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.

stress, spinners, and ISP

I just finished a paper about the standardization of the Amazigh language and its addition to the school system. I pretty much bashed both the “standardization” and the system, if you were wondering. It wasn’t a bad paper really, better than my Multilingualism one, but I still feel vulnerable when I’m asked to write something without solid references and based mostly on my opinion and what I managed to pick up in class. I like to be correct.

We all get a little bitchy about homework here, mostly because we have very little. OK, let me amend that: we have very little for our seminars. I have plenty from Arabic class. In fact, I approve of the Arabic homework. But back to the seminar stuff. Most of the lectures just barely scratch the surface of the subject matter, so to ask us to write a paper about what we’ve covered just scares us. Compared to a normal Skidmore semester, I have next to no homework, but I suppose the total mind fuck (excuse my French) of having 3 hours of intense language study every day makes up for it. By lunchtime I am nearly brain-dead from Arabic. In theory it’s not difficult, but we’re moving so fast that we have little time in class to review what we’ve learned. By the time I get home, I have enough time to do my homework, eat dinner, and then enough energy to make my bed and fall into it.

It’s a tough schedule, not to mention that being surrounded by a foreign language all the time keeps the brain working. I imagine it like this: my brain is like a cell phone that can’t find service, it keeps searching and searching for a signal, anything, that it can connect to, until it runs out of battery.

In other, more fun news about everyday life in Morocco, which is what you are reading this blog for, I will tell you about making thick string. Yes, you read me right. I’m not quite sure if it’s the business that does it, or the individual that busy the string and then makes it thicker. Any given day you can see men standing on the street spinning string thicker. They use little handheld thingies that look like tiny eggbeaters to spin the string. The fun part about this is that it turns the medina into a kind of Silly String party. First, one end of the string is tied to something on the wall about head height, it’s usually a bit of wire hanger or some sticky-out bit of a building. Next the string is hooked onto any number of wire hangers along the street, just so long as the path takes no sudden turns. Insert other of string into spinner, and GO. So men just stand in the street and hold these spinners and gossip with their friends who are passing by. They also try and amuse passerby like me by pretending the string is pulling them somewhere, or maybe that was just the one guy… In some places you have to duck under flying strings to pass along a street, and in others you have to avoid walking near walls because there is a mass of string oscillating. Today, for instance, I had to walk down the middle of the tiny alley leading to Veggie Street because there was string spinning on both sides. It felt like a high wire act to walk between them, except the wire and I had swapped places. I just reread that simile and it made very little sense.

I am still stressed about my ISP. I need an advisor and I need housing. More on that later when I actually want to think about it.

The henna from the village stay two weeks ago has worn off for the most part. Now my fading hands and feet make me feel like a henna leopard, like I have some kind of faint skin color variation on my hands and feet that looks vaguely like flowers and leaves.

In addition to juicing and slicing, Hajja also likes to fry. Moroccans in general like to fry foods, which is bad for my waistline, but let me tell you, Moroccans know French Fries. Hajja fried some eggplant a few days ago. So tasty. But then again last weekend she fried bread and then sprinkled sugar on it. That may be the epitome of my gastronomic experience here in Morocco: bread fried and sugared.

Martil

This past weekend, myself and a few intrepid friends made the trek to the Mediterranean coast. We took the train to Tanger, spent the night, and then caught a bus to Tetouan in the morning. Form Tetouan we got a grand taxi to Martil, and were lying on the beach by noon. Sadly, some of my travelling companions neglected to bring their passports, which mean a lot of waiting around while they went to the police station and got their international information registered etc. It was frustrating.

Martil is one of a few seaside towns close to Tetouan. I think the area is just one long beach between rocky headlands. That’s another thing, we were in the Rif mountains, which are crazy beautiful. Driving form Tanger to Tetouan, we were passing these enormous hills covered in farmland, and even the peaks were blanketed with green fields almost until the top.

view of the Rif mountains from the beach

The beach was pretty much deserted, maybe because it’s a bit early for tourists. There weren’t many hotels, so I’m guessing Martil is for Moroccans on beachy holidays. I didn’t see many other tourists, except for the odd Spaniard. Our hotel was right on the beach, and cost around 88dh ($11) per person for the night. This is one of the many reasons why I love Morocco.

the view from our hotel room

Another reason I love Morocco are the hanoots that are everywhere. Hanoots are kind of like your neighborhood convenient store, with snacks, toiletries, that kind of thing. They are usually housed in a narrow cubicle that faces out onto the street with shelves inside and out that go up to the ceiling. I buy lots of yogurt. So anyway, we found the WalMart of hanoots in Martil, and loaded up on bread, cheese, yogurt and cookies, and had a picnic lunch on the beach. We even brought all our garbage back to the hotel, unlike others before us, who had simply left theirs on the beach. Garbage is a big problem in Morocco, one that continues to bother me where ever we go.

On Sunday we tried to get bus tickets from Tetouan to Rabat, but didn’t consider the fact that it was the last day of school vacation. So we took a grand taxi back to Tetouan and rode the sketchiest bus yet back to Tanger. Sketchy meaning it’s not the nice bus that all the tourists take, it the one that your average Moroccan will take to visit family in another town. It was an uncomfortable experience, mostly because the suspension of the bus was shot and I got moderately carsick, but it got us to Tanger, where we got the train back to Rabat. Mercifully, we found seats for the 5-hour train ride.

a blurry Tetuoan from the bus, but you get the idea

a sleepy shepherd I saw from the train

The least fun part of the weekend was walking home at 10:30pm through the medina. Dark, garbage everywhere, and men hanging out at corners. I did get a good dinner when I got home though.

back from the village stay

Back from the village stay, and yes, it was a life-changing experience. I know you probably want to know more than that, but you’ll have to be patient because I have to write two papers for this week, and attempt to document this past week to my liking. A challenge if I ever heard it.

So, we drove out past Boujaad, the nearest town to our village, and met half the parents on the side of the road. Most of us were nervous, but it was an expected nervousness because we’d experienced it before. We stared and giggled as half of the students milled around in the road waiting to meet their host fathers for the week.

Long story short, my host brother Mohammed met me at the next stop in the village proper, and I was then introduced to my two host mothers, Fatna and Fatna. We walked out of the village, past the school, turned left, over a hill and got home.

Note: Because both my host mothers were named Fatna, I will call one of them My Fatna because she was the one who pretty much adopted me, escorted me to the bathroom, mashed up my bread, gave me her bracelet, and cried this morning when I left.

Home
My house can more accurately be described as a complex. Out front are the stables for the donkey and mule, as well as the storeroom, laundry lines, the tiny homemade hammam, giant water jars made out of tires, and the entrance to the sheep pen. You have to stoop to enter through the front door, which has a homemade handle and locks, made out of assorted metal bits.

Once through the door, you’re under a covered section that leads into the main yard of the house, which is not roofed; all the rooms of the house open onto this yard. On your left as you enter is a low stone bench where the plastic water jars sit, along with a dipper. Straight ahead is the door to the largest room of the house. All the rooms of the house are pretty similar: rectangular, with a cabinet and pallet of blankets along the back wall. Some rooms have distinguishing features, like TVs, fireplaces, or looms, but really they can be used for anything because there are no large items of furniture. I guess the looms count as large items of furniture, but they looked like they’d be easy to take apart because they were literally tied to the walls and ceiling.

The room I slept in was the living room and bedroom for several people. It had a TV on a low table by the door, a cabinet along the back wall, and an enormous pile of blankets and carpets. Everybody sits on carpets and blankets instead of furniture. The walls were whitewashed and then the bottom half was painted blue. There was a giant clump of blue flowers painted over the window, and a stalk of grain over by the door. Up near the ceiling the word “Allah” was painted in blue, which I think was to indicate the direction of prayer. Once everybody was done with dinner and somebody wanted to go to bed (usually me) carpets and blankets and were spread on the floor for sleeping. Both Fatnas slept in the same room with me, along with either Atiqa, Usama, or Abd Al-Wahad.

