home!

My second full day home! I’m not sensing that much reverse culture shock, but I am feeling super aware of American culture. Is that culture shock per se? Anyway, since when were calories posted in restaurants everywhere? I haven’t looked or thought about calories for 3.5 months and suddenly they’re everywhere. And, all the stuff in the media (OK, just morning television thus far) about health and wrinkle creams and organic food and getting skinny. All this space too: giant parking lots, shopping complexes the size of the medina. Weird.

ISP kicks it up a notch

So I haven’t been very good about keeping up with my blogs, and that’s because I’ve been keeping a work journal for my ISP. I’ll I’ve been thinking about if my ISP, and that’s all I’ve been writing about. I am seriously ready to go home. I got sick last week when we moved into our house. It started out as allergies and then became a sinus infection, and then because a full-blown cold. Not only am I tired all the time, the temperature has been hovering around 85F, so we’re all drained from that. In short, I do not want to do this paper.

I had an intense meeting with Dr. James Miller, of the Moroccan-American Cultural Exchange Thingy, and he said I was asking good questions but I needed to focus my topic. I will admit, I have gotten sidetracked this past week by a few interesting ideas about the Hassan Tower, so I guess it was good that I got put on the right track (?). I suddenly felt like I had wasted a week of precious ISP time and nearly had a heart attack.

I think I may have an iron deficiency. Solution: eat more tasty street sandwiches with meat.

O, and if you really want to see my work journal, let me know.

ISP kicks off

So today my ISP kicks off for real. I have a meeting with my advisor this morning, where I will ask him point blank who I should talk to because I have absolutely no idea. The task of trying to choose somebody to talk to out of the whole Ministry of Culture, and then trying to get in touch with them is daunting.

After my meeting I’m heading back to the library for lunch and Skype, and then I’m going to show up at the Archaeology Museum and start talking. I just have to be ballsy about it. When I visited it last time, there were a few guys sitting in a tiny office by the door, so hopefully I can strike up a conversation. Also today I’m going to email Hefid, the docent I met at the Oudaya gallery last weekend.

In house news, Brenda and I are apparently on the secret murder list of the stove upstairs, because we can’t manage to light it. I’ve never lit a gas stove I my life, come to that, I’ve hardly ever used a lighter in my life. Eventually we had 11 hard-boiled eggs.

Also I think I have a sinus infection. Do you know how I know? I’ll tell you: my snot is yellow. It is not fun.

new house

So last night was our first night in our new house. Several things went wrong. Firstly, I had to abandon my nook because it was too dusty and I would have awoken in a pool or mucus had I stayed. Secondly, the girls upstairs were being very loud. Thirdly, the gas tank upstairs was leaking, so the loud girls upstairs left the house to sleep somewhere else, lest they die horribly during the night from inhaling propane. This morning the landlord and the handyman came, so hopefully the gas situation is fixed.

The house is pretty nice; a nice price that is. It’s 625dh for 3 weeks. That’s $78. I will say though, I miss my family already. It’s that family vibe I think. Our house, because it’s 12 girls, feels more like a crowded dormitory. It’s nice to have other people around all the time, so it’s easier to make plans, get together running groups, etc.

That said the house is kind of crumbling. I mean, it’s nice for Morocco, but it’s falling apart in a few ways. The stucco on the walls crumbles off if you brush up against it. I think maybe it wasn’t left to cure long enough. I think there’s also a water leak on the second floor, because the wall on that side of the house is rather damp-looking. There are little piles of stucco in the corners. This means we have to wear flip-flops around the hose pretty much all the time, but it’s only for 3 weeks and we’re young and hardy.

Another thing I like about living apart from my host family is that I can eat whenever I want, and however much I want. We get to go shopping on Veggie Street and play at being Moroccans. The produce is very tasty and cheap, and super convenient because we just roll out of our front door with some dirhams and buy fruits, veggies, and hubs (bread). If we were so inclined we could also purchase chicken, fish, rays (the fishy kind), and sometimes shark. I suppose if we wanted a cat we could also pick one up on Veggie Street, but that wouldn’t be for eating.

