Oujda

Greetings, earthlings!  As the time approaches for me to go back where I came from, it has been impressed upon me that I have been remiss in posting on this blog.  When I made this blog, I fully intended to post about once a week about my travels on the weekends or other cultural experiences and things like that.  No doubt you all have noticed by now that this has not been the case.  Please accept this small offering of pictures from a trip I took almost a month ago and just now put on my computer as a token of my sincere contrition.

The trip to which I refer was over the First of Muharram, and it was to Oujda, a city 15km from the Algerian boder.  Prior to the closing of the border in 1995, Oujda was a major overland trade center as well as an industrial center.  Now, it's mostly just industrial, and has clearly been suffering from a bit of a depression.  The main tourist attraction in or near Oujda is the Sidi Yahia oasis.  Loosely translated, that means the Saint John oasis.  Apparently Algeria is also visible from some of the hills surrounding Oujda, but most of those hills are rather difficult to get to.  Because of its proximity to Algeria, Oujda is in many ways more of an Algerian city than a Moroccan city; it tends to be more conservative than the rest of Morocco, and is not much of a tourist center, so furriners, especially light-skinned, medium-haired females, get stared at.

Anyway, here are the pictures.

Tree on the way in to the oasis.  I'm not sure what kind of tree it was.

Another tree framing the water in the oasis.  To the center-right there is a cafe.  The island in the middle is for the ducks who live at the oasis.

More water, but from a different angle.  The wall that surrounds the oasis makes it difficult to get to the hill behind, from which one can apparently see Algeria.  I wouldn't know since, well, the hill was hard to get to and it was kind of a sketchy part of town.

Water and tree.  And ducks in the lower right corner.

There were also roses growing near the wall by the entrance.

This is a short distance down the street from the oasis.  As you can see, there's absolutely no water, underscoring the importance of water and thus the oasis, especially in earlier times when water storage and filtration and such were not as advanced as they are today.

I went to Marrakech this past weekend, which was really fun.  I'll put up the few pictures I have of it soon, but I think that will mostly be a words post.  I didn't take many pictures because every time I took out my camera, about fifty people would descend on me asking for money because apparently I was taking their picture, even if they were behind me, and thus I had to pay them.  This was an interesting experience and definitely worth a words post, hopefully in the near future.

Later, gators.

A Long-Awaited Pictures Post

And here are my pictures from Spain.  Finally.  I couldn't find the cable to my camera, and then I realized that I have an SD card slot on my computer which will receive the card from my camera.  Needless to say, I felt like an idiot for not noticing something on a machine I've had for about eight months.

Anyway, enjoy the photos!  I may post others on Facebook.  We'll see.  I don't like FB as much as I like Blogger so I'm not sure yet.

Crossing from Tangier to Tarifa.  It's not really obvious here, but the swells were actually quite large, since it was raining and rather windy.

Flamenco dancers!  They were in the mall attached to the train station in Malaga.

The Malaga coastline at night.  There were lots of palm trees, which made me very happy.

A statue (I forget of whom) in the square in either Malaga or Cordoba.  I can't remember off the top of my head.  I think it was Cordoba, though.

The mosque-turned-cathedral in Cordoba.

Renaissance meets Moorish.

The other side of the Renaissance area.

Reflection of the moon rising with a sunset in a river just outside the mosque/cathedral.

That's all I have time for right now; finals are coming up and I have lots of things to do.  I will try to post photos of and commentary on my trip to Oujda soon.

Still here, at least physically

For your entertainment.

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plains

Hola! Again I am late with my blog posts. I'd like to think it's because I'm doing and experiencing so many cool things that I just don't have the time to write about them. In reality, though, the problem is more likely that I honestly have a hard time writing some of these posts and thus tend to put them off. Don't get me wrong, I like--well, more precisely love--writing, which is obvious if you've seen other things I've written, but it's really, really hard for me to write nonfiction, unless it somehow relates to economics.

I suppose it's not the actual writing that's the difficult part. It's getting started. Some of the things that happen don't really have a beginning; they're sort of a link in a chain of really weird and random events that are somehow connected but I don't always know how. Writing my blog posts is a bit like trying to solve a crime. I know how, where, and who, but I don't always know why, and that's the part that really matters in the long run.

Now that I've gone all metaphysical and scared off half my readers by awkwardly bringing the "crime" word into a blog post, I'll wriggle my way into my actual topic.

Yes, it was raining in Spain when I arrived there a few weekends ago, though I don't know if the rain in Spain does in fact fall mainly in the plains. I took a ferry from Tangier to Tarifa, right across the Strait of Gibraltar. From there, I took a bus to Malaga, which was a charming city, and would have been more so had the sky not been dripping for the first day and a half I was there. In spite of the rain, though, I had a great time in Malaga and will post pictures soon of some of the cool places I saw.

