Field Notes: Clothing

Alive and swine flu-free. In the clutches of 2 big papers and a handful of finals. But before I leave the country in just over three weeks (!) I want to get in a few entries just documenting my surroundings. To avoid total free association, we're going to try to go vaguely by topic.

Round 1: Clothing

The variety of what Moroccans wear was one of the big surprises when I arrived. Basically, there are lots of permutations. That is, you can find Moroccan women wearing snazzy modern clothes, heels and a headscarf, or women in djellabas with their hair uncovered, as well as the (very) occasional woman all in black with just her eyes showing. My host mother, as one example, wears a djellaba and ballet flats when she goes out, and covers her hair (though sometimes with very filmy fabric).

In Agdal you get the most modern young'uns, which means fourteen year olds in full makeup, heels and handbags - they definitely have their American counterparts. My host sisters, aged 19 and up, make use of a full array of trendy clothing, makeup, shoes and handbags.

As far as young Moroccan men are concerned, it's a peacock culture. They wear fancy jackets, distressed jeans, shiny shoes, belts with big buckles that say Gucci and whatnot, they slick their hair back. (Fashion you rarely see on straight American men.) It reminds me a lot of Italian men, actually. Older Moroccan men, depending mostly on their line of work, will wear European work clothes, or jeans and t-shirts. The grandfather-aged set often wear djellabas and leather slippers (yellow is the standard color for men) on a daily basis, and even the more modern dressers will put on a white djellaba for Friday prayers. What you won't see is a twenty something in a djellaba, unless he's a tour guide.

Some other interesting tidbits: the stagiaires - high school graduates who are getting their licence in business, marketing, computer science - often wear a white or light blue smock over their normal clothing, which I think is a leftover from French school systems.

The one person I've talked to specifically about veiling is my friend Laura's culture partner, Lamiya. She is 21 years old, and didn't start wearing a headscarf until 2 years ago (tradition would have her start at puberty), when she had a religious awakening (sorry, can't think of a better term) and started saying her prayers regularly.

Oh, and Moroccans like to be warm. So even on sixty degree days when I'm walking around in a t-shirt, people are still in sweaters and trenchcoats. Layers are a matter of principle: stockings under jeans, tank tops under whatever else you put on. The thing is, they've got the right idea, because the second you get inside a house or in the shade it will be much cooler, and I end up putting those layers right back on.

That's all for now. Perhaps later I can add pictures to go with the huge block of text.

Read more...

Meknes, Volubilis and Fes

Last weekend was our final group trip. First stop was Meknes, only an hour and a half from Rabat by bus (remembering our four hour drive to Tangier, we had all settled in for a long haul). In Meknes we checked out the medina and an artisans' museum. It was early, so the main square was empty except for a few kids selling candy and a couple of spice/medicine vendors.


The next stop was Volubilis, Roman ruins plunked down right in the middle of the Moroccan countryside. What's bizarre is that the paysage looks absolutely Tuscan, with olive trees and even a few cypresses. We also lucked out and got beautiful weather, unlike just about every other trip we've taken.


After Volubilis it was on to Fes. The city has three parts: the old medina, "New Fes" which is actually old, and Ville Nouvelle, which is actually new. Fes's medina is unlike anything I've seen so far, and unfortunately it doesn't look like I managed to capture it in pictures - probably because it's entirely made of narrow, winding streets that are full of people. Every couple of minutes you have to duck out of the way of a donkey, and you're either climbing or descending a hill the whole time.


There are amazing monuments sort of embedded in the medina though, including the sanctuary of Moulay Idriss, a Muslim saint and the founder of Fes. The streets around the sanctuary are lined with vendors specific to the tomb, selling all sorts of candles, incense and Fassi specialties which include nougat and sesame candy.

I also got it into my head that we had to find a place in the medina to have b'sara, bean and garlic soup. Our mission was successful, thanks to the trusty Lonely Planet guide - and a compass. I never thought I would actually use it to navigate! Oh, and the b'sara (served out of a huge vat with cumin, hot pepper, and olive oil, and eaten at a tiny table outside the stand) was delicious.


Formatting is screwy, but here are pictures of the Zawiya Moulay Idriss, Medersa Bou-Inane, and a blurry street.

Read more...

