UltraCrepidate

Wish that there are models for me to shoot.

Final part of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“Did you notice that?”

“Yeah, we were surrounded by hot chicks.” ~Random dialog between me and Mark

I remember starting an initiative with Jeff in university. That we’d initiate contact and talk to a random stranger everyday. The initiative never took flight because I was too scared of approaching a total stranger and too self conscious of making a fool of myself. But I decided to give it a try on this trip. This trip of no regrets.

At the beginning, I put a lot of thought on how to approach and what to talk about before I even start. Then as time goes by and as the novelty wore off, I started to get in front of people’s face and blurt out whatever that comes to my mind at that moment. To my amazement, many good conversation started like that.

Near the end of our trip, this turned into something even more amazing. I have no explanation what so ever until we scratched our heads together to try to come out with a theory. We coined it the traveller’s aura which is later confirmed by other backpackers who’ve experienced it as well. Everywhere we go, people would initiate conversations with us. More often than not, they turn out to be hot chicks in the range of 7~9s. Something that never happened in my sorry little life.. This is especially true in Spain where a dishelvelled Asian with a white dude stands out like a sore thumb. We noticed it while waiting for buses, we noticed it while chatting at the hostel and we noticed it while sitting in a pub listening to local flamenco. No efforts, no working up the courage to approach that hot chick, no mind numbing shock at trying to think about what to say, they just invade us.

“I mean, you are on vacation, you are happy with no worry about boredom and you are definitely not grumpy because you are not stuck doing the same thing for a year. You are backpacking so that means your life is completely in your own hand and that shows through your confidence. It shows through your interaction with people. It tells them that even though you cannot speak their language, you chose to be there and you chose to stutter through the few simple words in your vocabulary to get what you want. To them, THAT is sexy.” ~Fellow backpacker

Everyone defines success in their own way and just the same, everyone has their own reasons to be tied down to a place. The thing that intrigued me the most out of all these questioning is a lack of emotion right after I came out of such discussions. There’s only this cold, calculating mind trying to learn from what they’ve said. This detachment took a few days to sink in before I realize the implication of such a detachment.

Have I finally subdued my competitiveness? Am I finally free from the lures of chasing other’s dream just to show I can beat them? Am I finally walking on my own path? Yes, yes and YES!. No more jealousy, no more envy and no more sinking heart feeling. Just a constant tugging towards a direction. Unwavering. No matter how many times I fall on the path, I see now that I’ve been following myself unconsciously wavering here and there. But it has always lead me towards the North of my world.

I am finally an adult.

Throughout the internal turmoils I am experiencing, one song repeated and accompanied me through the day to help calm my soul. The music was originally created to be mixed with an experimental porn shopping catalog yet what they probably didn’t expect is to have people seeking after the name of the song. I for one enjoy the slightly rough but still beautiful female vocal that lazily sings echoes through the song. I have asked their permission to post a flash version for people to listen to, but have not heard any reply yet. It’s such a wonderful song that I can’t wait to share with you.

It seems that my review for restaurant has pissed off a few people. Enough so that they emailed their lawyer about it which brought a spike in traffic from their meticulous scrutiny of the personal food review site I maintain. If you are wondering which one I am talking about, it is this.

It started off as a simple review. Something that I do with honesty and sincerity until a long time customer got a hold of it and started emailing my employer (Because I forgot to remove a logo from one of the images), forcing me to waste a day worth my time to update everyone and deal with it (which resulted in the scrutiny and modification of any information related to my work by the whole marketing department).

In each one of my review, I try my best to mention both the positives and the negatives and did my best to do the same for that restaurant. Granted, my experience there wasn’t that great, but that’s the whole point of a personal website isn’t it?

Today, I noticed a weird spike in traffic and as always I check up on it to see if another person tried to leech off of my pictures. Lo and behold, it was a law firm going through every single one of my reviews from an email link that someone sent them. Prime computation deducts that it is the owner of that restaurant who sent it to his lawyer.

Instead of contacting me directly to rectify the situation, so far they’ve resulted to pressure tactics from my employer and perhaps legal means. I am just dumbstruck by this type of behavior. I mean it doesn’t make business sense. Consider the case where they win and they make my life miserable what will happen?

