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...

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.

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...

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.

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.