The Day the Internet Stood Still

Oh, blog delinquency. A proper update with photos is coming - my one excuse is unreliable internet. In fact, this morning Rabat (and the rest of Morocco) redid all of its IP addresses, which meant there was no internet in the entirety of Rabat for several hours this morning.

Can you imagine something like that happening on the Wesleyan campus? Or in New York? Weeley!

Classes continue to provide some funny moments. Last week in MSA we had the vocab word "bantaloonat", Arabized plural of the French word for pants, "pantalon", and my professor in his inter-lingual confusion cautioned us that this was "Fransuzich". My forehead almost hit the desk. This morning in MSA we got on a tangent talking about darija. Apparently, the Moroccan dialect word for freezer (the thing on top of the fridge) is the same as the Syrian dialect word for refrigerator. I have a feeling that somewhere along the line, a Moroccan told a Syrian to put his ice cream in the freezer, and was very displeased to find it completely melted a few hours later. (What effect this had on Arab politics has yet to be investigated.)

The language divide is very real. My host sister's friend Yasmina did an exchange program as a high schooler that took her to Cairo, where she consistently spoke English with the young Egyptians she met because they simply would not have understood her Moroccan darija.

I also have to confess to all the readers at home that I am mildly addicted to a Turkish soap opera, with the Arabic title Wa Tamdy al Ayyam - vaguely translated, "As the Days Go By". I think. The episodes are dubbed from Turkish into Syrian (?) Arabic, so bottom line I understand about 5% of the dialogue. The show involves three main characters who have known each other since childhood, all of whom have at least 2 names and one secret identity. And if you want to see them kiss (which they do frequently when they air in Turkey), you have to look up clips online, since Morocco censors all non-married smooches.

Next time, an audio visual update, god and the internet willing.

Read more...

Back in Action

Turns out getting back to class can kill a vacation high really really fast - all it took was two hours of MSA. I'd better record it before it's completely gone.

I flew with my friend Laura to Ouarzazate, a town just south of the Atlas mountains. We landed at night and it was a very windy 9 degrees Celsius. Ouarzazate is a Tamazight (Berber) name that means "without noise" - and so it is. It's a sleepy, beautiful town with gorgeous views of the mountains as a backdrop. We explored the kasbah, which is made of mud and straw with reed ceilings - it made me think of the pseudo-mazes in party spaces for young kids, except it was truly labyrinthine. We picked up a very nice but nevertheless false guide, who led us to his friend's store after our tour to look at lots and lots of beautiful jewelry. He also dressed me and Laura in all sorts of Touareg and Berber costumes - pictures forthcoming! We also visited the movie studios just outside of Ouarzazate, where the highlight for me was The Mummy set - maybe you've heard me gush about this super campy movie, maybe I've managed to keep it under wraps... I have a Rachel Weisz weakness, what can I say?

We took a day trip out of Ouarzazate further south into the Draa Valley, an endless palm oasis full of towns built like the kasbah. After about four hours of driving we hit the Merzouga dunes - not quite the Sahara - but we stopped there for a short camel ride. Camels are very funny, with squishy feet and long eyelashes. I did a report in 9th grade on Knut Schmidt-Neilsen, a biologist who figured out why/how camels and sea birds never have to drink, and he's right, the camel's nose is pretty amazing.

We moved on to Agadir after a couple of days, a beautiful, clean beach town. Spent a few days in the sun and eating delicious fresh fish, grilled as well as fried, at the local stands by the harbor.

The south stood out for two reasons: One, an excess of beautiful things. Jewelry, pottery, carpets, rose products. Two, the nice Moroccans live there. For example, Rabat's salespeople are aggressive, and indignant when you aren't interested. In Ouarzazate and Agadir they actually let you browse if you want to browse, and they invite you home for tea whether or not you buy anything. That bit seemed sketchy to me at first, but the more people asked the more I realized it's a legitimate thing to do. New Yorker instinct says nice people are always bad news.

In the south they never get tired of saying "Li zirbu, matu" - in English, "those who hurry are already dead." And they live that out, which is how sitting down to tea can take two hours. I have a feeling the rest of my semester will be, in Berber terms, pretty dead.

Read more...

North to Tangier, South to Ouzoud

Much to catch up on. (At right: the view from my living room window!)

