Marrakech + The End

I'm going to do this (really, really long but hopefully entertaining) post in reverse order because the segues make a little more sense that way, I think.  My thoughts are a little muddled due to the fact that I'm getting used to American germs again via influenza, but I'm pretty sure this thought is more or less solid.  Pretty sure.

Well, my Morocco adventure has officially concluded, which means this is the last official post on this blog, as far as I know.  I am now safely back in the States, and have been for a week and a half.  It's still weird; I'm experiencing some reverse culture shock, and no doubt I will for a while.  The thing that has impressed me the most about the West in general, but mostly America, is the amount of stuff people have.  Costco and Wal-Mart are freaking huge.  People actually use all that stuff?  Really?

Interestingly--and this is not something I admit easily--the culture shock has been a lot worse coming back than it was going to Morocco.  I expected a developing country when I went to Morocco, and that was of course what I got.  Aside from that basic concept, I tried not to have too many ideas about how Morocco would be.

Coming back to something familiar is completely different.  You get this picture in your head of how things are "supposed" to be, and when they aren't how you remember, it's frankly quite unsettling.  In the time in which I was away, I got a concept embedded in my head of how "home" was.  That concept was created by a different me, one that hadn't been exposed to the things to which I have now been exposed.  Sometimes I feel like I'm a little out of phase with my surroundings.  Morocco initially had an aura of unreality about it; home has an aura of terrible reality.  In one way, it's as if I never left home, but in another, it's as if I left forever.  It'll take awhile to reconcile everything in my own mind.  Perhaps then I'll be able to talk more coherently about my experiences as a whole.  For now, suffice it to say that Morocco was great, and home is great too, but nothing is perfect and you can't expect it to be unless you want to be disappointed.

Okay, now for a lighter topic.  Marrakech!  Or Marrakesh, as the Firefox spellchecker wants me to spell it.  Clearly it doesn't know Morocco was a French colony for a long time and thus the transliterations are/should be French, in my highly subjective and non-scholarly opinion.

Anyway.  Marrakech (I will persist with my spelling in spite of Firefox's best efforts) is a beautiful city, provided you can put up with a constant barrage of humanity and two-wheeled vehicles.  Motorcycles, variants on motorcycles, and bicycles are a very popular mode of transportation in Marrakech.  This is especially true in the old medina, in which the streets are so narrow and windy that most cars can't fit.

There is something for everyone in Marrakech, except perhaps peace and quiet.  Marrakech is most emphatically not a place to go for a relaxing weekend.  The riad (large house, formerly a family house but now a bed and breakfast of sorts) in which I stayed was beautiful and quite peaceful, but was the only place which felt that way.

Allow me to illustrate.

You wake up from a peaceful sleep in the lovely riad and take a nice, hot shower.  After a leisurely breakfast, you get your camera and any other necessary personal effects from your room and venture out into the street.

The moment you set foot in the street, you immediately have to pull it back to avoid getting it run over by a speeding motorcyclist.  You give him a dirty look, but there's nothing else you can do, since he's already skidded rather alarmingly around a corner.  Shrugging it off as an atypical incident, you start on your way deeper in to the medina.

As soon as you hit the main "street," which is a river of humanity, an armada of motorcycles zips by, again narrowly missing your toes.  You wonder how they can go so fast without hitting something or someone, and you regret wearing sandals.  You're still close enough to the riad that you could go back and change, but your friends are already plunging into the crowd, so you follow.

After a few minutes' walk--or, more accurately, wade--you arrive at the Djema'a al-Fnaa, which is the main square in the medina.  It literally means Gathering of the Dead, since it was the place in which public executions were held in a bygone age.  Now it's a massive expanse of asphalt, upon which hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors have set up their stalls and are now hawking their wares.

If the street was a river of humanity, this is the Pacific Ocean.  There are all kinds of wares, mostly targeted at tourists, who make up the majority of the population in the square.  Your ears pick up an interesting pastiche of languages--the typical Arabic and French, of course, but also English of several varieties, German, Spanish, and perhaps even some Russian and Italian.  The square is truly a melting pot.

Immediately following your entrance to the square, you are quite literally accosted by people trying to sell you things you don't need.  Shopkeepers try to physically pull you into their shops.  You find that speaking Spanish to these vendors gets you less attention than speaking English.

In the middle of the square, you see something interesting, so you whip out your camera to take a picture.

Big mistake.

About fifty people descend on you, yelling in various languages.  You freeze, instantly realizing your mistake.  Everything is for sale here, including photos.  It doesn't matter if the person wanting the money is standing behind you when you take the picture; you still have to pay.  You rapidly stow your camera in your pocket and flee into the relative safety of the crowds, muttering "no, gracias" as necessary.  No picture is worth dealing with that many people.  Perhaps when it's dark and you're less visible you can take a photo.

Having had enough of the medina for a while, you leave for the newer parts of the city.

Later that night, you come back to the Djema'a al-Fnaa and manage to snap this photo before plunging back into the throngs...

Somehow, through a little sleight of hand and disabling your camera's flash, you also manage to snap this...

...and then you immediately have to move away.

You smell an interesting smell wafting toward you from a block of vendors, so you and your group wander into the block.  The vendors are food vendors, and they cook the food right in front of you.  You've already had dinner, so you have to say no to all of them, which gets increasingly difficult as you get closer to the edge of the block.  When you finally break free of their clutches, they shout "f*** you, man!" at your back and promptly turn to snare their next victim.

Somehow you manage to get through the near-psychopathic souvenir vendors to the much more sparsely-populated caravanserai.  It's a breath of fresh air compared to the hubbub of the square.  The polite gentleman tending to a small textile shop tells you that it's a principle of the caravanserai that no one will push you to buy anything, a principle you greatly appreciate.  The man tells you it's because the caravanserai is where the caravans used to come to be refreshed, and the vendors there all want to keep the tradition of peacefulness.

Eventually you make your way back to the riad, exhausted from a long day.

The above is a dramatization of actual events.

There is actually one place a person can go for a little R&R in Marrakech.  For some reason--probably the flu--the name is escaping me at the moment, but I do know that it's a place for sharifs, or descendents of the Prophet's family, to be buried.  I also have pictures.

The axe blade-shaped things everywhere are tombs.

I think that's all I have to say now.  There may be another unofficial post here sometime, and there will certainly be more posts if I go somewhere else soon, but for the foreseeable future, this is the end.  I've enjoyed blogging--factual blogging, that is--more than I thought I would.  I actually don't really know how many people read this; hopefully someone got some entertainment and perhaps even usable information out of it.

Well, that's the end, I guess.  Morocco is officially a closed chapter of my life, at least for now.  Until next time, my friends...

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...