الصحراء

Thursday night, 2 a.m., and we all boarded yet another tour bus, our weekend bags in hand. Destination? The Sahara. Time it would take to get there? Fifteen hours. We drove and drove throughout Thursday night and Friday day, people sleeping in all imaginable positions, aisle space included, and listening to iPods in all their various forms. The time passed surprisingly swiftly, periodic stops for photos, meals, and gas station bathrooms the only signs that anything was in fact changing.

As Friday afternoon continued, though, we arrived at our hotel in Erfoud, where we did our best to cleanse ourselves of the grime of a day-long bus ride before climbing into a fleet of SUVs and heading out to the desert.

The barren flatlands soon turned to dunes, and as we stopped to take a picture, the sand between our toes (if only metaphorically, as I was wearing sneakers), it began to rain. In the Sahara. So that was bizarre.

Then we continued on our way to the campsite, where we put our stuff in our tents and hung out in the main building for a little while, after which we wandered a bit and spent some time talking with one of the many men who sell tourists fossils from the desert (which, after all, used to be a sea).

(feet, or africas? toes, in order: morocco, algeria, tunisia, libya, egypt)

As it got dark, we returned to the main building for dinner – couscous, yum – during which time I may or may not have accidentally let my napkin get too close to the open flame of a candle, catch on fire, and have to be put out by Adam's bare hand, thereby causing burn wounds (but thanks to him, not the incineration of the entire Sahara). So that was unfortunate.

Anyway, we hung out a bit and then went to sleep, dragging our mattresses from the tents into the courtyard so it'd be a bit cooler. Sand would occasionally blow everywhere, caking my eyebrows by morning, and it also began to rain the middle of the night, but it was a really neat experience regardless. And it's not like we were sleeping for that long: 5 a.m. saw us gathering, sandy and sleepy-eyed, with a group of camels and their drivers. Our goal? Ride them up to the top of the dunes in time to see the sunrise. So James and I mounted our camel, who he named Salah al-Din, journeyed across the desert with the rest of the group, and yeah, watched the sun rise. It was pretty spectacular.

We headed back by camel again, ate breakfast, and headed back to the hotel in Erfoud, where we slept and hung out for a while before getting on the bus once more in order to return to Tangier.

So that was a pretty cool weekend.

I've been to the Sahara!

Photos

Just wanted to add that there's a Flickr group where a bunch of us are posting photos from the trip. Feel free to browse/download/etc.:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/tangier09/

Tetouan and Chefchaouen

i.e., a break from the monotony. 

Nine in the morning last Saturday and all forty-five of us hopped back on a tour bus. This time, we were going to spend the day in Chefchaouen, a quaint/touristy mountain town a few hours away from Tangier. On the way there we stopped in Tetouan for maybe half an hour, but I’m not sure why, and we didn’t really do anything there. After Tetouan, though, the drive became really picturesque. Here is a photo to prove it:

And then as we were able to see Chaouen, it was also really pretty:

However, as we got even closer, got off the bus, and grabbed our prepared cheese sandwiches, it hit us: the weather was pretty unbearable. We walked through the souq, which was pretty, most of the buildings rinsed a pale indigo sort of color, most of the shopkeepers friendly and outgoing. However, my main achievement was buying a one-dirham (one!) popsicle, which was delicious and necessary for survival, I think. Then we reached the main square and sat in a café, drinking orange juice and lemon Fanta, etc., etc. The heat was still a little overwhelming, though, and I made a comment about how I wished I could shave my head. Frank, being Frank, decided he could cut it, and I was feeling just hot/spontaneous enough to go along with that. So he asked the guy at the café if we could borrow scissors, and of course we couldn’t, because it was a café, and why would they have scissors sitting around that we could borrow in order to cut my hair? However, he did direct us to a tailor down the street. So we walked there, and Frank asked him for scissors, and he gave us a pair and then a better one when Frank pantomimed cutting my hair. Then, I sat down in the middle of the street and he cut off all my hair. It was ... an experience. I am not entirely sure what I was thinking. James and Alex walked by and were equally perplexed, then even more so when they walked by an hour later and Frank was still hacking chunks of hair out of the back of my head, and some bemused Moroccan children/shopkeepers were standing around as well in a state of what I can only assume was astonishment and confusion.

In the end, the haircut didn't go particularly well, but it did achieve its aim of making me feel cooler, and when we got back James took a hair clipper to the back in order to even it out slash try to mask the bald spots. So that was something. My only fear now is that I look slightly identical to my mom...