We took our second group trip at the beginning of the month, going north to Tangier, a huge hilly city right on the water. In the past the city was famous for being a den of just about every kind of debauchery, as well as a hangout for Paul Bowles, a couple of Beats, and definitely painters (Sargent and Matisse for a start). Some of the seediness definitely remains - no where else in Morocco have we been offered drugs on the street...

First stop in Tangier was the American Legation, a beautiful building that used to be the American embassy, where they have stockpiled lots of art, beautiful furniture and old maps. The fluffy wall to wall carpets gave all of us a pleasant surprise after months of cold tile floors. Morocco and the U.S. have been buds since way back - and in the legation there's a framed letter asking the Moroccan government to fly their flags at half-mast after Lincoln's assassination. After poking around we hung out with the curator in the gazebo on top of the building and drank Coca Cola, in true American style.

We booked out of Tangier the next day to see Chefchaouen, a very cute, blue, and rainy mountain town. The drive was rather long, so I got a good look at the landscape, which is striking both in beautiful and depressing ways - gorgeous mountains, but cement buildings and trash everywhere. Everything is sort of cobbled together and half finished. You also see sheep grazing next to restaurants, and donkeys tethered next to parked cars.

The last day was even more of a trip - mental and geographical - when we crossed over into Septa/Ceuta, a city that is technically part of Spain. The difference is unreal. The second you hit Septa everything screams European, and Money. Developed Nation. We wandered around a little bit stunned, paid for things in Euros (expensive!) and took a peek at Gibraltar, which was just barely visible from the waterfront.

Next!

Last weekend we had two days off for the Prophet's Birthday, and I went south with three other girls to see some famous waterfalls at Ouzoud, a day trip out of Marrakech. This involved a) a long train ride to Marrakech, and b) a taxi ride to a tiny town close to the falls. The train was standard, but we didn't get ourselves a grand taxi until it was getting dark. Why? We stopped to eat, poke around the souk, make friends with the monkeys on Jama'a al-Fna... which for Laura meant an ape climbing in her hair, for me it meant getting peed on. And the handlers still expected money from me. Oh well. How many people can say they've had that happen to them?

So picture four girls crammed into the backseat of a twenty year old Mercedes, careening along in the dark up into the mountains, with a driver who passes every vehicle he can by going in and out of oncoming traffic. Weely weely weely. The next day we stumbled through ordering breakfast in darija - we had made it far enough into the countryside that French had evaporated - and bargained for a grand taxi to the falls. More careening along mountain roads, this time in daylight.

The falls, suffice it to say, are gorgeous. And there are wild monkeys there, who don't freak out in your personal space! Picture worth a thousand words, I think:After the falls it was a long bus ride back to Marrakech, and an even longer train trip home. Next time we will engineer a trip that is a little more resting and a little less getting around.

We're coming up on midterms back in Rabat, but the weather is just getting nice, so here's to studying en plein air as much as possible!

Read more...

Oh, language.

Early on in this trip, my father asked me if learning Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan dialect in separate classes was like learning Italian and Abbruzzese dialect from Scots. While that model isn't quite right, it is close in its bizarreness.

Imagine that Bostonian English, New York English, Californian English, and Southern U.S. English are different in more than just accent - the are different in vocabulary and in some syntax as well. What I'm doing here is like living in Boston and learning both Bostonian English... and Shakespearean English. Possibly even Middle English (whan that Aprile with his showres soote...).

Also, in this version of the United States, when you turn on the TV people are speaking Middle English. And some of your high school and university classes are in Middle English. The rest are in the language of your former colonizers (which in my model can't be England. Pretend France colonized the U.S. I mean, they did. Right, Louisiana?)

The thing about fusHa is that it is standard, but it's not. And it is "closest to the language of the Qur'an" but it has, by necessity, been updated and simplified (and, in any given textbook, marked by at least one country's dialect). But because of fusHa's closeness to religious, sacred language, everyone is reluctant to update it MORE, and bring that weird Shakespearean English down to earth to be used on a daily basis.

Why is this a problem? Go back to my weird version of the United States. Say you want to go to the south to implement a literacy program. The people there speak Southern English. But the language of education and the news is Middle English. So to make them literate in ANY way you have to first make them Middle-English literate, and then get them reading things that will change their thinking, help them get jobs, etc. etc. And yes, I know there are those of you who can make sense of Chaucer and regale us with a recitation - but it takes a lot of extra work to understand that!