After Malaga, I moved on, again by bus, to Cordoba, which, incidentally, was mostly populated by retirees. One can tell a lot about a city from the books in its train and bus stations; in Cordoba, the books ranged from apocryphal gospels to vegetarian cookbooks to tarot, palm-reading, and seance how-to guides. The last category was by far the best populated, though I didn't actually see any ads for psychics and such in the city proper. Perhaps Cordoba is a DIY psychic city. I don't know, because I didn't think it would be a great idea to walk up to some Spanish stranger and ask about it when my Spanish is barely adequate to conduct an incredibly superficial conversation. It also would have been awkward in general.

I will post pictures of everything soon, I promise. This is a words post.

After Cordoba was when the Bad Things started happening, again related to travel. Much ado and several hours later, we made it to Algeciras, which was the city from which we were going to catch the ferry back to Morocco. Unfortunately, the last ferry crossed at midnight, and we missed it by about twenty minutes. We ended up spending the night in the port until the first ferry of the morning departed at six. That was a very long night, but I guess it was character-building.

Once we got on the ferry, we relaxed a little. We had time to spare before our train from Tangier left. Everything was looking up.

About that. I think being hopeful about travel running smoothly somehow jinxes it. Smooth is the last word I would pick to describe the remainder of the trip.

Relative to my last post, this trip was peachy. I didn't end up standing near a train bathroom for hours, but I did end up sitting in a freezing-cold compartment for around six hours. For scale, the whole ride was supposed to be about four hours. It seemed like we sat still on the tracks more than we moved.

By the time we got to Meknes, it became painfully clear that we would not make it back to Ifrane in time for classes. At that point, everyone's cups of care spilled, which resulted in all of us laughing maniacally for a little while and then, upon arriving back in Ifrane, going to the marche (local market) to get hot food and drink mint tea and watch people try to walk in the cold, kind of heavy rain accompanied by capricious gusts of wind.

I spend the next weekend here in Ifrane, since I'd kind of had enough of travel for a while. As you no doubt can see, I'm posting this on a Saturday; yes, I will be traveling this weekend, but not to the place I had initially planned. And yes, I will post pictures of my adventures this weekend, too.

Hasta luego. Unless something really goes haywire, in which case hasta mucho luego.

(Yeah, I'm just making stuff up now. I'm tired, okay? You'll get to read why in my next post.)

Bad Things Come in Threes (or Fours?)

Remember how I said I was going to a beach this weekend? Well, I definitely made it to a beach. It was beautiful; I'll post a few pictures of it once I get them on my computer. There were a few things that happened, though, that will probably provide some amusement for my friends especially in the Western world. Be forewarned--this is going to be a long post.

Getting to the town by which the beach was located wasn't a problem. The town is called Asilah, and it's a very cute town. My friends and I wandered around the medina a bit the first day we got there, and the second day, we decided it was time to go to the beach. We tried a beach just next to the medina, but it was rocky and there was trash everywhere and it was probably the length of a football field. Not exactly the awesome beach we'd been promised. Thus, we wandered back into the medina and met a really nice Rastafarian guy who apparently lived there and knew the beaches. He got us a horse cart to take us to the "Paradise Beach."

I'll say this right now: horse carts are not as romantic as they appear in the movies. The cart on which we rode was basically a flat deck on wheels and was connected directly to the horse with no suspension whatsoever. That doesn't seem like an issue until the horse starts trotting/jogging and you realize that you can feel every single step the horse takes. Bonus: the horse's bouncing is magnified because the arms and bed of the cart act as levers. In addition to all this horsey bouncing, the side roads in Morocco have a lot of potholes and such, and since the cart has no suspension, you feel every single one of those, too.

That's child's play compared with the highway, especially on the way back from the beach.

Apparently horse carts don't adhere to the same traffic laws everybody else does. This means the cart will take the quickest route possible from point A to point B. Unfortunately, the quickest route occasionally entails going the wrong way on an 80 km/hr highway. If that's not terrifying, I don't know what is. On the way to the beach, it isn't really a problem, since traffic is going that direction, but on the way back, it can be a problem. I was facing backwards, so I didn't get the full effect, but the occasional shrieks from the people in front were enough.

It sounds awful, but it was actually insanely fun, in a heart-pounding, muscle-tensing sort of way. It was better than a roller-coaster because the danger of falling off was actually quite real, which made each moment that much more exciting. Every Moroccan we saw giggled at us. They probably knew what sort of tomfoolery was involved in riding on a horse cart.

The first sort of bad thing happened on the beach when a very creepy older guy started talking to my group and wouldn't go away. He also started hitting on the girls, which was no fun. Ah, the joys of being female in a foreign country.

We should have heeded this omen (and the previous omen, in which one of our group had an unfortunate and painful--but happily not life-threatening--accident), but we didn't. Oh no. We had more snafus to encounter in the next 24 hours.