3 weeks is so much time

Hefla (party) at the CCCL with our families this past Thursday evening! There were tasty cookies and lots of dancing. Once we got home Hajja and Soukaina dressed me up in caftans. I felt rather silly.

So much time now and I don’t know how to fill it. I think I will be doing a lot of reading over the next three weeks. I met with my advisor, a nice professor at the Faculte of Letters and Social Sciences named Taieb Belghazi, and we chatted for about 45 minutes on Friday morning about my subject and who I should be contacting. We came to no new revelations, so I still need to contact the Ministry of Culture. I will also be doing some participant observation, a.k.a I will be hanging around Chellah and maybe other historic sites in Rabat.

Yesterday I did have something of a breakthrough though. Brenda and I were in the gallery at the top of the Kasbah waiting for Allison and her friend, and the docent there was talking to us about the photography that was on display. He was also telling us about the history of the gallery space in the Kasbah. So we told him we were students etc. and what we were studying, and he mentioned that he had been to a historic site in Kenitra (the university town on the other side of Sale) but that nobody really knew about it because it wasn’t kept up. My ISP. So I asked for his contact info and I will hopefully be able to get an interview sometime after next Wednesday.

Last night I went to a concert with Diana and Jesse at the National Theater. It was a hiphop concert, and we went mostly because Diana’s ISP is on Moroccan hiphop culture. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. When Diana and I got to the theater we were just standing around in the courtyard, trying not to be noticed by the scores of Moroccan youth, mostly young men in tight pants and elaborate hairdos. So when Diana said that there were two guys approaching us I groaned inwardly and prepared myself to do my best ignoring. I had nothing to worry about, Alhamdulillah, because it was Amine and his friend. Diana didn’t catch on for a few sentences and I think she thought I was going to get picked up by these random Moroccans. In our continued good fortune, Diana’s advisor found us and collected us into the group he was with that included his Moroccan doctor friend, a Fulbright scholar named Kendra, and I think some of her friends. One of her friends bore a remarkable resemblance to Sean Penn, that is, if Sean Penn had been rather shorter and been of Latin American descent.

After pushing through the crowded door and the smoky interior, we got seats with this motley group. Soon after we were seated all of Morocco’s angsty emo youth rushed through the doors and immediately started shouting and fighting with each other. I’m pretty sure I went to high school with some of the people I saw light night; the same types of people anyway. Once the music started the entire theater went crazy and I was thankful we were seated in between our academic peeps and a young boy and his mother ahead of us (the poor mom looked overwhelmed). The music was good, but the sets were long, and little by little the academic set behind us disappeared: some left, Kendra went backstage with her friend, and Diana’s advisor and his doctor friend simply vanished (as an aside, Jesse, Diana, and myself thought it was rather rude for Kendra not to invite Diana backstage. Diana is researching the same thing as Kendra, and we were sure Kendra’s friend had no such academic interests.) We left shortly after that because it was getting late, the theater was smoky, and increasingly sketchy guys kept talking to us.

I wanted to smack all the men in the street who had the temerity to talk to us last night as we were walking home through the medina. After dealing with it for 3 hours in a theater I was not in a place to do the same outside. And it’s ridiculous that we had to behave in exactly the same way outside the theater as inside. But when you look at it, what the difference really? It’s a man’s world here, even if the “men” in the theater were nothing more than gothic-leaning children from upper middle class families who could afford to style their hair in vertical ways and wear dark t-shirts with even darker sunglasses indoors. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the music, I’m just saying that the audience made it difficult to be comfortable.

I got home and shelled peas with Soukaina until dinner, then went to bed.

What do I do with all my free time here in Morocco (when I am not engaging with the culture, etc.) you ask? I read. I read rather remarkable quantities of books. Here you find me having just completed Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which is why my writing has taken on something of a British flavor. I can’t help it you know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I started reading Jane Austen in middle school, and as a consequence I could translate the Constitution into modern English for my 7th grade social studies class. In any case, it comes far too easily to me and I only hope that I stop doing it before I have to write up my ISP. It would sound patronizing.

