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.