Every small family in the house had their own room: Abd Al-Kabir, Zahra, Usama, and Driss; Mohammed and Atiqa, Nadia and Zuhir (I think), and I really don’t know about Abd Al-Wahad. My Fatna showed me her room, although she kept it locked and didn’t sleep in it while I was there. The only other different rooms were the kitchen and fireplace/storeroom. The kitchen was where the food and utensils were stored, and the food was prepared. The fireplace was in another room entirely where bags of something were also stored.

Most of the women in the house wove carpets. Zahra’s loom was in the kitchen, presumably because that was her domain (she made the bread). Atiqa’s loom was in the room she shared with her husband Mohammed, and the Fatnas worked one giant loom next to the kitchen. If Nadia had a loom I didn’t see it, but then again, I never went into her room.

So, I know you really want to know about the bathroom situation. It’s a non-question really: you just walk around the back of the house and do your business. I added new dimension to this, however, by using toilet paper. Nobody in the village really uses TP, if they really need to remove, er, something, they use rocks. There was a tiny hammam that looked like a teepee in the front yard. I didn’t use it, so I can’t report anything about it. I brushed my teeth in the front yard next to the door. Nobody really brushes their teeth there either. I gave My Fatna some toothpaste when she requested it one night. Her teeth aren’t in good condition, but neither would yours be if you ate mostly bread and drank tea with your sugar. Poor little Usama’s front teeth are already black, and he’s only 6. He’s a menace, so when he gets smacked upside the head he starts bawling because it hurts his teeth.

The oldest of the five brothers (don’t ask me what his name is) lives on the next hill over, probably no more than 100 yards from the big house. He lives with his wife Khadduj, and two daughters Umima and Shaima. He came over to the big house pretty often. Kate stayed with them and said that he was in a bad mood frequently.

thoughts before the village stay

Yesterday was one of the rare memorable Arabic classes. Before break we were learning parts of the body and Fatima Zahra (our teacher) told us to sing the “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” song. Now, I can do it in English, and I can do it in French, but I cannot do it in Arabic. I think we massacred the poor children’s song. Fatima Zahra told us to go on our break pretty quick after that.

St. Patrick’s Day has passed. Some students went out for expensive beers to celebrate. Only a few people remembered to wear green. The day was probably as exciting as this paragraph is creatively-written, which is to say, NOT.

I bought two disposable cameras in preparation for our village stay, as the one my father shipped has not yet arrived. We’re all pretty excited for the village stay that starts tomorrow. In fact, I am so excited, I will go to bed soon. The last time I will see a bed for a week.

And, for the record, I am not uninspired while writing this, I am just extremely tired. Several of us went to the hammam today, which tires you out by sucking all the moisture from your body. Afterwards we walked all the way to Marjane (a Wal-Mart type establishment) and all the way back. Don’t worry, Diana’s host-brother was with us, so we were safe and stuff.

Goodbye computer and internet! Goodbye bed! See you next Friday!

not about much of anything

Much to relate from the past few days.

Allison, Rachel, and I went to the Exotic Gardens in Kenitra this past Sunday. They’re not really exotic gardens in my opinion because the subdivisions looked remarkably similar. In any case, they were super fun because there were multiple levels and stairs and bridges tucked into corners. It was really more of a playground. It would make the world’s best game of Hide-and-Seek.

I finally got to go up on the terrace; I went up with Hajja when she was hanging laundry. It’s a shared terrace because the house is divided into smaller apartments, and everybody gets access to the terrace. The terrace is the clothes dryer. The view is magnificent, if you can look past the roofs of the neighbors: you can see the Oudaya kasbah, the Bouregreg River, the ocean, Sale, and way up the Bouregreg valley to where the suburbs of Sale are spilling over the hillside into the valley below.

Aside from the view, I was also treated to a minor rant about Hajja’s neighbors, who don’t keep their part of the house clean enough. I think Hajja also said that the other families rent from Al-Hajj, whose house it is. Mind you, this was all in French. Al-Hajj grew up in this house.

Our house is on the Rue des Consuls, which back in the day was the only street in the entire city where foreign representatives could live. Hajja is sure my room was once the office of a diplomat. She also said that a few years ago somebody knocked on their door and asked to see the house because their great-great-great(-great) grandfather had been a diplomat and lived here

I had never really associated our house with history before. The house is old, sure, but I had never stopped to think that it had a history; it’s just the building where I live. It’s very Moroccan, living in history. In fact, that’s what I want to do my ISP about.

My friend’s host sister has started teaching a belly dance class just for us CCCL-ers. Monday and Wednesday nights we get to see just how uncoordinated we are. Personally, I just don’t think American hips can move like Moroccan ones. And talk about a workout: I didn’t even know those muscles existed. Happily there were also showers at the dance studio, as I believe my brother may have messed up our hot water. You have to turn the gas on manually here to get hot water.

ankle splashers and The Giant Tea

A word on the accursed Ankle Splashers mentioned in the previous entry. So I told you the medina is paved, right? Well, the whole thing is kind of tiled with stones blocks. The streets are anti-crowned so there’s a low spot in the middle for all the water to flow down. It’s like an open sewer but don’t think about it too much. I don’t know what the surface is like underneath these paving stones, but it is obviously not level because the stones crack sometimes. When the stones or mortar around then crack, water gets under them and when you step on the paving stone it spews water. Thus, the accursed Ankle Splashers. Constant vigilance is the only way to avoid damp pants, but even then the lurkers may get you. I try and keep an eye out for the loose mortar, but even I don’t stay dry all the time.

The situation is reminiscent of “Indiana Jones and the...” ( I forget, but it was the one with Sean Connery) and Indy has to cross the room on stones that spell out God’ name in Hebrew and he dithers over how to spell it and has to choose the right stones or risk certain death when he falls through the floor. Yes, so that is like walking around the medina after it rains. It’s like looking for some kind of sacred sign in the paving stones that tells you where not to step. Although wet pantlegs aren’t as bad as almost certain death, but then the Indiana Jones movies give people false idea about archaeology. I definitely recall telling people that I study archaeology and they respond “Oh, like Indiana Jones?” and I have to say no, because my idea of a future does not, in fact, involve stealing sacred golden monkeys from unidentified ruins deep in the jungle, retrieving large pieces of jewelry from old flames who live in the Himalaya, witnessing human sacrifice, snakes, the Holy Grail, or Sean Connery. But I don’t mind snakes that much. So yes, paving stones.

Jesse and Allison came over for tea today, which was epic. I think Hajja or Souakina actually baked something for the occasion, and all the sweets were brought out, in addition to two little bowls of my favorite olives, popcorn, and hubs of course. So much tasty food. Gods, I am going to gain so much weight here. But after having read Fatima Mernessi’s book “Scheherezade Goes West”, I don’t feel that bad about it. You should read it too (especially you, mom).

So while we are eating all this tasty food, we start talking about dancing and eventually we all end up dancing around the living room (TV salon) to Egyptian music with scarves ties around our hips. Soukaina always leaves a scarf lying around the living room in case company comes and she needs to veil. It’s like relay race sometimes if one of Amine’s friends shows up: somebody gets up and tosses the scarf to Soukaina who throws it around her head with practiced ease and is really to receive the visitor in seconds flat. I digress; we were dancing around the living room. Hajja closed all the windows, and anytime we heard anything in the vestibule we paused to see what it was. Al-Hajj was also closed into his room after tea so he couldn’t see us.

I don’t think I have any room for dinner after all the tasty sweets…

anti jameel

I think some of my new Arabic vocab is starting to stick. I can recognize more words on TV and I can pick out a few in my family’s conversation. I have a strange mélange of vocab though, as some words I know only in darija or fusHa and not French.

