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.

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.

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.