Adaptive Spaces
In September 2004 I took up a part-time Masters in Digital Art & Technology, and this week I submitted my final project and thesis.
The project is location-aware audio software that allows you to make field recordings while out walking, and simultaneously playback the recordings made by other people in the same area.
The thesis is titled — wait for it — Adaptive Spaces: Technological Augmentation of the post-Situationist Urban Experience. Actually I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, as I at least managed to work through some of the many random-but-somehow-related thoughts I’ve been having about this area over the last couple of years. If you are one of the few people who gets around to reading it, I would love to hear from you.
You can get the source code of the project and a PDF copy of the thesis at this page: Adaptive Spaces.
Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
Idea: The Album Song
I didn’t know this before now, but Radiohead songs aren’t available to download from iTunes. Instead, they’re selling them DRM-free (320kbs MP3s) on another website, and — get this — only as entire albums, not as single songs.
What to make of this? Maybe they just think that Apple’s DRM is a crock and don’t want to have any part in it. Probably not though, as EMI are one of the few labels that allow their tracks in iTunes to be sold DRM-free for a premium.
The stated reason for doing it is that “iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but [Radiohead’s new digital distributor] 7digital doesn’t. Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that.†But here’s what I’m not sure about — should Radiohead really be allowed to dictate the context in which I listen to their music? I mean, obviously it’s their legal and moral right to do so, but really, do they have a point here?
Here’s how I see it: songs are the basic unit of content produced by musicians. These units have traditionally been packaged in bundles called “albums”, so that distributors have a viable means of manufacturing physical objects that contain the units, then shipping these packaged units all over the world and selling these them to you in shops. Of course, over time this bundle of songs developed into a cultural object all of its own, and some musicians started to come up with the idea of concept albums[1], and fans came to decide on their favourite albums. As someone who used to make music, and as a fan, I can get behind both of these perspectives. But that doesn’t necessarily make them absolute truths, or opinions that I can universally dictate to others (particularly to my fans if I’m a musician).
Other artists — not musicians, but artists whose work is not intrinsically tied to commerce and business — don’t seem to have this hangup. An artist might have an exhibition of works that is significantly more of a coherent collection that the average album, but by and large they are happy to allow their pieces to be enjoyed individually, and to sell them individually. This is because non-musician artists don’t have this odd historical context that the business side of their distribution model imposed on what they produce, and thus on what they sell.
So on the one hand I respect Radiohead for sticking to their convictions here, but on the other hand I don’t know if it’s not a little bit hypocritical and selfish. I love albums, and I honestly mourn their passing. But I also recognise that when you sit down to write a song, it’s just a song, and not really a chapter of a larger master work (unless you’re Pink Floyd[2]). And even if it is, that doesn’t mean someone might not just enjoy that song you wrote one afternoon in isolation.
Obviously this all highlights yet another hangover that the music industry has inherited from its own colourful past, and the present difficulties in finding an alternative model that everyone is happy with. The old guard will hang on as long as possible, smaller forward-thinking distributors will struggle to get a foothold, and Apple will fail to man up enough to go that last few yards for customers. And bands will still crawl all over each other to dive into the trench and maybe get noticed.
Here’s what I would do if I were in a band that was looking to make an impression: record twelve songs, and then publish them as a single-track album. Tell everyone it’s a forty-minute sprawling rock opera song that just happens to have eleven silent sections, each of which separate parts of the song (or “movements”) that have completely different melodies and rhythm. Call it The Album Song, or Metal Machine Music II. Claim that it was inspired by Radiohead and Walter Benjamin, and if your label tries to interfere accuse them of trying to dictate your art for the sake of commerce. Sell your song on the digital download stores for 99¢, make a little bit of money, and get your music heard by more people. It can’t lose.
- There are definitely albums that I can think of that constitute self-contained works, and not just a collection of songs: Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is the best example I can think of. In fact, it might be a bit unfair of me to pick on Radiohead here, because I consider OK Computer to fall wholly under this category too.
