12-16 I saw ice today and I even stepped on it

Madrid is a bit of a shock. The weather is just the beginning. I realized that though I may have though from time to time in Morocco that I was cold, I had completely forgotten about the kind of cold in the winter that just bites and numbs fingers and noses. For the first two days, I would go out, and very soon I would be thinking, “My nose is cold, my feet are cold, my head is cold. Lets just go back to the hostel. We can see Madrid another day—it’s too cold today.” Then I realized that that is how winter is, and normally, I just face the cold and walk around…

Today, Hannah took me to sort of a Spanish equivalent of Macy’s, but even bigger. This store was seven giant floors; the escalators just kept going and going and all I could say was “What is the purpose of all this STUFF?!” I hadn’t expected such a shock because I was constantly bombarded by the material in the medina, but this was on so much of a larger scale. I felt a little nauseous. It was kind of scary—I think you could live there and never leave. They had everything—clothes, food, a post office, a supermarket… I thought it was hilarious when we were looking for the post office. It was on the lingerie floor, along with a travel agency and a craft shop…

I was also amused by the exhibit of singing, dancing dolls in the front window about Christmas around the world. The one about the US had Christmas and Thanksgiving rolled up into one with cowboys, Indians and the Empire State building. Hannah and I were left kind of speechless, but I realized that the average American probably isn’t any better informed about Spain or any other country. It made me wonder what kinds of errors we make on a regular basis.

I found some Moroccans at the hostel. I heard them speaking Darija. Now they’re trying to pick me up…

To catch up, Lauren and I spent a day walking around Sevilla, which was adorable—and clean, and acceptable to sit outside, even at night. Everyone I talk to about coming home from Morocco talks about crossing streets—I was so surprised when people just stopped for me (though also a bit baffled by the need to wait for the crosswalks in Madrid—“What do you mean we can’t cross? This side of the road is completely clear and in a minute, we’ll be able to get across the other half, too!) Somehow, as we randomly wandered through the twisting maze of streets without really knowing where we were going, we almost always wandered right where we wanted to go. I’m not sure how that worked.

We went to the Giralda, which is a Cathedral, but was originally an Andalusian mosque, which was supposedly modeled after the one in Marrakech. I was surprised at how church-y it was. Aparently they did quite a bit of converting (I think it wasn't actually finished as a mosque to begin with) and they pretty much hide the muslim side. I didn't understand anything, but Lauren said that they explained the various stages of construction, but didn't mention that it used to be a mosque...

While in the apartment in Sale, we bought a blender, and we were trying to figure out what to do with it afterwards. We hauled it all over Morocco (and didn’t end up using it at all) and thought it would be funny to bring it to Madrid and give it to Hannah as a Christmas present. However, when I found out that she decided not to stay all year, I decided that I had carried it long enough. So I gave it to the hostel in Sevilla. They were so confused as to why I was carrying a blender. So after traveling from New Sale to Safi, Essauira, Rabat, Tangier, and crossing the Strait of Gibralter, the travelling blender is residing in Sevilla.

The bus ride from Sevilla to Madrid was six hours, so I decided that was a good time to henna my own hand. Surprisingly, I managed to do it without seriously screwing up or making a giant mess.

12-12 Bislama Morocco

Bislama means goodbye, but I’ll be back in nine days—my mom and sister are coming, but for now, I’m in Spain. I didn’t have to say real goodbyes to Morocco or my families, but it was rough saying bye to all my friends. We’ve been through so much together and gotten so close, but I have no idea when I’ll see them again—especially the ones who are going abroad again next semester.

I’ll be travelling up through Spain with my friend Lauren and meeting my family in Madrid. We spent last might in Tangier (one last hurrah fro 12 dollar hotel rooms and Turkish toilets) and took the ferry over this morning. The mountains on the coast were breathtaking. I’m preparing to be shocked by European infrastructure and prices. Though so far, the bus isn’t too different—it’s still arriving two hours late, and I’m hearing plenty of Darija.

During the last week of the program, we all came back to Rabat to present our projects and say goodbye. We stayed in a wonderful hotel—the first day, our toilet didn’t flush and though we were excited about the hot water, we missed the cold—our cold taps just didn’t turn on…

I finally got around to buying henna powder and proceeded to cover anyone available (mostly Erin) in henna. People at home are going to wonder what happened.

