gato gato gato

Time, is never time at all

you can never ever leave

without leaving a piece of youth

Smashing Pumpkins: Tonight, Tonight

It's shitty how quick one forgets. Impressions and experiences which should lead to world-changing actions, ever so often echo away in the grand hollow space of the average human brain in which all random impressions and experiences are doomed to fade out. (Read as: Been wasting time in bars too much lately)

This means I am officially back in Amsterdam, aka "hipstertown". "Welcome back to hipstertown" a friend anti-enthusiastically greeted me last week. Today, my gear included: a racing bike, a designed fleece jacket and colourful shoes, and most importantly: a herschell backpack (which I've been wearing for six months but wtf everyone seems to have one all of sudden) in order to buy a casio watch, I realised the Moment was there: hipstertown hello, goodbye crappy lil surfertown.

When you come back after a while, you find that some things have changed, others stayed the same (but you are older). Amsterdam is a bubble. But Taghazout, or any other place, is also a bubble. And once you're back in the bubble, you're back in the bubble. And you forget what the other bubble was like. The transitioning phase is just being in complete chaos. I'll try to, bit by bit write some remaining resonance down from the impressions Morocco made on me, insh'allah.

A week ago, I wanted to write something about traffic. It surprised me how ballsy I'd gotten on the bike in Amsterdam, and figured it was because I got used to surfing in a local's spot in Morocco where everyone's basically on their own. When you're not taking priority, it will never be your turn. Forget it. You wait forever. So at some points you just have to go. Even when there are two shortboarders with nasty pointy noses and knife-sharp glass fins on their boards who will not hold themselves back possibly going for the same wave. Wave traffic can be gnarly and on a busy day, a surfer or two exits the water with a nasty fincut. g n a r l y. And the road traffic too. Most people in Morocco are insane drivers. Add up to that the fact that taxis don't leave before they're full: two people on the passanger seat in the front, and four people on the backseats. Taxis are mercedes from the sixties, or fifties, but they're mostly quite OK and seem like undestructable cars. Mountaintaxis on the contrary, are old Ford vans. We sat on a plastic crate in the back, and had to manually keep the backdoor closed because it was only attached with two pieces of household rope to the rest of the vehicle.

It's safe to say there is a 85% unpredictability factor on the road, including freerunning goats. You never know what's going to happen. Something or someone might just pop up out of nowhere. When you are overtaking a truck, someone else might want to try to overtake you at the same time. Roundabouts are like death traps. Even in traffic jams, people try to squeeze between two rows of cars through the middle of the road. Crazy bus drivers who overtake on a cliff corner. After sunset, risks increase a tenfold because even along the highways, there is hardly any light. I remember driving back from Marrakesh once during ramadan, and seeing a road accident every 50 meters. In the headlights of our car we saw heavy lorries with broken axis, which had run into family cars, failing engines, some accidents more severe than others. It was pretty scary. I looked at Jaouad, our driver. He looked straight ahead, motionless. We had sixteen people in the van, and they needed to be brought back safe. And ourselves too, if that was permitted. There was not much more to rely on than Jaouad's nerves and driving skills. Moroccan traffic is one big russian roulette.

Back in Amsterdam: nicely predictable traffic, and everything's quite orderly. You can trust on everybody respecting the basic rules. So you can easily take priority whenever you feel like it, run around like crazy, and race through town like a mofo. Transitioning between two bubbles, best of both worlds, yeahh!