We pretty much had to run to get to the train station on time, in an eerie repeat of our performance on the way to Asilah. By the time we got to the train station and obtained a few "pizzas," we were told by an upsettingly lackadaisical ticket agent that our train was, in fact, going to be forty minutes late, so all our rushing was in vain. We decided to make the best of it and go eat our "pizzas," which were little more than tough bread with a veneer of tomato sauce and some cheese and mystery toppings.

At last the ticket agent deigned to sell us tickets, and soon after that, our train came. During the rush to get on the train, the group got separated into two different second class cabins. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, except that in this case, in an inspired moment of scintillating asininity, someone had decided to put a first class cabin in between the second class cabins. This meant that our group could not get back together. To add insult to injury, there was only standing room in the carriage my part of the group had boarded, and we were some of the last to board, which meant that we were standing next to the carriage bathroom. The problem here was twofold: first, we were standing sardine-like in a high-traffic area, and second, train bathrooms are not renowned for their cleanliness. I think the last time this particular bathroom had been cleaned was when it was built. I'm sure you can imagine how it smelled. All that was the second bad thing.

At least we were on the train at this point and it was moving.

For the moment, that is.

Probably fifteen or 20 minutes into the ride, the train lights suddenly flickered and went out, and the train screeched to a halt. Someone had opened the door to our carriage to let a bit of fresh air in and have a smoke, which I thought was a really bad idea considering that the train goes in the vicinity of 100 km/hr at its fastest. At first we figured that opening the door had caused the problem, but it turned out that the carriage in which the other part of my group was riding had somehow broken down and had to be fixed.

We ended up standing there in that entryway, by the stinky toilet in which three guys decided to smoke hash, for probably half an hour. I was really tired by this time, so my recollection of time may be off. Anyway, the train finally started moving again after that half hour, and we contacted the rest of the group--thank goodness for cell phones--to coordinate positions. All that constituted the third bad thing. It wasn't all bad; there was a kind Moroccan gentlemen who had some essential oils or something with him which he used to occasionally alleviate the smell of the bathroom.

When the train arrived at the next stop, my part of the group hopped off and then back on again in the somewhat nicer carriage in which the other part had ended up. We reconnoitered for a while and finally found places to sit and more or less sleep.

The train had been moving about long enough for us to get back to Meknes, where we were supposed to get off, when someone peeked out the window and realized that the train was stopping in Kenitra. This would have been okay if we had wanted to go to Rabat, which is on the coast. Unfortunately, Meknes is a good hour and a half to two hours inland from there by train. Apparently we were supposed to change trains at some point a good distance back, and we had not noticed this little tidbit printed on our tickets. Another friendly Moroccan gentleman told us we could get off in Sale, which is right across a river from Rabat, and go back to Meknes from there. We got off and went to the ticket counter immediately, where we learned, to our dismay, that the next train from Sale to Meknes left at 11:25 at night, an hour after we had arrived in Sale. Again, this normally wouldn't be a problem, except that we needed to be back for Monday morning classes and Grand Taxis stop running at 11 and don't start again until 5. It looked like we would be spending the night in Meknes, so we started calling around for hotels in Meknes. Courtesy our invaluable Francophone, we found one for 50Dhs per person.

The time came for our train to arrive. We waited five minutes past the correct time and then noticed that the sign said it was now delayed by 30 minutes. Fantastic. All that was the third bad thing.

Finally, after all this ado, we arrived in Meknes and got to the hotel. The train had been freezing cold, and we were all shivering or close to it, so we were hoping for warm rooms. Apparently such rooms are not to be had in Meknes for 50Dhs per person. I have trained with heavy punching bags that had more give than these beds. The bedsheets were torn and looked like they hadn't been washed in weeks, and the blankets smelled weird. I slept in my clothes. The running water in one of the rooms didn't work at all, and in the other, there was mystery hair in the sink. There were two toilets; one was a regular toilet and the other was the hole-in-the-floor kind. Neither of them flushed normally. After we left the hotel the next morning, we figured out that flushing was the reason there was a little bucket next to a tap in each of the bathrooms. These bathrooms also were lacking in the hygiene department, and had probably not been cleaned even before they were put in.

Oh well. At least we had a roof over our heads. This might have been a fourth bad thing. There's still some debate as to whether the hotel was the fourth bad thing or the "pizzas" were or my friend's accident was, or if maybe there were five or six things. There's also debate about whether or not the Bad Things Meter resets at midnight, which would have meant that the hotel incident started a new chain of bad things.

Anyway, after this adventure, we at long last got a Grand Taxi back to Ifrane and arrived at the university at about 11. As I sit here now on my relatively comfortable bed with my computer on my lap and access to the interwebs, it feels like ages ago that all this happened. Looking back, I can see the hilarity of our situation, but at the time, it felt awful. I tried to console myself with the thought of how I could put everything in my blog, but that idea didn't hold up well once we passed Kenitra. It's all here now, though, and I'm chuckling about it as I write. At least it's something I can tell kids about when I'm crotchety and old and people can teleport wherever they want and don't have to deal with the ins and outs of ground transportation anymore.

