“Florida is the hottest city in the USA”, yaps a hobo with a flawed geographical knowledge. He rolls a cigarette and sits down on a bench. The rest of his gang follows his example. They all take out their shag tobacco and cheap supermarket lager and continue to cackle loudly. High above, someone must be nodding approvingly. For we are not in Florida at all, but in Jack Kerouac Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. Fragments from Kerouac’s novels and poems can be read on colossal memorial stones. Together with the hobo benches, these stones form a mandala, referring to his flirts with Buddhism.
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Tangier, Morocco: European ambiance, African chaos
“Upon arrival in Tangier, most travel guides advise you to make immediate plans to leave, if you haven’t already. They are right: Tangier is a first-degree shithole.”
A book called 101 places not to visit catches my eye in the library of Pärnu, according to its cover “your essential guide to the world’s most miserable, ugly, boring and inbred destinations.” The book promises to teach you how to spot biological hazards and radioactivity and how to avoid marriage to locals desperate to escape.
Because we haven’t returned from Morocco very long ago, I quickly browse to the pages about Africa. In addition to the above sentence, this anti-travel guide knows that Tangier is “culturally as interesting as a service station, minus the handy plastic and the kitchen roll dispensers.”
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