So, back to books. It is nice to be able to have so many hours at my disposal to simply read, but then I start thinking that I really should be engaging with Moroccan culture, etc., in this time that I am here. I love Moroccan culture, I truly do, but sometimes I think if one more skinny, hair-gelled youth tries to talk to me in the street I’ll snap and try to put out his eyes with his cheap, knock-off sunglasses (O my, I think I am being unduly harsh in this entry…). Reading is my mental break. Some of the students watch copious quantities of movies, others smoke. I read; it’s more educational than watching movies, and is not a threat to my health like smoking. My host family must think I’m some sort of hermit, the way I keep to my room reading. It’s really no more than my host sister does, except she watches TV all the time, and when my host-brother is home he plays loud club music and surfs around on the internet.

I keep telling myself that I should read something useful, like books about Moroccan culture and history, or at the very least well-known fiction. The problem is that reading would not be such a lovely mental break if I couldn’t escape from Moroccan culture, and the prospect of reading something like Anna Karenina or Les Miserables when I’m already emotionally run down is just too damn depressing.

Another bad habit that I attribute to all my free time is a tendency to ramble on about inconsequential things. And then decide to post them to my blog.

American hips

Ouch. Belly dancing class this evening. I continue to maintain that American hips can’t move the way those of our Moroccan belly dancing teacher can. It is craziness. I am convinced I am going to give myself arthritis from all this hip-waving. My hip joints actually hurt. I think I need to get one of those jingly belts. Not because it will make my hips feel better or anything, but because I can have more fun while I make my hips hurt. Also, I think we cause a scandal whenever we leave the dance studio with wet hair. Showers in the dance studio = I am clean more often than I would usually be at this point in the week. Generally women don’t go outside the house with wet hair, and when they leave the hammam it’s all wrapped up in two scarves, so you can’t tell it’s wet anyway. So we were scandalous yet again this evening.

Today I had an ISP epiphany. My topic is really just me trying to relate to Moroccans. I mean, I am all about preserving and learning from historical materials, so wouldn’t it make sense for me to see if Moroccans felt the same? At least now I can explain my project better. Because it is me looking for the same thing in a different culture.

I am about to send a cat down into the courtyard / chimney to shut those birds up. So my room actually sits on top of the front door of the house under us. One of my windows looks out into the street in front of their door, and the window on the other side of my room looks down into their central courtyard. Where they keep some caged birds. Sometimes I think they forget to cover the cage at night, because those birdies are cheeping at all hours of the night. There are plenty of spare cats running around. It shouldn’t be a problem to find one to drop one out of my window and into the courtyard to eliminate the Bird Problem, thus allowing me to sleep more soundly.

only one week left before ISP!

This evening on the way home from Arab Café, I saw not one, not two, but three men peeing on the medina wall, the Andalucian Wall to be exact. Hundreds of years old of course, but it still seems like something of a public urinal. This is exactly why I want to study Moroccan attitudes towards historical preservation. For example, does it matter to these men that this wall has been around since Rabat was a pirate state called the Republic of the Bou Regreg (yes, I did consult my guidebook for that one)? Or perhaps their full bladders got the better of their sense of historical wonder. I’m not saying they shouldn’t relieve themselves on the wall, but do they even think of it as a historical monument worthy of not peeing on?

I do not think it would be a good idea to interview men peeing on the wall for my ISP.

We only have one more week until we formally begin our ISP time. And then three weeks, and then five days, and then I go home. Ridiculous. I am excited to begin my research, but I am a bit apprehensive to have to contact and attempt to talk to people about my project who may not speak English. All I’m saying is they had better be patient with my French. I still haven’t got an advisor, or housing. I suppose I should be more stressed about that than I am now, but I am confident Allah will provide. Or SIT.

What I really care about at this moment is dinner.