Last Monday was apparently the Muslim new year. For the most part, nothing happened—some people got t he day off, and kids set off fire crackers all of=ver the medina all week. Erin’s host brother had three GIANT fire crackers, which he set off on the roof. My ears were ringing for a good 15 mins after. I went with Erin to couscous Friday with her family and we decided to try eating with our hands. There are a lot of foods that can be eaten fairly easily with fingers. Couscous is not one of them. I had to make a scoop with my hand and dump it into my mouth. I think we ended up with more couscous on our laps than in our mouths. After couscous, Ahmed decided to try to make fire crackers by stripping the lighting tuff off matches. Unfortunately (or probably fortunately) he was unsuccessful at lighting them.

Over the course of the semester, my hair has been getting gradually longer and stragglier, and Erin has repeatedly offered to cut it. I finally decided to take her up on it. I think my time in Morocco has skewed my sense of whether it matters how I look. I was brave enough to let her try to layer it. But it will grow…

12-6 The Home Stretch

40 pages and way too many hours holed up in various hotel rooms and I’m done with my ISP!

My plan was to spend the first two weeks researching (or cooking) and the last one writing. Erin and I decided to travel to Essaouira and Safi. We left Rabat bright and early—too bad our train was an hour late. I think it was stuck behind the party train. There was a big soccer game happening in Casa that day, and as we were waiting for our train, a train pulled up without an announcement. It was crampacked with boys, who jumped off as it stopped. After a few minutes, it started moving again, and they hopped back on—a few almost got left behind and had to run and jump on as it pulled away. As usual, we—being blonde—made a scene. When we started laughing at the boys running to catch the train, the whole bunch started yelling and singing. We could still hear them five minutes later.

On the train to Safi, we chatted with the people in our cabin, both of whom tried to invite us to stay with them. I don’t remember how we chose it—I think it came up when we were looking at the train map. We found the transfer stop to the bus to Essaouira and looked at what other cities were near by. Safi isn’t exactly a tourist destination; as we walked around, instead of catcalls, most people simply gave us confused stares. One evening at a café, a couple of guys started talking to us and were very curious how we ended up there.

We stayed in a super sketch hotel with a shared Turkish toilet. I think the man running it was pretty confused as to why we were spending all day in the room, but the fact that it was raining made it seem slightly less suspicious. The whole country pretty much flooded. The streets in Safi were rivers, and for a day or two, apparently they shut down all t he trains between Casa and Rabat because there was so much flooding. So it was a good opportunity to get some work done and not feel bad about staying inside all day.

Really, the only time we left was for diner. (Well, I went out around noon each day to pick up bread and yogurt for lunch.) At the restaurant, when we told them the food was bneen (delicious), they got really excited and brought out someone else (presumably the cook) and told us to say it again.

We tried to leave Safi on Wednesday, but unfortunately Erin got food poisoning. After throwing up in the street on the way there, she was ready to get on the bus—until she threw up again in the bus station… So we found a hotel and she slept all day. Mashi mushkil (that means no problem).

We took the bus to Essaouira. Good thing we weren’t in a hurry—the bus showed up half an hour late and then took half an hour lunch break in the middle. As we were walking through the medina looking for our hotel, we were approached by several men trying to get us to come to their hotels. The first one followed us forever even after we pretended to speak only Croatian, told him no, and tld him to go away, but for some reason, we trusted the second. He took us first to one, where the cheep room was already full, then to another, which didn’t even have a sign on the door, but was adorable and bright.

We had to stop back in Safi on the way back because Erin left her wallet at the hotel, and ended up eating lunch at a tiny little restaurant down the road. No one spoke French and the menu was in Arabic, so I went to try to sound out some options. After trying to explain that I wanted a vegetarian tajine, I ended up being shown a bunch of different tajines and pointing to the one I wanted. We ordered a tajine and an omelet, but they served us lentils, salad and fries as well…

I tried another new fruit. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera. It was another variety of prickly pear, but this time, it was BRIGHT MAGENTA. Yes, that bright. It made my lips purple. It tasted a bit like pomegranate juice, which is funny, because pomegranate doesn’t taste like pomegranate juice.

