Chess tournaments- as boring as they sound.

Brought to you by Incubus (I know, I think it’s weird, too. Just go with it.)

So, I’ve had a shitty week. I hesitate to go into detail because most people close to me know what went down (and if you’re a pal-o-mine that is unaware, email/skype me and I’d be happy to ramble to you about my problems) but I’ll leave it at this: I was looking for an excuse to get outta town for a couple days.

That’s when Michael, my recently-named inner voice said to me, “Hey, I’m just spit-ballin’ here, but why don’t you go to a chess tournament in Rabat and take eight kids with you without getting any written consent from their parents?”

I like the way Michael thinks. Here follows an account of the past 36 hours.

First of all, it turns out my kids aren’t that awesome at chess. This isn’t really that surprising because they’ve only been playing about 4 months (they started playing around the time I got to site. These two events are NOT correlated. I suck at chess.) They definitely hung in there, and more importantly learned a lot, but for the most part they lost matches early in the rounds and were left with lots of downtime to:

A. freak out at the concession stand (our little town doesn’t have these), and
B. make me take 50 asgajdglshillion photos of them.

After an exhausting photo sesh, I needed a change of pace. Thankfully, at that exact moment a crazy approached me. She started speaking in English and making shifty eyes, then she asked me if I wanted to hear the rap lyrics she wrote in English. I thought she’d never ask! I didn’t have my pen on me and my memory sucks, otherwise I’d share a sample with you now. I have to admit, she wasn’t bad. This anecdote is starting to remind me of how Tenacious D wrote the Greatest Song in the World but couldn’t remember it, so I’ll move on.

Ah yes, dinner time. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much when the club president (who, by the way, looked and acted exactly like John Hammond’s uppity nephew that takes over the company and fucks everything up in Jurassic Park II: The Lost World) told me free food would be provided, but I did hope to eat more than a baguette with a few slices of Spam-esque “meat,” a Coke and an orange. I guess I could have misunderstood him… he speaks to me in a mix of broken English with a heavy accent, French, and Fusa (classical Arabic). I can figure out the English and French okay, but to me, Fusa sounds like the language of Mordor but sped up. It is a tongue I will not utter here.

What was I talking about?

Okay, well if the free food was shitty, what would you expect the free lodging to look like? Hello youth hostel, it’s been awhile. The place really wasn’t that bad. It was clean, the proprietor was nice and there weren’t many other people there so it was quiet. Of course, it was the first hostel experience for a few of the girls, so they were kind of freaked out. Fears were put aside when we started a bit of a photo shoot in the girls room (yep…I had a sleepover with a bunch of tweens. Giggling, late night snacks, talking about (not) getting married….good times).

Which brings us to day two. FUCKING WALID woke me up at 7:15 because he wanted my camera. Mind you, breakfast would not be served until 9:00, and my alarm was set for 8:30, but none of that matters now, I suppose.

Anyway, Walid woke me up because it was very important that he take photos of everyone sitting in the lobby of the hostel for twenty minutes. Did I laugh heartily and in his face when Walid fell backwards out of his chair later that day? Yes. Yes I did.

Because we had so much downtime, Amin, my Counterpart on this, thought it would be cool to walk around a bit. Parliament was near where we were staying, so I was planning to take pictures of the kids there.

Unfortunately for me, the kids freaked over a group of pigeons and everyone wanted there photo taken with them. This ran my battery down and it died before we even got to the Parliament building. Their loss.

Now it’s 9:00 am. Breakfast is served, and guess what? It was shitty.

Actually breakfast was pretty good, I am just bitter because the only drink they offered was milk. I hesitated to drink mine, convinced some magical man would be coming around momentarily to pour coffee in it, but no dice. (Luckily, I was able to get coffee a bit later in the club’s “Member’s Only” café, of which I am not a member.)

Let’s see…other highlights from day two. Ah yes…

SPOTTED: Moroccan stage mom. I didn’t get a pic of her, but she was legit. Bedazzled track suit, huge sunglasses, camera in hand, constantly hovering over her son, Augustus Gloop.

Even after SPOTTING a stage mom and Roald Dahl character in the flesh, I still needed something to occupy my time. Did I mention I like to doodle?

All my complaining aside, we had a good time. Four of the kids in my group placed in the competition (take THAT, city slickers) and the rest of them were on such sugar highs I don’t think they even knew they were competing.