Today’s not-so-fun academic exercise included waiting around for 40 minutes for a meeting with Abdelhay to chat about the upcoming ISP. I’m thinking I want to do something with the perception of history in Morocco and how it affects archaeological sites and materials.

I finally got home and began to get hamman equipment together because Jesse and I were going to go. When Hajja got home she told me that our hammam is closed to women after 6:30pm, when it’s the men’s turn to use it. Dammy. Thankfully the hamman Jesse goes to is open to women only and all the time. Jesse’s hammam is larger than ours and cleaner, however, there were considerably more people and it was exponentially louder, especially with the addition of screaming soap-covered children.

After I got home there was teatime, where I was literally cornered (as usual) and couldn’t leave until everyone had finished their tea and biscuits. I hurried to meet Allison for dinner at her house, although the wait was fine because her mother had forgotten twice that I was coming. Therefore dinner was spaghetti and involved CHEESE.

The best part was getting to meet another Moroccan family and seeing another house. Allison’s sisters are 3, 5, and 7 years old, and all the most adorable little girls ever. OK maybe with the exception of Isabella, but I guess I’m a bit biased. Malek, who’s 3, was teaching me words out of her school book in the manner of 3-year olds, but they weren’t the words written on the page. I know because I could read it. We played some games with family photos that I didn’t quite understand because the rules were created by Malek.

It was nice to be speaking English at home, a home anyway, even if it wasn’t mine. It gets kind of trying here at my house having to listen to all the conversation but not know what any of it means because it’s all in darija. I mean, I can usually get the gist of it if I pay attention because it’s usually based on what’s the TV at the time or about the food. Except that time they were talking about some kind of traffic accident and made the spoons roads and the knife a bus, etc. Anyway, Allison and I got to speak English and have our own conversational privacy where were were on the understanding side of the conversation wall instead of being the loners on the outside.

Walking back home at 11pm through the medina was an adventure, to put it mildly. All the shops were closed up, so the street was bare except for the odd pile of trash here and there and the roving bands of young men. Since I was a single female, and obviously foreign, of course I got “bonjour”ed and “bonsoir”ed and “salut”ed and “ooo la la”ed. My personal favorite was “anti jameel” which is in fact Arabic for “you’re beautiful” except the adjective was the wrong gender. Does that signify anything or were they just being lazy about adding the “a” to the end that would make it grammatically correct? I was tempted to holler back “ana a’rif”, which means “I know”, but responding to catcalls (hahaha because there are cats everywhere in the street) is a bad idea. I just had to hold my smirk in until the posse had passed.

The worst part about having to walk to or from home is the fact that I must walk down the veggie street. I forget the real name of the thoroughfare, but it’s a market street for fruits and veggies and meat and chicken and essentially any food item a Moroccan cook would want. During the day you have to dodge flying crates of produce, tiny trucks, pieces of animals on hooks, bikes, motorbikes, children with backpacks, mothers with children with backpacks, puddles, piles of goo, sewers, garbage and cats. At night you only have to worry about the last five and the roving bands of young men. The only good thing about walking down the veggie street at night is the absence of chickens. Chickens smell vile. The award for Most Vile Moroccan Smell is a toss-up between camel fart and chicken coop.

I went to an oriental dance class last night with a few friends. It was a good workout, if you consider that climbing a flight of stairs may be the only physical activity I have all day. It was a belly dancing class. American hips can’t move like that, period. When I got home (wet to the knees because of the accursed Ankle Splashers) I discovered my sister Soukaina is ridiculously good at oriental dance.

clean!

My first day back home in Rabat after our Southern Excursion. Hajja did laundry last night, so I was greeted by all my clothes hanging up in the central court. I’m still not sure how I feel about my undergarments on public display, though.

As the first step of Southern Excursion Detox I got up early and went for a run down by the Bouregreg. I timed it just right and hit breakfast about 30 seconds after I got home. And get this, our breakfast viewing was Aladdin. That’s right, the Disney favorite. Does anybody else think it’s weird that I was watching Aladdin with Moroccans? I wonder how they feel about the portrayal of an Arab kingdom as seen through the eyes of American children everywhere. It is like me watching what Bollywood thinks America is? Because Bollywood America always involves far too much midriff.

Soukaina and I went to the hammam, which is always fantastic. I will miss the hammam. Today we sat in the hottest room for 10 minutes and it was glorious: like a sauna but better because there was soap involved. I hope you don’t mind me talking all about my hammam experiences because I’m pretty sure it’s haram (forbidden) to do so if you’re a Moroccan. I’m not worried about H’shouma (shame, Moroccan-style) in this blog. If you’re reading my blog we’re probably had more awkward conversations.

It was such an extremely good hammam experience I was exhausted and took a nap when we got home. I got another Alone Tagine for lunch, which I inhaled without being told to “kuli, kuli”. I met up with some friends and walked around the nouvelle ville (the new part of the city outside the medina walls). I ran some important errands, including the acquisition of toothpaste (herby flavor) and toilet paper. The most popular toilet paper here is pink.

And here I am writing four-days worth of blog posts retroactively while wondering if there’s tea tonight. I sincerely hope so because I have the munchies something awful and lunch was at 4pm.

Is it juvenile of me to say I don’t want to go to class tomorrow?

southern excursion day 7 and homeward

We lugged our luggage to the bus station, accompanied by a puppy we nearly smuggled (ok not really) onto the bus with us. Our hotel search in Marrakech took awhile, but we eventually got some rooms on a street a stone’s throw away from the Jemaa Lfna.

We spent the rest of the daylight walking around the city, getting postcards, and going to the Bahia Palace. The Bahia Palace was built in the 18th century by one of the sultan’s viziers and then used as the residence of the French resident general. The only thing left of the palace is the building and the interior decoration, like the magnificent painted and carved cedar and plaster ceilings.

After dark the Jemaa Lfna really comes alive, and becomes way less touristy. Food stalls and tents spontaneously appear, serving food of questionable quality to tourists and locals alike. The smoke and lights made the square look like it was filled with white fireworks. We saw some performers, but not many. There were some fortune tellers, dancers, and also games where you could win a bottle of soda(?). We hung around for about 20 minutes until I noticed we were being followed by a super sketchy guy, at which point we hauled ass over to the Koutoubia mosque square to meet other friends.

G doesn’t go clubbing. The other three ladies I was staying with went out that night while I went to bed early. I didn’t have anything to wear anyway.

We caught the train the next day at 1pm, and arrived back in Rabat at 6pm. Although it was great fun to travel around the country for a week, I was glad to get back to Rabat. 57 Rue des Consuls does feel like home to me now. I had an awkward Alone Tagine for dinner and went to bed early.

The Alone Tagine is so called because I eat alone, from my own mini-tagine. Since my family eats dinner really late, I’ve been getting my meals earlier in the evening; for instance I had dinner when the rest of the family was having tea. I do appreciate Hajja making me dinner early, and even though it is a bit awkward, it’s my one American Thing I wouldn’t change. I just can’t handle eating so late at night and then going to bed immediately afterwards. I also get the hubs basket to myself, which may or may not be a good thing…

southern excursion days 5 and 6

I spent the first hour or so of the drive to Essaouira hemming the scarf I bought in Rissani. It’s an extra big scarf of a dark cobalt blue dipped in black on the ends. It’s extra big because you can wrap it around your head to create a proper turban-type thing. Because it’s a desert town, everybody in Rissani, even men, wears a scarf for when sandstorms kick up suddenly. Anyway, the hemming was less a display of my domestic skill than it was a way to keep the scarf ends from fraying.

You’ve probably noticed I like scarves by now. It would be a bad habit, buying all these lengths of different fabrics, except this is Morocco, and what is more feminine and proper than scarves?