11-26 Happy Bibi Day! (slightly belated, but that should be no surprise)

Cooking bizzef continues. And somehow, it continues to succeed.

Cooking bizzef continues. And somehow, it continues to succeed. Erin’s Sheep stew turned out deliciously, and we managed to cook an entire thanksgiving dinner without an oven or a fridge. I am still baffled as to how that

worked. But we cooked a turkey leg and stuffing in a pot, as well as all sorts of other Thanksgiving-y

dishes: green bean and carrot/pumpkin casseroles, cream cheese pumpkin pie (on a plastic tray), mashed potatoes, gravy, and cider. The only things missing were sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce—it seems that cranberries don’t exist here (along with canned pumpkin, but we bought a slab of fresh pumpkin at the souk)—but I made applesauce, and it did the trick. We had a total of 12 people who had at one point or another said they were coming, but Megan ended up being the only one to actually make the trek out to Sale, so we had way too much food and sent her back to Rabat with a bunch. Aside from misgivings about the origins of the holiday, for me, Thanksgiving has always been about spending time with family, so I felt their absence. But Erin and Megan are almost family at this point, so I was glad to celebrate with them.

Today, I went into Rabat for Couscous Friday to eat couscous bizzef with Erin’s host family. In case I wasn’t full enough already… It was fun hanging out with them. It seemed to be a day of kitchen gardening. The 14 year old brother, Ahmed, had a bee caught in a jar and he created a whole little ecosystem with flowers, mint and dirt. I learned that worm in Darija is douda. His friend, Hamsa, was carrying around an onion in a cup of water, claiming he was going to grow it into a plant and get two

Also, I got Megan’s pictures, so I’ll post some that I’ve missed.

Ouizane: the little girl in this picture gave me a tour of the garden, named all the fruit for me, and found out all the big bananas. Check out the flying olives in the next pic. that's how they sorted out the sticks and leaves!

Souk--it's in a field, so it gets a bit muddy when it rains, but I love it. Everyone is surprised that I speak Darija, and confused when I try to buy vegetables in singular quantities. Sometimes I end up with half a kilo instead.

Food bizzeff: (and this isn't even all of it...) Sacrificial sheep stew, grilled cheese, burritos, rice crispy treats, spanish x-mas candies from Hannah

My fruit buying adventures also continued. We saw this at the supermarket and wondered what it was. It's called a kiwano, or African horned cucumber. It wasn't as exciting to eat as it was to look at. the inside is kind of the texture of a tomato, and tastes a bit like banana, but it is pretty bland.

In other news, after getting NO work done at all during the week of the Eid (the whole country pretty much just shuts down. We couldn’t even find bread in New Sale the weekend after, and a bread deficit in Morocco is something I thought I would never encounter.) I finally got moving on my ISP. Two of my professors who teach in English Departments at Moroccan Universities in Rabat and Kenitra let me come in to their classes to find students to interview.

On Tues, I found that the Rabat campus that I was supposed to be goining to, was almost not in Rabat—I was told that the petit taxis wouldn’t go there. So I had some bus fun, and ended up in several other departments’ campuses before finally finding the right school. I set up an interview schedule for the next day, which worked shwiya (I shouldn’t have been surprised—schedules are not a very Moroccan concept) but I came out with four interviews. While I was waiting for one of my no shows, another student started talking to me. I tried to interview him (in French), but I don’t think he really understood my project (or maybe my French), because he just talked about children and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. On Thursday, I went to Kenitra (another town about half an hour away) to meet some students of another prof. I had mentioned that I needed about four more interviews, but when I showed up, I found eight students ready to be interviewed. The day before, the interviews had run half an hour plus, so I was worried about making everyone wait, but they were really excited about it and sat around while I talked to them one at a time. Luckily, these ran faster, and I somehow pounded out ten interviews (two more showed up) in two hours. I’m glad I had a recorder. Now, I just have a lot of reading, transcribing and writing. Luckily I will very shortly be separated from my kitchen, so maybe I’ll actually get work done.

Because if I didn’t end up with some ridiculous dilemma, it wouldn’t be life in Morocco.