There are actually less people visiting that site than the real people that I know in life. At the beginning, when I finished writing the post, I was neutral and hoping to go back again to experience the dining experience as an individual to give them a fair score. With all of this that has already happened now, I am leaning towards telling people not to go to that restaurant if they ask me.

However, when they do take legal action and really make my life miserable. What do you think I will do? I will not only have an interesting and funny story to tell everyone I know, I will also do it for free and go out of my way to do it.

How much are they paying their lawyers? And how much am I getting paid for telling my funny story? That’s my question.

It has occurred to me that the effort I put into writing posts is taking precious time away from the things I should be doing instead. Add to the fact that I’ve become quieter recently. I will be focusing on entering photography and writing contests instead of honing my skills in a blog post from now on and see how it goes. I am, after all, competitive in nature. I can’t justify the time I am putting here right now. If you want to follow what I am doing, then I suggest my twitter.

Summer is here and I don’t want to sit in front of my computer.

The first time I tried to put my prediction of the economy in words was in February when I said that March should see the worst of it and indeed we did. Now that we have safely survived that moment, I have to hammer in an even worse prediction. September will actually be the worst. Why? Because the oil price increased by 50% from February till today. The slow ripple effect means that we won’t see this reported in companies financial until the 3rd quarter report. i.e September. At which point we’ll see some panic.

It is wrong to exclude volatile food and energy inflation out of the inflation data they use to see the health of the economy. After paying mortgages, food and energy combined occupies about 1/3 of my spending and I believe it is about the same situation in every other household. How come business reports simply take it out of the equation to measure inflation?

Because of the above mentioned point, economy deterioration will continue which will force Bank of America (the only bank that hasn’t cut dividend) to cut its near 9% dividend payout. At which point, I will buy that stock.

Having a crisis of motivation. Hence the short message.

That is what I originally wrote. But then, the surge of thoughts rushed through me. I realized that I’ve been supressing what I really wanted to write about in order to present the experience. Truth is, I’ve become quieter.

I had thought that I’d go around blurting out stories of Morocco to everyone I see at home, but when it come time to perform, when my friends asked me about the great adventures I had. I simply smiled and said: “It was an adventure.” I don’t know why I feel this way. It is in me, it has changed me then why don’t I want to share the experience?

Perhaps it is the realization of what I really want. The proper tuning of emotions and desire to my real actions. I realize that it is not what I need to do to reach what I want. It changed me, you can feel it and that is enough. No more, will I go against my feelings even if it means that no one reads this journal or the content becomes boring as hell.

Part 9 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“What is up with these European sizes?”

At first, I was pissed off at the miniaturized size of everything in my plate and worryied about hunger right after I finished wolfing down the meal. “Why are they paying so much for so little food? How do they even survive?” Seriously, a piece of bread that’s smaller than the size of my palm with cheese and ham costs 5 Euros. I shook my head when I saw it for the first time, still in shock from the implication.

I never had a proper breakfast in Spain. The one that I salivated and dreamed of consist of a piece of bread, two sausages, two eggs, hash browns, butter jam and coffee. You know what I am talking about and you can get that in Canada for around $5 CDN (Exchange rate at this moment is $1.5 CDN = 1 Euro). Instead, I was greeted with the same disappointing “Tostadas, jamon, kaiser y Cafe” (Toast, Ham, Cheese and Coffee) for 5 Euro. I can make this at home at the cost of $0.75. Unlike in Morocco, the prices are usually non negotiable, or rather, shall we say that nobody is trying to negotiate the price. Peer pressure and the take it or leave it attitude puts the haggler in me to its death bed. I want to see what Ania would do here and worship her if she does pull it off.

Why am I dedicating this post on food? Because Spain’s timing is off… from a Canadian’s perspective. Our first encounter of this off timed eating schedule was when we were walking around looking for dinner around 7PM, a reasonable time back home, but not so much in Spain. The restaurant owners would tell us in Spanish that the kitchen is closed and we’d be scratching our head trying to figure out what they just blurted out in super fast Spanish style. This continued on until the owner got impatient and blurted out the word “Kitchen closed”. Which gave us even more question marks.