But by and large though, I don’t think this is the case. People might think that The White Album is a monolithic piece of art that is completely intertwined with itself, but I don’t. It’s just what happened when one of the best bands ever went into a studio and recorded a bunch of completely random songs; wonderful examples of songs as single units. If they’re adhesive in some way it’s not by design, it’s because the band were on a roll and the songs were all recorded around the same time. That’s why I listen to the White Album as an album, but that doesn’t mean that the songs don’t stand alone. Revolution 9 and Rocky Raccoon don’t rely on each other to be what they are.
- Again, maybe Radiohead are Pink Floyd, so they might get a free pass here.
Why I don't have a job writing for The New Yorker
Last year I tried writing about that intangible sense of warm satisfaction that comes from using a mechanical camera. I didn’t think I was too successful in expressing myself even at the time, but I figured that was mainly because those types of sensual experiences are very much a visceral thing, and can’t be adequately expressed through writing.
How wrong was I? Dig this:
The Leica is lumpless, with a flat top built from a single piece of brass. It has no prism, because it focusses with a range finder—situated above the lens. And it has no mirror inside, and therefore no clunk as the mirror swings. When you take a picture with an S.L.R., there is a distinctive sound, somewhere between a clatter and a thump; I worship my beat-up Nikon FE, but there is no denying that every snap reminds me of a cow kicking over a milk pail. With a Leica, all you hear is the shutter, which is the quietest on the market. The result—and this may be the most seductive reason for the Leica cult—is that a photograph sounds like a kiss.
Candid Camera: The cult of Leica, by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker).
Prosperity
I’m going to have to go against the tide of popular opinion and say that I think Prosperity, a four-part drama that’s currently running on RTÉ 2, is some of the best Irish TV I’ve seen in ages. It observes four separate underprivileged Dubliners on a single day in a quiet yet affecting way, following them as they wander through the streets of the city.
The script is pretty understated — virtually nothing happens in the way of plot in the first episode, and most of the dialogue is monosyllabic chat — and I can understand how some people immediately dislike it. Made by director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran, the duo that produced Adam & Paul, it’s subject matter is similar but it lacks the overt comedy of that film. Despite the suggestion of a strong social message in the title, there’s no morality lesson or proposed solution to the “dark side of the Celtic Tiger” situation so beloved of Sunday newspaper columnists. It starts, drifts along for a while, and stops.
So what’s to like?
First of all, it’s beautifully made. From the Sopranos-style opening credits that have been transplanted to the generic ringroads of Dublin to the slow, deliberate pacing and editing, the whole thing hangs together well and creates a mood, even if that is one of boredom and disconnectedness.
The characters are delicately drawn, not meant to be animated movie roles but rather developed and believable people. Both of the main characters in the two episodes that have been aired so far (Jenny the young single mother and Gavin the young teenager with a debilitating stutter) are desperately repressed and shy, resigned and quietly hiding behind masks of passivity. The young actors do really well to convey inner emotion while remaining apparently resolute, and any revealing moments are all the more effective for it. Similarly the events of the day are nothing that extraordinary and don’t culminate in any sort of cinematic epiphany, but rather grow into a slow dawning awareness. It’s a mature approach to telling this type of story. This is much tougher to pull off than simply relaying a narrative, but for me it worked.
The style reminded me a lot of Pavee Lackeen, a film about an Irish Traveler that similarly surprised me in its self-restraint. The temptation with this separate-but-interconnected-storylines structure must be to try being too clever, and end up making Short Cuts[1] for inner city Dublin. Thankfully Prosperity avoids this, and avoids the Oscar-baiting wailing and gnashing of teeth that could also have come with the roles.