Even when I’m living on my own and spend my entire day in my apartment, unforeseen predicaments seem to find me. Erin and I were hanging laundry on the line on the roof and one of the neighbors was helping us/filling us in on how laundry drying works here. A few minutes after we had returned to our apartment, we heard a knock on the door, and our new friend handed us a bag of frozen meat. So now we have sacrificial sheep and have no idea what to do with it. I don’t know anything about cooking meat, and if you’ll recall, we don’t even have a fridge, so we need to figure it our pronto. And as Erin put it, we can’t throw out wholly sheep. I think that would be shuma. So we’re doing some google research and we’re going to try to make stew tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Attention = 2 * amount of blonde squared

^{Last weekend, my friend Hannah, who’s studying abroad in Spain, hopped down to visit me. She was flying into Casa late, so I went to meet her and we spent the night in Casa. Travelling down, I realized how little time I spend alone in this country. I studied the map before I got off the train, but still ended up unsure of where I was going. I don’t mind walking alone in Rabat, but I did not enjoy being shwiya lost (I wasn’t really even lost, but would have appreciated being able to look at my map without having to pull out my guidebook labeled “Morocco” in giant letters) in an unfamiliar city, especially as it was getting dark. Luckily, I managed to (pretty much accidentally) wander onto the street I was looking for. I realized that though I feel confident travelling alone in the US and Europe, I’m glad that I won’t be doing much of it here.}

I took Hannah to the hammam (it was way nicer than the ones I’ve been to in Rabat, but that meant that I was almost as lost as she was. Exploring on a Friday afternoon in Morocco was a bit of a plan fail—couscous Friday means everyone is at home with their families and nothing is open for most of the afternoon. So it was a bit empty and sketchy. But we found a pastry shop and got more than enough for both of us to eat for lunch for 17 dirhams (about $2). Hannah said that in Madrid, we wouldn’t have been able to get anything for that much. We went to see the grand mosque (and showed up just in time for a tour that I didn’t think was even happening) before heading back to Rabat, where we met my friends for an American night at Pizza hut. (I would never go there in the US, but here, we need those now and then, and it’s kind of comforting.) We got ice cream after dinner, and walking around with a third blonde in the group brought out substantial evidence to support Erin’s theory that the amount of attention received increases exponentially with the amount of blonde.

On Saturday, we explored Rabat. Unfortunately, it was raining, so we were slightly wet and miserable, but we enjoyed some couscous, marzipan balls and juice.

Seeing Hannah see Morocco for the first time really rough out how comfortable I’ve gotten here, whether it be walking in front of traffic to get across a busy road, ignoring catcalls, or navigating the medina maze or the pubic transportation system (which included walking across the train tracks to get to the next platform).

Oh, and catcall of the week: "Where are you going my pretty white chickens?"

11-16 more catching up

Ok, back to the task of filling in the last few weeks. Here are a few more noteworthy occurrences that I haven’t mentioned.

1. My camera broke during Southern Excursion (it did not appreciate the sandstorm) and I’m waiting until I’m back n the US to get it fixed, so I probably won’t be posting many photos—though I do intend to steal them from my friends (and steal their cameras to take pictures), so I might get a few up. It’s kind of interesting for me to not have a camera. I expected it to bother me a lot more than it does.

2. During ISP time, we are given about $25 a day to cover food and housing and left to figure the rest out on our own. I intended to stay in/near Rabat for the first two weeks to interview students, and I really wanted a kitchen, so I set out on the task of finding a short-term apartment. I searched a lot of sites in French and sent out lots of unreturned emails, but in the end, we had a few possibilities, so one Sunday, Erin and I went out apartment hunting. The apartment of the day was in Temara, a town in the suburbs of Rabat. Both of our host families discouraged us from living there—they said Temara was too far away and that it wasn’t safe, but we decided to at least take a look. So we got directions, got on a bus, and hoped the ticket-checker had understood my Darija when I asked if she could tell us when we were at Massira 1.

Though we had thoroughly researched the location of the apartment and had drawn a map in my journal, when we got off the bus, we realized that it would not help us—we had no idea where we were in relation to the map, and Rabat does not use street signs. Luckily, we met a very nice man (yes, they do exist, and I’m getting more comfortable making judgments as to who they are) who helped us find the café next to our turn.

