the dark continent

dum dum dum... AFRICA. the lion king, charlize theron, and pygmies.

but first... the night in tarifa was filled with beach walking and castle exploring. i know i got my fill.

















the tarifa castle was re-traversed and all of the mystery held behind the door was revealed. dum dum dum! i wish i could put music on here, but i can't. here's what the place looks like, to refresh your memories:

















so that's all i saw the last time. let me tell you that this time i went alone to the castle. at midnight. so i was crapping my pants. i moved down through the stairwell past the door and i came to this doorway:









beyond this doorway was a room:









you can see a door in that photo. this door opens to a passageway that looks out over the sea:









and that's all there ways down there. just the castle basement/dungeon/lookout/who-knows-what. but i was very satisfied with my ability to explore that place alone. i bought a flashlight for the occasion. later on, after i got out and found the mexican girls i was traveling with, i convinced one of them to come back with me.


this is Jade being all blair-witch in the corner.





the next day it was on to morocco. duh duh duh DUM duh DUM. charge! we left europe in our dust...erm, spray.









here's the first view of tanger, morocco from the docks in the bay.









my favorite moroccan friend Behiya was conveniently on her way home to visit her family and we rode the same ferry over, so she helped us find a nice and fair cab driver that would take us down the coast to the quiet beach town of Asilah. on the way there our driver Ahmid stopped us at this little outlet to give camel riding a try.












that's right. i rode a camel in africa. bam!



after we got to Asilah and found our hostal we headed down to the beach to play some frisbee (i've been dying without it) and do some swimming if it seemed like a good idea. we headed back after sunset.









the Asilah nightlife was kinda cool. we tried to find some wine but to no avail. i did watch some of the valencia v. celta vigo match at a bar with a cool moroccan guy that i met. other than that though, we just hung out in the room. here we are with our friend Erik (from Texas) that we met on the ferry.









the next day we hit up the markets. hot times!




















we said goodbye to Erik who was going to venture farther south for a couple days and headed back up to Tanger with Ahmid who came back to Asilah to pick us up. 4 amigos and 1 chauffer.

















so Africa was great, a super blood-pumping adventure. monday we came home from tarifa and i had a nice sleep last night without any worries. this week i have no school because of semana santa (holy week) which is a pretty big deal around here. actually, more like the biggest of deals. the world comes to sevilla for semana santa and its saintly processions down the streets. i will be doing lots of homework in my down time this week, and will be spending many nights downtown watching the happenings. i'll report back soon with photos as always. thanks for reading!

morocco, take two

we're trying morocco again. i will hopefully return on monday with piktures.

sevilla v. zenit

fabrício's last night here went perfectly. we rolled into the sánchez pizjuan stadium at about eight on thursday and the match was scheduled for nine. so we had an hour to enjoy the stadium filling up, the perfect sevilla night at 60 degrees, and the nice view of the zenit fans fighting the security guards. it got pretty intense for a few minutes. i read in the paper today that 15 russians (zenit is from st. petersburg) were detained and 9 security guards received medical attention - one of which had a broken jaw! yikes.

let's cut to the chase, though: sevilla killed them 4-1. now, it would be important to know that this is the quarter finals of the UEFA Cup, so no match is easy by any stretch. these are some of the best clubs in europe. so that makes it even more impressive.

this is fabrício and i pre-game getting pumped.




this banner dropped down and almost made me cry! "más que mi corazón me late tu escudo" is "your shield beats more for me than my heart" and was a really special thing to see as the team was coming out of the locker room. this is actually the clubs centennial season - it was started in 1905.

here's the team celebrating martí's goal off a penalty kick. it was 2-1 then.





here's some sweet in-game action.






you should download these video files. they may take a little bit (16 MB and 9 MB respectively) but it will be worth it.
here's a link to the celebration after goal number 3: http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=5891164
here's a link to fabrício's post-game video analysis: http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=5672940

so it was a great night. and here's a hilarious story from after the game: we're sitting on a bench and this very sad russian man walks up to us with an inquisitive look on his face, leans down close to us, and says as clearly as he could "Vodka". as if asking which direction he could get some, we explained with spanish that he couldn't understand and pointed the direction to a bar. then he walked off. the only russian i've ever talked to in my life said one word to me - "vodka". it's no longer a stereotype, it's a fact. the end.