Driving through all this farmland, I got to thinking about fertility. The whole country is fairly popping with life: there’s farmland and herds of animals everywhere, oodles of little children, and more puppies and kittens than you could shake a stick at, not to mention the emergent and rich Amazigh culture. Fertility isn’t limited here.

Essaouira is a beach town, even in the winter, when pasty Europeans fly south to get sunburned. The town was Portuguese for 200 years, from the 1500s to the 1700s, so it has European-looking ramparts and towers ringing the medina and port. We spent the afternoon wandering around the medina, because there are no sights, unless you count the beaches. Again, lots of tourists and the same old stuff in the tourist souqs in addition to the goods made of thuya wood, which looks like mahogany.

Essaouira is known as a surf/hippie town, so some of the young Moroccan men sport quantities of dreadlocks. Surfers could be seen riding the muddy waves of the cove.

The next morning the bus left for Rabat, but we weren’t on it. Only six people were, in the end. Most people chose to stay in Essaouira or went back to Marrakech for the weekend. We strolled along the beach, sat at cafes, and relaxed all day. A high point of the day that I will mention is our vegetarian lunch at a vegetarian café (catering to tourists no doubt) because it was, guess what, made of entirely vegetables. It was beautiful.

A group of us got a room at a hotel directly opposite the wall and ocean. It wasn’t the best of hotels, but hey, we’re students and we’re cheap. It was nice because our room opened onto the terrace, so our window looked out over the walls and ocean. Middle-of-the-night bathroom runs were very scenic because you could see the fishing boats cresting the horizon and making their way to the port. And the clear night sky filled with stars, that was good too.

southern excursion day 4

Spirits were low this morning because of the grey, rainy weather, not to mention the fact that 35 women had to use four turkish toilets. I know you’re probably tired of hearing about turkish toilets and showers, but really, that’s all we talk about. It’s important. Toilets are anyway, I couldn’t really care less about the showers, but some girls need to plan their week around when they can shower.

Moving on, the incessant rain for the past few weeks has taken its toll on the countryside: widespread flooding. The road from Ourzzazate was flooded in several places, forcing us to stop each time. The bus driver just drove through some raging torrents as if they were puddles. We were stopped for a good half hour at one stream. Nobody was crossing it, including us. Buses and cars were stopped and the drivers were having a little powwow at the edge of the rapids. An impatient CTM bus (one of the national bus lines) tried to cross the ocean and got stuck on a gravel bar. Eventually a heavy-machinery-giant-shovel-thing was sent in to clear the gravel and thus allow the water to flow down the valley and us to drive through it.

It wasn’t a bad stop really, we got cookies (biscuits!) and I discovered that my camera didn’t work. I guess I got some sand in the lens, and it got jammed open. Thankfully my friend Jesse has let me steal some of her pictures. Thanks Jesse! I did miss taking pictures of the High Atlas, Marrakech, Essaouira, and the rest of our trip, which was frankly, a total bummer.

Once we got the Marrakech and dropped our stuff at the hotel, we set out to explore the city for a few hours. Our first stop was Djmaa Lfna, the main square of the city, and some say the entire country. Our guide books were very eloquent about it, but during the day it’s a giant tourist trap, with henna ladies, monkey handlers, and others of the sort.

The souqs of Marrakech were very clean, but had the same stuff I’m used to seeing in many of the cities we visit, except for the surfeit of tourists. I did purchase a hat from a sweet-looking Amazigh lady. To be honest, I only stopped because she looked so nice. She didn’t speak Arabic, so the shopkeeper next door did all the bargaining. So I got a Purple Berber Beanie for 40dh, which I could have bargained down more (it started at 60dh), but I thought $5 was ok. The hat came in handy shortly because it started to rain. I was quite the sight, with my purple beanie under my pink scarf, but I look strange enough to Moroccans anyway so it wasn’t much of a change.

As the rain started to come down, I felt at one with the Marrakshis, dashing for doorways, not quite avoiding puddles, holding things over our heads, and in general getting soaked despite our best efforts. Moroccan puddles are nasty, in the cities anyway. You don’t really know how deep they are or what may be floating in them. I had Marrakech grit and nastyness all the way up to my knees.

southern excursion day 3

So about that predawn wake-up, it really felt like I was going to hop into a boat for crew practice instead of onto a camel to ride around the dunes. Some of our camels were late, creating initial fears that some students would not have a camel all to themselves, but they eventually arrived. Camels are smelly creatures and very flatulent. Another thing, did you know that camels have a special snack stomach? That’s right, they eat some food items whole and store them in s separate stomach that allows them to regurgitate, chew, and eat it again. All the camels were tethered in lines of four or five, so I was able to hear the camel directly behind me access its snack stores. Vile.

We rode the camels out to the nearest high dune to watch the sunrise. The moonset directly behind us was more spectacular if you ask me.

The Land Rover drivers went crazy driving us back to Rissani, doing desert donuts and swerving all over.

After yet another fulfilling handful of hours on the bus, we stopped in N’qob for lunch at one of the many kasbahs in the town. In the south, Kasbahs are not walled towns, they are more of a fortified house. The grounds of the kasbah had fruit trees, a small museum, and a pool. We all wanted to stay there instead of continuing on to Ourzzazate.

Possibly the most irritating incident of the day was the fly storm in the bus. One of the boys had left a bag of garbage on the bus overnight in the desert and it had spontaneously created a swarm of flies. We had to drive with the back door open to get rid of them, and even then there were some devious ones that managed to remain for the rest of the trip.

On our way to Ourzzazate we passed through the Draa River valley, which looked remarkably like the Ziz except it was a different color. And probably had many different cultural stuffs but we didn’t stop to find out and drove right on through.

I don’t think I can adequately describe the roads on which we were driving through the Middle Atlas, or the speed at which our driver was taking them. Remember that our driver has balls of steel? They must be titanium or something because these roads had only a guardrail between you and a 1,000-foot drop and he was driving in both lanes at once. We had to have a sick break for one of our number once we got to the valley floor because we’d been lurching around so much.

We stayed with other students in a dorm in Ourzzazate. The dormitory is the result of a foundation called Association Tischka, which provides housing in the city for girls from distant towns. Since they live so far away, they wouldn’t have been able to get to Ourzzazate for high school everyday by themselves, nor would it have been acceptable for them to stay in the city alone. The dormitory, Dar Taliba (House of the Students), gives them a secure environment for them to stay while they study in the city.

We slept on bunks, so it felt like one enormous sleep-over. But I got sick again that evening, so it wasn’t all fun and games for me, especially as they only had Turkish toilets, and that’s all I’m going to say. We got to have dinner with the students and chat, so far as we were able in our mélange of languages. The girls at my table were all from Zagora, a town east of Ourzzazate. Three were still in high school but one was studying film production (Ourzzazte is the capital of Moroccan film) They were eager to hear about what we were doing in Morocco, and gave us suggestions about what to see in Marrakesh the next day.

I don’t even know if I can count this evening as being in Ourzzazate seeing as I didn’t actually see any of it. I’ll save it for the next visit.

southern excursion day 2

The bus left this morning under grey skies, but the rain held off. We spent the first half of the day driving through the Middle Atlas, listening to presentations the students on the bus neither wanted to do or hear.

The high point of the day was the scenery we got to see: a tizi (mountain pass), the Ziz river valley, and the beginning of the desert. The Ziz River valley carved out a gorge in most places, and in some it’s big enough that whole villages have sprung up around the river. They cultivate palms and other shorter plants that can live under the palms. The villages are the same color as the earth because they’re made entirely of mud bricks, so the only reason you can see them against the land is a difference in texture and shape.

We seem to have very interesting rest stops. No lie, we stopped in the Ziz River valley, no trees in sight, and had 15 minutes to scout out a private place to relieve ourselves. I’m sure it looked crazy from where the bus stood because there were about 35 girls running all over the hillside, ducking out and disappearing behind rocks.

