Morocco is a cat country. They’re everywhere.
The gang on the walk to class:
This kitten snuck by us and climbed onto the baskets we were looking at in Chefchaouen.
About 4 seconds later, it was asleep.
Piles of kittens are a normal thing here.
Box-o-newborn kittens at the train station:
This little guy laid down at our table in Merzouga and didn’t leave until we fed and petted him.
Surprise!
I got married last night.
Our program wanted to throw us a traditional Moroccan wedding party as a sendoff, and I was the chosen groom. We got decked out in Moroccan clothing, and just went along for the ride. They hired a band and a professional wed-er, someone who moves ceremonies along. She would bellow something and people would come move us around the room or fix our clothing or lift us up. Casual.
It was a sad day in the Riad today. After dinner we ventured out looking for Sfinjsh, pastries that are fried and shaped like donuts and taste like funnel cake but are much lighter. They cost one Dirham a pop, but we always try speaking Darija to the shop owner, so he usually throws in a few extra. Slather a little nutella on top and it is the perfect desert. Our Sfinjsh guy works in a little cubby of a shop. He sits on the ground next to his fryer and makes them as they are ordered. After a quick fry, he strings however many Sfinjsh you buy on a long piece of grass – essentially donuts on a string. What more could you want?
Anyway, we got to our Sfinjsh place only to find that he started making sweets for Ramadan. Ramadan starts on Sunday, and people here eat this special kind of pastry for the month, so he is cranking them out like no one’s business. He felt bad, so he gave us some free Ramadan pastries instead.
So sadly, we will be without Sfinjsh for the remainder of our time in Morocco…less than a week!
I posted this on Saturday when it happened, but Tumblr mysteriously deleted it…so here goes Take 2.
Summertime is wedding season in Morocco. Since the back of our Riad is across the street from one of the more popular venues in Meknes, we have been hearing wedding parties all summer. We heard one on Saturday, so I convinced a couple of people from our group to go check it out. We got to the door, and they invited us in. #winning
There was a band playing, but not a single person was dancing. A bunch of kids/teens/twenty-somethings saw us and joined us on the dance floor. After that, the whole room joined, grandparents and all. Everyone got really intense after we started the party. One girl even passed out from dancing. We conga-lined and did something like the hora, all while being showered with flower petals and sprayed with rose oil. The photographer/videographer was loving us, so the four of us we are featured prominently a lot of the family portraits and much of the video. In short, it was glorious.
I can now officially cross “Wedding Crashing” off my bucket list.
Apparently Meknes is the hiphop capital of Morocco. According to our teacher, most of the big rappers paid their dues here. So today in class we got a little taste of M-town rap courtesy of H-Kayne (pronounced Aash Cane).
Here’s a little preview: H-Kayne — F’mo Hadak
H-Kayne lives down the street from our teacher, so he said he’ll ask him if he and his entourage would be willing to meet us. We’re going to a billiards hall tonight, and Mr. Kayne might be making an appearance. Here’s to kicking it Moroccan hiphop royalty
I took two day trips this weekend. On Saturday we went to Chefchaouen, and on Sunday we went to Fes. Not much to report about either. Chefchaouen is a small city up in the mountains that is known as “the Blue City.” Knowing this, I was expecting, well, a city that is blue. It’s not all that blue. On the blueness scale of northern Moroccan cities, I’d rank it above Meknes and below Asilah. But it was nice. We took a walking tour of the Medina and the Kasbah after which we ate at a café and wandered around. The next day we set out for Fes. Our train was an hour late, but there was a group of Moroccan summer campers across the tracks from us, so we entertained them and ourselves by making faces at each other.
Getting on the train to go to Fes served as a reminder that boarding trains in Morocco is a full contact sport. When the train stops, people all jostle to get on without letting the people off. The ensuing bottleneck is utter mayhem, and on more than one occasion an old Moroccan lady has thrown an elbow in my direction. The mad rush includes everyone – I still don’t understand how women manage to beat us onto the train with a baby in one arm and a suitcase under the other.
