travel space-time friends

It's been awhile because I've been away and gotten lazy. I also went on a whirlwind trip through the south with chris coco, an old friend, and a new friend, Florian, we met in marrakesh who came along for the ride. You can check out how much more filled-in my morocco visiting map is with the link in the upper right of this page. I also have a ton of photos, some of which are below.

We went to ouarzazate, agdz, tinghrir, erfoud, the desert, fez, and back to our town. The south is different. The people are poorer, generally more open, kind, generous, and welcoming, and there is a heavy berber influence. Most people are very proud of their ethnicity as non-Arabs. In Agdz, the women were more conservative and I heard the most formal and religious of responses to salaam 3laykum I've ever heard. The desert was indescribable, particularly at night up on the sand dunes. Absolute quiet and immense darkness, reminding me of a passage from the Dharma Bums having to do with the "roaring silence" of the desert. We experienced an interesting variety of travel, in a single day we moved by camel, 4x4, grand taxi, souk bus, foot, and small taxi. We had to pay/hitchhike a couple of times and chris and florian got to experience some of the uncomfortableness. We slept outside twice in 3 days, and generally had a damn good time. It was like going to another country for me in terms of freshness. 

I am intensely aware of how easy is it to travel with all guys. I am never on edge- the worst thing somebody can do is cheat us of money and who really cares? (just kidding-- i get seriously pissed off when that happens). People may stare, but they don't leer menacingly. Maybe it had to do with traveling through a tourist corridor, where people in every town asked immediately if I was Peace Corps once they heard some Arabic. But traveling with dudes is low-stress. It didn't matter if we needed to hitch rides in packed cars. It didn't matter if maybe we had to stay in an unknown town or at seedy hotels, if we had to be packed in to taxis and souk buses with sweaty people. 

Once Coco and I returned to my town we were joined by another friend from college, Emily! We went to the beach and the mountains and generally relaxed. Relaxing would have been easier if we weren't battling a lice infestation and water outage in the house but it was still all good.

It was very strange to have these friends here with Krista and me, in our Peace Corps world. They are the only two outside friends to have visited, the only two who will have some idea of these years of my life. And they are the only two friends who I have seen- all other people have essentially been cut off from me- this time, and who they are during this time, is foreign to me. We existed together again for a brief period in a little space-time bubble. Very odd.

As for time, Morocco was supposed to do daylight savings time. Then, twelve hours before this was going to happen, the Ministry of Time (a real thing) decided to delay the change for another month. Why this couldn't have happened earlier, and what the Ministry of Time does during the rest of the year, I have no idea. But it meant that all the times for Emily's flights were simply wrong.

As for water, it was cut off because we never got our bill. I realized this, went to the office, and tried to pay. They office didn't allow me to pay, so I said fine, I'll do it next time. Then we got a notice in the mailbox saying in 8 days your water will be cut off unless you pay and pay a fine. But the 8 was scratched off and somebody had written 0 and simply turned off the water. So not only did the utilities company never deliver our bill, but they were also so late in warning us that we had no time to respond. Assholes. Maybe they were furloughed because of a government shutdown? oh wait that's america. 

Here are some awesome pictures... Click on a photo in order to enlarge and scroll through them.

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.

Long periods of boredom interrupted by brief periods of extreme integration

It has been a while since I last wrote something on this page. There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest one is that nothing is happening. In August I did nothing, except for 10 days straight of full-time camp. Responsibilities included teaching English in the morning, making sure kids didn't drown, and keeping an eye on thieves at the beach. Krista and I did camp in El Jadida, which is just south of Casablanca. It was nice to be somewhere with a breeze off the ocean, and it was nice to work in a camp that had some sort of organization.

And there was only one kid who got hit hard by the camp director- Bonus! If there were any kids he should have been hitting it was his own. This guy's four year old sun decided to pee on the ground right in front of the door to our bungalow. But other than that, it was a good camp. Beforehand, the Ministry of Youth and Sports attempted to steal scholarship money for sending a couple of our town's girls to the camp, but they failed and the girls had a great time.

