Ernie says "GO AWAY!"

So I went to AIESEC US's national LTM this past weekend. The following is my account of the crazy shit that happened outside of the actual meetings.

I got to the airport and it was a breeze to the terminal. I patiently started reading Life of Pi (yes, finally, and Shanky I still have your copy of it), and eventually the plane started boarding. My side of the aisle was just me until the very last moment, when the final person to board the plane was the window seat of my side (I was in the aisle).

Now, I don't know how else to describe this guy except to say that he was an older, fatter version of Mr. Bean. He had the same facial expressions, the same mannerisms, the same accent, everything.

He got to our seats, put his bag into the overhead bin, and then smiled at me and said "Excuse me." I let him in, and no more than a couple minutes later, I had to let him out so he could to get his bag. He sat back down, and then two minutes later, he had to get something again. This repeated 8 more times, and then eventually I said "You know, you have enough room underneath your seat to just put your bag there. Plus, I don't think there's anyone in the seat in between us, you could put it there too." He looked at me blankly, then after a couple seconds he brightened up and said "Ahhhhh."

Once we had taken off and were high enough to use our electronics, we both got out our iPods. 10 minutes later, I noticed that I was hearing something that wasn't coming from my earbuds. This really bothered me, because I always play my music really loud. I hit pause, and realized what I was hearing was coming from the window seat. I took off my earbuds, and it occurred to me that I was hearing Mr. Bean's iPod blasting Die Fledermaus. I'll let that marinate for a minute. Over the low blasting hum of the airplane, and through the loud house music coming through my own earbuds, I could hear HIS music. Meanwhile, he was slouched against the window, snoring softly. I looked around, and no one else seemed to mind that his music was loud enough to be heard within a 5 seat radius.

The view from my seat. Taken for posterity.

So we landed in NYC at 11PM and I scurried for the M60 bus stop. I'm standing alone there, and over the course of maybe 15 minutes, a flock of little Asian girls shows up, followed by an old married couple and disgruntled airport worker.
And immediately afterward, Blue Steel showed up. Picture Ben Stiller, but blond, 6'5", and actually a model. Er... so basically, a typical male model with Derek Zoolander's trademark pout. He maintained this expression until his bus came by.

The Q72 came up around the corner, and almost immediately Blue Steel dropped the pout and took on a look of sheer bliss. But it was not to be. As the bus got closer, it was becoming rapidly apparent that it wasn't going to stop. Slowly, the grin became a grimace of murderous intent. When the bus zoomed by us, Blue Steel dropped his bags and chased after the bus, screaming at the top of his lungs "WHAT THE FUCK?!"

This was enough to spook the flock of Asian girls into scurrying 50 feet to the taxi hub, but the old married couple merely snorted and went back to cataloging the contents of their bags. Blue Steel was trudging back, saying "Are you kidding me?" out loud to no one in particular. I just smirked and went back to my book (at around this point, Pi had successfully constructed his raft).

"Are you kidding me?"

Blue Steel furiously pawed through his blackberry, looking for god-knows-what. The pout had returned. The old married couple got on the Q33.

"Are you kidding me?"

The M60 finally came by, and I got on and produced two crisp $1 bills for the driver. "Coins only," she said, without even looking at me. Now it was my turn to say "Are you kidding me?!" So I shambled back into the terminal and found the change machine. When I came back, Blue Steel was squawking into his phone about the bus injustice.

"Are you kidding me?"

The bus had left me, and by now it was past midnight, which meant that the next M60 wouldn't come by for maybe an hour. Blue Steel came up to me and said "You know, the next M60 probably won't come for another hour or so." We got to talking about how retarded the New York airports were: JFK's clusterfuck qualities, La Guardia's insanity, and Newark's distance. A Q__ bus pulled up, and the Asian flock scurried over to get onto it, while Blue Steel meandered over to the taxis to talk to the cabbies.

"Are you kidding me?", as he headed over.

He came back a few minutes later. By now, half an hour had passed since the M60 ditched me for lack of quarters. "You want to split a cab?", he asked me. I replied, "Aren't you going into Queens?" He said, "Yeah, but you could take a train into Manhattan from there. I'm willing to cover 3/4 of the cab fare."

Are you kidding me?

