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.

Southern excursion

Wow, I just realized I haven’t posted in quite a while. It’s been kind of crazy, but more on that later. First, here’s a post I

actually wrote two weeks ago and just didn’t get around to finishing and posting:I just came home from a whirlwind tour of Southern Morocco, which involved seven days, six nights, approximately 33 hours on the bus, eight cities, and a camel.

It was great to see so much of the country, and kind of fun to get to play tourist. I don’t want to write a long “here’s what I did” summary—that’s boring—so I’ll just share some of my favorite stories.

Our first stop was Ifrane, and what a shock to the system. Firstly, it was FREEZING (ok, so it was probably 45 degrees, but I was not ready for that. I don’t think I actually processed it when I was told it might be snowing there.) Secondly, it looked like Switzerland (It was built as a French Colonial vacation town.) It was beautiful, but it also seemed out of place in this country.

In Azrou, a little town nearby, we had 15 mins to explore (yep, that was often how the trip worked) and I climbed a giant mount of rocks with a crown on top. We saw men some hundred feet below us waving, so we waved back. Then,one of them lifted a foot in the air as a challenge (I was standing at the very tip top) which I of course took. We also saw little boys in a park doing flips.

Next we drove through the cedar forest in the mountains we saw Barbary apes. They were so fuzzy and awkward looking.

Erin and I made a book club on the bus. I had read The Sand Child in the village and convinced her to read it. In the story, a man has seven daughters and decides to raise the eighth as a son. It’s so interesting and twisted and I felt like I didn’t have a very deep understanding and wanted to discus. When Erin started marking her book with sticky notes, I knew I had a best friend.

We went to the Sahara (Did you know that sahara means desert in Arabic? And har means hot) and rode camels into the sunset. My favorite part was running and jumping and tumbling and rolling down the dunes. The sand was unbelievably soft and a really beautiful orange-brown. Unfortunately, the dune I was on was experiencing a minor sandstorm (the wind was coming up from behind and blowing sand everywhere. The next morning when we woke up at 5am and climbed the dunes by moonlight to watch the sunset from the top. The dunes are absolutely surreal, and the soft light right before sunrise and the bright orange right after made them look spectacular.

On the road, I saw desert and barren, rocky mountains and mesas that would suddenly open into green oasis valleys. The oasis is such a romanticized idea, but the reality is pretty surprising and spectacular—a huge forest of green in the middle of endless brown.

The mountains were also surprising—or rather, the road through them was. It was windier than most Colorado mountain roads, but had NO shoulder, often no guardrail, was about as wide as a one-lane road in the US, and to top it off, we were in a giant bus.

Marrakesh is the touristic capital of Morocco,and I had heard so much about how magical it is, but I was a bit disappointed. At one point, when I was walking through the square with a couple of friends, a man approached us with wooden snakes, saying “Buy a snake, scare your boyfriend” and when we ignored him, another shopkeeper said “Sorry, I didn’t know you were lesbians.”

Our last stop was a surftown called Essaouira. It was touristy, but in a much more chill sense—meaning that it was clean and friendly, but didn’t feel like Disneyland. It was a really nice way to end the trip. I spent the afternoon at the beach swimming in the perfectly straight waves, exploring the sand dunes and watching the sunset.