"Dern kids. In my day, people missed trains instead of just getting lost in little pieces somewhere in the atmosphere or the digital world or whatever the heck place you younguns jabber on about. Trains were actually something to complain about!"

Laundry and Liver

I think we're about due for a culture post now. I haven't done one in a while and there have been a few semi-interesting things that happened, so this seems like an opportune time. I also just finished midterms and am thus suddenly possessed of strangely large amounts of free time. Brace yourselves; silliness is coming.

Let's start with laundry. I recently whined on Facebook about how attempting conversation with the laundry ladies underscores my lack of language skills. It's true; there really is nothing like trying to talk about laundry to show you how much you actually know about a language, or at least how much you know under pressure.

The episode that sparked this particular bout of "oy vey" had to do with signing in to the laundry room. I'd never had to do that before, mainly because the laundry logbook of legend was just that--a legend. This past time, though, it precipitously appeared from its magical resting place, so I had to sign in, and it was way more difficult than I expected. I had to do all the obvious stuff, like sign my name and so forth, but apparently I also had to write down my room number. The laundry lady must have thought I was an ignorant cretin; in spite of her advanced proficiency in Charades, it took me a solid thirty seconds to understand what needed to happen.

The really sad thing is that I actually speak Modern Standard Arabic well enough to facilitate exactly this type of conversation, and so do the laundry ladies. I know how to talk about room numbers and where I live and all that kind of stuff. It honestly isn't that difficult. Unfortunately, my mind was a total blank, as it is right now as I'm trying to think of a clever simile for the blankness of my mind. Yeah, not going to happen. Anyway, the moment I finished writing everything down and stepped outside the door, all my Arabic suddenly rushed back into my head, confirming the laundry lady's probable estimation of me, or at least of my memory. So it goes.

Now for liver.

This was, in fact, not my first encounter with liver. I have sampled liverwurst on purpose at home and immediately regretted the decision. If even the cat doesn't eat it, you know it's bad. Here, though, was the first time I've ever had non-processed liver, and I can honestly say it's one of the worst-tasting things I've ever eaten. In my defense, it was by accident. The comparison that came most readily to mind was cow poo. I tried not to think about it while I was eating the liver, but as far as flavor goes, liver tastes exactly like cow poo. (Point of information: yes, I do know what cow poo tastes like due to an unfortunate turn of events in which said poo was splattered on my face and into my mouth. Yuck.) It also has a really weird consistency; it's like it wants to be real meat with a grain and everything, but doesn't have the structural integrity necessary. It sort of falls apart in the mouth, and not in a good way, or at least it would if it didn't have weird bits of membrane scattered throughout.

Even massive amounts of ketchup couldn't mask the horror that is liver. I managed to gulp it down by breathing in while chewing and chewing as little as possible before swallowing the stuff mostly whole. My gag reflex kept attempting to bring it back up, but through a massive exertion of willpower, I managed to keep it down. It was good for me, I guess, since it had a lot of iron in it and I have recently felt kind of low on iron for some reason.

That doesn't mean I will ever seek liver out. I now inspect the meat extremely closely to make sure it's not super dark with little bits of membrane everywhere. There is no way liver will ever pass my lips again unless I really need to be polite to someone.

Well, I think that's a gracious plenty for now. I'm going to another beach this weekend, in spite of the fact that it's supposed to rain. We shall see. I'll take pictures regardless of the weather, though.

Until we meet again at some undefined point in the future...

The Criscuit Saga

The name will make sense if you read the (admittedly very long) post, okay?  This was a long and traumatic experience and the things that came out of it were... well, they weren't cookies, that's a fact.

It all started quite a while ago, actually.  A few friends and I were craving real, home-baked chocolate chip cookies, because the closest things you can get to that here are uber-crunchy Chips Ahoy.  We didn't get to try to make the cookies until last weekend, though (not the one that ended yesterday, but the one before that).

First of all, it's impossible to find brown sugar in Boondocks, Morocco, or really anywhere outside the US and probably Canada, apparently.  Maybe you can find it in the UK.  I don't know.  Anyway, the point is brown sugar cannot be had for any price here.  Neither, apparently, can vanilla extract or baking soda.  After over an hour of wandering around the local market, we finally were forced to come to the conclusion that we were not, in fact, going to find real vanilla or any variety of baking soda.  Thus, we trekked back to campus to begin our preparations.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of recipes for chocolate chip cookies without brown sugar.  Without vanilla and baking soda, though, is a totally different story.  It seems that in order to make chocolate chip cookies without baking soda, you need brown sugar, and vice versa.  We had to improvise.  I'd used Coca-Cola before to make stuff rise a bit, so I figured we could probably use that.  (Note the use of the word "figured.")  We were already basically making everything up as we went; what was one more little substitution, right?