And if you wanted to teach people to use computers or whatnot in Southern English, you would not be able to find the teaching materials in that language. Rural women's literacy in Morocco is absolutely dismal - down around 10%. And they are being held back from reading and a whole lot else by the darija/fusHa split. And this is true for North Africa and the Arab Middle East - that is a whole lot of countries! (This is the part where I go look up literacy statistics to put my money where my mouth is.)

So yeah, that's the fusHa situation in a nutshell. Kind of exhausting.

Read more...

Dar dyalee

Two minute video of the inside of my family's apartment. House Tour! Oops, Alpha Delts read this. Ahem. I mean Tour of the House.

Read more...

Illustrious Persons

On Saturday I went to the Institut Italien here in Rabat to see (drumroll for the French students) Fatema Mernissi. She was speaking about her latest book, L'amour dans les pays musulmans, in the company of the book's Italian translator, a psychologist/literary theorist, and an Italian moderator with hilarious accented French.

Mernissi, as one might expect, is quite the personality. She addressed the audience as "les enfants" and reprimanded one annoying Spaniard who stood up to ask a question but really just wanted to hear herself talk. At the end Lella Fatema signed my program, although I did have to wait for a large multilingual crowd to stop bothering her.

And this morning in MSA I sat next to (drumroll for the Arabic students) Mahmoud al-Batal, none other than one of the three editors of the infamous Al-Kitaab. WHAT? He's apparently teaching us a lesson on Wednesday. I'll have to bite my tongue to keep from telling him that my Moroccan fusHa professor regularly says that the grammar in Al-Kitaab "is not Arabic" by which he means it is, well, too Egyptian for his taste.

Read more...

Marrakech: Did you just give our food a pronoun?

As far as I can tell, this weekend has three chapters (aside from the epilogue, in which I got almost none of my homework done).

Chapter 1: Mosquee and Illness
We got on a bus at 7:30AM, first stop the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca. It is absolutely enormous, and right next to the sea. The sun was breaking through stormclouds here and there, so there was very dramatic lighting on the huge minaret, the archways around the courtyard, and the endless flagstones. We toured the bath complex underneath the mosque - picture a hall full of columns and long lines of marble fountains shaped like eight foot wide toadstools.

Long bus ride to Marrakech, driving in and out of storms. The whole weekend, Friday through Sunday morning, was absolutely, miserably damp. Our first outing in Marrakech was to Jamaa al-Fna, the main square, but I was battling some major nausea and stayed behind. My first Moroccan illness! (It's hilarious and also kind of scary that after a month here we're very used to updating each other about our digestive systems.) Ironically, I was too sick to go out and eat food from the stalls (sweet pigeon tagine, snail broth, couscous) that was very likely to make people sick.

Chapter 2: Chez Ali
Saturday we did some down and dirty sightseeing, hopping on and off our tour bus. My favorite was the al-Badia Palace, literally the palace of the favorite, meaning the favorite wife. Very nice digs. It reminded me of the Seville Alcazar, in layout and decoration (the two are very closely linked in style, I just can't remember who came first). Beautiful painted wood ceilings, amazing tile work, including suras and poetry along the walls which needless to say, I found exciting.
That night some of us went to Chez Ali, a three hour epic of tourism, overstimulation, and groaning hilarity. The experience is very close to Disney World or a Renaissance fair - the completely fake buildings in the middle of nowhere, the dancers in traditional attire who look completely despondent to be dancing in front of your table, and then a very absurd Fantasia show, including trick riders and a belly dancer. It was out there. And one of the dinner courses was quite literally half of a roasted animal. (Cliff?! Oh, poor Cliff...) The second we set foot in the place Christa and I were convinced it was all going to turn into a horror movie by the end, and we would have to steal the dancer's daggers, commandeer the show horses or, in a pinch, ride out of there on a donkey. The finale of the show was a fireworks display and huge flaming letters spelling out CHOUKRAN MAA SALAAMA (Thank you, goodbye), and if that isn't an eerie first step toward a horror movie I don't know what is.

