slightly annoying that it is winter in the south, while in the north  it’s summer, because it is kind of funny to arrive from Brazil in short sleeves and summer trousers while at the airport in Milan is snowing. Jumping up and down in the car parking to warm yourself up, while the freezing cold gives a warning of urgency to your bladder.
But the most awful thing is the shower. The evil shower with its two taps is a clear  evidence of the existence of a plot against  frequent travelers. By convention the hot water comes out of the left tap, which also has a red dot, while the tap at the right has a blue dot and cold water comes out. That is accepted as a conventional rule of good sense.
For some reason  sometimes in the hotels you will open the cold water tap, the one with a blue dot in your right side,  and a jet of boiling water will invest you, and this is not  good news, because it would take someone with a long arm to close it, and therefore allow you to reach the tap to regulate the water at a proper temperature. You will have a few options, maybe the easiest way out would be you go to call the reception to get someone brave enough to help, or … call in the tall (handsome) guy next door, who you only met for a fraction of a second in the lift? There is also the possibility, if you are a determined person,  to get the umbrella from the very bottom of the suitcase, wear your raincoat and gloves and dive for the tap in the steamy bathroom?
Sigh. The universal conspiracy against frequent travellers with short arms.

Now you understand why there are no photos for this post 😉

Close to the destination

We are not very far from Portugal now, two more hours, maybe three as it is raining.

We are just outside Salamanca, having lunch.

It has been quite a long trip, as I stopped to work for two days in France.

   

 

On the road again

There is only a worn out moon and us in the highway which will take my husband and me to France.

I was thinking about the poor brainless people who write the lyrics now a days,  listening to the radio makes me worry about their future. 

Btw, I also wonder who was the genius who invented the needle system to open the SIM card door of the iPad. Poor guy. Sigh. His mother must be talked a lot.

Every trip I make I go through this nightmare of opening the thing to insert a new SIM card, a different one for each country, bleh, does it sound so complicated to have one company that covers all Europe?

I think that I better go to sleep another couple of REM cycles to see if my mood changes. 

 

So many meanings for a door

Spiritually a door represents the sheltering aspect of the great mother.

I must say that I love to shoot doors and windows. Everywhere I go.

A door has so many meanings, it represents so many concepts, it is so full of symbolism!

a door means access or escape: a door to success.

A door means property, safety, privacy, or it may just mean home, opportunities, transition.

They can lead to secrets, adventures, danger or comfort.

doors are also symbols of transition, and metamorphosis

In some countries they are colorful, not so much in other countries.

In Morocco there were all sorts of doors, all shapes, normally there was a donkey in front of many of them.

I love doors and donkeys.

The old man who sold water

 

Going to Morocco and living for that very short time in the country was in many ways an eye opener.

Nobody doubts that water is one of the world ́s most precious natural resources
People in Morocco gave a high value to the water, to every drop of it – not because it hadn’t rained and there was lack of it,  in fact we got rain and all the fields were nice and green and people told us that the last year has been blessed with plenty of rain. People have the correct awareness of the fact that without water, without clean water, the humankind would not survive.

The water is so precious that it cannot belong to us, to the single individuals. We are all guests of this Planet.

Items have a second life, in this case an old tire was used to give a drink to the donkeys

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For the three of us who followed the rules/principles of the sustainable tourism it was not difficult adapt ourselves, and I believe that we did all we could to respect the way of living of the locals, and contribute to the local economy. We stayed in a village, had several meals there, we bought the local products from the source, we didn’t waste food nor water in any way, etc.

the tops of old oil barrels became basins to hand wash clothes and an old tire became a great bucket

basins made from oil or paint barrels

One day (of the two and a half days we spent there), we were introduced to an old man who sold water. He had a bag, I believe it was leather or something like that, connected to a brass thing with holes, similar to a rain shower head, and two small brass bowls. You could buy water using the bowls as a water unit. He didn’t sell it by the gallon, he sold it by the bowl. EVERY SINGLE DROP WAS PRECIOUS.

the old man who sold water. Hopefully I will meet him again in October, Inshallah!

Just like for the water, we noticed that many items had a second life. I loved that. I bought a beautiful handbag made from a big old fashioned rice bag inside and jute from a coffee sac outside. I love it.

There were so many examples of that, and some were really smart looking.

We returned home with a new awareness. We see things now with different eyes. We should never take anything for granted.