Once we finally got all our ingredients together, we realized we had no real dishes to bake or mix in except a tiny saucepan (dirty), two soup spoons (also dirty), and a basting tray (disgusting).  In an uncharacteristic stroke of luck, I happened to have dishwashing liquid, so we were saved from having to make food with other people's germs on it.  We also had no real oven; just convection ovens.  It was at this point that we began to seriously question our plan, or lack thereof.

First we had to break the chocolate into chunks, because there's no such thing as chocolate chips here.  That took the longest, but it was tasty.  Since I don't tend to document anything well, it didn't occur to me to take pictures until well after the chocolate phase.  Oh well.

When we were done, we had a ton of chocolate chunks.  We guessed it was probably in the vicinity of maybe two cups.  (Note how certain we are at this point about measurements.)  I then realized that all the measurements in the recipe were in cups, not grams or liters.  Great.  Fancy math must happen.  Fortunately, there exist on the internet converters for cups of XYZ substance--butter, for example--to grams.  The flour conversion really didn't seem right, though, so we started guesstimating based on the ratios in the recipe.  (Yes, this process was highly scientific and precise and accurate measurements were used at every juncture.)  We piled everything into the saucepan just in time to realize that it might not fit.  Stirring was a very interesting exercise and resulted in multiple flour puffs.

After much ado, we decided it would be easier to take the batter out of the saucepan and knead stuff into it instead of trying to stir it, which was rapidly becoming a messy and inefficient modus operandi.  We now knew for certain that any sort of traditional cookie was completely impossible, so we basically were just trying to make something edible.

Once we had gotten most everything kneaded into the dough (it was definitely not batter at this point), I realized I'd forgotten the Coke and vanilla sugar.  I made a little brew in the bottom of the saucepan, and back went the dough.  It ended up looking like this:

(Those hands belong to my lovely friend who was also part of this venture.)

Basically looks like batter after we added the Coke, right?  It would have been much more like batter except that it had Paula Deen-worthy amounts of butter in it, in spite of the fact that everything in the recipe was measured relative to the butter.  I still have no idea how that worked.

At long last, we got the cookies into the convection oven, after Googling convection oven and regular oven differences and trying to figure out how to turn the dangnabbed contraption on.

At first we turned it on what we thought was low, just to make sure we didn't torch the cookies, because apparently that's a distinct possibility in a convection oven.  Turns out the little picture that looks like it should mean low actually means just the bottom element is on.  Guess what the cookie tray was sitting on.  Yes, that would be why only the bottom of the cookies looks like it's cooking.

It took us a few minutes to figure this out, so we had to move the cookies up onto the top rack to cook the tops, too.  The top element heated unevenly, so we also had to spin the tray around every now and again to at least attempt to cook everything the same amount.

Just before the Last Trump, after about two hours of toil, the cookies were done.

That's my hand to the left, for scale.  Those of you who know me in real life know that I have rather large (basically man-size) hands.  That should give you an idea of how big those "cookies" were.  They were also about an inch thick in the middle.

Of course, it's now abundantly obvious that those monsters are not, strictly speaking, cookies.  Neither are they biscuits or scones, though, so another friend dubbed them criscuits.  Surprisingly, they were pretty tasty, though they didn't quite taste like regular chocolate chip cookies and obviously they didn't have the right texture, either, seeing as they lacked baking soda and had an overabundance of butter.  Oh well; it momentarily satisfied the comfort food craving.  Nom nom nom.

Thus ends the criscuit saga.

Busy busy busy

That's why I haven't been posting lately. Lots of things have been going on here, but sadly not all of them have been particularly interesting. Midterms are already upon us and I doubt you all would want to read about the duties of the Umayyad and 'Abbasid caliphs, so I don't have that much noteworthy material to choose from.

Never fear, though; I do, as usual, have pictures!

Yes, that is a picture of my feet, and yes, it is here on purpose.  It's almost impossible to upload pictures to Blogger accidentally since Blogger will hate me if I don't resize them all from 4000x3000 to something more manageable.  Anyway, the reason I took this picture is to show off exactly how much I've been wearing flip-flops.  My friends call it the X-Men tan for obvious reasons, and it's even more pronounced now than it was two weeks ago when I took this picture.

This is the beach I went to three weeks ago.  The water was pretty cold most places, but there were a few little tidepool-type things that were a bit warmer.  The air and sun were fairly hot, though, so at least the water felt sort of good if you just put your feet/lower legs in it.  Any more than that and it got very uncomfortable very quickly.

Indonesian culture night!  The two men in suits in the middle are the Indonesian ambassador to Morocco and the president of the university.  The performers danced traditional Indonesian dances and played some angklung music, which was really cool.

This is part of the Bab al-Mansour in Meknes at the main entrance to the old medina.  It's a huge tourist attraction, as evidenced by the fact that a bus stops there about every 15 minutes and lets out a load of people armed with DSLRs, sun hats, and guidebooks.

The Bab proper.  I couldn't get a straight-on view of it because I would have gotten run over by one of the aforementioned buses or perhaps a city bus.  Obviously there were also a bunch of people in the way.