After another brief rest stop, this time in the town of Errachidia, we continued on to our lunch in Rissani, a crossroads on the edge of the desert. Lunch was something called “buried bread” ( in Arabic “hubsa medfouna”). It was a Rissani calzone is what it was, although I don’t know what exactly was in it.

In Rissani we left our giant tour bus for Land Rovers to take us into the desert. A sandstorm was kicking up around this time, making the 30 minute drive to Merzouga not very scenic. There was nothing around to see anyway, except signs marking side roads to auberges (small hotels) cupped somewhere in the low hills.

In Merzouga we visited the Hasi Labiad Association, which helps women and families by providing women with income from crafts, but also by hooking tourists up with village families. The tourists get to see how a traditional family lives, and the family gets some sort of stipend (I think). Part of the money goes to a village fund, so when there is enough money every few years it goes towards a project for the village. The women of Merzouga also produce traditional Amazigh (Berber) handicrafts that they sell, either to tourists, in fairs around the country, or in Europe.

Also in Merzouga we went to the palm grove, rather uncomfortable in a sandstormish-type environment. Each family has their own plot within the larger grove and throughout there are small irrigation channels. Each family has rights to a certain amount of water as well, like a half-day or quarter-day. When they have finished using their water for the day the channel leading to their plot is plugged with sand.

Water rights are just as important as land rights; for example you could own the land but not the water on it and vice versa. I was quite intrigued by this system of sharing the water. Does it work on the based on the honor code? If you see your neighbor has had his allotted half-day but not plugged his irrigation channel, can you stop the water for him? What kind of etiquette is involved? Anyway, very interesting.

On down the road to our auberge. Because of the inclement weather (sand is weather?) our planned camels for that afternoon were cancelled and we lounged about the auberge (Auberge Ayour) for the afternoon. Once the wind calmed down quite a few of us ventured out into the dunes behind the town. It’s really an island of dunes, only 28km by 3km, but it was big enough for us. Since the wind was still blowing I had my scarf wrapped around my head. I was very stylish. The sunset was gorgeous, but not as beautiful as our buffet dinner.

On this whole trip, everybody ate way too much. I think it was something to do with the ability to eat if you wanted, and not being told to “kuli, kuli” by family members. The fact that it was a buffet, with VEGETABLES, no less, made it even better. I still couldn’t avoid the hubs.

After dinner we had a performance of Gnawa music. The term can be used to refer to the people of western Africa, or the music, or both at once. The group uses big dumbbell shaped castenette thingies, a 3-stringed lute, drums, and vocals. They cross a duple and triple beat, so it’s very catchy. The musicians are also dancers. The dances are vey simples though, just moving back and forth, side to side, to the beat. It’s a very meditative kind of music and dance. We got up and danced too, but I don’t think we were quite as meditative about it.

It was such a beautiful night that some of us decided to sleep on the roof of the auberge. My room was on the roof anyway, it was a tower room, but sleeping under the starts seemed much more appealing than in a stuffy room. The night was wonderful, but like all such attempts, I slept very little. I got a bit too cold for my liking so I went inside. We had to get up at 5am anyway, so nobody got much sleep.

southern excursion day 1

We had a whirlwind drive across the country to start our week of awesomeness, otherwise known as the Southern Excursion. We left Rabat this morning and went east to the Middle Atlas mountains.

I didn’t mind spending so much time on the bus today because the countryside was so beautiful. As a result, I have far too many blurry photos taken from the bus window, and even worse, from the front of the bus. I couldn’t help it, really!

Occasionally Lahcen would chime in about something we were passing, like onions on the plateau about the town of Eyebrow (it’s really called that, but I don’t remember the Arabic name). The farmers preserve their onion crop on stone walls, to dry them out I guess, to await the time when they go to market in the city. Lahcen’s commentary went something like this:

“Those are how the farmers keep their onions until there’s a good price in the city for them…these are red onions, but in the south there are also yellow onions, which are also interesting…but I like the red onions, but you need to cook them…and if you eat a lot you’ll need chewing gum…(extended pause)…which I have…”

Our first official stop was in Ifrane, a relatively recent city. The French built it up to look like a winter resort in the Alps, so all the houses look like Swiss chalets. It looked a bit like Disney World because everything was so clean, well organized, and followed the same general design scheme. Ifrane is also a destination for Moroccan tourists. We picked up 5 bags of hubs (bread) for lunch and the bus disappeared for about 20 minutes before it was finally located.

We stopped for lunch on the side of the road, pretty much the only spot where the bus could pull off the road. The forest was very open and sunny with lots of fallen trees to sit on. The hubs reappeared and cheese, peanut butter, jam, tuna in tomato sauce, Nutella, and olives were produced from a large cooler. After descending on the food like locusts we scattered around the clearing, perching on logs and gleefully stuffing our faces. Several groups set out in the underbrush to find pee trees, and only two people were lost.

Back on the bus we were all tired and passed out until we reached the town of Azrou. Azrou funnels down a valley between two mountains and eventually spreads out on the valley floor like an alluvial flow. We were dropped off next to the mosque and told to map the town socially, economically, age-wise, etc. in 40 minutes. Yeah right. So we strolled around the town center in groups, gathering strange looks and have men talk to us, you know, the usual. Jesse and I sat for a while on the bluff above the new part of the city and got sunburned. Then the Rock of Azrou (I have no idea why it’s so important) proved just too persuasive. So we climbed it. The Rock of Azrou is a giant knobbly lump of smooth pocked limestone. It also has a crown on top. We made the summit in under 10 minutes, narrowly avoiding the piles of poo along the way. We didn’t stay long at the top because we were already late for the bus. Although the scramble down wasn’t difficult, some construction workers below found it in their hearts to yell at us, Tarzan-style.

Anna sprained her ankle walking around Azrou! Some high curb bit her or something. It could have happened to any of us. Thank goodness Will had his giant first aid kit handy so her ankle could be wrapped.

We made a short stop in the cedar forest near Azrou (I think it was Ifrane National Park) for a lecture and some macaque chasing. Long story short: people in Morocco don’t understand that you shouldn’t litter everywhere. Coming from America, I just don’t understand how you can not not understand that littering is bad for the environment. There’s also a complicated network of reasons why keeping the forests “pristine” is difficult, starting with the fact the macaques eat the topmost cedar branches during a drought. That’s right, only the top ones. There were also men leading (dirty) horses around so tourists could ride them (the horses, not the men).

For the next two hours we drove through country that looked alternately like Scotland, on account of all the sheep and stone walls, and Colorado, on account of the wide open spaces and rocks. Between dozing off and Lahcen’s running commentary, I managed to take even more blurry photos of the countryside. We must have had the same bus driver as when we went to Moulay Idriss, because he was king of the road. Seriously, this man was taking up two lanes with this tour bus, passing cars, negotiating narrow mountain roads.

Our hotel here in Middelt is gorgeous and guess what makes it even more wonderful. That’s right, a western toilet and shower. The roof over the restaurant downstairs reaches out beyond our rooms so we have kind of a balcony, except there’s no doors so we jumped out the windows. We have a stunning view of the snowcapped mountains (very Lord of the Rings-y), and there was a full moon tonight.

In other news: Happy Birthday Mr. Prophet Mohammed! It’s a pity we had to travel today because my family wanted me to be with them for the holiday. Today is Eid Al-Nawlib and there are festivities everywhere.

Perhaps because they are out of the office, the CCCL, Lahcen, Nabil, and Nawal are all working the casual look. Lahcen especially, as he was wearing designer jeans and fancy sneakers (he’s probably in his 40s). All I can say is he should have invested more in a functional belt. Allison and I think we should keep a running Creeper Tally, this instance of I-didn’t-need-to-see-that being point number one.