More about this in a previous post: https://pauladas.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/responsible-tourism/

Our first lunch in Morocco

I must say that we always had very good food, in Morocco. I don’t eat meat, but there were so many tipes of vegetables tajines, and the girls had meat during our first lunch in Morocco – in the place where I shot the photos you see in this post.

we had our first lunch in Morocco @ this place

We were the only women there. We sat in the far corner, with our guides Ayoub and Abdelghani, and we enjoyed the food, and the company. People would give us quick glances, a guy who played music came to us for a tip, and we had our first mint tea there – in that place where you could take pieces of meat or vegetables and get someone to cook them for you, just outside the door. We ate with our hands, we felt deeply the word “sharing”. Sharing food. Eating literally from the same plate. Drinking a fabulous mint tea, after the tea ritual was done by Abdelghani.

We felt blessed to be able to live the country from inside, with a panoramic view over the farmers community. We were spiritually part of it all, then and there.

our first lunch, or at least part of it

Loaded with fun

Interesting how those three days in Morocco were so full of emotions, how in such a short time we shot some of our best photos ever.
No, it was not the “wormwood” tea, no kidding, it was our own energy, which instead of decreasing after our 12 long days of photo adventure, which had started in Spain, was still increasing in the last days, in Morocco. We felt good, we worked/walked a lot, we laughed so much that I don’t remember doing so since I was a teenager. We were happy.
We were also tired at times, specially since we were slightly sleep deprived 😉 due the fact that in Spain we arrived late at night and still had to cook, do the laundry and download photos, and we left early in the morning every day, and in Morocco because we went to so many places and shot so many photos that it took us forever to download and backup everything!

We got rain, but with the rain we also got a soft diffusion filter and an exceptional light, and the feeling of re-birth, springtime…
We felt blessed every day for the fact that we could share such a trip, and take such extraordinary images.

An argan tree loaded with fruits, sorry, goats 🙂

Inshallah

In some countries you really find every day the difficulty that people have in planning the future, (except our guides, who both lived for a while in western countries). It can be frustrating some times, when you are trying hard to make a plan and organize details, because often people say “yes”, but that doesn’t mean that it will still be “yes” a few weeks later, or that things will be at the same conditions. Exception made for our two guides (local) and a few other people we actually met.

The same happens about “early morning”, it is a very relative concept, it could mean 10 o’clock for some. If you explain about the best light, any kind of light is good – which it is in fact if we think about it as photographers and not as tourists trying to make postcards instead of photos.  Our eyes can only see what our minds are ready to see. Our mental and visual laziness is bizzarre sometimes.

At the soukh, when we were already feeling nearly invisible and mixing well with the locals (thanks to our guides)

Distances also seem to be subjective, specially when the unit of measure is “time by car” and not  Km, so twenty minutes is the normal answer you get for any distance 😉 . Except for our guides 🙂 Did I tell you that we had the best guides in the world? 🙂

the door of a pubblic hammam, attempt of digitally painting it

There is no drama and no hurry and no regrets if things don’t work out the way they should have done, quite often. Fatalism mixed with Inshallah.  You just need to adapt yourself, and try to think in the same wavelenght. Be happy. Carpe Diem. 🙂

We thank God we had the perfect guides who showed us around also in “mentality” and “feelings”  and not only in latitude and longitude.

Most people don’t want to have their photography taken, true, they are not in a zoo, they are not landscapes, they are human beings, with their beliefs and their feelings. Think about it this way: if you went around in YOUR country, IN YOUR TOWN, taking photos of people who you don’t know at all, what would happen? I can guess 😉

I loved the djellabahs, and the caftans

That is why I appreciate so much the help of Consuelo’s agency and our two experienced local guides, in Morocco. They were the catalyst in that chemistry of cultural melting pot, that you must accept as unavoidable or you will simply float and see nothing with your heart.

The results we had were unforgettable, our experience tasted slightly bitter at times, but the whole trip changed our vision of the world  about so many things. We were there only for two and a half days. We felt like if we were plunged in the past quite often, but in a positive way, which made us think about some big mistakes we are doing in the western countries, like taking things like availability of water for granted.

There are some countries that are not for the petty-minded, nor for the people who don’t want to make an effort to study, well ahead,  other cultures and their history. Those people will only get to the first layer, the pretending layer, and not to the real treasure which is a few layers down. For a photographer it is even more difficult, many photographers tend to accept the outward appearance, because they are not ready (prepared) to see any further.  Some don’t see past the collective imagination of that country, which they know from TV documentaries, the News and some movies. Many don’t see the country from the “inside”, because it is easier to just take and not to give – and I am not talking about money. We did that too, some times  😦     but we were learning, every minute, and I believe that next time we go there, we will behave the right way from the moment we land.

Inshallah!

street view late at night