Chapter 3: SUN!
At last, Sunday morning, the sun came out, which also meant that the Atlas mountains materialized out of nowhere. Oh my god gorgeous. There was still fog so we couldn't see them touch the ground, and they were covered in snow, pale blue and blending into the sky.
For our half day left we explored the souks. Michael and I ended up in a carpet atelier that was the full three stories of the building, went all the way up to the top and talked to le patron, who said he had been an interpreter for Dennis Hopper at Ouarzazate when he was filming Samson and Delilah. We saw two men weaving on a very large loom, another spinning on a bicycle wheel spindle. For the next hour he laid out carpets for us, served us mint tea... I started to get really upset that I didn't have enough money on me to make a purchase. Or did I?
We were very careful not to ask about prices until we'd seen over a dozen rugs. I pulled a favorite out from under the pile and asked him a price. 2300dh. Did not have that. He went down a few rungs. We asked about a second hand rug - nope, those are more expensive. Michael and I laid it out: we have 900dh on us, what can you do? Final offer was 1100, and he would be happy to let me go get the rest from the tour bus. So the final picture is of me handing over all my money and following le patron's nephew back through the souk (clutching my rolled up and packaged carpet) and through the main square to get on the bus.
Buying something like that after so much bargaining is a rush, honest to god adrenaline. And the rug! It's a Berber rug, kilim style, with red and black and wonderful gold stripes, about 4x6 feet. Unbelievable. Oh, and 1100dh is less than $140.

So yes, Marrakech was pretty great overall. And Sunday was proof that when the weather finally does clear up, it is going to be sublime.

Read more...

Systems

A brief portrait of Rabat transportation systems:

As a New Yorker, I don't bat an eye at the fact that the Rabat bus system does not run on a schedule. This is actually more familiar to me than having to show up at the stop at a particular time. Rabat, however, seems to be even worse than the M4 as far as gaps between service. You miss a bus at the wrong time of day, well, good luck. (There was also a strike last week - the Moroccan way of celebrating French colonial roots.)
The buses themselves are all metal on the outside, a steep climb to get in, a couple incandescent bulbs inside for light. You board at any door, and once inside the ticket agent comes to take your 4dh (fifty US cents!) and hands you a little slip of paper that says RAHA BUS Rabat - not valid until scribbled on in the agent's ballpoint pen. To signal your stop, you stand up. And if the driver doesn't see you stand up, he may go right past your stop (bus stops are sometimes hard to find - there are no shelters, just a single sign). If the driver does miss your stop, you go over to the door and bang on the metal box above it. Not kidding.

Of course, if the timing isn't right or the buses or mobbed you can take a petit taxi, little blue hatchbacks of various marks and ages (usually Renault, I think). Half the time, the meter inside is analog and not digital, fifties vintage, and is labelled either in Italian or Spanish. You can hail them down wherever and pay metered fare.
There are also taxi stands, and the fare from taxi stand to taxi stand is 4dh flat per person. The trick is that 3 people going the same way get into one cab. How, you might ask, does that work?
The taxi stand next to the train station (where I go in the morning) is a small triangular parking lot formed by two forking streets. Taxis pull in and park. There are two attendants - one is a tall youngish man in jeans, the other is grandfather aged, has a beard and wears a djellaba. As people walk up they find out where they're going, and sort them into cabs. Once there are three people, you go - but not before the driver tips the attendant (1dh, I think), usually by handing it through the window.
The thing about the whole system is that it's not exactly transparent - the attendant's not in uniform, there's no signage... for a week and a half I was going to Jam'aa Badr (Badr Mosque) as my destination until my sister told me to ask for Sharia Franca (Avenue de la France) which is much closer to Amideast but I had no idea it was a taxi stop. I've also seen people get a few extra blocks out of their driver, still on flat fare.

So far, understanding the taxis and buses is one of my few resident-creds. Not much, but it's a start.

Read more...

One day in all the days

Okay, five days is a bit of a lull. It's mostly been spent getting used to my class schedule: loving my Islam and the West seminar, knocking my head against the brick wall of MSA, trying to keep up with darija. (I find myself understanding every 10th word spoken by my family or by people on the bus.)

I've also been getting my head around what it means to live in and explore Rabat. It has been incredibly frustrating to realize both the limitations of the city and the limitations of my mobility in it - i.e. don't go there alone, don't sit there alone, don't try to do this by yourself.