Clearly, my internet connection will not allow me to upload all the fabulous photos I took throughout the week, so I'm going to try and post them on Facebook. I don't know how that will work, out so keep checking back.

Chellah: archaeological site or playground?

Happy Birthday Mom!

After weekdays where all our waking hours are scheduled, a free day baffles me. It’s a Friday too, so the whole atmosphere is very slow. I guess I could do something, but I would much rather sit around and read, like I would do at home when I’ve nothing to do.

On the bright side lunch was absolutely amazing today. We had a roast chicken covered in fries and stuffed with tasty shredded squash, and bread of course. I was actually still hungry when it was gone; there’s first. Today was also a good day to be fretted over during a meal because I got tasty chicken pushed onto my plate. Second-best meal in Morocco thus far, the first being the pastilla at the CCCL during orientation week.

This afternoon I took a break from all my relaxing and went to Chellah with Emily and her sister Aicha. The Chellah complex was originally built by the Romans to oversee the Bouregreg river valley. It’s an ideal spot for a fortification because it’s on a little peninsular plateau jutting out from Rabat proper, it has several springs, and has a great view of the river valley. Once the town was abandoned by the Romans, the Almohads and then the Merinids used the citadel as a burying ground. The tomb of sultan Abou el Hassan is within the ruins, as are several domed tombs of saints. A spring-fed well is a home for eels that are fed hard-boiled eggs by local women praying for fertility.

Rabatis frolic inside Chellah

The whole complex is built on hill, and the top part is a large garden covered in storks and egrets. The storks also nest in the ruined minaret. Apparently, having a stork nest in your minaret is good luck. Elsewhere in the complex are obvious signs of Roman architecture, such as toppled columns, pedestals, inscribed stone blocks, and even a mosaic. The ruins are overgrown with grasses, wildflowers, agave, and prickly pear.

Chellah is also overrun by something else: people. As a future archaeologist I didn’t know what to think about this. You can climb all over the Roman ruins because none are more than 6ft tall. You can also walk around inside the mosques which accompanied the burying ground. It was a strange experience for me, coming from culture which would generally rope off the whole area to promote preservation, but also to prevent people from hurting themselves. None of that here; there were only a few men in uniform armed with whistles that they would sound occasionally.

The Chellah grounds are used as a park by the Rabatis. Whole families were having picnics on the hill, children were playing soccer, couples were talking, and groups of young men were sprawled everywhere. This had nothing of the air of an archaeological site.

As we were walking into Chellah we asked Aicha about the history of the complex, but she knew very little, despite the fact that she said she and friends used to eat lunch and meet up there often. The draw of Chellah has little to do with its status as a historical site and more to do with it being a green space, a park. The ruins serve as more of a playground than a museum piece. This goes along with what we’d heard in class: that history is not seen as “dead” in Morocco. For example, people still visit the tombs of saints that died hundreds of years ago and speak to them as if they were sitting next to them. The past is very much still a part of the present. Museums, too, are not very prominent in Morocco, probably for the same reason.

As far as preservation goes, people climbing all over the Roman stone walls aren’t going to do much to damage the area, so why not let them? It was really fun to be able to walk freely around the ruins. The Islamic part was the area that had the guards, but then again the buildings there were still intact for the most part.

I think it’s nice to be able to open up the complex to everybody and make it a part of city life. Instead of having a somber and contemplative air as an abandoned town and necropolis, Chellah is still full of life and activity. The use of space reflects the Moroccan view of the past as a part of life in the present. ISP here is come.

Emily and I agree that our diet rich in bread and sugar is making us crave…bread and sugar. It’s a self-perpetuating problem.

Casablanca

I went to Casablanca today, and I am exhausted now. We did so much walking. The whole program went, but not on the bus: SIT gave us train tickets, meal vouchers, and the addresses of sights in the city, and then left it up to us to go. We took the train this morning (about an hour) and made it to Casablanca in time to go to the 11am tour of the Hassan II Mosque. It’s the third largest mosque in the world, and one of the only ones in Morocco that allows non-Muslims inside, for a fee of course.

The Hassan II Mosque

The Hassan II Mosque took only 6 years to build, but workers and craftsmen were on the job 24 hours a day in shifts. The cost is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (US$). The materials are the best money can buy: local and Carera (Italian) marble, cedar wood, titanium, and Venetian glass. The whole building is marble, something like 10 hectares, our tour guide told us. The cedar wood and titanium were chosen because they resist corrosion. One-third of the mosque is built on land reclaimed from the sea, and hangs out over the ocean. Hassan II built the mosque like this because a verse in the Qur’an says that the throne of God is on the water. He took it literally. The central portion of the roof can also be retracted, like a stadium, to let daylight and fresh air in, especially during Ramadan when the mosque is filled to capacity, 25,000 inside and 80,000 outside. It’s an enormous complex, and you can see the minaret from miles away.

the opulent interior of the Hassan II Mosque

On our English language tour, we met up with two other travelers. These two guys were friends who worked in London, one was Australian and one was Danish. We all (6 from the SIT program and these 2 guys) walked along the coast to Ain Diab on a super sketchy abandoned road and then on an equally abandoned sidewalk. We had lunch at a McDonald’s, if you can believe that. They were one of the only places that accepted our food vouchers. The McDonald’s here are so classy they look almost like Panera Bread back home.

After lunch we walked along the beach and enjoyed the ocean until the beach suddenly ended. A nice man let us through a gate and into Ain Diab proper, right into the parking lot of the movie theater Amine had told me about the day before. Weird coincidence. We went to the Al-Saud library, one of the sights that was recommended to us, only to find the staff had no idea we were coming. We had an awkwardly short tour and then left.

We walked along the main drag of Ain Diab, which looks strangely like Manhattan Beach with all the palm trees, beachside cafes, and expensive houses. Our group split because the guys wanted to find a bar, and some of us didn’t. 4pm is a bit too early to start drinking if you ask me, and alcohol is expensive here too. I had avocado juice instead, although it was more like an avocado smoothie (so tasty!). We took a taxi back to the train station, bought relatively expensive munchies, and then spent an uncomfortable hour on the train back to Rabat because it was so crowded we had to stand.

I have never been so glad to get back to tea. My feet hurt from all the walking and I got a bit of a sunburn. I like the French: J’ai attrapé un coup de soleil. It literally means “I caught a sun cut.”

I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow, but whatever it is, I’m going to sleep in.

a moment on the roof

I had a wonderful day, but not for any one particular reason. Arabic this morning went quickly, mostly owing to the fact that our real classes ended early with a nice quiz. All the classes gathered downstairs after their quizzes for a lecture on Koranic schools. We pretty much got to play pretend. We all sat on plastic mats while Badrdine (one of the Arabic teachers) gave a little presentation on Koranic schools. Children go to these schools until they’re around 10 years old, and they learn to memorize the Koran by reciting it, almost in a singsong manner. Students write on wooden boards covered in dried clay, with ink made from goat skin and milk mixed with water. I won’t go into all the details of the presentation, but it was a fun time. The whole thing was in Arabic, and miraculously I understood all of it.

As it was a glorious day, I hauled myself up to the CCCL terrace after lunch and just lay out in the sun. It was the noon (12:45ish) call to prayer, the sun was shining, and I had a full stomach. I can’t really describe it, but baking there in the sun, letting the muezzins’ voices wash over me, I felt calm and complete and one with the world. There was no other place I would have rather been at that moment.

In the afternoon we had short presentations on our upcoming Southern Excursion (!) and our day trips to Casablanca tomorrow. Then we all piled onto the bus and went to the Royal Institute for Amazigh (Berber) Culture. The whole visit was kind of surreal. It’s this giant, obviously new, building, but there was nobody in it. We had a short tour from the Director of Translations, but saw probably three other people in the whole complex. We got a lengthy lecture from the Director of Translations, outlining the institute’s purpose and mission. Of course I nearly fell asleep, like everyone else. If can’t be helped really: 3pm is prime naptime.