We made it on and managed to find seats together. Even luckier was that we ended up in a car with working AC, a rarity on Moroccan trains. An hour and a half later, we were in Fes. Fes is like Meknes, except bigger, cleaner, and more touristy. We wandered around the Medina (sound familiar?) and took a tour of a tannery. Stinky, but cool.
I’ve been MIA for the last week because we went to the beach. Immediately after class on Tuesday, we hopped on a train for Asilah, a small-ish beach town about an hour down the coast from Tangier. It’s somewhat of an artist colony, so it has a very bohemian feel to it.
We rented a house right outside the Kasbah that was about 15 minutes from the beach. The bottom floor had an apartment for our professor and his family. His son, two sisters, nephew, and mother came. When we arrived, we all had to be kissed by his mom to officially be welcomed. We had the top floor. It had 2 bedrooms for the girls, a parlor with rock-hard couches (which we, the guys, had the distinct pleasure of sleeping on), a kitchen, a dining room, and a terrace. Bathroom? Moroccan-style. It had a sink, a shower, and a squatter off in the corner. The first floor had a Western-style bathroom, but to use that you had to take a walk-of-shame in front of the entire family. What to do…
The medina was unreal. All of the houses were whitewashed trimmed with striking colors. And the streets were very clean, which is somewhat uncommon for medinas in Morocco. Every year Asilah has an international arts festival that highlights a specific country. Qatar was the selected this year, so the city had several Qatari artists paint giant murals all around the medina. It was pretty cool to turn a corner and have a massive mural staring back at you.
There happened to be a carnival in town. It was right on the beach, so we went every night. Going on the rides may have been the most terrifying experience in my life. We first tackled the Caterpillar, which is a ride that goes around on a track in a circle, forwards and backwards, that has a cover that goes on at full speed. The lap bar could have been non-existent for all it was doing. I had the misfortune of sitting in the outermost seat, so my two seatmates were pinning me against the wall of our cart, thereby cutting off all circulation to my legs. Getting off the ride was a struggle.
Next up was bumper cars. There is no system of waiting to get on – when the round is over, everyone runs out onto the track and tried to find a car that someone is getting out of. After six rounds of running around frantically, my friend and I finally got one. The round started. This is when we realized that 1) we had the slowest car and 2) we were now sole target in a game of “Hit the Americans.” We got hit so hard once that my friend got thrown out of our car. He landed right next to our car, but the car decided it wanted to keep moving and, having no idea what to do, I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back into the moving car. Lesson learned: Moroccan carnivals are deathtraps.
Since it was a long, eventful week, here are other notable happenings:
-I saw a camel get milked.
-We crashed a Moroccan summer camp on the beach. They had a bike obstacle course and a dance floor, both of which we dominated.
-I was mistaken for Mexican.
-We played soccer with the kids on our block.
-I ate snails from a street cart. It’s apparently the thing to do here.
-We made several friends from Asilah. They were all normal college-age students that wanted to practice their English. One was in the process of applying to work at Epcot in the Morocco pavilion. One also tried to convert all of us to Islam. He was very persistent. Another was quite proud of his cat-like noises. That last one was pretty odd, actually.
-A man knocked on the door of our house, so I answered. He couldn’t understand MSA but said he could speak Spanish. Thinking him to be the landlord, I went and got someone that spoke Spanish. Turns out he was homeless and wanted a sandwich.
We had a jaunt into the Sahara this past weekend. We left the riad bright and early at 5:30 AM, and boarded our minibus heading for Merzouga, a town on the edge of the desert. 11 hours and numerous scenic-overlook stops later, we made it.
Our Berber guides led us to the camels and started assigning us. I had just started a book taking place during the French Revolution, so with that in mind, I decided to name my camel something aristocratic. I settled on Wallace. I was taken over to a camel and informed that his name was Jimmy. Disheartened, I figured I’d roll with the punches. My camel was newly christened Jimmy Wallace Buffet, the Hawaiian shirt-wearing, fun-loving camel in the House of Lords. At this my guide notified me that his name was Jimmy Hendrix. Non-negotiable. After getting acquainted, Jimmy Hendrix and I set off into the Sahara. I knew it would be a 2 hour ride, but it was a long 2 hours. The entire time, all I could think of was seeing Bear Grylls sleep inside a camel on Man vs. Wild.
