The World Beyond Switzerland

An oxymoron? I once thought so too! But I learned that there's more to the trans-alpine universe than meets the eye. For example:

Morocco

My trip to Morocco marked the first time I have been approached in the street and told I was “very bad man”, the first time I have had my mother’s honour called into question for refusing to buy a glass of orange juice, the first time I have been declared a dead ringer for Denzel Washington, and the first time I have bought lukewarm meat stew from a roadside vendor and vomited on the sands of the mighty Sahara itself.

Aside from these cheap thrills, however, my time in Morocco gave me ample opportunity for a more spiritual kind of enlightenment. The curriculum began in the Atlas Mountains, where we befriended Mohammed, a local mountain guide, and spent the night with him on a hotel rooftop. First came mint tea and a cultural music exchange worthy of a Unicef commercial, with my friend Kristin and I naturally choosing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as the ode most representative of our lives and times, and Mohammed waiting politely until we were done before launching into some more melodious and far better executed Berber tunes.

Quickly thereafter, however, our conversation shifted to matters theological. Mohammed was in the process of explaining the importance of women appropriately mourning their deceased husbands – respect, family honour, and so on – when a certain phrase I had never heard until that moment caught my ear. It was: “…or djinns will turn the sinful woman into a giraffe for an entire night and force her to run around and around until she is utterly tired.”

I asked him again to be sure I had understood his French correctly. Yes, he assured me, the penalty is always this. Moreover, he continued, there is a sure way for those who witness a frantically aerobic giraffe to ascertain what they are seeing: simply beat the animal savagely with a club. Then, in the morning, check if any of the village’s crop of unfeeling widows are sporting fresh concussions or internal bleeding.

Naturally this information piqued my interest in djinns, a crew I’d always previously associated with more innocuous activities like hanging around in lamps and breaking spontaneously into song with the voice of Robin Williams. But as Mohammed assured us, these loveable scallywags can do a whole lot more.

“Once, a man I knew heard a knock at his door, but when he went to open it there was no one there,” Mohammed told us. “Then suddenly he received a mighty punch in the face – it was a djinn who had attacked him. Another time, a man was hiking in the mountains when he was suddenly struck a tremendous blow across the back by nothing he could see. He was severely injured.”

“It sounds like djinns mainly just beat people up,” I offered.

“Oh no, not at all,” Mohammed hastened to clarify. “A woman from my village was in her kitchen when a djinn hurled a pot at her. Then it kicked her until she fell bleeding to the floor.”

“Do djinns ever do nice things to people?” Kristin wanted to know.

“Yes, of course!” laughed Mohammed. “Some people go many years or even their whole lives without being attacked by a djinn.”

So, in summary, djinns can administer ruthless beatings, or, if they are feeling exceptionally kind, refrain from administering ruthless beatings. They can also opt to indirectly cause people to undergo ruthless beatings by turning them into jungle beasts. Let's see any of your cultures produce characters this well-rounded.

My education was further advanced on a sweltering bus ride from Marrakech to the coast, for it was here that I saw my first Prophet. He wore long flowing robes and a baseball cap, and he carried himself with a graceful dignity that was undiminished even when he was standing at the front of the bus shrieking at the hapless commuters in his congregation to step up their donations.

His preaching shifted randomly between Arabic and French in a manner not unlike a drunk driver swerving from one side of the road to the other, paying no heed to the divisions of sentences or even words. I caught fascinating snippets of comprehensible speech. “You must not trust anyone!” he cautioned us at one point. Then some Arabic. Then “All your neighbors are scorpions. The world is full of scorpions and hateful … [more Arabic] You must love all people – why are you only full of suspicion?”

Having fully developed that thesis, the Prophet started on a lengthy Arabic binge. He whipped his flock into a frenzy of cheering and booing and laughing, building to a thunderous crescendo, at the peak of which he switched to French. “IT IS LIKE…” he bellowed. Then he halted, struck dumb by his own wisdom. There was dead silence.

“Like the wind!” an old man in front of me cried out suddenly.
“Like scorpions, I’ll wager!” someone else shouted, to general approval. This seemed the safest bet to me – our Prophet had already mentioned scorpions about a thousand times so far.
“Like you?” some suck-up offered.
“Like Morocco?” “Like Allah?” “Like dead scorpions?” – the ideas kept flowing for a good two minutes. Eventually the Prophet held up his hand for silence.

“Like … snow,” he said at last.

In the whole history of men in flowing robes making pronouncements, I don’t think there has ever been a more disappointing revelation. “The wind!” the man in front of me tried to argue, but the Prophet’s stern glance and quick demand for money put the old heretic in his place.

Italy

Quick mental exercise: what would you do if someone asked you to compose “a hymn to life”? If you were just now struck by the idea of taking the skeletons of 4000 monks in diverse stages of decay, pulling them apart and playfully arranging the various components in a series of rooms organized by theme like attractions at a fun park (the Rib and Vertebrae Crypt, the Chamber of the Scapulas, etc.), and finally doing some interior decorating using a jaunty array of skull wainscoting, chandeliers made from fingers, and grinning corpses standing around in monastic robes – then maybe you should try to think of something a little less painfully obvious. That hymn to life (and they do call it this) has already been sung – in a church on the Via Veneto in Rome.

Inside the church, a plaque on the wall offers answers to frequently asked questions. Last on the list, seemingly as an afterthought, is an inquiry as to exactly WHY the building is littered with the grisly remains of thousands of dead monks in whimsical array. Luckily, a comprehensive answer is at hand. “Some of these monks were people of great holiness,” the plaque explains. The nature of this link – between a state of holiness on the one hand, and a state of having your pelvis serve as a structural support for a mantelpiece on the other – is left blithely unrevealed.

Spain

If you are – a) looking for a place to stay the night in southwest Spain and b) so Mother-Hubbardishly cheap that you refuse to give so much as a Happy Meal’s worth of currency to Hostelling International – then there’s a good chance you’ll eventually find your way to the Parque de Maria Luisa, in the center of Seville. Most likely you’ll head to the southeast corner of the park, which boasts the fewest floodlights and traffic-bearing roads, and there you’ll spy an inviting little patch of grass partially surrounded by shrubbery. You’ll lay out your sleeping bag without a care in the word, and slip into delicious dreams of nickels and dimes and a penny saved is a penny earned. Perhaps, at some moment between waking and sleeping, it will occur to you to wonder why I bothered narrating this whole rather dull process to you at all.

Your musings will receive a stern reply at precisely 1 a.m., when sprinklers will emerge magically from hiding and begin strafing you with ceaseless, uncaring Spanish brutality. Reeling away in your sleeping bag with all the agility of a burrito, you may suddenly realize through the noise of your own swearing that this might well be the reason why the park is so lush and green while the rest of southern Spain is a parched wasteland. You’ll also quickly ascertain, by a combination of sight and touch, that the range of the sprinklers extends over the entire park – which, I might as well tell you at this point, will now be securely locked, in cheeky defiance of the conclusion you and your friends came to the previous evening (namely, that the ten-foot spiked iron walls and gates were for decoration only). Eventually you’ll role into a dryish hollow and try to grab snatches of sleep from under the throbbing baseline emanating from an all-night dance club right next door, until 5:30 a.m. when the time will come to begin your walk to the bus station – begin it, that is, right after you climb over said ten-foot spiked iron gate with an 80 litre backpack while Spanish clubbers keep an amused eye on your progress.

Anyway, just think of those savings!