Good discoveries included the English language bookstore right in my neighborhood, and a second visit to the Kasbah when it was actually sunny and a pleasant temperature (there was a storm blowing in from the Atlantic, but who's counting?) Oh! And the roof of Amideast - the one place you can find sun on a weekday morning.

More to come, including some more pictures, inshallah. Also, according to my friend Laura, google lists this very blog as your first stop for Lolcats: Rabat, so stay tuned! I will not let you down.

Read more...

Sea Views!

A quick 360-degree video of the view from the Kasbah (yes, that thing you're supposed to rock) des Oudaias. Out the other end of the terrace are the quiet little streets of the kasbah, painted blue and full of cats. We also spent a fair amount of time in the medina, and one nice vendor even let us play with a "magic box" that has not only a hidden lock but a hidden key, so you have to find the key and then la serrure before you can open it. Very cool. Okay, so watch the video!


And this morning I went to the hammam with my sisters. Oola. Two hours of scrubbing, rinsing, and covering myself with henna goop, then clay - both of which totally bring out the four year old in you. There was also an interesting moment when a woman just passing by helped me rinse my back.

The thing about Morocco is that there are very specific spaces that have been set aside for men and women. For me, seeing a dozen outdoor cafe tables with only men sitting at them is something subtly but deeply unnerving - I know that I'm not welcome, that particular cafe is not my space. But the women's hammam, while more welcoming of me, is just as deeply coded to be unwelcome to men. I'm also puzzling out what might be a close equivalent, space-wise, to the hammam I was at today. My experience with American spas and nail/beauty parlors is far from extensive.

(Speaking of coded spaces: Just wait until I've done my research on gender in the physical space of the mosque. Weeley weeley weely! [that's darija for Oooolala!])

Squeaky clean Chiara signing out.

Read more...

Inauguration!

To all Yanks reading: Yeah Obama! In just a bit I will go upstairs to watch the ceremony on CNN. We're all pretty psyched, even though around and about there isn't much talk about it (and forget about MLK Jr. Day - I needed a reminder myself).

The news here across the board has been far more focused on Gaza - to be expected from a Muslim country, even one that has close ties to the U.S. and European supporters of Israel. Let's see if I can do this in a balanced way:

First of all, the news footage they show here, from my American perspective, tells a whole lot more of the truth than the sanitized, eight-second loop of night-goggle video that we usually see in the U.S. Shots of children crying get immediate preference - but you also get a no-holds-barred look at the rubble, the injuries, shots of soldiers, civilians, and aid workers. They have green screen maps for the bomb sites or clash points that make it look like they're announcing the weather.

THAT SAID, you can tell right off that the news is biased. All of the reporting, for this invasion at least, has come from within Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine, nothing from inside Israel and no nod to the injuries or damage on that side.

In the end, my opinion of the whole thing is not what matters - and even without posting anything about the invasion, the news, or Israel I've already gotten a troll-tastic commenter. I'm abroad to learn and observe. So now that I've merited it a bit more, go right ahead. I'm psyched about the inauguration today, and as the Moroccans say, safi (that's enough, that suffices).

Let me know how you all are celebrating!

Read more...

The Museum of Morocco

Hi gang, I'm updating from my homestay, a large apartment near the Gare de Rabat and the Museum of Morocco which, technically, doesn't exist yet: it's a whole lot of poured cement, a crane or two and lots of work noise throughout the day.

I have three sisters, two of whom are at home, plus an aunt; all together it reminds me of hanging out with my cousins and sister, fast forwarded a few years (appropriately, I would end up in the aunt role).

Classes start tomorrow, and leading off is fusHa (Modern Standard Arabic) for three hours starting at 8:30. Aguh. That class is going to feel wonderful though, since I can actually form complete sentences in fusHa - in darija I've got nothing. I speak 80 percent French, 20 percent English with my sisters, French with mom and dad. They speak darija with each other, so I'd better get on that. Darija is quite the dialect - from an outside perspective, it's amusing to know that you can legitimately ask for information with words like "Shnou?" (What?) and "Shkoun?" (Who?).

Video house tour coming up soon. I know I keep promising multimedia, but I was stuck with spaztic hotel wifi - I'll get on an Amideast computer and make it happen.

Read more...

No other takers?

Okay, so it's been a few days, might as well bury my own post with another one.

