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.