Blue Steel seemed like a nice enough guy, but I had been to New York enough to know that taking the metro into Manhattan from Queens could take hours. So I fed him a bullshit response about how I didn't know Manhattan at all and was meeting friends at a specific subway station. He relented, and we said our goodbyes. "Safe travels," he said, and flashed Blue Steel as he ducked into the cab. The cab sped away, and I was left alone on the platform.

At that very moment, an M60 pulled up. It had been just over an hour since the last bus, approximately 90 minutes since I first stepped out of the terminal. I staggered forward with my fistful of quarters, only to hear the man in the driver's seat say to me, "The machine is broken. Ride is free."

...

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

The trip into and through Manhattan was pretty monotonous. The hostel was really kitschy and nice. I slept fitfully until the next morning and went to LTM.

Lunch was at a fabulous Turkish?/Lebanese?/Persian? place. The service was slow, but the food was worth it. No pictures to document this, sadly, but Northwestern has a new place in my heart from the conversations that took place. It turns out Richard finally got in touch with the LC there! Yay! Also, there was a girl there (whose name currently is escaping me) that's going to be in Shanghai at the same time as Katie and I. Now that's a network for you.


In the evening, we headed to Layaly for Ma'andi's final hurrah. Take note, kids, this place was amazing.

I'll let those speak for themselves.

Got back to the hostel at about 1AM. One of my roommates was busy washing his socks in the bathroom (yuck), and the entire room smelled like wet feet. I went to bed despite the olfactory assault.

When I got up the next morning, it only took me a few minutes to get washed and packed and down in the lobby to check out. When I got there, I saw one of my roommates arguing with the poor woman at the front desk. He swerved around, looked me dead in the eye, and screeched, "YOU STOLE MY WATCH!" Imagine my incredulity.

At this point it was already 9:45, and I had to walk 10 blocks to LTM. But this crazy motherfucker made me stay (by preventing the woman from being able to check me out) while he called the police over to arrest me and search my bag. Luckily, the po-pos thought he was as crazy as I did, and let me go whilst taking him down the hall to calm him down. My only regret is that I didn't snap a picture of the guy doing his wild "WHERE'S MY SHIT" histrionics.

I got to LTM at 11:30, an hour and a half late, but whatever. By the end of the day, we were exhausted. Costa gave us a ride, and this is what followed:


I got on my delayed flight and nearly finished Life of Pi (I got to the carnivorous island and couldn't deal with it anymore). Arrived in town at around midnight.

The end.


P.S. The other LIGERs are awesome.

Plot the course

So I'm trying something new this time. Usually when I write these I somehow lose focus or interest before finishing and I invariably wind up either going through my entire list of bookmarks or flipping on the TV. With that in mind, I've literally hidden both my mouse and remote control on the other side of the room. Maybe I'll get more than a few lines down this time.

It's been several weeks since Morocco now. I'm a bit ambivalent about finally writing this so late after-the-fact. Other things have arisen which have clouded my memory of that wondrous event. But then again, I imagine that the really important things, the truly memorable things... they would have survived the gauntlet of short term memory.