Kitty!  He was hanging out at the restaurant at which my little group ate for lunch.  We called him James Bond because he's wearing a tuxedo.  He was very friendly.

We thought it was really funny that we found a "Montana Bar" in the middle of a Moroccan city.  No, we didn't go in; this picture is courtesy the massive zoom on my camera.  As you can probably tell, it looked like the sort of place where weird stuff happens, so we avoided it.

This is another gate to another part of Meknes, near the Grand Taxi station.  For those of you who don't know, Grand Taxis are taxis that travel between cities and Petit Taxis are taxis that travel within cities.  We had to take a Grand Taxi from Ifrane to Meknes, since it's about a 45-minute drive and none of us really want to drive a standard in Morocco.  Actually, I don't really think any of us want to drive at all here.

Anyway.

We couldn't figure out quite where this gate went; it wasn't exactly the old medina but it wasn't exactly the new medina, either.  It was pretty, though, especially with the giant moon next to it.

The night before we went to Meknes, a friend and I attempted to make chocolate chip cookies.  I'll post the Cookie Saga later, along with a description of my first taste of liver.  I will say no more on that subject for now...

Later, gators.

Possibly...

...I am the worst travel blogger ever. To everyone who has been looking for regular posts from me, I'm sorry. This whole polychronic thing is really starting to sink in, I think. Well, that and I haven't done anything dreadfully interesting lately.

Okay, let's see; two weekends ago, I stayed here in Ifrane, which meant I did homework and hung out with friends all weekend. That was fun, but not something I'd like to do all the time, since there's really not all that much to do on the weekends in Ifrane unless you like being out until four in the morning at one of the two local "clubs" and marinating in concentrated cigarette smoke. It seems like everyone smokes here, and there are no rules about smoking inside, so if you go inside a restaurant--not even a bar--the air will probably be kind of foggy from the smoke. That's one thing I miss about 'Murica. Otherwise, I quite like it here.

Last weekend (the one that ended two days ago, if you're counting), I went to Temara on a church retreat. Temara is sort of a suburb of Rabat and is right on the ocean. It was absolutely beautiful and the weekend was very peaceful. I'll post pictures of the beach as soon as I rescue my camera from the clutches of my possibly buggy purse. That was the one downside to the weekend; some dastardly little harbingers of itchiness hid out in my mattress at the beach, I believe, because I now have odd little bites on my arms and legs. Oh well. The bites are going down already and I haven't yet sprouted extra limbs or anything, so I think we're good. Hooray for new life experiences!

Other than that, life is continuing along its new status quo. Homework has started to ramp up a bit, a fact which has partially contributed to my recalcitrant blogging habits. There's a lot of reading but hardly any written homework, which is the converse of what I'm used to at my home university. Thus, it's been kind of weird for me to have to make that switch in my mind. Everything is progressing well, though, so I'm not worried.

As for the disturbances in the MENA that have apparently continued, rest assured that none of that has touched Morocco much, let alone sleepy Ifrane. I'm continuing to keep my eyes open--as usual--but all is well here. No worries. Pics to come.

Later, gators.

Pictures Because Tired

Hello, friends!  I'm a little sleep-deprived today, so if some things either don't make sense or are weird pop culture references, that's why.  I'll try to keep that to a minimum, though.

Why am I sleep-deprived, you ask?  Long story.  Mostly it's because my internal clock keeps trying to wake me up at about 6 a.m. no matter when I went to sleep.  I think it's still a little confused.  At least it's consistent.

Anyway, this past weekend, I got to go to Rabat with a bunch of pretty awesome people.  Yeah, I know, I'm way behind in posting this, but I've been... yeah, no, I haven't been especially busy.  There goes that excuse.  I guess my tardiness is attributable to the fact that I've had a lot of writing to do this week for homework so by the time I finish my homework, I really just want to look at pictures of cats on the Internet.  This is all tangential.  See?  This is what happens when I'm tired.  Lucky you can't hear me or you'd get a bunch of bad impressions of famous accents.

The main point here is that I really liked Rabat.  After the desert aridity of Ifrane, the coastal humidity of Rabat was wonderful.  My skin no longer resembled the Utah salt flats.  Of course, it does again now that I'm back in Ifrane, but that's a tangent again.

How about pictures?  They're worth a thousand words or something so maybe I'll just post those and stop trying to form coherent sentences because obviously that's not working.

Kitties in the medina!  Not necessarily pettable kitties, but at least they didn't have pemphigus foliaceus like some other kitties I've seen.

My group went out on a little tiny rowboat to see the sights and so forth.  This was one of the sights.

This was another sight.

This is the inside of what is now the National Jewelry Museum and what used to be the king's guest residences.  We got the whole tour, but we were only allowed to take pictures in certain areas because they didn't want flash photography.  This photo happened to be the one that came out the best.

Rumor has it that this entire pillared area was once covered with a roof, but the roof fell down a really long time ago and the kingdom didn't have enough money to fix it at the time so it's stayed unfixed ever since.  Personally, I think it's cooler without the roof.