The apartment was cute, but we decided that Temara was a bit of a treck, slightly sketchy, and my host mom had a friend with an apartment for much cheaper.

3. Erin and I introduced her host fam to oreos and peanut butter. Success.

4. One Saturday, my academic director invited all the students to his vacation house to witness olive pressing. So we got up at some obscene hour, rode the bus for 3.5 hrs, and arrived at a little town in the mountains. The light was so pretty and warm and the town was really cute. Abdalhay’s house was a mini paradise—a handful of different terraces and a big garden at the bottom with banana trees, orange trees, pear trees, a pomegranate tree…

It was really interesting to see the process of making olive oil. The way they do it hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. It is so simple, but also so efficient. They beat the trees with long poles to make the olives fall, catching them on tarps. Then they scoop the olives up in a bucket and toss them down the hill, catching them in another tarp. This eliminates most of the leaves and sticks, which float off in the breeze, whereas the heavy olives are carried all the way to the second tarp. The pressing process begins with grinding the olives. The olives are dumped in a giant basin, with a grinding stone in the middle, which is pulled round and round by a donkey and people. Next, the ground olive mixture is placed in wicker baskets and placed under a press to squeeze out the oil. Finally, the oil is collected in a basin and filtered with water.

11-19 And then they left me alone with the pot of BRAINS…

I spent the night after the Eid with another family—friends of my host fam who have been a bit of a second host family to me. (I’ve gone over to their house when I’m locked out, they’ve fed me dinner, and they’re the ones from whom I’m renting the apartment) They invited me for the Eid, and when I said that I was staying with my host fam, they insisted I spend the next night with them. Adorable.

They’re incredibly sweet and though they’ve been reserved in the past, spending a longer period of time in the house allowed me to get to know them a lot better. They speak less French than my host fam (though still more than my Arabic) and speak to me mostly in Darija (especially when I speak to them in Darija). For some reason, I felt more like I was actually a part of things than I usually am with my host family. I became included in the discussion of TV choice (they even found American movies so that I would understand), and they let me help in the kitchen. Over dinner, I asked what was in the carrot salad, and one of the sisters, Hyat, told me she would make it again with me the next day so that I could learn how.

While making the carrot salad, Hyat was putting spices in another pot, to which she added some meat. She asked me if I knew what it was, and when I took a look, it looked like brain. I pointed to my head. Correct. Then, she put the pot on the stove, and asked me to stir it a bit, because she was going to the hammam. So there I was, in charge of a pot of brains.

Over the last few days, I’ve eaten way more sheep parts than I ever cared to taste: liver, heart, lungs, stomach, possibly tongue… Lunch on Thursday was a bit intense. In addition to the stewed brains, out of the other pot, came an entire sheep’s head. The women in the house began digging in, pulling out pieces of meat and telling me to kouli. I had a really hard time complying.

11-17 3id mobarek

So there are currently two sheep carcasses hanging from a ladder in the middle of my house, strips of fat on the laundry rack (with the wet clothes), blood all over the floor, and I think heart and liver cooking in the kitchen, but the 3id is not actually as hard for me as I expected. The 3id is the holiday celebrating the miracle of Allah providing Abraham with a ram to sacrifice instead of his son, and what do Moroccans do? Yep, they sacrifice rams. For the last week or so, Moroccan families have been buying rams and keeping them on their terraces, hallways and apartments. I was lucky in that my fam kept theirs in my host father’s currently empty shop, so I didn’t have sheep in the house until this morning. (I would not have expected them to be so loud—I’ve been listening to sheep outbursts for the last few days at the apartment, and if they were in the house, I don’t think we would have slept.)

Last night, my host grandparents and aunt came over, so we spent a festive evening eating two snacks and a dinner (at midnight), and I woke up this morning to my dad and brother dragging two big, mean-looking rams into the house. The slaughtering is actually quite a process—it took about three hours to kill, skin and gut the two of them. Mostly I hid out in the back of the house with Boutaina, but gradually I got more confident and actually watched the second one’s throat cut. Death is not pretty. I began to think about how most Americans are so disconnected and squeamish about their meat. In Croatia, we threw meat in a grinder and made sausages, and Moroccans slaughter sheep in their apartments, but I can hardly deal with raw meat. (granted, I don’t really eat meat when I’m in charge of my own meals) I think that as a meat eater (at all) it was an important process to watch, but I’ll have to admit, I was rather relieved that my camera is broken and so I had an excuse for not taking pictures.

