1-1 The fam comes to Morocco continued…

Happy New Year! But I have some catching up to do. After Essaouira, we took a very very long bus ride to Casablanca (it was supposed to be 6 hours, but ended up being more than eight) and then caught the train to Rabat. It was so nice to be back. Rabat is like home; I know my way around, and see people I know on the streets. I dragged my family all over town to all the sights and we visited my host family, my adopted host family and Erin’s host family. It was a bit awkward for my family since they couldn’t actually talk to almost everyone, but I did my best at playing translator. Of course, everyone fed us and gave us tea. My host family really pulled out all the stops for my family—they made couscous, which they had only done once during the semester. I tried to feed my mom and sis all my favorite foods (I told them they had it easy—they were in morocco for more than a week, whereas Hannah was only there for a weekend…) and they loved my juice place as much as I did.

On Monday, we took the train to Fes, where we stayed the night before catching a bus to Chefchaouen, a little town in the Rif mountains. We really only spent an evening exploring the Fes medina, which wasn’t enough to experience how crazy and huge and winding and chaotic it is, but I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to take them far in anyway for fear of never finding my way out again. As I did when I visited with my program, I found Fes friendly. Somehow it’s not as in your face and rude as Marrakech, or even Rabat sometimes. I was looking for a certain kind of hat and I asked a guy from whom my mom had just bought a scarf if he know where I could find one, and he lead me to several shops, where he asked if they had them, and where we could find one, before finally finding someone who had them.

The Rif Mountains, which cover the north portion of the country, are beautiful. They are splattered with olive groves, terraced farms, grassy meadows, goats, sheep, palm trees and yucca plants and are a shade of green that is almost surreal. Chefchaouen was also quite pretty. It’s all built on a steep hillside and covered with narrow streets and stairs winding up through buildings that are all painted blue.

Our taxi got lost and dropped us nowhere near our hotel. He dropped us in a deserted parking lot with stairs leading up into the medina. Since we were hauling around giant suitcases (my fault—I’m making my mom and sister bring home all my summer clothes and have filled my own suitcase with gifts) I went in to try to find the hotel. I had all but given up and was thinking that there was no way we would cary the suitcases up so many stairs, but I met a Dutch woman who asked what I was looking for and said she was going in the same direction and would take me there, so I followed her. The hotel was so cute that I decided to try to get the suitcases up. Luckily, I also realized that we could take the road around and only had a few flights of stairs instead of the dozens that I had climbed.

Somehow, the only one to get food poisoning on this trip was me. I’m not sure how that worked, but it was probably better me than them, and it was very mild.

After not nearly enough time, we got back on the bus and headed to Tangier to spend the night before catching the ferry to Spain. I realized that this time, I was saying goodbye to Morocco for real. My adventure isn’t over—I’m travelling a bit in Spain with my mom and my sister, and then I’ll spend another week in Tunisia visiting a friend—but my time in Morocco is. So maybe now is a good time to think about summing it up. I don’t think I necessarily got what I came in expecting, though honestly can’t even remember what that was. I guess I came in without a whole lot of expectations and maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much.

I learned to appreciate the ease of knowing how everything works and being able to communicate freely, but also became comfortable in a foreign city and by the end, tasks that were at first daunting and unforeseeable complicated, such as printing a paper in the medina or navigating the city buses became facile and normal. Over the course of three and a half months I accustomed myself to a modes of conduct, routines, table manners to the point that it feels weird to go back to what was normal. I got used to speaking four languages on a daily basis, but also learned enough Darija to be able to get around mostly without breaking into French. Not to mention all the wonderful people I got to know. I think the friends I made were the biggest surprise, but also what kept me alive and sane.

I think one of the big questions of the semester was: What is Morocco? People keep asking me to pin it down, and though I myself spent so much of the semester trying to figure it out, I still don’t feel confident answering their questions. I think my final answer is that Morocco is very diverse and is in so many transitions and constantly changing. There are so many different—and often contradicting—aspects of life. I say that Morocco is historically quite religiously tolerant, but also advised my mom against mentioning that she is Jewish. There are modern cities that host businesses from across the globe, but I also don’t bat an eye when I see chickens or a donkey cart in the road. There are people who speak five languages but can’t read or write. Many people can read and write Classical Arabic, one of the country’s official languages, but feel uncomfortable speaking it, while Darija, the language that most of the population speaks, is not an official language. There always seems to be construction everywhere. Pretty much everyone has a TV—though they don’t necessarily have a toilet. These are just a few things that came to mind. I’ve spent my semester trying to learn without judging. Eventually, I became used to going along with things without necessarily needing to understand everything that was happening and why.