The Hassan Tower, which is the most visually significant part of the old mosque that's still standing.  It's up on a hill of sorts, so you can see it from kilometers away.

Oh look, a hoomin!  This particular hoomin happens to be me.  (Unless you were there and laughing at me, you have no idea how ridiculous I looked getting up on that pillar, which is almost as tall as I am.  I still have small bruises on my ribs and a brush burn on my right elbow from doing the worm to get up there.)  Behind me is His Late Majesty Mohammed V's mausoleum.  I took some pictures inside, but they don't look very good because there wasn't much light.  I won't post them here unless someone begs me to.

Another part of the old mosque, taken from this angle because it looks cool.

The flag was cool and I really, really like palm trees.  REALLY like them.

Post Scriptum...
I know many of you have heard about the bombing of the consulate in Libya.  First of all, don't worry; that's a really long way from Morocco, and even if it was closer, I seriously doubt Ifrane would be drastically affected.  Second, there have been no major problems in Morocco itself.  There were/are demonstrations in Casablanca, but as far as I know, nobody's tried to blow anything up, so it's okay.  Everyone I've spoken to here has denounced the actions of the people in Libya as non-Muslim and wrong.  For the people back home who might be worried about me and are reading this, you don't need to be worried.  I'm fine and am by nature a very cautious person when it comes to things like this, so I won't do anything surpassingly stupid and I will keep my eyes open, now as always.

Later, gators.

Stuff that makes the page load slooooowwwwwly

Hey all!

I've done it again--I keep taking pictures of stuff and then uploading them here and it makes the page insanely slow.  Sorry.  At least once they're archived the page won't take so long.

Anyway, these are pictures from my few days in Paris before coming to Morocco.  Enjoy!

The Eiffel Tower, obviously.  We didn't get to go up in it because the ticket line was probably a half-mile long.  No joke.

And again.  It's way too fun to take pictures of this thing.  I could bounce around the plaza and up and down the tower all day and still not get every angle I wanted.

View of the arch at La Defense (I forget what it's called).

Eiffel Tower again, after I figured out how long to make the exposure.  We still didn't get to go up in the tower since the lines were even longer after dark.

I tried to take these two pictures from approximately the same angles as the first two so people could clearly see the difference between night and day.  Don't know if it worked, though.

And finally, Notre Dame from across the Seine.  I couldn't get closer without being an awkwardly pushy American since this is apparently tourist season and there were tons of people everywhere.

Hopefully I'll find some time to post again next week.  Classes are starting to get a little hectic, probably because I have four out of five of them on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  At least I have nice Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Until next time...

Fez, or Why It Kind of Stinks to Have a Sensitive Nose

See what I did there? It's a pun. Ha. Ha.

I promised pictures, and I'm sorry for how long this page probably took to load as a direct result of said pictures. Nevertheless, people have been asking, so I blame my dear readers.

We'll get to the whole Sensitive Nose thing in a minute. First some more interesting "cultural" things.

Q-Tips.

You know those handy little cotton swabs on sticks you can use to clean your ears and hard-to-reach places in water bottles? Yeah, well, for furriners like me, they're apparently devilishly hard to find in Morocco. I never realized quite how many things I used those for until I couldn't find any. Since I packed really light for this trip, I didn't bring a giant box with me. Somehow I thought they'd be easy to find. WRONG.

Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places. I don't know. Anyway, the point is, I finally found Q-Tip-type swabby things at the Moroccan equivalent of Wal-Mart (Marjane). Incidentally, they don't sell hydrogen peroxide or even rubbing alcohol there. You have to go to a pharmacy for such items. I found this out after having a conversation with four different staff people in a weird mix of French, Arabic, English, and Charades. It took about ten minutes before anybody understood what anyone else was saying. During that time, I realized that 1) my French is incredibly limited and 2) somehow it's still more functional than my Arabic, which theoretically should be a lot better than my French. C'est la vie.

Anyway, the Marjane was, for a monochronic person, pretty much a dream come true. People stood in lines! It was wonderful. I was also able to pick up a real towel, which is nice because I've been using a little backpacking towel for the past two weeks. It worked, but that was it.  Ford Prefect would be proud, I think.

Now. Pictures! And Fez! And Smelly Things!

I thought I would share my hand soap with everyone.  It's not technically hand soap--I don't know if the picture is sharp enough, but the writing at the bottom (yes, that's a tin) says it's "the transparent whitening facial bar."  It's transparent, all right, but I have my doubts about the whitening bit.  My hands aren't appreciably whiter than they were two weeks ago.  Then again, I'm just pretty white all over, so I suppose I can't make much of a comparison.

This is the main gate that leads into Fez's old medina, which is set apart from the rest of the city because it's completely walled and some of the buildings are, I'm told, in the region of a thousand years old.  This entire gate was painted by hand.

