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.

kasbah!

I went for a run and took a shower; it was a good day. Classes were slightly less taxing than the 30-minute run. We have Arabic in the morning for 3 hours. It’s the local dialect of Arabic called Darija, as opposed to the classical Arabic called FusHa, which we start next week. Our teacher, Fatima Zohra, is very nice. The whole class is like playing Charades, but it works.

Our lecture this afternoon was disappointing because the lecturer’s English wasn’t really up to it, but she made a good effort. We were done super early, therefore, a bunch of us went to the Kasbah. It’s right across the street from my house really. It has a beautiful garden that, in theory, is good for studying, but the kittens are distracting. Street cats are everywhere, and not bending down and petting all of them tries my patience daily, especially the kittens.

So the Kasbah. A kasbah is really just a walled town and they’re all over. In fact, most cities have a kasbah at its center. The kasbah here marks the first area of settlement of Rabat, where the river Bouregreg meets the Atlantic Ocean. All the houses inside the kasbah are painted white and blue; it looks almost like Greece.

I got home around 3:30 and tried to study my Darija vocab. I tried. But I ended up taking a nap, so it’s really just like home.

Later in the afternoon I went for a run down by the beach with my friend Becca. The glorified sidewalk is actually under construction. That’s one of the things I like about Morocco, the public works are open to all. Really though, we almost ran between a dump truck and a bulldozer; there aren’t any fences or guards or anything. We were running on half-made sidewalks and curbs and it was fine.

The coast is spectacular, by the way: the waves have been eating away at the sandstones and limestones to create a 30-foot drop to the ocean. The waves were huge today, easily breaking over the tops of the cliffs.

Crazy people surf here actually; there’s an official surf club on the beach. Some members were walking home and ran me off the sidewalk with their boards (in a nice way).

That’s another thing, we girls get yelled at everywhere we go. The main road parallels the sidewalk by the beach, so can you imagine the amount of catcalls and beeping we were subject to? Yeah. A lot. You’ve just got to understand that these guys don’t mean anything hostile when they holler at us in the street. Back in the day, and still, it was a manner of courting: the only place where the sexes could mingle was the street. Guys yell at girls to get their attention, and girls can look back at them, or something, to indicate their interest. It works against however, because when somebody shouts at me I generally look. Some guys are just trying to be polite I think, but others are just trying to get your attention. Broken English is popular, as is French, and sometimes Arabic, but I don’t usually get the Arabic because I am blond, and therefore a European. Some guys will actually follow you, but that hasn’t happened to me yet. I’ve also learned to ignore pretty much everything in the street as I walk.