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.