baudot

Waking up. The heavy wood bedframe is likely older than the country I come from. It goes up to the bed above, to a second floor of wood installed in the middle of the room, to another bed, and another. Privacy curtains block me from the sight of the other nineteen folks sleeping in the room, but their sleeping noises make it through.

Good morning, London.

- - - -

The Jamaal el Fna of Marrakech was what I'd been imagining of Morocco. Harsh lights on market stalls winding back into the night. Marchants bargaining playfully. You make the first offer. Something low enough to signal your willingness for their familly to starve. They come back with a laugh, an astronomical offer and an unlikely story. Somewhere along the way you might come to an agreement.


Anomalisa lost her wallet the night before. Today she has given up on trying to control the trip. She is just having fun. We wander about in slackjawed wonder of the Ben Yousseff Medersa, from cell to cell where the students were crammed in eight to a jail sized rooms.


- - - -

After the train ride and a walk through Salisbury cathedral and faire I hop aboard the bus. It lets us out a tunnel away from the site I woke early for this morning.


The audio guide says that it's known now that Stonehenge wasn't an observatory, though the sun does line up with the stones on the equinoxes and solstices. It wasn't a fortress, though the first thing they built was a giant moat and earthen wall. The guides don't want to say what it was, other than a mystery that will always remain a mystery.

Me, I favor the fort theory. The moat may not have been as deep as later moats, nor the wall as high as later walls. Still, you figure any tribe that spends a few lifetimes digging a man-deep moat with only horns and antlers for tools were doing it plenty deep for the tools they had. Also, it seems like for people who had to trade for all their stone, at the peak of the stone age, that nothing could be a more ostentatious than a giant ring of stones.