Blood, Sweat and Tears...Viva la Espanya !!

Salaam,

There was a Lot of blood (not mine) a lot of sweat (mine) and quite a few tears (not mine again). To explain;


Yesterday was a long day. A Very long day. It all began at 7 am when i caught the train from Fez for Tangiers and ended at 11 pm when i arrived into Granada, Spain.

It seems weird that travelling can seem so exhausting as after all, physically you´re not really doing much for the majority of the time. But for those who have had to travel long distances know, somehow or the other, it seems to sap the energy out of you. For me the main problem was my luggage. Wherever i go i´m dragging 35kg with me and after a few minutes it gets very exhaustive leading to me sweating away. Its got to the point where i´m actually ditching stuff on my travels. In Marrakesh i left behind some clothes, in Fez some trainers...etc etc..im trying to look at the funny side of it all...trying...

Alhamdulilla it all went OK though. Even though i didn´t really have much of it planned, it all seemed to fall into place. I arrived into Tangiers at 12:30 and got to the port to find there was a ferry leaving in 10 minutes. Perfect. Then when i got to Algeciras, i found there was a coach going from the port to Malaga in 20 minutes. Perfect, perfect. 16 hours after i left i got into Granada.

Ah the blood and the tears! And my god was there quite a lot of it! Sunday was dedicated to shopping in Fez, so i was just wandering from shop to shop. As i mentioned before it can get quite claustraphobic in the souk as the streets are a few feet wide and its usually full of people.

Anyway i was in a shop when suddenly i hear screaming and shouting, i look out and i see people running ans carmbliong over one another and then a guy running waving two HUGE swords, one in each hand (i exaggerate not, these were HUGE, at least a foot long, with teeth (i.e. not just a smooth blade)). I could see he was chasing someone. The guy he was chasing then ran into the shop next to where i was, followed by the guy with the swords then all i heard was two screams/groans and all i saw was the look of horror on the faces of the women opposite that shop who actually saw what was going on. And then the guy with the swords came out into the street with his bloody swords high in his hands, for a moment stood still in the middle of the street and looked up and down, and then ran down the street.

For a second everything seemed to stop. Then lots of people ran to the shop where the incident took place and there was absolute mayhem. As i went forward, the guy who got stabbed emerged from the crowd, stagerring and bleeding heavily from the head and the stomach. Somehow he just walked away and people let him. After this it all seemed to go back to normal straight away, like this was a normal thing in Fez, and the emphasis seemed to be to clean the blood up ASAP to hide that anything did happen. And then within a few minutes it was all back to normal...

I was pretty shocked to say the least. I´ve seen a few dodgy things in Burnley but this is up there with them...Anyway five minutes later, and i was walking up the same road, and i see three police men running down the road with HUGE (again im not exaggerating..these were huge as in you can´t get your hands round them huge) wooden batons. Someone was gonna get a good beating.

Obviously i don´t know what it was all about and what happened to the guy who got stabbed and the guy who did the stabbing, but the shopkeeper said it was most likely to do with drugs. Sigh. Its very sad (again) but in Fez and most of the other Moroccan cities there seemed to be lots of druggies and alcholics lying around on the streets, usually in the poor areas. A sad situation common in most Muslim cities.

Anyway i am in sunny spain and loving it. Today the weather was glorious. Beautiful. Amazing. It´s quite a change though from visiting lots of mosques to visting lots of cathedrals. Also it´s hit home i´m back in the west in terms of finding halal food and the leud behaviour of these people. It´s been a long 6 months in the Muslim lands and maybe i´ve taken a lot of these advantages for granted...May Allah protest us all


Salaam