David the Explorer

These past two week­ends have been a whirl­wind of travel, so apolo­gies for the lack of updates. I have pic­tures and sto­ries for you from Casablanca, Fez, Mek­nes, Azrou, and Ifrane, all of which are very, very dif­fer­ent areas in Morocco. In fact, it was remark­able how I could go from hav­ing a snow­ball fight to play­ing with mon­keys to sit­ting on Roman ruins all in one day. But that’s Morocco for you.

About ten days ago, I went to Casablanca with a large group of friends from my pro­gram on an unof­fi­cial adven­ture. We took the train there–it’s only an hour away and only thirty dirhams, so the whole process is pretty easy. We did the first log­i­cal thing to do once we arrived, which was to go to Pizza Hut. I would describe the cheese-filled crust and the cer­e­mo­ni­ous con­clu­sion of my pep­per­oni abstemious­ness in detail, but you would prob­a­bly be _____________. (Off-screen, David the Explorer shouts, Disturbed! Disgusted! Ashamed! in Spanish.)

AMIDEAST has been pretty awe­some by pro­vid­ing a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties for us. Fur­ther­more, our coor­di­na­tor, Doha, will straight up book us hotels in a spe­cific price range all over Morocco for us to make sure we’re safe (though of course each hotel still rips us off because we’re White). So after P-Hutt, we walked a thou­sand miles to our Casablan­can hotel which fea­tured faked ferns, pink toi­let paper, and beds which were made of a mate­r­ial I can only describe as diaper.

Once we got set­tled, we did the next thing to totally seize the oppor­tu­nity of the fact that we were in Casablanca: we took a nice, two-hour nap. I mean, I didn’t take the train all this way to stay awake and see Casablanca, am I right? After wak­ing, think­ing we were wear­ing Depends, but then real­iz­ing it was in fact just the con­sis­tency of the bed, it was time to do The Main Thing On The Agenda. Now, being in a pro­gram that is 85% female, I think it is clear what The Main Thing On The Agenda was. Shopping.

The Morocco Mall is the largest mall in Africa, chris­tened by the likes of J. Lo and a thou­sand dif­fer­ent flower stat­ues of mun­dane things like sun­glasses and high heels. It’s a lit­tle out­side of Casa, so the cab ride pro­vided ample oppor­tu­nity for me to get to know the kind soul of the cab dri­ver. In Ara­bic, I learned about his home town and his favorite places in Morocco. He seemed ecsta­tic that I was study­ing Ara­bic here. So ecsta­tic, in fact, that he demanded we pay ten times the price of the cab ride, to which we replied, “La.”

Words I’d use to describe Moroc­can Mall: Con­sumerism, large, Burger King. I’m still hard-pressed to find a crunch­wrap supreme in al-Maghreb, though. I toured around with Julia and Eliot for a while before get­ting lost with­out cell phone min­utes in a Zara that I was pos­i­tive was a Zara Women but was actu­ally a Zara Men but I still don’t believe those signs because I’m pretty sure I saw a straight up dress.

Our night in Casablanca was equally hilar­i­ous, involv­ing a club called Le Squat, a bride-to-be, and a midget.

Quick inter­lude about the minu­tiae of daily life here. Things are good. My Ara­bic is get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter, insha’allah, and most of my classes some­times talk about inter­est­ing sub­ject mat­ter. While I love learn­ing about rev­o­lu­tion the­ory and the pen­e­tra­tive power of the Moroc­can satel­lite sys­tem, I miss my Eng­lish classes. Last night, Mar­wane, Eliot, Tamar, and I watched The Descent, and all I wanted to do was dis­sect its hor­ror para­bles and ana­lyze how the descent in The Descent is actu­ally a descent from decency… and law and human­ity. But that didn’t stop me from maybe think­ing the cave peo­ple were in the bathroom.

I love my host fam­ily. Some­times it gets a lit­tle tir­ing hav­ing to deal with Lat­ifa (“You in the hos­pi­tal of le crazy, Daood!” “Eliot, you top crazy!”) but some­times it’s so reward­ing (“I get sweets before din­ner so we eat quickly because my momma she will be mad if she know”). My mom is still a phe­nom­e­nal cook, our dad still loves teach­ing us, Mar­wane still loves hang­ing out. Eliot recently wit­nessed a car acci­dent around 3AM one night and, in scared stu­por, asked, “Kul shay b’kher?” which, accord­ing to our host fam­ily is the fun­ni­est thing in the world since you just… don’t say that. (Imag­ine see­ing a woman who just got in a car acci­dent, blood stream­ing down her face, and ask­ing her, “Hey girlie, is every­thing dandy?” Keef keef.) Any­way, lit­er­ally every­thing is kul­shay­bkher? now and then laugh­slaugh­slaughs and I am curi­ous to see how long inside jokes go for in Morocco and if there is any­thing called Beat­ing A Dead Horse because it looks like there isn’t.

The fol­low­ing week­end, AMIDEAST took the whole group to four dif­fer­ent places: Fez, Ifrane, Azrou, and Mek­nes. It was an awe­some trip. We trav­eled by minibus, half the group in each, and Eliot brought an iPod radio adap­tor and walkie talkies so we could lis­ten to Got 2 Luv U by Sean Paul on repeat for hours.