Television drama rarely ventures beyond straight storytelling or character arcs, with every scene progressing the narrative steadily towards a conclusion, but Prosperity makes the most of the diversion by taking the opportunity to instead gradually build mood. To begin with, there’s a sense of tense anticipation that something explosive is going to happen at the end of these periods of quiet buildup, and then nothing does and you deflate. This mirrors what you expect of the characters too; there’s a lot of anger built up, but they refuse to let it out in any way. After all of this non-release, when something does eventually happen (as at a couple of points in the second episode), it’s comes as a shocking dull thud, just like in real life. I guess the style I’m describing is Realism, but that’s not really a style that we associate with portrayals of modern Ireland at all.
Which leads nicely into one of the most striking things about watching the first episode: the contrast between the program itself and the content of the three ad breaks that interspersed it. From a stylistic point of view the frenetic, saturated ads clashed with the careful editing and muted tones of the program. But the content was a complete juxtaposition too; expensive cars, wrinkle cream and holiday homes bookended the lingering shots of Jenny sitting around in the shopping centre, waiting for the day to pass. Of course this would not have been the intention of the filmmakers, but if you want your social message, there it is.
For fear of annoying the program’s detractors further I’ll restrain myself from talking too much about the Joycean similarities of a main character wandering around Dublin for a single day, interacting with a variety of characters, listening to the colloqueal speech patterns, quietly observing the details of everyday life, walking along streets and past local landmarks. But it’s there if you want to look for it, that’s there too.
The dialogue, yeah? Not much there either. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a typical exchange from the first episode between Jenny and her friend:
INT. CITY PARK
Stacey and Jenny are sitting on a bench in the park.
JENNY Boring here isn’t it?
STACEY Yeah.
Beat.
JENNY I like your scrunchie.
STACEY Got it today.
JENNY Did you?
STACEY Yeah.
JENNY It’s nice. Purple is nice.
STACEY Yeah. Why didn’t Natasha come in with you?
JENNY Just.
STACEY Why?
JENNY On bebo all day she is.
STACEY Right.
JENNY I think Lauren is coming in though.
STACEY Why is she coming in?
JENNY Getting something. Buying something.
STACEY You hanging around with her now?
JENNY Sometimes.
If you think this is desperately pedestrian, you’re right, but that’s the whole point, just as it was in Waiting for Godot (whoops, now I’ve invoked Beckett). We Irish have a tendency to romanticise the simple nobility of the common man from our past (hence the undying obsession of Irish films and plays with the misery and deprivation of stony grey 1920’s Connemara cottages and crammed Dublin tenement houses). Yet somehow it’s a leap too far to see any kind of poetry in the banality of modernity. The English seem to have no problem with this type of thing, as evidenced by Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Shane Meadows and co.
Additional credit for Prosperity to RTÉ for making the episodes available to watch online in full as they are aired, both with and without director and writer commentary, as well as the shooting script that the dialogue above was taken on.
- … or Magnolia, or Slacker, or Traffic, or Amores Perros. Although I do love these types of movies, I expected Babel to fall into this category so completely that when it turned out that this wasn’t the case, I was thrown completely.
Outside Lies Magic
I created a new Flickr group called Guess Where Dublin.
The idea is totally ripped off from many other similar groups, but I think it’s a great concept. Members are encouraged to post a photo taken somewhere in Dublin and everyone else has to guess exactly where it was taken. What could be more fun?
Not entirely unrelated, I just read a beautiful little book that interested types might enjoy: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places by John R. Stilgoe. It’s a “guidebook to exploring” everyday places by walking or cycling, and it really is accessible and enjoyable. From the intro:
The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted — all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in.
Join the group and start exploring.
Reading live data from a Garmin GPS unit on OS X
If you’re not interested in how to connect a GPS unit to a Mac you can stop reading now. In fact, as your doctor I advise you to do so immediately, this is desperately dull stuff.
I don’t normally do this type of thing, but I needed to document this anyway, and I feel morally compelled to make this information available to potential Google searchers. Perhaps it will protect future generations of frustrated GPS hackers from the frustrating death by a thousand cuts I almost suffered in trying to figure this out by myself. It shouldn’t be this hard, but it is, and there’s almost no information out there on how to overcome the many small pitfalls you will encounter if you’re trying to read live GPS data on your computer.