In a nutshell: the Amazigh is the cultural group that was present in North Africa before the Arabs overran it in the 9th century A.D. The word “Berber” was a term used by the conquerors, and has therefore begun to fall out of usage in favor of “Amazigh”, the name the people themselves use. Translated it means “The Free People”. The Amazigh resurgence in Morocco today is a cultural movement that calls for recognition of equal cultural rights, including language. Many Moroccans are of Amazigh descent, something like one third (and probably more) of all Moroccans. The Amazigh people were never persecuted, but in the face of widespread Arabization that occurred over centuries, many were simply absorbed into the Arab culture and stopped identifying with the Amazigh culture. The movement today aims to preserve the Amazigh language by teaching it in schools, standardizing it, and creating a more visible identity. The Amazigh dynamic within Morocco is difficult for me to understand, but to make a long story short, it was once pretty taboo to identify with being Amazigh. That is no longer the case. The institute gave us some of their nifty publications: a brief survey of Amazigh history and national landmarks.

Later I met up with some friends by the riverfront walk, and we did a little shopping in the souk. I bought a backpack for our Southern Excursion next week. The shopkeeper said 200 dirhams and I got it down to 150 and left it there, although my shopping companions assured me I could have got it lower. At least I brought it down some: it was my first real bargaining experience where somebody would actually bargain with me.

I came home, had a nice late tea with my family, took a shower (kind of), and my clothes are in the washing machine. Tea has become interesting lately, because I just spectate while the family talks together. It’s kind of nice because I get to observe, instead of having to try and describe my day’s activities in sub-par French. This evening I think Amine and Al-Hajj were arguing about a traffic incident, or the location of some event, because the table was turned into an impromptu map: the knives were the curbs of the roads, the jam saucer became a building, and after a brief search the spoon was designated the autobus. I think the whole thing was actually about a bus getting stuck on a curb somewhere (?).

complications

If this were the fall, I would just turn my laptop off and leave it at home. But as it is the spring, I need to bring it with me to the CCCL all the time; spring is the season for registration, housing, and internships. I’m currently trying to line up an interview with the archaeologist from Klamath National Forest, and having a hard time of it. First of all, California is 8 hours behind Rabat time, which makes this a mammoth task to begin with. Add to that my sporadic internet connection and limited availability, and you’ve got one stressed Geneva.

Conclusion: I broke down and bought a modem at Maroc Telecom this afternoon. I can get internet at my house now, but only if I unwind my laptop’s power cord to its fullest extent and sit right up against the window frame. The poor connectivity may also be due to the fact that I am surrounded by brick and adobe houses with very little space between. (Hajja’s making dinner, I think, and it smells like…hot dogs?) My laptop battery is also about to give up the ghost, become an ex-battery, expire and go to meet its maker, etc. In other words, it’s about to die and get recycled and sent to China.

When I bought my modem today, I waited for 20 minutes, but then it took less than 10 minutes to actually buy it. In the US such a transaction would take way longer. One of the nice things about Morocco is that kind of speed and single-mindedness. I suppose it makes administration and bureaucracy a total mess here, but it makes buying things much simpler for me.

I’m getting sucked into the soap operas here, Scheherazade especially, and not just because I like the music. All of them have catchy opening songs, and when they pause for commercials there’s a special little jingle that is becoming as familiar to me as anything back home in the States.

I miss being active. I never realized how much I structured my day around practice and workouts, let alone the importance of the social aspect. I don’t want to join a gym for several reasons: they’re not as clean as I’d like (this is probably the only place I’d complain of cleanliness), I don’t want to be hassled by muscle-y Moroccan men, and I don’t want to spend the money. So that leaves me rounding up friends to go running and doing improvised weight circuits in my room like a creepy person. Did I mention one of the family’s previous students rowed for Yale? Yeah. They showed me pictures and I felt woefully unfit.

I miss you Skidmore Crew! I can’t wait to get back on the water in the fall!

I have an exam tomorrow morning in al-arabiya (this way of saying it is an abbreviation of al-lugha al-arabiya, meaning “the Arabic language”). I suppose I should study for a bit…

Tangier etc.

So I can’t pretend to like everything on this trip. I did not like this weekend’s trip to Tangier, and here are the reasons why:

1. the 4 hour bus ride there
2. living with 5 other girls in a cramped, but nice, apartment
3. how those same girls thought it would be a good idea to buy lots of bad wine and get drunk last night
4. tourists are not a novelty, they are a source of income only
5. we got hassled way more by men on the street
6. other things…

Here are the things that I liked:
1. lunch on Saturday at a tapas restaurant called Zoco Chico, where the owner was very nice and the food was amazing
2. walking around the medina
3. the view from pretty much anywhere in the city
4. the cleanliness of the streets

Once we got back to Rabat we tried to catch a cab, and a cabbie herded four of us into a Petit Taxi, which is illegal (only three per Petit Taxi). And then we noticed he didn’t have a meter, so we got out, got hassled, and hailed another cab which dropped us off right outside the medina next to a clump of police officers. I was tired, sketched out, and hungry. It was not a good time.

I was so glad to get back home to 57 Rue des Consuls. I returned in the midst of a cleaning frenzy which was precipitated by the washing machine overflowing (?). My French isn’t working so well right now, but they got the idea that I’m tired.

I didn’t come to Morocco because it was going to be easy. I decided to study abroad in North Africa because I knew it would be different from everything I had ever experienced and I would come away from it a wiser person. This is hard, I admit. I’m tired of eating so much bread and cookies and sugar, I’m mentally exhausted from living in three languages, and I miss my friends and family back home just like everyone else in the program at this minute.

I think it’s a turning point though. Having such an awful time in Tangier really made some of us realize how much at home we were in Rabat. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. This is also the time where we just have to abandon all our feelings of discomfort with our surroundings, and accept what and where we are. It’s no use missing what you can’t have.

This next part is because I know you appreciate my honesty and frankness, and also because I just need to complain to somebody: some of the girls in this program are rather high maintenance. If they absolutely require a western toilet and hot water so they can shower everyday and shit without squatting, then why did they choose to study abroad in Morocco? The mean part of me can’t wait to see what they do for the village stay.

respect your zone

So you know about my newfound love affair with bread already, but I bet you are still curious, eh? Bread is anathema in the US, but here bread is life. Bread is at every meal, in fact, it is the entire meal of breakfast unless I can beg an orange or a banana from Hajja. More often than not I get fresh-squeezed orange juice…Since many Moroccans eat with their hands, bread is used as a utensil to scoop the tasty food up. In the Raissi house we have small forks for most meals so this isn’t necessary. Even so, bread is used to mop up tasty sauces.

Another thing you should know about Moroccan table etiquette: RESPECT YOUR ZONE. Many meals for a single family are served in one large dish in the center of the table, and you are armed with a large spoon, if there are any utensils at all. At a round table, in a round dish, everyone has their own wedge of space from which they can eat. You must eat only the food within this zone, unless a zealous host deposits other choice tidbits in it. This practice results more often than not in the creation of walls between the zones. This phenomenon is especially prevalent on Fridays, as Fridays are the day of couscous, a slightly sticky dish that holds together well. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end because AL-Hajj just eats the rest when we’re done. OK, maybe not all the time, but I think it happened last Friday.

Side dishes, or salads, are served in individual plates for each diner. Hajja favors cabbage and cucumbers, or beets and potatoes. These are eaten with the minuscule forks I mentioned earlier.
I don’t know what the deal with meat is, but perhaps it is relatively expensive, because we don’t have it often.

In academic affairs, today was our first day of FusHa (standard classical Arabic), and we reviewed grammatical delicacies such as the idafa (possessive), question words, masdar (the gerund, a.k.a. nouns ending in –ing), and the several ways to say “because”.

