More Weddings and Sitting Around

I went to my second wedding within a week- in Qenitra by Rabat. I felt as though I was crashing it as I knew nobody aside from the groom (and the groom usually shows up briefly a few hours into the festivities). Embarrassingly, I was also the most underdressed person in the room, as I was on my way back from a meeting about improving volunteer services for special needs youth in the capital. Most of the weddings I've been to have been outside, in tents, with all the men in jeans and tshirts coming and going as they liked. This one was in a venue by the river with chandeliers, a full band, a dozen servers, and a 3-man professional camera team, all of which run to a few thousand bucks for the night. I ducked out super early (midnight) in order to catch an all-night train across the country and get back to Krista, but I had time to see a little dancing before my departure. It turns out our local dance, the Reggada, in which you shake your shoulders back and forth, stamp your feet, and sometimes hold ornamental rifles, isn't done in Qenitra. The women there all danced with elbows at shoulder height and hands up and outspread. They would step with one foot, leaning forward, head and arms, shaking their hands, and then step back onto the other foot, leaning backward, head and arms, shaking their hands. The mens' dance appeared to simply be a sort of running-in-place with high knees. Good exercise but I didn't hit the dancefloor this time, as I didn't want to be sitting in sweat for the 10 hour ride home.

Following this trip, I've been doing more sitting in my site- hanging out with the directors, drawing tentative schedules for the beginning of Oct. start of classes, fiddling with grad school applications, and working on stuff for the special needs group. Not much to speak of, overall, except for Krista's continuing unbelievable cooking.

Yesterday, though, I did see something I hadn't before- a funeral. I was sitting at the cafe with the director of my youth center, talking about nothing, as per usual, and an ambulance drove by with a few extra people sitting in it. Everybody at the cafe stood up as the procession went past. A few pickup trucks followed the ambulance with lots of people crowded inside, and then a few cars as well. I had heard crazy stories about people paying professional wailers to mourn at funerals. Either these reports are false, or the procession is different.