A note before we start: I know very little about this topic, really, so beyond what I lay out here I won’t be able to help you out with any other problems you might encounter. This is one specific way of doing things, and I don’t know any other (although I don’t doubt that many alternatives exist, many of them perhaps better and simpler), and I learned this by figuring out everything as I went. This will be the very basic outline of the process that I wished I could have found beforehand.
Let’s begin.
The purpose of the exercise is to get a constantly-updating live reading of your current global longitude and latitude coordinates on a computer. To do this you’ll need a GPS unit. I chose one of the most common and cheapest models available, the yellow Garmin eTrex, which I bought new on eBay for about €100. You’ll also have to buy a serial cable connection to attach to your GPS unit (it doesn’t come with the unit as you might expect), and a serial-to-USB cable to connect that to your computer (this assumes that your computer doesn’t have a serial connector). I got the official Garmin GPS to serial cable which worked as expected. Caveat emptor when buying the serial-to-USB adapter though; I got a cheap one from Maplin, and the driver software came on one of those mini-CDs that won’t work in a slot loading CD drive like the one on a Macbook Pro. Instead I got a Keyspan serial adapter, which worked fine and seemed fairly Mac-friendly. Install the adapter driver, plug everything together, and you’re all set up.
If you just want to view your current location, the OS X freeware program GPS Connect should be sufficient. Once your GPS unit is plugged in and switched on, you can select your serial port (“KeySerial1” if you’re using a KeySpan adapter) and Protocol (“NMEA”), click Connect, and your live GPS data will appear in the app’s dialog box and update as it changes.
Simple so far. However, if you want to programmatically use the data (and you probably do, since you could already read this data from the GPS unit’s own screen), you’ll have to access it another way. I wanted to use Python to manipulate the data once I had it, so it made sense to also use Python to actually import the data. (This next bit assumes you know how to program a little in Python and know the basics of using the command line Terminal.app.)
There’s a PyGarmin module for Python, but as far as I can tell it only supports serial connection to Garmin’s own proprietary GPX format, an XML-like text format for storing saved waypoints and tracklogs (i.e. GPS values that you have already collected and saved on your handheld unit). To get live, constantly-updating GPS values, you’ll need to read data in the standard NMEA serial protocol. To do this, you’ll need to first read the serial data (even though it’s actually coming in your USB port, it’s still serial data), then convert it from NMEA to numerical lat and long values. Luckily, there are Python modules to help to do this. Install PySerial and PyGPS.
Before writing your Python script you need to configure the GPS device to send data in the correct format, and know the name of the port that the data is coming in on. On your GPS unit, go to Setup, then Interface. Change I/O Format to “NMEA” and take note of your Baud number (mine was 4800). Then with your GPS unit plugged in and switched on, open Terminal.app and list all ports available to you by typing
$ cd /dev $ ls -la
There should be a couple of new port names in the long list that had not been there before you connected your USB cable. Mine were cu.KeySerial1 and tty.KeySerial1 (the name is obviously dictated by the serial-to-USB converter you use), and one of these is the port that your NMEA data is available on. Use the cat command to view each port’s data, and the correct one should display garbled text. This is your active port (in my case it was cu.KeySerial1). Now you’re ready to write your Python script that will read this data and output it as GPS coordinates. Here’s a basic sample script:
import NMEA import serial `ser = serial.Serial('/dev/cu.KeySerial1', 4800, timeout=1)` while 1: lat,lon=0,0 line = ser.readline() nmea = NMEA.NMEA() nmea.handle_line(line[:-1]) lat = nmea.lat lon = nmea.lon if lat != 0: print lat,lon
Note that in the line that defines ser, the first parameter must match your active port name and the second must match the baud rate that you set on the GPS unit’s Interface screen. Running this file continually prints your current location:
$ python sample.py 53.3312616667 -6.26907666667 53.3312616667 -6.26907666667 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.3312616667 -6.269075 53.33126 -6.269075 53.33126 -6.269075 53.33126 -6.269075
Pace
And now another one about Twitter, sort of. As with the cycling post, I’m not positively nuts about Twitter (and God knows there’s already enough aggrandising analysis about it out there already), but it’s undeniably magnetic. On a completely different track, I was looking for a reference in a post I wrote almost exactly a year ago about what I thought a multiplayer videogame might be like in the future, and came across this passage:
There will certainly be more cross-pollination between the game and the web, and between your activities in-game and your activities on the web. Just like your real life bleeds into your online life via your blog and your Flickr account, that reflected online persona will in turn become drawn into your gaming persona. Gaming will probably become a pretty poor label for what eventually emerges (as it becomes less about play and more about interaction and creation), but the name will stick, just like “talkies†never really caught on over “movies†in the cinema. Virtual space will feel more like an actual space (it might even be actual space), more like something you inhabit than somewhere you pass through. You’ll leave traces of where you’ve been behind you, and you’ll return after a break to see the traces of others that were there in the interim, and this sense of effect and permanence will infuse the entire game and encourage continued interaction, just as the gradual accumulation of an archive of blog posts rewards the ongoing effort of writing.
It doesn’t quite have the property of capturing passive activities or play that I was pushing for, but it’s not a stretch to read that and draw some parallels with the model of interaction that makes Twitter attractive. I wrote that a just year ago, last July, and already the fact that Flickr was the only service that was available to reference seems slightly clunky and antiquated.
This post tries to figure out how you could explain a news item about World of Warcraft being spammed to someone from thirty years ago, and the scale of the backstory necessary is just fantastically funny. I had a conversation the other day about long term predictions. I argued that a certain science fiction-style technological breakthrough wouldn’t happen in my lifetime, but now I’m not quite so sure. Not because of something as trivial as Twitter, of course, but just because even though I thought I knew something a few months ago, you just don’t see this stuff coming.
He's writing about cycling again?
The frequency with which I write about cycling here probably belies my actual interest in the activity. Although I enjoy going out for a spin from time to time, cycling is mostly a utilitarian undertaking for me. But it’s also 30 minutes of guaranteed, uninterrupted empty time every day, and for someone who is easily distracted, that’s probably a good thing. So, it’s fairly inevitable that I often find myself cycling along, mulling things over, being struck by some relatively mundane idea about the act, and typing it up when I get home. I get my shower ideas on the bike.
All of which is a way of saying “here comes more stuff about cycling”.
This time it’s city bike sharing. Via s+c (and in a probably unintentional allusion to 1968), news that Paris’ “paving stones are being ripped” to accommodate hundreds of bike rental stations. You’ve heard of these; bays of bikes available for rent for a couple of hours at a time situated around the city. You grab a bike from one bay and dock it back at another within a reasonable amount of time, all for a couple of Euro. This presentation from the nascent New York project (PDF) outlines some of the existing European systems.
Of course, if you are in any way interested in interaction design (or if you’re Irish), you’re already picturing dozens of brand new bikes at the bottom of the nearest canal. How do you design a system that balances implicit trust and accessibility against overbearing security? Security cameras at every docking station? Mandatory pre-registration for every user? GPS tracking? And what about the payment method; prepay smartcards, supermarket-style coin locks, text message deductions? Credit card swiping is an option, but it renders the system useless to anyone who doesn’t carry plastic (I saw this on a system in Vienna, and it raised the barrier to adoption enough for me to not bother). These are not simple problems to solve, but the NY project linked above outlines the following prerequisites for success:
The first half-hour must be free
There must be sufficient density of bikes and stations
A bike-share program must be independent and flexible
Users must be able to render a bike immediately
All of this is to ignore the wider design problems of creating a bicycle-friendly city, and making people actually want to bike around. The topology of somewhere like Amsterdam (where I was lucky enough to enjoy an unforgettable day-long solo bike dérive) intrinsically suits cycling, but Dublin is almost as famous for being a traffic nightmare. Better bike lanes, perhaps more imminent thanks to the fact that two of our ministers bike to the Dáil every day, are probably the first step, but to be honest that’s a topic I’m not even ready to get into at this stage. Suffice to say that any viable solution will have to be as fair and advantageous for our car-driving friends as it might be for cyclists.