So where to begin? Perhaps with the beginning. But to make things interesting, I'll lump in the ending too. The flights were relatively uneventful, for the most part. Security was what I pretty much expected it to be too. All three of us got pulled aside in Atlanta for a thorough check, but it was pretty routine and I'm convinced it was legitimately random. Emily got to give an elevator speech about AIESEC to her security officer and I actually found out that my guy has a girlfriend in AIESEC in South Africa. At least that's what I think... he might've thought I said something else. But meh, it doesn't matter. Paris security was pretty relaxed. I felt bad for the woman in front of us at one point though. She had gotten duty-free alcohol at some point and hadn't had a chance to stash it in her checked luggage... and they made her ditch it at the international flight security check point in CDG airport. It was pretty ridiculous, but I guess there's no way around it. I thought it would've been awesome to just pop it open right there in the security line and start a Nordic circle with everyone there, minus the chant at the end of course. I told her in passing to open the bottle, take a swig, and pass it back in the line. The other Americans in the line grinned at me, so I guess it wasn't just me that had the idea. Security back into the States was a nightmare though. The safety color code thing was at orange or whatever for Atlanta, D.C., and Cincinnatti, so we had to wait in a million more lines and jump through a million more hoops. At one point in Paris they even ran background checks on us. It was all a blur though, I spent the first 60% of the trip home hung over and sleeping it all off. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm going to jump to somewhere in the middle now. This was the third night of the conference, and the OC had set up a party on the beach. The prep for this night was the epitome of ridiculous if there ever was one, because they were worried about outsiders showing up to the event. More security issues, right? So anyway, they had us line up by country delegation like they make you do in elementary school. Then the OC, Facis, and Moroccan delegation linked hands and formed a human circle around us. I shit you not. Then this human circle led us like a herd of sheep the quarter mile down to the beach. The point was that anyone not inside the human circle didn't belong at the event, which I guess sounded good in theory. However, the problem... was that the circle moved at different speeds at different spots. Remember, this circle had to encapsulate at least 200 people, so it was rather large. Eventually the circle started to break in certain places, leading to people having to join the circle to patch up the tears. I myself got sucked into it. But eventually it just completely dissolved, but we were within steps from the sand already anyway. And then there it was... the Moroccan beach. They really went all-out for it. There was a bonfire and the dance floor thing was set up on the sand with (apparently) a famous DJ there to spin for us. I looked up at the moon... and it was truly spectacular.

I couldn't help but be amazed that I had actually traveled further than the horizon I had seen countless times back on those beaches in Florida. And of course, it was AIESEC that brought me there. I'd gone to so many new places and done so many new things since my Florida years, but this felt like the capstone achievement of that part of my life. For some reason, somehow, being there on the beach at midnight at the other side of the ocean gave me some closure that I hadn't realized I had been lacking. Even now, I can't describe exactly what that closure entailed. The realization that I was beginning a new chapter in life felt surreal. There was a sense of anxiety but also a sense of calm. It was distressing to be confronted with "what-ifs" once again, but there was subtle comfort in knowing that things had worked themselves out without me even being aware of it. I was once again left with the questions of "What do I do now?" and "Where do I go from here?" But this time... it felt like a challenge.

So yeah. I didn't exactly share this magic moment with the rest of the delegation. It was kind of cheating, because in reality, it had very little to do with the general sentiment of the MENA region. But in all honesty, no one has an attention span long enough for all of that. Not during plenary... hah.

After the conference, we spent the night in Mohammedia with friends of Emily's family. Great people, true testiments to hospitality. It was a little awkward though, because I'm always left feeling guilty when my hosts treat me as well as I had been treated. Not to mention the strange hygiene products they had in their bathroom. One was apparently Chinese, but had been badly translated into English. One of the words used was "horniness". It was shampoo.

Afterwards, we took the train to Rabat and got completely screwed with the ferry to Spain. There was no way we would be able to make it to the city we needed to be at. So we ended up shelling out all this extra money in order to fly from Casablanca to Barcelona. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We spent a great day in Rabat just walking around with Rachid and some other Moroccans and a couple token Tunisians. Too much happened there for me to talk about. I bought a silver ring though! It has one of those rotating centers. Apparently Maddie got the exact same one. Great minds think alike, eh?

Crisis averted, we made it into Spain. However, it would cost us even more money and more time to get from Barcelona to Valencia. We had originally planned to spend a full day with Preston. But as it turns out, we spent that whole day in transit: Rabat to Casablanca, Casablanca to Barcelona, Barcelona to Valencia. When we finally arrived, we had a mere six hours before we had to be at the airport to return home. And to top it off, poor Emily had her backpack stolen in the Barcelona train station. Preston found us, though, and good times (and donner kabob) were had. We went to this bar where I apparently drank a few too many cocktails and made a complete fool of myself.

I realize my anecdotes are getting more and more vague and curt. Blame it on the attention span.

Let's see. What's left for me to ramble about... ah yes, that's right... nothing. Well I'm sure there's something, but therein lies the flaw with spending too much time on the most significant thing. Invariably you end up forgetting about everything else. At least that's what happens with me.

Maybe I'll be able to write more about this later.

Grasses are greener

I'm less than 12 hours from being at the airport to head to Morocco... but all I can think about is not being able to in Miami for the Trance festival that Adi is going to.

Ah well. You can't have everything, right?