I'm sitting at the Amideast center waiting to find out about my homestay family. If any of you have ever had to meet with Anne Greene on a regular basis, this is a bit like those meetings - ten minute slots assigned, and everything running heinously late.

The Amideast building is a funny place. There's a computer lab in the basement, reception on the first floor, and classrooms for three upper floors. I think it's a converted boarding house or hotel. Tea and coffee breaks are frequent - just when we've had too much darija or Orientating someone appears with trays of teapots and we get to take a pause.

We have the afternoon off. I'm dead nervous about moving in with a family on Saturday, but I guess it's like my overall abroad terror and it will evaporate eventually.

The weather has gotten much better since we arrived. The middle of the day is warm enough to go without a coat, and at the moment it's blue skies all around.
I'm running out to get food and mentally prep for darija, guh. Multimedia update soon.

Read more...

Lolcats: Rabat begins here.

This is why you all read the super-blog of internationality: while Jesse is being told not to go into Arab neighborhoods, I can't NOT be in an Arab neighborhood, and we're both in places that are carrying on almost as usual while the Gaza invasion goes on. We were told that it hasn't inspired any violence in Morocco, but there have been protests - and we are to avoid them.

I'm typing despite one very stiff hand: tonight we had a fancy dinner at a family home in the medina, complete with henna tattoos and gnaoua music - it involves iron castanets and an oud (splice a drum and a three-string guitar). And dancing.

This morning was my first darija (Moroccan) Arabic class, in which we all broke a sweat. The challenge is the fact that the basics are all different in darija - and all the more complicated vocab and grammar is exactly the same as Modern Standard. So once I switch myself from "na'am" to "iyeh" for "yes" I'll be halfway there. Ouf.

This afternoon we toured Sale and Chellah. Sale is across the river from the rest of Rabat, and part of what's over there is a complex of ateliers - pottery, basket weaving, tile and metal and leather workshops. I watched a potter make a tagine in two minutes flat, and the top and bottom fit together perfectly. I got to try the kick wheel! Must retrieve that picture from my friend Dante. Chellah is the ruins of a Roman town as well as a Merenid necropolis (see picture). Tons of huge storks and cats (I can haz sardine plz? Ruinz cat iz too cool for storkz). Pool with eels. Gorgeous views.

The subtext to this post is, essentially, that I am no longer terrified, as I was in several spots before leaving. I'm excited to be here and explore. I still feel like May is a really, really long way away... but there will be things to keep me occupied / amused / challenged while I'm here.

Read more...

Things you wouldn't expect

Rabat in January = Edinburgh in August.
We could see our breath leaving the airport this morning, it got up to a decent temperature midday, and it has been raining and cold for the past couple hours. Oh my numb toes.

I'm settled into my hotel, the wifi is kind of dependable, had tagine for lunch and a super-francais cafe creme comme snack. As predicted I stop to read street signs in Arabic simply because they're in Arabic, but a huge percentage of stuff is in French.

I would stay in and write more (read: sleep for the next fourteen hours) but lunch went right through me so I must venture out for dinner with the group. Lesson learned: vegetable tagine is not always robust enough. When off-the-plane hungry, get the meat.

Read more...

Vroom!

Oh good god enough making lists and running around and worrying - I'm finally getting some genuine let's-get-going feelings. That is, when I'm not feeling anxious or uncertain or annoyed at my program for leaving me in the dark about some pretty important things, i.e.:
I don't know who my host family will be in Rabat, nor do I know what languages they will speak, or how far from town/class they live. I don't know what the kids on my program will be like, or whether I'll place into the level of Arabic I want, or if I'll be able to obtain a bike to explore the city.
So packing and prepping continue. Tomorrow I'll visit the gorgeous Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is blocks from my house and always makes me feel more connected to NYC as home. And then Friday I'll take a long succession of deep breaths... and get this show on the road.

Read more...

Welcome

Wotcher, Ahlan wa sahlan, and dobrideyn to you!

Welcome to a tri-ex-patriate blog following the Spring 2009 adventures of Chiara, Lindsay, and Elizabeth as they set off to Morocco, England, and Siberia respectively.

Basically, we know you all are lazy. If three people are updating one blog, odds are three times as good that you'll check up on us - and that there will be consistent posting, from one continent or another.

So enjoy, and remember that surrealist / totally unrelated comments are always appreciated.

Read more...