A Man Down To His Last Dollar Makes It From Morocco To Spain To Germany To Home In The US

He Had A Bright Beginning In Germany

This is a story about how a seemingly intelligent student can end up looking like the biggest moron in the world. Our traveler, who we’ll call Bill, was in Germany for a conference. Bill was a Ph.D. student and had been attending the conference on behalf of his advisor. As a student, Bill was traveling on a shoestring budget but had found a way to work a little bit of vacation into this work trip. Bill described his side trip as, “a quick solo trip to Spain, Morocco, and Gibralter…done on the cheap, as I was – as a doctoral student – incredibly poor.”

At first, everything was great. He grabbed a meal at the Munich airport, “a schnitzel of dubious quality,” and boarded his plane for Madrid. When he boarded, he was out of cash, but he knew there would be plenty of ATMs in Spain. ATMs were only the start of his problems when he landed.

The ATMs Were Not His Friends

As Bill explained, “The travel guide for Spain mentioned that ATMs were both plentiful and accepting of overseas plastic. As such, I had not taken the liberty of arming myself with cumbersome traveler’s checks.”

Indeed, Bill saw multiple ATMs, right there in the airport and as soon as he was through customs, he stopped at one. There was immediately a problem. Bill requested 100 Euros from the machine and “the machine whirred for an uncomfortably long time before, ‘La tarjéta disminuyó’ appeared onscreen.” Uh oh. For those that don’t speak Spanish (and according to Google translate), “La tarjéta disminuyó” translates to “The Card Decreased.” That’s not good! Remember, Bill spent his last few Euros in Germany on a questionable schnitzel at the airport. He needed some cash if this part of the trip was going to work. It was impossible that he had no funds in bank account, or so he thought.

He Had No Idea How Little Money He Really Had

Bill found another machine, this time from a German bank with branches in the US. He also decreased the amount of money he was requestioning from €100 to €40. Bill held his breath and “after a brief pause, the machine whirred to life and yielded a fistful of tender with an uneventful series of clicks.”

Success! Bill had €40 and was ready to for his trip that he planned to go from Madrid to Morocco to Gibralter and then back to Madrid and on back to Munich where he would catch his flight home.

While Bill had his €40 and was ready to go, he figured he could grab more cash later and just use his card for the hostel and any meals. But here’s what Bill didn’t know – because of a bureaucratic blunder, his last paycheck had not been deposited into his account like he’d assumed. He was, for all intents and purposes, flat broke. As he described it, “Little did I know that I had just cleaned out my entire bank account. Several weeks before, a minor administrative change at work had placed my continued compensation in the hands of a portly university bureaucrat who had not only failed to push paper, but lied to me by assuring me that all was well on the eve of my departure. The net result of this negligence was me being in not-so-blissful ignorance that a sorely-needed paycheck would not be forthcoming.”

It was going to be a problem. A problem Bill wasn’t equipped to handle, as his next few days would prove.

Everything Was Coming Up Roses…At First

Bill spent the next couple days enjoying one of the great cities of the world, Madrid. It’s a city that one can live pretty cheaply in (by Western European standards) and Bill was trying to travel “frugally,” so he stretched the €40 as far as he could. With the looming disaster still not presenting itself, Bill decided to take the train down to the Spanish town of Malaga and take the ferry from there to Morocco.

Bill arrived in Tangiers, Morocco, which he described as a “decrepit city” filled with the stench “of poverty and desperation.” But he was here and he was going to enjoy it. He quickly found a hotel and a room, though he would quickly regret settling so quickly. As he described it: “I hammered out a deal for a room at the princely sum of $6 a night. I still judged the establishment overpriced when I discovered that the room lacked entirely in both towels and toilet paper. I learned of these shortcomings separately, each at the worst possible time. While discussing my remedies in great detail would be inappropriate, if you find yourself staying on the fourth floor of Hotel Mahmoud anytime soon, stay away from the curtains.” Now, remember, he didn’t realize at this point that he was quickly running of hard cash and was totally unaware that his bank account was empty.

At least the room was only $6 a night. That would be the last stroke of good luck that Bill would experience for a very long time.

Now The Trip Starts To Tank

The next day, Bill thought it would be funny to take advantage of the low cost of living in the north African country and found a barber that would cut his hair for 50 cents. Or so he thought.

It turns out that the barber was confused. American tourists were usually looking for the illegal substances Morocco is famous for, so the barber was ready to sell him some. Bill, strangely and innocently, only wanted a haircut, something the “barber” didn’t seem to understand at all and an intense discussion followed, between the barber and an insanely naive Bill:

“The barber, who looked like a cross between Gollum and the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, threw a smoky apron over me and leaned in behind my right ear. In surprisingly good English he asked, ‘Something special, my friend?’

‘How about a fade?’ I requested.

‘No, no,’ the barber replied, leaning in and tipping me a Bob’s-yer-uncle wink in the dingy mirror, ‘I mean, something special for you?’

‘Come again?’ I asked, now genuinely confused. ‘Hair. Cut.’ I simplified, making scissors with my fingers.

‘No… ha-shish,’ the barber said, a wicked grin spreading across his face. ‘You want some, friend?’

‘Um, no thanks…I’m good,’ I managed.

