There aren't very many feelings that can compare with that of getting on a plane or a train or a boat or even in a car for a long journey, for a trip to somewhere that is new and exotic and throws you so far out of your reality that you can barely fathom the place you come from and the place you end up existing on the same planet.

The last three weeks were exciting and fascinating and exhausting and so so so humbling. I know I'm lucky. I have always known that I am lucky. I have always been consciously aware of that fact. But it sunk in more fully for me than it ever has before this summer. Morocco was everything that I remembered about Sudan, only with better paved roads and fewer goats roaming the streets. I loved it so much there. The sun back home doesn't seem like the same one that heated the Souk of Marrakech or the beaches of Essaouira or the high peaks and ridges of the Atlas mountains. It lacks so much intensity here.

It would be impossible to explain to anyone that has not been to North Africa the total relief you feel when you walk into a washroom, and for the first time in a week the toilet paper is white instead of a weird shade of pink.

I secretly liked the attention, too. I liked that people exclaimed over my hair, thought that it was such a novelty. I liked boys leaning out of car windows to whistle and yell compliments in my direction. I liked when the compliments came in French, and I could understand them. I liked that my parents were offered 20 000 camels for my hand in marriage. It is probably incredibly laughable, maybe even pitiable (or just pitiful) that these things gave me such an ego boost. That's okay with me. I liked standing out.

I wish I could gather these thoughts in a more clear and orderly manner. I wish I would have something more to look back on, to remember this trip by, years from now. The amount I wrote in my journal was shameful.

We went to see the Guernica in Madrid. It was twisted and sad and quite frightening. Google it in images if you don't know what it is. Or don't. I obviously wont force you to. Anyways, I thought it was sad to see all these tourists whipping out cameras and snapping up photos of it because their guide books told them it was famous and important, and I doubt 1 in 10 even bothered to take a good look at it and figure out what it might be telling us. Having said that, I know nothing about art, and likely did one of the world's worst jobs of interpreting it, but I feel as though I can be forgiven for at least having tried.

In other news, I ate a shrimp. It was not disgusting. And I am proud.

Oh, and I'm glad I'm home (for now).