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.

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.

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.