On my own. And what am I most excited about? Eating lots of vegetables and going to bed early!

OK, finally up to what is happening now.

One component of my program is an independent research project, and the last month of the semester is set aside for completing this, and so for the next three weeks, I am on my own with no classes. I just moved out of my homestay on Sunday, and for the next two weeks I am sharing an apartment with my friend Erin and whoever happens to need a place to crash. The apartment consists of one bedroom, where we are storing all of our STUFF, two living rooms, where we actually sleep (like most Moroccan living rooms, they have couches all the way around the edges, which are converted to beds each night by removing the back pillows and putting on sheets), a kitchen (but no oven or refrigerator), and bathroom (but no shower or hot water). I had a realization yesterday of the extent of my perspective shift when Erin told this to her brother. He said “That’s ridiculous” and she replied “No, it’s normal.” Most urban Moroccan houses do have ovens, fridges and hot water, but their absence didn’t even phase us. We can heat water on the stove, we can go to the souk every day to buy what we need for the day (and store a few things outside the window at night). I think the lack of oven is the biggest disappointment, because we were really excited about baking, but we are improvising with the stove. We cooked nachos yesterday in a pan.

We ended up in Salé, the next town over from Rabat, and though the half-hour commute into Rabat is a bit of a hassle, it is so interesting to be in a place where there are NO foreigners. Rabat is not very touristy, but between study abroad students and a few tourists, there is always blond hair to be seen here and there. Here however, I am living in kind of a suburb, where no one has any reason to visit, and I can tell that everyone on the streets is baffled by the presence of three white girls. I’m really enjoying conducting daily life in this setting—to me, it’s actually way more interesting than visiting lots of different tourist destinations. Yesterday, I realized that I can conduct the necessities of daily life (greeting people, asking for directions, buying ingredients for dinner) almost entirely in Darija.

We all miss our host families (OK, Erin misses hers a lot, I miss mine a little but am also relieved to be out of it, and Megan is mostly just happy to leave—but we all miss Erin’s host family), but it is really nice to be on our own. It’s so nice to have our own space and to be in charge of our own meals and eating schedule. As I mentioned, we are so excited about cooking. We’ve basically been cooking and eating nonstop wince we got here. (Yeah, so much for a break from constantly overeating, and now I can’t even blame Moroccan hospitality.) We’ve enjoyed some missed comfort foods from home as well as trying a few of our favorite Moroccan recipes. So far, the list includes: grilled cheese with tomato soup, peanut-butter cups (well, balls, actually) chicken marsalla, orange-mango smoothies, Moroccan mint tea, peanut-butter banana sandwiches, nachos (we made tortilla chips, salsa, and guacamole all from scratch), burritos, sfoof (a Moroccan desert/snack that is basically a powder made with peanuts, almonds, sesame seeds, flour, cinnamon, anise, honey and oil) and avocado juice. Looking at that list, I don’t think I should have been allowed to eat all that food in less than 48 hours—no wonder I have a headache…

And there must be a bunch of other things that I should have written about between southern excursion and now. Erin told me to read her blog to figure out what I’ve done.

10-31 Home again

Another delayed post:

It’s really nice to be home after so much travel. Time away from the fam made me realize that even though they are sometimes overwhelming (namely Boutayna, who is all over me all the time), they are so sweet and I am so glad to be part of their family. We had a little dance party the other night to the belly dancing on TV. I’m also getting more and more comfortable with Boutayna’s mischief as I get more comfortable and aware of social norms and what’s going on around me. I’m not sure I’ve talked about it before, but she likes to walk the line between acceptable and scandalous (I think it’s a thirteen-year-old rebellion thing, though she seems more boy-obsessed than the typical teenager). I’m considering actually playing her little game of social chicken. She’s been feeding me slang to say to the shopkeepers, and while I’m not sure how appropriate it is to say “Where’s it at, piece of meat?” (I think in this case it’s more vulgar than homeslice), I did get a piece of candy out of it yesterday.