But yeah. So that was an adventure. The drive back from Chefchaouen also involved a strange run-in. The bus had stopped so people could use the bathroom, and I decided to take a couple of pictures of the sunset:

This went as expected. However, as I was walking back towards the bus, I randomly decided to take a photo of a group of men sitting by the road. They weren't actually by the road, I suppose, as they were behind a fence (that later came in handy), presumably on private property, but still. Group of people, at a table, no motive for me to take a picture other than "hey, let me capture humanity rather than just the physical beauty of this setting." Apparently this was a Bad Idea. Upon realizing that their picture had been taken, the men leapt up from the table and started yelling, and I immediately deleted the photo from my camera and hoped I hadn't offended them too gravely. The anger and gesturing continued, though, and I frantically tried to explain in a variety of languages: laysa hunaka sura, la borré, I deleted it. I handed the camera to one of the men so that he could see, because that seemed to be his objective, but upon taking it from me he began to pantomime smashing it to the ground, and only stopped at the behest of one of the other men. The calmest of the three asked me what language I spoke and I responded English o español because clearly my MSA wasn't about to help me communicate in this situation, but no communication in any language really ever happened until the bus driver came over, said something to them in derija, reclaimed my camera, and led me back to the bus, where I proceeded to panic over the fact that I was offending people because that was so never my intent at all.

But yeah. Oops. Overall a really strange day. Got back in the evening and went to a bar/club to hang out with James' Moroccan journalist friend and some of her friends for a little while. Got back after curfew but the gate wasn't locked, which was good. Went to sleep. Woke up Sunday afternoon and got back to the whole school thing. So it goes.

Tangier.

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. It’s just that … well, it’s summer school. And also, this page hasn't been loading for the past few days. So I've been trying, really!

But anyway, we’re in Tangier now, at the American school, have been for over two weeks. The campus consists of a building of classrooms, two dorms (separate for guys and girls, but each with a common room that people of either gender may enter), a cafeteria in the guys’ dorm where they provide us with breakfast and lunch every day, and a playground, because this is after all a school and not a university. There’s flowers, palm trees, and among the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. It’s actually really nice. And the girls’ dorm is air conditioned, so that’s a plus, although really the weather here is pretty temperate. Better than Indiana definitely.

The downfall? We’re stuck in a walled compound with four hours of class and about that much homework or more every day, plus other optional classes if you want (I don’t, usually) and required speaking partners for an hour a week and occasional lectures/trips that are kind of a waste of time – spending over two hours at a museum of old stone tools, really? Add a 10:30 curfew on weekdays (midnight on weekends) and “fun” isn’t really a huge option, although we do get glimpses of it. And I mean, getting delicious mint tea between classes always makes one feel better.

Despite my griping, there has been the occasional day when I didn’t have an insurmountable amount of homework. I spent one of these walking along the esplanade for a couple of hours, which was beautiful, although I didn't really take any pictures. However, I do have some snapshots of the sea, taken from the American Legation Museum and the Kasbah respectively:

So that's nice. The land in the first picture is part of Morocco, but if you stand in the same spot and turn left, you can see Spain in the distance.

On an unrelated note, interacting with people is not something that happens much, especially since most of them speak French first, Moroccan dialect second, and Modern Standard Arabic never. I have had a pretty successful conversation with a cab driver on the way to Marjane (the Moroccan Wal*Mart, basically) in Arabic, so that was cool, but also a rarity. Then again, so is getting out of the compound for any extended amount of time. Ho-hum school.

Reverse Panopticon

Thursday, 18 June

In the shadowy light of a Moroccan riad, I wonder. Locked out of my room, I sit in the grandiose lobby of sorts, three floors of tiled walls and pillars towering above me. In old-style Moroccan homes, the rooms’ windows all face the center, looking over the inner courtyard. If they wanted to, every person in this house could be staring down at me right now.

I wonder what they’d see.

Fez

So I still don't have a very good sense of time here...the following things all took place in Fez (I think), but I don't know if they actually happened on the days I say they did. Oops. I'm just hurrying up and posting this because I don't think my memory will ever get any clearer.

Wednesday, 17 June

Bus ride from Marrakech to Fez. Saw the king's palace in Fez.

Checked into the riad, a bed-and-breakfast type thing in the style of a traditional Moroccan house, or something. It was really nice, and a pleasant change from the isolated five-star hotels we'd been staying in previously. Photos:

Thursday, 18 June

Walked through the souq.

Saw posters of Shahrukh Khan.

Saw what used to be an asylum where the treatment process involved not shock therapy or lobotomies, but rather music. 

Visited a tannery and witnessed the leather-dyeing process.

Friday, 19 June

Wandered a bit. Bought a Qur'an. Etc.

"Traditional" dinner with live entertainment that then turned into audience participation. Thankfully I was not a selected audient.

Saturday, 20 June

Oral placement exam, then day-long bus ride to Tangier. More about Tangier later. I have eight weeks.

To market, to market...

Monday, 15 June

A group of people and I wandered about the souq in Marrakech for a while yesterday. The outer limits are more touristy than the inside: snake charmers placing their snakes on people’s shoulders, telling their friends to take a photo of them, requesting money because harassing people with animals alone is just not enough; women with henna grabbing foreigners’ wrists and gracing their hands with designs before they have time to pull away, and that’ll be 250 dirhams, please; a monkey on a chain whose purpose I can’t discern. It’s all rather depressing, or at least I imagine it is for the animals involved.

