Let me talk more about the Kafka-esque nightmare of the healthcare system, EVEN WITH reasonable insurance and a doctor’s office down the street from me. I don’t even want to think about what would/will happen if/when the system we do have is dismantled and replaced by something worse… I guess this was precipitated back in March when I needed a typhoid vaccination…in that the pharmacy that had the oral typhoid vaccine is going to come into play in this story…. Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Making up words
Or as Tracy Morgan would say, “WORDPLAY” Inconsonance: When you just can’t stop your p’s, t’s, and q’s from dribbling out of your mouth. Planner + Flaneur = planeur – someone who is pretending to wander but is actually really anal and has set out a specific path. Slur-gery (I can’t claim coming up with this one–just defining it): Drunkenly performing an operation on someone. This is only tangentially related but the other day I misread “instagrammable” as “mammogramable”
Los Angeles flora and fauna
Los Angeles always gets me with how amazing everything smells. I could just walk the hills smelling things all day. I encountered some excellent animals and plants in LA and San Diego. Here they are:
Sad Brooklyn
I need to magically become a graphic designer so I can draw this map. Sad Brooklyn: Frown Heights Dark Slope Upset Park Bensonhurts Fort Mean Boredom Hill Squabble Hill Gowahhhhhhnus Prospect Fights Phony Island Vinegar Pill Flat-affect bush Williamsblerg …that’s all I’ve got.
Over-hearing
You know, like oversharing, but from the audience’s perspective. (Maybe it wasn’t necessary to spell that out.) On the train: -Man whispering gently into his iPhone -Guy to his friend: She was claiming that she had paid the landlord and he was screwing her sister, or something. On the street: -Teenager talking to her friend: I always tell my mom that she thinks of me as the bad kid, but really I’m the GOOD kid because I tell… Read more »
Marrakech!
Getting from Chefchaouen to Marrakech involved multiple forms of transportation: bus from chaouen to Tangier, taxi from the Tangier bus station to the Tangier train station, overnight train from Tangier to Marrakech, and cab to the Marrakech medina before walking down the narrow streets to find the riad. The only problem was that you can’t buy train tickets online without a Moroccan credit card, and because of how stressful the bus station in Fes was, we did not go to… Read more »
Fes and Chefchaouen
Going from the desert to Fes was the only really long day of driving. It was about 7.5 hours, and Abdul dropped us off in Fes around 5 pm. What can I say about Fes? Not much, unfortunately, except that I need to go back. My time in Fes was analogous to someone traveling to NYC but only visiting Times Square and the Port Authority. I was there for about 15 hours and my heart felt like a clenched fist… Read more »
The Desert, Day 3
Question: Is it okay to ride a camel? I thought about this during our drive to Merzouga, while we rode the camels into the dunes of the Sahara (side note: when examining a map later, I discovered we were in a hilariously small piece of desert…still technically Sahara, though), and afterwards. It seems like there’s a spectrum: You don’t ride on dolphins. You don’t ride giant tortoises. You possibly shouldn’t ride on elephants (maybe? I think more people would say it’s… Read more »
The Desert, Days 1-2
On day 1 of the desert part of our tour, I had finally started to feel–not normal, again, yet, but like I could remember what normal felt like. When we left the mountains I figured I was on the mend, especially as we descended, but the overall nausea and lack of appetite continued as we made our way to Ouarzazate. And then in the middle of the night that night, I came down with a 24-hour stomach thing. Honestly, I… Read more »
The Mountains, Day 4
Last mountains, I promise. New topographies coming next post. The final day of hiking was also eight hours, and while eight-hour Day 3 was my favorite, Day 4 almost ended me. I’m not totally sure what happened–I want to say that I had altitude sickness, but we were only ever as high as 2500 meters, which isn’t really enough to do it. I already had a head cold when we got to the mountains, though, and that + the higher… Read more »