Not to be outdone, bike sharing is coming to Dublin too. This report from Dublin City Council (another PDF) outlines what seems to be a remarkably clued-in plan to introduce a 25 station, 500 bike scheme. No doubt some bright spark will think to slap some ads on them, too (the Paris operation is run by omnipresent billboard vendors JC Decaux). Ambulance chasers, this may be an unmissable opportunity to connect directly with your target audience.
Recycled feeds
Here’s a fun thing: using blogs to re-publish old episodic content.
Samuel Pepy’s diary has been published as a blog since 2003. Bible RSS feeds for your daily scriptures (see also Blogging the Bible by David Plotz on Slate). It’s Bloomsday, but is reading Ulysses a page a day via RSS any more manageable than the dead tree version? Steven Wright and Jenny Holzer are rocking opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum over on Twitter (never before, I think, has a medium been put to such perfectly apt use). Each day last February I posted the 28 chapters of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
The Books
I went to see The Books last night. Here’s why it was the best gig I’ve been to in ages:
The music of collaged found sounds was backdropped by a projection of videos they have made. Along with sound recordings, the band collected a thousand hours of video footage while on tour and then cut it to their songs. The music is cinematic enough anyway, but it was perfectly augmented by the visuals, and not just in a way that made for cool eye candy for the show, but in a way that actually complimented the music a lot. I got the impression that the visuals were as important to the band as the music.
I didn’t know what to expect, and so I didn’t expect much… a prerequisite, I think, to really enjoying any kind of performance. Or as their song Smells Like Content says,
Expectation leads to disappointment. If you don’t expect something big, huge, and exciting… Usually, uh. I dont know, it’s just not as… yeah.
(Similarly, I love film trailers, but watching one has never made the final film better for me.)
They did away with the non-essential parts of playing live. That is, they took the sensible approach to electronic music and just let all the non-live mouse-clicking stuff play as a prerecorded backing track, and played only guitar and cello live. I’ve had many discussions about this in the past, but I’m now of the opinion that there isn’t really any value in seeing someone create sounds by knob-twiddling live on a laptop; engineering is not performance.
There was lots of video footage and audio recordings from when they were kids, which made the whole thing a lot more emotionally resonant (again something I think most electronic music lacks). It also made me think about how encouraging creativity in kids can result in a very unselfconscious adult artist; lots of the material was of them as kids playing around recording stuff for fun like kids do, and now they are simply grown ups doing the exact same thing. Why not also play around with computers and make video if you’re a musician? The two guys happen to be really good at making music, but they are not interested in just being in a band, but in being artists in a vernacular sense. Most people could make videos and drawings and a website as good as The Books if they were just interested in making art for the fun of it.
Seemed like nice, normal guys, just doing their thing. And they stayed around to chat with people after.
Two encores!
A more reliable Twitter badge
If God didn’t want us to add widgets to our websites he wouldn’t have created sidebars.
I added a Javascript call to the Twitter API to display my latest update on this site a while ago, but it slowed page load down quite a bit, so I removed it again (at least until Twitter get their scaling problems under control). I could have written some server side code to cache my latest update, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then Google released the very cool AJAX Feed API this week, and I stayed up for hours playing with it. One of the many ways you can use the API is to hit Google’s more reliable servers for the latest cached version of a feed (from the same data source that Google Reader uses). So instead of accessing your feed directly, pipe it through Google and call it easily with Javascript.