Deeper in the souq, things are somewhat calmer. Vendors have set up booths to sell their wares: shoes, clothes, spices. Our group attracts attention, of course—no self-respecting lot of boisterous Americans wouldn’t  (sigh)—but nobody is too pushy towards us. When it starts pouring, we stop inside the shop of a man who sells musical instruments, and speak to him in Arabic a little. Other people are better at this than I, so I leave them to most of the conversation, but he seems really nice and dispels some of my fears of talking to people in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a thing that nobody actually speaks other than TV reporters and the like, but nevertheless what I have been studying for the past four semesters. We have learned a few phrases in derija, the Moroccan dialect, but only the really simplistic ones, and I feel silly and impostorish using them. Oh well. I assume things will get easier in the weeks to come.

Mosque we saw on the way to the souq:

And then, the souq:

This is life.

Standing on top of a playground, swings creaking in the background, I stare at the sunset. Clichéd? Yes. Gorgeous regardless? Also yes. The clouds form wisps of orange and purple behind the distant hills. 

It begins with one mosque. Allahu akbar. God is greater. Others join in at their own pace until the call to prayer is audible in surround sound. Allahu akbar. There are more words, but I don’t know them, and as each mosque blends with the others these words become indistinguishable, become something greater than the sum of their parts. Slowly, various voices die off, until one lone muezzin remains. Then that too ends.

The silence that follows conveys an inarticulable sense of peace.

Vicious Lies, Part Two

Sunday, 14 June

There is one mosque in Morocco that non-Muslims may freely enter, in Casablanca, where our flight landed this morning. (No, I haven’t seen the movie; no, I wouldn’t like it if all your comments to me referenced it.) It is the third largest mosque in the world, I think, and the largest in Africa, constructed between 1986 and 1993. There are tours available in the hours between regular prayer times (i.e., sunrise, noon, sunset, etc.). We went on one of these.

View out the bus window on the way to the mosque:

Outside:

Inside:

The upper level is for women to pray; the lower for men:

The mihrab, or direction of prayer—towards Mecca, which in the case of Morocco is more or lest east, I suppose.

The hammam (this one is for women; there is also an identical one for men). A public bath, with community-centered but not explicitly religious goals. This is actually not yet open to the public, but according to the guide, it will be soon.

There was also an ablution room (well, two: one for men, one for women), but I didn't get a picture. Wash your hands up to the wrists three times, mouth, nose, face, hands up to the elbows three times, hair, ears, right foot three times, left foot three times, and yay! Ritual purity. Maybe. I am probably remembering inaccurately. Ho-hum orthopraxy. I’d make a terrible Muslim.

Summary of Events

Hey everyone, long time no see. Sorry about that … we’ve been traveling around the country for a week and WiFi (pronounced wee-fee) has been scarce. That said: I’m in Morocco! When I last updated you I was in the states, in the nation’s capital. Since then, I’ve flown D.C. to Paris, Paris to Casablanca. I’ve bused Casablanca to Marrakech, Marrakech to Fez, Fez to Tangier. I’ve been laughed at by a ten-year-old kid after suggesting I pay 80 dirhams for the Arabic-English Qur’an he was trying to sell me for 150. I’ve bought said Qur’an from said ten-year-old kid for 125 dirhams (exchange rate ~8:1). I’ve taken two placement tests and made a surprising group of friends. I’ve realized time and again how obnoxious Americans are. I’ve realized time and again how obnoxious groups of forty-five people traveling by bright turquoise omnibus are. I’ve realized that the state department takes really good care of the students it funds. I’ve realized that I never want to work for the state department. Etc., etc., etc., and then there’s Morocco.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

Maybe I was looking for India. Where else have I walked through open-air markets that sell spices, clothing, fruit? Where else have I observed the lingering effects of colonialism? Where else have I almost been trampled by mopeds and donkeys? Where else is Shahrukh Khan a cultural phenomenon? Where else have I made the wrenching decision to not use the bathroom rather than attempt the complicated maneuvers associated with squat toilets? The list goes on, but there are striking differences.

(1)  Cleanliness. There are roads in Morocco. There are also sidewalks. These roads and sidewalks meet at 90-degree angles, creating gutters of sorts. The astonishing thing? These gutters are visible. They do not contain dust. They do not contain trash. They are simply there.

(2)  Poverty. Where is it? Yes, there are a handful of beggars in the markets, but that seems to be about it. I have yet to see homes made of corrugated metal, yet to see sheets of blue plastic that serve as walls, yet to see any real destitution. I am not sure whether it is masked or located elsewhere or really not there. The last of those choices is more wishful thinking than anything, I guess, but regardless I’d like an answer.

(3)  Overpopulation is apparently a nonissue here.

(4)  Traffic. There are traffic lights. People use them. It’s utterly confusing.

(5)  Government. Walking around, large square billboards line all the major streets. Plastered across them are various photographs of the king. Also on the money. Yep, it’s a monarchy all right…

So yeah, those are my impressions so far. I’ve taken lots of photos and written up some snippets about the past week or so traveling the country, but I’ll space them out a bit so as not to overwhelm you, my ever-faithful readers. We’re in Tangier now, at the American School in Tangier, and classes start Monday… soon things will become routine, I assume. We’ll see how that goes.