We finally got to our camp. It was a small oasis at the foot of a huge sand dune. And according to our guide, we were only 30 miles from Algeria. They cooked us massive tagines for dinner (that were quite good), after which we dragged our mattresses out of our tents and slept under the stars. The sky was incredibly clear, so we could see everything. Our guides woke us up at 5 :00 a) to see the sunrise and b) to get out of the desert before it got too hot.
The sunrise was cool. 2 hours later we were back at the hotel in Merzouga. After a shower, a hearty breakfast, and a fleeting concern that my feet would never point forward again, we got back on the bus to head back to Meknes. On the way, we stopped in Azrou to see the monkeys. We had been told that they were friendly and plump and loved to be fed, but they were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t meant to be.
After a long weekend and a long day in class, it’s now time to celebrate the 4th of July Moroccan style: Mac n Cheese, Apple Pie, and Bruce Springsteen.
Layers of paint in Tangier
This past weekend we took a trip up to Tangier. We left right after class on Friday to catch a 1:30 train. It didn’t pull into the station until 3:00. We shared a compartment with a Rai singer who chatted with us in Arabic. At the end, she offered to have us over for lunch the next day. We panicked and declined, but in hindsight, it could have been a lot of fun/delicious. We got off the train and it was a solid 10 to 20 degrees cooler than Meknes. Our hotel was down the beach from the train station, so that was a nice walk. And people in Tangier are more used to seeing non-Moroccans, so we didn’t get as many stares.
Our hotel was an interesting place. It was really cheap and had good reviews, so it seemed perfect. On the surface it was really nice — beachfront, pool, recently updated rooms. But we very much got what we paid for. The lights in our bathroom were duct taped into the ceiling, the comforter on the bed had numerous cigarette burns,and a tile fell off the wall.
The first night we down the beach towards where more of the city is. This was when we realized there is not much more to do in Tangier than go clubbing. The entire street is lined with clubs along the beach, including the bizarrely named Club Snob and the infamous 555. After dinner and another walk along the beach, we went back to our hotel for the night.
The next day we walked around the Kasbah in the morning. The souk in the Kasbah was mostly outside, so we jumped on the opportunity to go to the indoor part. Little did we know that this was the food market that locals shop in. So we wandered deeper and deeper into the market, trying to get out. It smelled like raw meat and olives at first, but the smell abruptly changed to distinctly fishy and it kept getting worse and worse. We ended up in the fish market, which was not smelling to great in the 100 degree weather. After our stinky adventure, we headed back to the hotel for some quality pool time.
That night it was back to the main drag for dinner. After wandering around for a while, we stumbled upon a concert on the beach. We went to check it out, and my conversation with a roadie (in Arabic) went as follows:
Me: Who is performing?
Roadie: A man.
Me: What is his name?
Roadie: George.
That riveting and informative conversation convinced us to stay and check it out. An hour and a half later, George finally came on stage. (His actual name is Gralid George.) The concert was a lot of fun, and it was our first exposure to Moroccan dancing. Not traditional dancing, but actual young people dancing to pop music. I’ve given a lot of though as to how to best describe the phenomenon that we witnessed, and the best I could do would be if Shakira and a Russian folk dancer were to have a lovechild, it would dance like this. But I think that doesn’t really capture just how intense it was, especially when there were thousands of people doing it all at the same time. There was also some intense shimmying going on. It was quite a sight.
That Sunday we took a train (without air conditioning) back to Meknes. It was definitely nice to get out of Meknes for a weekend. One of the nicest things about Tangier is that people there actually spoke MSA, as opposed to in Meknes where people mostly speak Darija and French, of which I can understand neither. This was a nice little reassurance that what I’m studying is actually somewhat practical. So after a much needed shower, it was time to hit the books.