lots of stuff

so i'm kinda behind on posts. so i'm going to do a big ol' picture blog here so you can see what i've been up to. these first pictures are from last weekend. on friday i went to carmona and on saturday i went to mulva (mulva?). lots of old ruins in both places. here you go from carmona (about 30 miles east):

this is my friend from denmark, metta, going down into an old tomb from the 8th century.





this was a ceremony plaza outside a tomb of a king.










this is the alcázar in carmona. it was pretty cool and gave us a good view of the city as you can see.









these next few are from mulva, about 30 miles northeast:


Ok, so there's a view of our destination: 2nd century roman village.






















this is my moroccan friend Behiya. i have a really good time with her. she's fun and speaks four languages: french, arabic, english, and spanish.


look how green things were this day!

more adventures

well that post was sure a winner! one comment (thanks jeremy)! guess most people don't appreciate castles, or nobody reads this.

well, after all that madness we walked around for another while, ending up down where i took the night photos of the cathedral. then we followed the old city wall around the city to end up at the sea.













so that was cool. then we found some more old buildings that were assumedly part of the ancient city wall around the city. from like the 11th century. in this picture you can see brandon standing at the top and me running up the steps cause i set it on the timer.













after that we went walking around down through the city and we came upon a bar that had some cool music playing inside, so we went in and had something to drink. after talking to the bartender we found out that the two arches in the the bar were actually the gates to enter the city in the 900s when the city was much smaller. wow. that only added to our "holy crap things are old and awesome here!" binge.







































so that was basically the end of our night. we went home around 2:30 and slept and then got up and didn't go to morocco cause of the cancelled ferries. so i went home. and that was the weekend. i did a lot of stuff this last weekend too, which i will post later.

the night of adventures

so here's how it started: we got to tarifa and walked to the hostal after a little shopping. there was a couple fútbol fields out back and there were some kids playing there. maybe 7 or 8 of them. they waived for us to join but we declined being the nice temperate people that we are. so we went inside. and after sitting there for a little bit we realized we were idiots to not play with them. so we went down and played with them for probably 30 minutes or so. they made us look REALLY stupid on a couple occasions, but i think we also suprised them a couple other times. it felt good at least to take part in that.

next we headed back up to the room and realized we were hungry. so the girls gave us a list of stuff to get at the grocery store and we headed out. we must have been really into the "let's be in spain" mood (which i'll admit sometimes i lack) and we opted to eat at a local café and bring the food back later. "surf kebab" was the place of choice. how could we resist with such a pretty señorita behind the counter. the food was excellent. reminded me a lot of the tapas from Enebro in Toledo up north. i was pleased. so then we went to the store and frantically grabbed the food as it was closing, headed back, and tried to explain why we weren't hungry.

after an hour or so of some tinto de verano and lord of the rings in spanish, brandon popped the question: "wanna go for a walk?" it was probably a little after 11 then. it was a good idea. we walked for probably 15 minutes through the streets before we happened upon a mysteriously enticing castle on a hill overlooking the straight of gibraltar. the first one is said castle by day and the second is from above via GoogleEarth (you know you can make it bigger by clicking by now, right?):






ok, so we stumbled upon it and were drawn to climb a wall and scale a muddy cliff to get up to it. we climbed up the northwest side where the front door is.








look how LOOMING THIS IS! and it's just all alone on the top of this hill. no monument, no tour guides, nothing. it just sits here day after day.











then brandon found a way around the edge of the castle to the back side...and holy cow.




i should probably set the scene here on the back side a little better. our light sources were the moon and whenever we took flash photos...and the lighthouse light that flashed by us from about 500 yards north on an island. i'll admit, i was scared the WHOLE time, scared of getting caught, or of a bum jumping out of a broken window, or just scared of the unknown that was all around us. it was then that we made the discovery that i will carry with my the rest of my life until i die. this:









if you look at the GoogleEarth image from above the castle, you will see a little dark spot just to the southwest of the castle proper. that dark spot and the picture above is a stairway down into the ground. and what you see in the image above at the bottom of that stairway is an OPEN DOOR. it was swinging in the wind and when i first saw it i almost lost all bodily control. no, we didn't go down there. we had no light, and i couldn't make myself! but i will find out what is behind that door someday. i will and i must go back! at this point it's the greatest mystery of my life. what could be down there? just a locked door at the end of the passage? or an unguarded way inside the castle!? there was plenty of graffiti on the walls inside, those people had to get in somehow. so anyway.... moving on. this is a very haunting image of the castle on the descent from the hill:









i will continue the night of adventure in another post cause this is turning into a larger project than the papers i have to write for homework. as always, your comments are welcome! thanks for reading!