This afternoon’s lecture was on Moroccan politics, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. The addition of a cappuccino to my afternoon schedule may have had something to do with that.

I spent the afternoon messing about on the internet, applying for another summer internship (At Mesa Verde!) and trying to Skype with my dad, except the internet cut out about 10 minutes in (Sorry dad!) and I couldn’t reconnect. Balls.

It also had been raining all day, so evening plans to go out with some friends and Amine got cancelled. I did, however, have a pleasant experience with my French this evening, when I skipped English in my thought process and went directly from idea to French. If only my Arabic would do the same…

I think I am pretty much better after the great Weekend of Stomach Badness, but my tummy still aches. Perhaps I could tell my family that it only tolerates vegetables.

bathe once a week but soaps every day

No internet when I arrived at the CCCL today. I never realized how essential the internet is to my existence. OK, maybe not my existence, but my feelings of comfort.

This morning it rained buckets, literally. In the Raissi household, water from the roof is funneled down into the house and collected in buckets to be used later for watering the plants. Soukaina had to change the buckets several times during the morning.

And that’s another thing, as the youngest member of the house, and a girl, Soukaina does lots of chores. She cooks when Hajja is at work and sees to the requests of her father and brother. I certainly never had to do that much around the house, but then again I’ve also never had to live with a mom, a dad, and a brother.

When I get back home in a few months I will be happy to help with household chores (within reason, family!). I’m still treated as (what I think of as) a guest. It’s a strange and new dynamic for me because I’m used to going about my own business by myself. Like I said before, the family thing is brand new to me.

Here’s another cultural phenomenon that I am unfamiliar with: soap operas. I’ve seen three so far in my house:

Aina Aba?- Originally Mexican but dubbed in Darija. It has lots of mariachis and flashbacks.

Scheherezade- Originally Turkish but dubbed in Darija. Great camerawork of Istanbul. Whenever Scheherezade is onscreen the music turns into Scheherezade by Rimsky- Korsakov.

Vaidehi- Originally in…something Indian, but dubbed in Darija. Watching this one makes me dizzy because there are so many shots flashing from one character to another. Al-Hajj likes to sing along to the theme song.

And I’m sure there are more. They’re a bit overdone for my taste, but then again I’m not a connoisseur. The whole family loves them.

four dynasties, one weekend

If there’s a Moroccan “Delhi Belly” equivalent, then I definitely had it this weekend, making our excursion to Meknes and Fes less than enjoyable. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say it was very uncomfortable.

This weekend was our Four Dynasties in One Weekend whirlwind tour of the cities of Meknes, Moulay Idriss, Volubilis, and Fes. We took a bus tour through Meknes, where we were the Tourists. It was very strange: I’ve spent the last few weeks trying not to look like a tourist, because I do actually live in the Medina in Rabat, for a while at least. We only got off the bus to snap photos (and cause one minor traffic accident) and then piled right back on. We stopped at Bab Al-Hamis (the Thursday Gate), Bab Al-Mansour (the Glorious Gate), the granaries of Moulay Ismael, and the mausoleum of Moulay Ismael.

Bab Al-Mansour

granary of Moulay Ismael

mausoleum of Moulay Ismael

Our next stop was the town of Moulay Idriss for lunch. This place was beautiful, but not big enough for our tour bus. Our driver must have had balls of steel to take that bus where he did; we nearly squashed townspeople against the walls of buildings we passed. Moulay Idriss is in the Middle Atlas mountains, situated in a steep valley right on the border between the rolling agricultural lands and the mountain slopes. It reminded me of Great Sand Dunes National Park actually, the way you could see it from miles away, cozying up against the mountains. Jess thought so too.

Moulay Idriss

After lunch at a restaurant I’m sure depends on the tourist trade, we lurched our way down a road more accustomed to donkeys than tour buses. Giant agave plants, sheep, and olive trees were scattered along the hillside. The agave plants sometimes serve as fences (or maybe boundary markers?) so lines of them march up the mountainside.

sheep and agave on the hills of Moulay Idriss

The Roman town of Volubilis sits at the foot of Moulay Idriss, on a slight rise about the rest of the valley floor. As our tour guide mentioned, the Romans really knew how to choose their sites: there are springs in the hills nearby that were accessed by aqueduct, the land is extremely fertile, and you can see for miles and miles in all directions.

a view of Moulay Idriss from Volubilis

Volubilis and the surrounding countryside

our guide in Volubilis

It felt kind of strange being able to scramble over a Roman town with no restrictions. Most of what you can see has been reconstructed by archaeologists from the ruins of the town (it was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of…um…a long time ago), so some structures have modern bricks for walls, and column tops have been placed on the bases with no trace of the actual column in between. It was such a peaceful experience to be able to ramble about in the early afternoon. There were however, some pretty serious clouds bearing down on us and it did rain a bit. The whole situation reminded me of Spirited Away, and how there’s this abandoned theme park in a grassland, but at night it lights up and becomes inhabited by spirits. If you think I’m being weird, go rent the movie.

Back on the bus for the ride to Fes. It was the most glorious bus ride I’ve ever had. If you can imagine the green fields of Virginia unrolled over the Green Mountains, you can get some idea of how beautiful the countryside in the Middle Atlas is. Now I just have to think up a subject for my ISP (individual study project) that will allow me to hang around the Middle Atlas for a month. The white buildings and minarets of distant towns stood out against the verdant fields. This just reaffirms the fact that I’m not a city girl. I can’t wait for the rural homestay, and hopefully I can stay in the countryside for my ISP.

Once we got to the hotel in Fes there was a mad dash for the showers. I’m pretty sure we upped the per capita intake of water in Fes by 50 liters.

Dinner was at another tourist restaurant, but this one included an evening’s entertainment. When we arrived there was a small ensemble playing (traditional?) music, and after dinner was served there were dancing musicians, a dancer, a small musical ensemble with dancers, a magician who address the audience in four languages, a belly dancer who did things with fire, and a wedding reenactment. Several of us agreed that this smacked a little much of Orientalism.

This morning we had a walking tour of the Medina of Fes. It made me glad that we’re staying in Rabat. First of all, it’s a labyrinth: I would have gotten lost in probably ten seconds flat. The roads aren’t even wide enough for a tiny car, and some barely wide enough for a single person. It was like an urban Howe Caverns (Google it if you’re not from upstate New York). I liked it because every little space had been used, like some kind of 3-D Tetris.

Fes medina

Because cars can’t fit, people use donkeys and mules to get around the city, which means quantities of donkey and mule poo in the roads. People leading their animals yell “Balak!” in the street, which translates roughly to “Get out of the way or I will run you over with my smelly equine!” By the time a second “Balak!” is verbalized, it’s usually too late and you are under the mule’s hooves, or so our tour guide told us. I am happy to report that nobody in our party was trampled today.

Few is famous for its tanneries, which made me never want to buy leather ever again. We climber up into a (obviously touristy) store that hade balconies from which one could view the tannery. We were given mint leaves to sniff should the smell overcome us. I had the leaves practically stuffed up my nose, a.k.a. it was VERY SMELLY.

tanneries of Fes

The bus ride back to Rabat was pretty short, because I slept the whole way back, and I got back to the house at 6:30pm. Amine was on his way out, Soukaina was at a friend’s house, and I have no idea where Al-Hajj was. Anyway, Hajja made me “un petit repas” (a small meal) for dinner, including potato cakes, a fried egg, some cabbage-olive salad thingy, and cream puffs…and tea and bread of course. We chatted for a few minutes about my weekend, and then when Soukaina got home we chatted a bit more and previewed some of my photos. I’m not used to all this familial attention.

Something our tour guide Ahmed said today stuck in my head: “No Medina without walls.” More on that later.