Most of the last week has been consumed by boredom/filling out graduate school applications. In a little preview of future tuition, I'm shelling out cash left and right just to email the places my papers.

And then my friend/former student/former Arabic tutor told us she's getting married. We went to the wedding last night. They cooked 70+ chickens, and blasted local music all night. We were literally the first to leave, at 5 in the morning, just as the first call to prayer of the day sounded.

Here are some wedding pictures- keep in mind that no alcohol was involved.

the bride

the woman on the right was featured in a previous post- "an old berber Henna" - sweet lady

1:30, time to start the party

krista and the mother of the bride dancing

white batmen

lets have the bride sit in this little bowl and then carry her around

...and shine bright lights in her face so the video turns out well

3:00 am

photos of the couple

outfits #2

hey

4:00- things are really getting started. fairly consistent gender separation

traditional music matched with lazerlightshow

outfit #3

enough already - 4:45 am. I left, it probably went until 7. then moved to another town to continue

Bored

It's cooled down to 102 degrees, alhumdullilah. I am bored.

This past week it seems as though I've been defining my life by what isn't happening, rather than what's in front of me. Perhaps this is because there is literally nothing in front of me. I'm spending all my mental energy thinking about what's 10+ months in front of me. And watching tv.

I've been bored. Luckily, however, Ramadan is coming to an end. The day after tomorrow, thousands of people from town will congregate on the highest hill (which is a huge, empty lot), to pray together as the sun comes up. Maybe just men, I'm not sure. Then they will drink tea and eat cookies for about 24 hours in celebration of the end of fasting. A day or two later, I'll be peeling out of town on my way west until I hit the Atlantic. In el Jadida, which is a little south of Casablanca, I'll do 10 days of summer camp and then come back for the end of August.

500 days

500 days ago, I was in America. It's been a while.

So what's my day-to-day like now?

Wake up
Read
Study Arabic
Make lunch
Prepare grad school applications/play on the internet
Exercise
Either make dinner or go to someone's house to break fast (I am not fasting)
Watch the West Wing

It's Ramadan. It's 102 with 30% humidity. And there's no running water. Nor have I done anything remotely close to 'work' in about 6 weeks. But I'm doing okay. I have another week of mercilessly killing time before an English-language summer camp on the Atlantic coast and I think I'm going to survive.

Maybe two weeks ago I returned from vacation with Krista. It's always hard coming back from Europe- the other two times I've done it, I had a distinct case of the blues for a long time. This time we pre-empted the doldrums by hanging at a nearby beach for a couple days with some other volunteers. Cost of the hotel on the beach: six dollars a night.

Of course, some things about coming back in summer are tough. The enormous, disgusting flying cockroaches that crawl out of our hole-in-the-ground toilet being one of them. Another is the lack of distraction. But the biggest problem is that it's Ramadan. People are hangry. It's hard to leave the house because everybody's wandering around like zombies, and few businesses are open. And some people crack.

I was standing on the corner for about an hour and a half waiting for a bus that might go to the beach. It was about 8 in the morning and I saw a group of guys laughing and doing what looked like gambling, on a bench across this sort of open plaza in the middle of downtown. Somebody must of drawn a lucky (or unlucky) hand and everything changed. Two of the guys started this silly dance that could be called public fighting. The way it works is, you maybe make one swing at another man and then all your buddies hold you back, and all his buddies hold him back, but they still let them yell in each other's faces, and then one is pulled away, but then his buddies let him rush back, but then hold him again and they yell in each other's faces again. This was all normal, so I wasn't particularly worried. But then the swords came out.

Yup, sword fight. Maybe they were technically knives, but they were probably 18 inches long and these guys were trying to hack each other apart. It was like Aladdin, but without music. Somehow their friends still managed to drag them away and they both looked ok (other than being certifiable psycho-whackjobs). I saw no police, nor did any show up.

So that made me miss Ireland and Italy a little bit. Didn't see many sword fights at the gelatterias. Before jetting off to Europe, my parents and grandmother came to Morocco and we toured around. It was wonderful, but as this blog is primarily for them, I won't go into details. But here are some pictures.