Closer view of the gate, in which the intricacy of the painting is (hopefully) more visible.

Inside one of the old houses in the medina.  Again, everything was hand painted.  Behind me, and therefore out of view, is a fountain, which kept this main area cool.  These houses are typically two or more stories with the pictured large, atrium-like main room in the middle onto which all the smaller rooms on the edges open.

Most of the streets in the old medina look like this.  Obviously there's no way a car will fit in there, so most transporting of goods and people is done with mules, donkeys, handcarts, and--very rarely--motorcycles or motor scooters.  The medina is on quite a hill and the cobblestones can be pretty slippery, so motorcycles don't necessarily do too well.  It's hard to take a run at a hill when people, cats, and donkeys are in the way.

And here's the reason for the title of this post.  This, my friends, is the world-famous Fez tannery.  At first glance it looks pretty benign and actually pretty cool, but not at first whiff.  There are no harsh chemicals, just the all-natural tanning process, so that's interesting.  Boy, do those all-natural methods stink, though.

WARNING:  THE FOLLOWING IS A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF AN UNHOLY STENCH.  VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Imagine if a bunch of birds, a few rodents, possibly an omnivore or two, and some donkeys all decided to poo in the same place, stir it up, and let it sit in the desert sun for a few days, sprinkled daily and liberally with the urine of those animals.  That's about how this place smells.  It's not nearly as pungent as, say, a four-days-dead roadkill skunk, but it's still pretty nasty.  Since I happen to have been blessed with a super-sniffer (thanks, Mom), the reek was all the more special for me.

The real insidiousness of this bifurcated-tail-and-pitchfork-worthy stench doesn't actually reveal itself until several hours after the fact, at which point it's too late to do anything about it and everything smells like the tannery since it's been burned into the nose.  Not even the sprigs of mint the tannery workers give you will help with that.  No matter what you do, that smell will stay in the nose for a very long time, and it's really not a lot of fun to brush one's teeth with that hanging out in one's sinuses.  I advise holding the breath.  Or you could just be smart, unlike me, and smell on the mint the entire time instead of trying to be tough and just ignoring it.  REALLY bad plan, okay?

Since I went to Paris before I came here, I'll add pics of that, too, but not yet.  This post is quite long enough as it is.

Also, the background photo for this blog is the view from my dorm window just after sunset.

Later, gators.

Yeah, I'm alive. So far.

So for those of you who know me in person, you know I'm studying abroad in Morocco this semester. Hooray! It's been fun and challenging so far.

I'll start with the challenging bit so we can end with the really cool stuff.

Time.

Holy. Toledo. I was not prepared for how differently people view time here. It's been explained to me as polychronic versus monochronic. Polychronic people tend to think of time as very fluid--basically, relationships and so on are more important than "being on time." In fact, there is often little to no concept of "on time" in a heavily polychronic culture. In monochronic cultures, the opposite is true. Time is, as they say, of the essence--time is money. Relationships and such are less important than "being on time."

The US obviously tends to fall more on the monochronic end of the continuum, and Morocco falls more on the polychronic end, at least for things unrelated to being punctual in classes. I tend to be pretty monochronic myself; I like to do things in the most efficient manner possible and get as much done as I can in as short a time as I can.

This difference also extends to how people stand in lines. I have yet to come across a place (off campus) in which people actually queue. It's more like a cluster in which the most vocal person typically gets served first. Therefore, shouting and pushing tend to ensue to some extent. For my painfully "Western" mind, this is honestly a little frightening. I'm used to people standing in tidy lines and being attended to in the order in which they came to the line. It appears to be more efficient that way. Admittedly, I have witnessed several times now where the cluster method appears to serve more people at one time, so I guess it's not really a question of efficiency, but rather of my comfort zone. That's why I came here, though; I want to stretch myself, and what better way to do that than to uproot myself from everything familiar and go to a place where I barely speak the language and am intimidated by queuing at the grocery store?

Okay, now for some fun stuff. How about food?

Yeah, I could talk ad nauseam about the deliciousness of the food here and still not be done. Bonus: it's mostly organic and pretty much completely non-processed, so it's also really good for you! I'll try to learn some recipes for the folks at home. If I can't cook them myself (I'm a notoriously inattentive and therefore poor cook), I'll give them to somebody who can cook and then probably stand behind them and tell them what to do, as if I actually know what's going on.

My favorite food so far is couscous. It's not like people make it in the US, with oogy globs of some kind of wheat-based something. It's kind of like a Sibelius symphony for the taste buds--substantial, yet not too heavy, with beautiful harmonies, soaring melodies, and a deep sense of tradition. We eat it every Friday because, well, that's the tradition. The stuff they serve in the cafeteria is, I'm told, not really Moroccan couscous, but it's good anyway. We--that is, the international students--had a chance to try the "real" stuff a few days ago. That's where the symphony simile comes from.

Well, that's all I've got right now. More will come at some undefined point in the relatively near future. I'm being polychronic now, see?