morocco!

we were so close to morocco this weekend it was silly. however, the lovely ferries from tarifa decided they wanted to sit it out a day. that's right, we didn't make it. the ferries were all canceled on sunday. so that was a bummer. i don't know if i'm going to try to go again either. but we'll see. my companions for the weekend were the blacks: brandon, brittany, and brooke. i enjoyed them quite a bit. i had a great time running around tarifa with brandon on saturday night. i would say that thus far it was my best night in spain. here's us on the way to tarifa from marbella, looking really hardcore....or trying.





unfortunately, it rained most of the trip, but that didn't deter us from doing our fair share of sight seeing. this is the cathedral at night. we later went through it during the day. it's 16th century neo-gothic.


























tarifa is a nice little surf town on the southern-most tip of spain (and europe). there's a really long beach on the west side that we only saw from the mountains above because it was too rainy to go anywhere during the day. but we headed out of there at 3:30 on sunday. we had some trouble on the way back in algeciras, where we were going to catch our buses to málaga and sevilla. but we all made it back ok. so that's really good. i'm going to save the amazing night of adventure that brandon and i had for another post. it's too good for right now.

and now i will do some homework. byes.

readers of aaronwk

dear readers,

we at blogger.com regret to inform you that aaronwk's account has been terminated effective immediately. the blog will be removed in 24 hours.
-staff

not a blogger? it's easy to join!

actually, it's not being terminated, i just haven't posted on it all week. and won't for probably a few more days because i'm off to morocco tomorrow! woo! the dark continent is about to get a little whiter. pasty-whiter. i'll report back asap with photos though! have a good'n.

birthday partay

it was andrés' birthday on friday. they actually celebrate those in foreign countries too! here's what we did:













let's revisit andrés' perrenial coolness from the cádiz post:









and now i present exhibit B:













the dude is bad. i'm sure james dean is proud of him somewhere.











can't have a birthday party without a little dancing. right? right.


























i found this hat and we all revisited our cádiz disguises for a litte bit.













all he's missing here is a fag. then he'd be don juan for sure. school is back in full swing this week. i should have some visitors at the end of the week. a friend and his little sister are coming to visit their other sister who is studying in málaga (100 miles or so southeast of me). so we'll be hosting brandon and brooke black when they come to sevilla on thursday. should be fun. ok, later!

last night

it was andrés's birthday so we went into the city and had a good time there. there were seven of us. we first met in a plaza down near the cathedral and walked from there for about 20 minutes before we got to this bar where there was a group laying brazilian music. it was a pretty cool place. some of the others didn't like it too much cause they weren't playing dance music, but that didn't really bother me. we only got there for the group's last song, which was pretty enjoyable.

saw this church on the way to the bar. actually, we saw probably 4 or 5 but it got old wanting to take pictures of them all.











that is fabrício doing the chicken dance. no, not THAT chicken dance, the brazilian one.













we saw these guys in one of the plazas we passed through. they're getting ready for semana santa in april - probably the largest religious festival in spain. the streets are filled with these man-powered tables that will carry statues and other sacred objects around.

srvrllr, thr wrrkrnd

r hrd r prttr grrd wrrkrnd. r drd r lrt rf hrmwrk hr rt thr drms. rnd rn frrdr r wrnt tr thr crtr rnd wrnt tr thrs rrllr rld hrsprtrl frm thr 15th crntrr. rt wrs crrl, hr r srm phrtrs rf rt.




































i promise a normal english post later.

this week is AWESOME!

ok, awesome is not the right word. more like less exciting than the others have been. we had a day off school on tuesday so that was nice. and i have tomorrow (friday) off like usual so i'm going to go run around the city and see a lot of things i haven't seen yet. not sure what exactly, but i'll put up some pictures later. fabrício and cláudia (the brazilians) left for barcelona this weekend until monday so i'm here without a roommate. but, i do have lots of homework to do this weekend. i've got two tests to study for and two papers to write. so i'll keep myself busy, don't worry!

here's what i'll be doing most of the weekend when i'm not reading books or running around the city.