Fez is the old­est city in Morocco. Once we set­tled into our hotel (named Hotel Splen­did, so things had to be good. Yes, it had a swim­ming pool, and, yes, it was 45-degrees faren­heit outside–talk about sum­mer!), the group decided that shawarma was needed to be had. We trav­eled around for a lit­tle while, only find­ing a restau­rant named The Mona Lisa instead of a shawarma shack. As the des­ig­nated Talk To This Man To Find Out Where We Are per­son, I Talked To This Man To Find Out Where We Were.

“Hello, Mis­ter! We would like to eat at the best shawarma restau­rant in all of the city Fez. Do you know where I am able to find this restaurant?”

“Yes, brother, [gar­bled­words] shawarma [unclear­dia­logue]. I will walk you [he’stalkingreallyquickly].”

The man pro­ceeded to abort his orig­i­nal mis­sion to walk us ten min­utes to the sec­ond best shawarma place in town named Puerto Rico (wait what?) because Grace got too hun­gry to wait for the best one. On the walk, he gave me a won­der­ful les­son on Islam (what else is new), told me all about Fez and where he lives and his work, and in the end, explained,

“Many peo­ple, they do this for money. For exam­ple, they walk [pleas­es­low­down­sir] and then they say, ‘Please give me money!’ But me, [wasthat­aclick­lan­guage?] and I do it because Islam says it is impor­tant to help a friend. You are my friend. Good luck and [itslikeyouretryingtospeaksignlanguage].”

So nat­u­rally, I gave one of my Hall­mark good­byes: “Thank you very much, my brother. Hope­fully in the near future I will see you again around this city that is named Fez and then we will talk because your help was very impor­tant and I would not have not have been able to find Puerto Rico the Sec­ond Best Shawarma Place in Fez alone.” And then, an adden­dum, “Also please excuse my hun­gry friends who did not want to walk to the best shawarma place in Fez. This is good enough for us, and they are tired.”

And then, just as quickly as we found him, he dis­ap­peared into the Fez­ian afternoon.

The Fez Med­ina was beau­ti­ful. We did a lot of sight-seeing within it with a knowl­edge­able pro­fes­sor, tak­ing pic­tures at a madrasa (reli­gious school) and a place where peo­ple once traded things (there were scales). Then, we had time to do, what else. Shop­ping. The girls got ear­rings and the girls got scarves and the girls even got soap this time which was sur­pris­ing because I thought they just kept want­ing to buy ear­rings and scarves because who doesn’t need sev­enty pairs of those accessories?

High­lights of Fez were see­ing a camel’s decap­i­tated head on the side of a souk that we quickly named Herb (the camel, not the head), and then actu­ally con­sum­ing camel burg­ers at the beau­ti­ful Cafe Clock. It was pretty tasty.

Ifrane was so so cold. In fact, there was snow. And snow ball fights. Lessons I learned include that it is really easy to destroy Moroc­cans in snow ball fights because they sim­ply have no idea. Rochester, Land of Snow and Lake Effect Mis­ery, trained me for this day, I told myself.

Fol­low­ing ice-cold beauty were mon­keys galore and Berber/Amazigh shops where the girls did the unthink­able. Shop­ping. And yes, they bought ear­rings. Again. But luck­ily I had mon­keys to keep me com­pany, and unlike in India, these mon­keys weren’t inclined to rip my face off at the jaw line and instead were very ecsta­tic to take my bread and excrete off trees in front of me.

We stayed the night in Azrou where we explored the souks and ate good food and made Dumb Lawn jokes. (I think I’m get­ting weirder by the day.)

There, we slept in Hotel Panorama which had a beau­ti­ful view but unfor­tu­nately ran out of elec­tric­ity and dou­ble unfor­tu­nately looked exactly like a mur­der mys­tery cas­tle and a thou­sand unfor­tu­nately had thus no heat and so in con­clu­sion it was the cold­est. And darkest.

While tak­ing the bus back, we stopped in Mek­nes to eat and explore the souk there, too, and then paraded around Roman ruins tak­ing pic­tures of every­one in their drug rugs (those burlapy sweat­shirt things) pre­tend­ing to be gnomes.

It is so cool that Morocco has this much vari­ety within it. Trav­el­ing on the week­ends is a breath of fresh air. Yet, cer­tain things, like when we acci­den­tally walked into the epi­cen­ter of the pros­ti­tu­tion ring of Fez, made me excited to come back to Rabat which is alto­gether a lit­tle more put together than these other places. It’s homey, now. It’s a homebase.

So kul shay is in fact bkheer here. I’m cur­rently at my intern­ship, where I’m about to draft a pro­posal for an Ibn Rochd think tank that will com­ple­ment Morocco’s democ­ra­ti­za­tion efforts by putting pres­sure on pol­icy reform with research and dia­logue among high-profile stake­hold­ers. I’m pretty sure I have to write it in Eng­lish and Ara­bic, so don’t get too excited about the suc­cess of this project.

AMIDEAST also orga­nized a fake Moroc­can wed­ding at my (host)aunt’s house where every­one got dressed up in djellabas and Eliot and Elana got fake mar­ried. It was a lot of danc­ing with our lan­guage part­ners, singing with my Ara­bic teacher, and a lot of fun even though none of us had any idea what was going on. What was even more fun was walk­ing around Rabat in a djellaba and a fes try­ing to get a taxi and being openly laughed at by all.

This week­end, my dad and grandma are com­ing. I’m excited to show them around Rabat and do all of the touristy things. It will also be nice to see some fam­ily, but I am not look­ing for­ward to shaving.

In con­clu­sion, always remem­ber: Swiper, no swip­ing! Espe­cially no swip­ing ear­rings ’cause you have enough of those by now!!