The offhanded dismissal was apparently insufficient and seemed to offend the proprietor, who took my refusal as an entendre to enter into negotiations. ‘You cannot be serious,’ he said. ‘This is the finest Moroccan. It is of highest quality. Kings smoke this. Forty dirhams per decagram.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I stammered. ‘I’m gonna pass this time.’

‘Fine. Thirty-five dirhams. Any less and you are spitting on the product and my generosity.’

‘How about just the haircut? How’s that feel?’ I asked, rapidly losing hope that this would end well.

‘You drive a hard bargain, my friend,’ said the barber with an earnest chuckle. ‘Thirty dirhams and I throw in the haircut for free.'”

Bill still didn’t seem to get it. But at least in his cluelessness, he realized the overstuffed ashtrays in the barbershop weren’t filled with the regular smokes.

“The ‘barber,’ meanwhile, had decided I needed some visual convincing. He reached into his smock and pulled out a gallon-sized Zip-Loc bag completely full of product.”

It was time to leave.

The Emergency Credit Card Discovered Only A Little Too Late

As he left the barbers, it suddenly dawned on Bill that he had an emergency credit card. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? If there was ever a time to use such a card, this was certainly it, right? Because he was overseas, Bill figured that the card, which was registered to a Florida resident, would be flagged as soon as he used it.

He decided he would try to make a bunch of purchases in a short period of time before the credit card company “figured out” what was going on. Of course, what was “going on” was completely legitimate, but Bill had lost all sense at this point, it seems. He quickly bought a ferry ticket to Spain, a train ticket to Madrid, and a cheap flight from Madrid to Munich, where his return flight was scheduled to leave in a few days. He then went to a grocery store and bought everything he could get his hands on that remotely looked like food. What he actually got seemed to be completely random items, including what he thought were chocolate-covered raisins but were actually chocolate covered coffee beans. Seriously, who buys chocolate-covered candy when you are down to your last few ducats? In a serious of bad decisions, this may be the worst.

Of course, it wasn’t the only one. He still had a few days to kill in Spain and again, rather than calling his credit card company or even checking to see if the card was frozen, he decided he’d just live like a bum on the streets of Madrid.

Life As A Spanish Bum That Doesn’t Speak Spanish

Bill breaks down his last three days in Spain: “I roamed the streets, growing a spotty teenage-level beard I hoped made me look just dangerous and/or crazy enough not to be trifled with. Three days from my date of departure, my supply of food ran out. I seriously considered trying to find a Spanish soup kitchen but was hampered by a lack of knowledge of the native language. I had pieced together how to say, “I am poverty,” (“Yo soy pobreza”) and “my mouth needs a sandwich” (“Mi boca nececita un bocadillo”), but couldn’t put the two together to adequately enough to express my plight to the locals. I was hungry.”

At one point, he even contemplated eating a sandwich out of a trash can, as he described in his journal: “Day 15. In Buen Retiro Park, I saw a businessman throwing away half a sandwich. Without even realizing it, I had walked over to the bin. The sandwich was sitting on top of a newspaper. It looked good. Turkey. Lettuce. Maybe spicy mustard. Before I could think about it, a bum came along and plucked it out and ate it right there. My God, if he hadn’t come along, I would have eaten that sandwich. What have I become?”

Finally, the day of his flight came and he was chagrined to realize that he didn’t even have enough to take a taxi or the bus to the airport. He was left with only one choice, at that point.

“Have You Ever Tried Walking To An International Airport?”

The answer to the question, “Have you ever tried walking to an international airport?” for most people is, of course, no. But not Bill. Maybe because he had decided to live like a starving homeless man, he was delusional, but he decided to walk to the Madrid airport. Like the idiot he was turning out to be, somehow he ended up on a freaking runway. “My route into Barajas International Airport took me through some places I reckon few commercial flyers ever see, including a maintenance hangar and a tour of the southernmost landing strip on a luggage vehicle driven by a sympathetic airline worker.

‘Are planes using this runway?’ I asked the driver, as a 747 took off perhaps eighty yards away.

‘Little bit,’ he replied.”

Seriously, he ended up on a freaking runway at the airport. While riding on a luggage vehicle. That is a level of stupid that is hard to reach, but Bill would soon manage to surpass even this.

Finally He Gets On His Plane

Bill somehow stumbled into the airport and, maybe by pure luck, ended up on the correct airplane. At this point, anything was possible, which was verified by the letter he found waiting for him from the credit card company when he got home. He was expecting it to inform him that his card had been shut off, but instead, the company informed him that his credit limit had actually been raised thanks to his purchases overseas.

And so the story ends with Bill, at home, reading a letter that re-enforced how silly he had been on his trip. Maybe out of embarrassment or maybe out of ignorance, Bill still managed to sound like a fool with his last words: “I read the letter twice, thinking about all the food I could have eaten, the bed I could have slept in, and the cabs I could have taken. While I should have grown madder, the letter had the opposite effect: the core of rage that had swelled within me collapsed upon itself. For the first time in days, I felt peace and tranquility. After all, the two weeks of the trip may have turned disastrous, but from the experience I’d gained, I learned a valuable lesson in Zen: If you’re going to slip through so many cracks, it’s impossible to be swollen with anger.”

You didn’t “fall through the cracks,” Bill. You acted stupidly and naively. Fellow travelers beware lest you also fall into “the cracks” like our dear, old Bill here.