To display your latest Twitter status, add these lines between your web page’s head tags:
<script type="text/javascript">
var THWX_twitter_id = YOUR_TWITTER_ID_NUMBER;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOUR_API_KEY"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://thoughtwax.googlepages.com/twitter.js"></script>Replace YOUR_TWITTER_ID_NUMBER with your Twitter feed ID (the number in the URL of your Twitter RSS feed) and replace YOUR_API_KEY with your Google Ajax Feeds API key, which you can get here.
Then add this HTML where you want your latest update to appear:
<div id="THWX_twitter_status"></div>Lovely. Example here.
Morocco
Paula and I arrived back yesterday afternoon from our week in Morocco. It was my first time visiting a non-Western country. Get ready for some superlatives.
We rented a car and drove north from Agadir airport to the small hippie/surfer village of Taghazout, then to the walled city of Essaouira, east to Marrakesh, and back to Agadir through the Atlas Mountains.
Life moves slow in Taghazout. Most of the fishermen come ashore after a couple of hours in the morning, by which time the day has eased into its usual mix of visiting surfers and local loiterers. Beach soccer is pretty popular.
The roads in Morocco are just as interesting as the cities they lead to. The coastal views are spectacular. Indigenous Berber people line the roads, walking, standing or just squatting, watching the traffic go by. Some work in rocky fields or guide donkeys along the roadside, but mostly they sit in the shade alone, apparently for lack of anything else to do. Some wave frantically at the passing cars, smiling and holding up bottles of olive oil for sale.
Closer to the city we passed road painters and small crowds of men putting up giant red national flags, and things generally got busier. It was obvious that there was a frantic cleanup job going on, and when we got into the city we heard that the King of Morocco was arriving the following day. The whole town was buzzing in anticipation, and getting their streets and shop fronts ready.
Inside the walls of Essaouira is a maze of twisty passages (all alike), lined with markets, tea houses, workshops and restaurants, and opening out into squares and ports.
The city is soaked in bright blue.
Each night we stood on the roof terrace of our riad and listened to the final call to prayer of the day echoing out across the city from the mosques as the sun set, and each morning we looked down into the tightly packed living areas.
On to Marrakesh.
Coming from Essaouira, Marrakesh is a hard place to arrive into. After being flagged down by an aggressive motorcycle guide while entering the city and falling for the oldest trick in the Moroccan book (allowing him to guide us through insanely busy streets to his friends guardian de voiture parking area and haggling over price), we found our way to our riad.
Outside of the main tourist areas of Marrakesh you see very few Westerners, the poverty is conspicuous, and the density is overwhelming. The streets are a ballet of people on foot, bicycle and moped avoiding and interacting with each other. The culture of repair and reuse is everywhere. Any of the guys in the food markets and craft souks could teach you a hard lesson in business. It’s a real city, warts and all.
Final leg of the journey. We too took the scenic route back, up and over the snow-capped Atlas Mountains (2100m) and down the small winding road into the desert on the other side. Children on their way home from school thronged around our car if we stopped nearby and wrangled whatever sweets we had out of us, then chased us down the road. Some held up paper signs with “STOP” scrawled on them and shouted “bonjour!” as we passed.
This is a rough edit of the five hundred or so shots we took during the week, far more than I’ve ever taken before, and that was without even trying. We couldn’t help ourselves, it’s certainly the most photogenic place I have ever been to, and the visual offering is only a part of the story. Again more than any place I’ve been to, Morocco is a full sensory experience, and the sounds and smells really are something else. For every photo I took, I wished that I had a microphone with me to record the sounds.
What have I not mentioned? The incredible hospitality and openness of the people there, the amazing food, the beautiful weather… I warned you about the superlatives. The running joke of the week was a gameshow-style ding that would sound every time Paula said “so gorgeous” or I said “amazing”. Ding!
If you can take any more, there are still more photos on my Flickr and on Paula’s.