Other mysteries includes going into places during normal business hours and getting the boot with the word “siesta” or “tapas” to accompany us out. Those of you who’ve been to Spain is probably laughing now and I agree with you that it is funny. Just imagine the puzzled and clueless look on our face around 7PM trying to point at the picture of a plate of hot meal and motion the action of eating.

So, later, with trial and error, we found out what the deal is. There are two siestas in the working day, each lasting about 2 hours. Tapas (small plate) and beer time is from 5 to 7PM while the kitchen opens at 8PM (Meaning the chefs get there at 8 to open the kitchen). We didn’t bother figuring out the official lunch time since nobody offered any kind of real meal before 8PM. The most you can find is “Toastadas y …” or some tapas place.

This European diet is part of the reason why I lost so much weight. That and the small portion of food they serve. As time goes by though, I started to see things their way. Even though the portions are smaller, the scent and tastes are stronger. You can see this trend in everything. Even the coffee they make is stronger (In a super tiny cup that you can fit two thumbs in). Upon returning home, I verified this fact by ordering some of the same food and drinking coffee.  I am now a sucker of “Toastadas y Porsciutto y Cafe”

Most of my pictures are devoid of people. It’s a worrisome trend that I only realized when I started going through my collections. Truth be told, I don’t know how to shoot people’s face nor do I spend time thinking about it. It seem to be the most important factor and probably the biggest of my failings when I was taking pictures for this trip. I was constantly reacting to the moment, trying to turn on my camera fast enough to capture something that suddenly happened. It’s a race against time and I find that I almost always lose because the pictures usually turn out to be blurry, under exposed or over exposed. I simply didn’t have the time to change the settings.

As we traveled on, I realized what I need to do to improve the likely hood of getting the pictures of I want. I need to go up to them and ask them. I need to compose, think about where I want them, what pose I want them to have and what feelings I want to convey before I even start. This, I realized too late.

This marks a defining moment of my journey in photography where I learn the truth about my own preference. I want to capture people interacting with their environment.

Because the plug-in I used doesn’t import the image’s description from Flickr, I suggest you head over to the set to get the back story of each image.

Part 8 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“Fuck you!”

“Well fuck you too!”

Near the end of our trip, it is not uncommon to hear this type of exchange between Mark and I. The words might seem extreme, but I assure you it is only so on paper. At least, my interpretation of our interaction dictates so.

These exchanges come not as hatred, but more like a frustration that we felt about the way the other person are. The problem with being an adult is that we each has our established values and habits and we both have enough confidence in ourself to not bend over backward to get pooped on by other people.

I remember that there was a time when I was afraid that people would lose respect or dislike me if I show the negative side of me. Over time though, I found out that I much prefer the company of those who knows my quirks and still accepts me. I don’t have to or want to watch my behavior with these people, nor do I have to worry about them pissing me off because the feeling is usually mutual.

This is reinforced by the fact that I met the people I met on this trip in my most dishevelled state possible, yet they still enjoyed my company. (Think no shower for a few days, no shaving at all with sand and dirt in my hair). I was being accepted the way I am and I was glad.

One of the first thought I had when I got back is: “Wow, people take a lot of effort making sure they look good.”

Part 7 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“I used to look up to people who’ve backpacked through Europe.”

Tourism, traveling, backpacking and the general means of roughing it while moving from one country to another has lost its romantic allure to me. I no longer look at it with a youth’s glossy eyed innocence. For the moment, I am saturated. And because of this saturation, I am able to stand across the fence and give myself lectures that would otherwise sound like heresy to the backpacking religion.

I think this comes from the failure to find the type of traveling that I was really looking for. No, I had mistaken the ideal in my mind with the general accepted concept of traveling. Makes you wonder just exactly what I happened on this trip to change my perception of it so drastically. It’s simple really. I just realized that everything is already taken cared of for the tourist. Less so in 3rd world countries like Morocco, but it feels smooth as melted butter when you are going through Europe. Even the cheapest of the worst hostels that we stayed at felt like heaven compared to the relative discomfort we’ve been through. But that’s not it at all. It’s the fact that the relative uncomfortable place is even there to begin with that bothers me.

No, I don’t think I want to travel as a tourist at all. I don’t want to see the museums, the churches or any type of architecture that are either semi bombed out or restored to perfect shape. The canned sights, the soul searching and self exploration have all been done to death in my life (Last tally, I’ve seen 90 cities already with some more to add to the list). No, for me, traveling is about the interaction with people. With other travelers and with the locals in order to live their life through my body.

That and the fact that I met this 45 year old guy on the road who’ve been traveling since 20. We talked, we exchanged thoughts. I walked away telling myself: “I do not want to be like him.”

Part 6 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“You know, the most excitement we got in the five days since we arrived is you almost slipping on some Irish puke and stepping on dog shit.”

Only 14 km away, but a world’s difference. If you fancy a fast lane to a double whammy of cultural shock, try taking the ferry from Tanger(Morocco) to Tarifa(Spain). The sharp contrast will make the most boring of us realize some kind of truth in ourself. For me, it served as a basis for me to further understand the nature of time warp; a concept dissected in-depth between me and Fred.

Fred had mentioned that working in the corporation is like working in a time bubble. You don’t really feel the passage of time, but in a blink of an eye, 5 years have passed. In the past two year of so of my tenure in the same corporation, I started to feel the same way. I see it coming, but nothing I did allowed me to escape from its grip. In the blink of an eye, two years have passed.

Don’t get it wrong, I didn’t just stay home and get fat. I did a lot of things. If you read through the past two years of my blog, you’d agree too. I’d say that I reached more goals than I did while traveling through Morocco. So why does it feel like more things had happened in that one month than the past two years combined? The only logical conclusion I can draw from it is this.

I was constantly being pushed past my comfort zone. I could not predict what the next minute will bring or whether I will be ok or not.

Part 5 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“Peter’s steel stomach 0: McArabia 1″

The downfall of my stomach happened around the middle of our trip. Since then it only gets worst until the cleansing of western food when we arrived in Spain. I remember burping a lot and the stank of the Arabian spice would gross me out. I could’ve swore that the McArabia I had at McDonalds stayed in my stomach for at least 3 days.

Strangely enough, McDonald is a lower end medium class restaurant in Morocco as opposed to Canada where it is crowned the lowest end out of all restaurant you can go to. We actually created a category for it called fast food. We thought we were escaping to safe haven when we entered McDonald, who would’ve thought that McArabia is their hidden weapon, ready to do me in.

We were pretty spartan with food during periods of hardship and we both lost weight in the process. Yet during all those time I never felt the same type of hunger that I feel now when I sit in the air conditioned office mowing down problems that grew like wild weed while I was away. The hunger induced by mental activities felt more urgent than the hunger created by physical labor. It make sense because the brain consumes sugar and that isn’t stored in our fat. Perhaps using your brain is the solution to diabetes? If some researcher care to investigate in that direction, there might be a lead.

I am not implying anything, I am just sure of the fact that I didn’t use much of my brain in Morocco and I am really not doing any physical labor right now in Canada. Yet the hunger still comes and it feels different.

Part 4 of the Morocco miniseries: Words from the dusty road

“Quelle reservation?”

A common response from the hotel owners upon hearing that we’ve made reservations over the phone. You can’t really plan ahead in Morocco, the most we’ve been able to do is to plan one day ahead and even then it’s been a hit and miss trial run with some final twist in the end that you have to react to. Yes. If I must give a theme to our trip to Morocco, it will be called “React to the moment”.

It’s the opposite of my nature. One where careful planning puts me ahead of my competition and saves me the frustration of reacting to unexpected stimulus. This trip is the perfect balancer, forcing me to play along and live from moment to moment putting me far away from my comfort zone. Nothing I’ve done there is within my comfort zone and this type of extreme exposure bred another type of characteristic: “No regrets.”

A some point in the trip, I seem to acknowledge to myself that when I put my heart to it, there’s a way. So I became someone who does what he thinks of doing no matter how my social conditioning tried to pull me in other direction. A life with no regret. Isn’t that what everyone is toting as the best way to live? Yes, but did any of them tell you how crushing a blow it is when you pull it off, but the result is not one that you wanted? The opportunity costs of non-planned action is often overlooked by people.