Side story: stained-glass window

Check this out.  People praying, candles, a church, more praying, the sun…black figures ascending.  What’s with the black figures? Does anyone have any insight or any ideas?

Another look.

The only other black figure in the church.  I thought this was neat because it has what looks like a Native American.  But this is Africa.  What gives?

Demons getting spears in the mouth.

A duck?

More.

Chronologically inappropriate conclusion

The trip is over.  I’m back home (sorry to spoil the ending).  I failed spectacularly at posting often, and for this I am not afraid to blame circumstances.  So for those of you who were confused or disappointed, I apologize.

I’ve updated the first post with relevant pictures.  I wrote another long post covering the middle part of the week, but stopped short of finishing Thursday and forgot a significant event from Wednesday.  I will cover all that in my next post, for those of you with lots of time on your hands and very little else to do with it.  There will be pictures for the skimmers.  In the mean time, a chronologically inappropriate conclusion follows.

I will not be taking an organized group trip again.  The organizers did a good job considering the number of people involved but in order to achieve what they did some sacrifices had to be made to the quality of the trip.  Unfortunately the quality was reduced beyond my personal threshold.  I had a good time and I’m glad I went, for sure.  It just wasn’t for me.

I’ve long been of the sentiment that there are tourists and there are travelers.  I like to consider myself one of the latter (but who doesn’t associate themselves with the more favorable side when making a comparison of light and dark?).  There were times early in the trip when the group would approach something photogenic and the sound of 40 or 50 cameras being whipped out and uncapped would drown out the surrounding noise and probably some small aircraft.  Someone would inevitably squeal “I feel like such a tourist!” to which someone else would giggle “Well, you are!”

Meanwhile, I cringed.  I kept trying to convince myself that yes, I was a tourist too, and it was okay to take that picture.  I kept telling myself that if I was there alone and not in a huge group I would take the same picture and not think twice.  A good photo opportunity is a good photo opportunity, and that’s all there is to it.  But I couldn’t swallow that.

In experimental research, the Hawthorne Effect is a phenomenon in which participants in an activity improve their behavior when they know that they are being merely observed.  In traveling, the newly minted Robinson Effect is a phenomenon in which locals of a country being visited alter their behavior or show other evidence of being disturbed when merely observed by visitors.  The postulate to the Robinson Effect is that the measure of disturbance is in proportion to the number and conspicuousness of the visitors.

Applying the Robinson Effect here, a reasonable conclusion is reached that a small, unlucky subset of the population of Morocco has recently been moderately disturbed.  I don’t like having been a part of that moderate disturbance.  If I need to disturb anyone at all, I like it to be minimal. 

(One could argue here that a perfectly good way to travel is to actively engage the locals and that interaction is even more of a disturbance than simply snapping a photo.  I head off that argument by distinguishing the meaning of “disturbance” as something negative or unwanted, not merely affecting inertia as in disturbing a plant.  I could not agree more that interacting with locals is the most enriching part of any trip, both for the traveler and the local, therefore that encounter is not a disturbance in the sense that I am using it.)

(Please don’t argue that moving a plant is disturbing it in the negative sense and that the plant doesn’t “want” it.  I don’t feel like fighting that fight, and frankly no one should have to.)

“Leave only footprints” is the slogan of conscientious campers and nature enthusiasts everywhere.  It means that visitors to the wilderness should not leave trash behind when they leave or negatively affect the environment while they’re there.  The same thing should apply to traveling but I think that normally that is not the case, and that’s too bad.

As some of you know, this trip marked my first to Africa since we moved from Côte d’Ivoire to Virginia in 1997.  Since 1997 I have been asked more than a few times where my favorite place to live has been or what it was like to live in Africa.  Part of my answer to both of those and to many other questions has always been that Africans are the nicest people.  I repeated that so many times that as I was preparing for Morocco I wondered if my perception would change now that I am nearly 13 years older.

It didn’t change.  The only thing that changed is that my resolve to find a career that takes me to Africa, either on frequent travel or to live, has strengthened.

Experiencing the culture, even as disappointingly sparingly as we did, was a breath of fresh air.  After we visited a spice shop in the medina in Fes, I was sitting outside in the alley with some others from the group and a couple guides hired for the day whose job it was to make sure no one got lost in the maze that is the medina, waiting for some people inside to finish buying their spices and whatnot.  My stomach was rumbling so I took out a bag of trail mix that I had brought from home.  I had a couple bites and saw the guides watching me.  I offered some to them, and they refused.  I had a couple bites, intentionally taking my time.  No reaction except watching, so I put it away.  Finally one of them asked me if it was Americain.  I said oui.  He asked qu’est-ce que c’est.  I told him dried fruit and nuts and asked again if he wanted some.  He said non.  The other one asked if he could have some for his son.  I said sure and put half of it into a second bag.  The first guy was encouraged by this and said, what about him? I gave him the rest.  They noticed that one of them ended up with more than the other, so they evened out the amounts.  One of the employees of the spice shop appeared in the doorway and asked one of the guys if she could have some, and he obliged.  They both thanked me repeatedly and were obviously very happy.

At the Berber tea ceremony, I mentioned that we were fed some homemade food and that Fatima and I made the rounds eating the leftovers.  When we were on the last plate she had some tea left and I had finished mine.  She poured half her tea into my glass and I split my last piece of bread with her. 

The Berber matriarch, who has very little, gave me a token of her appreciation.  At the lunch with the lamb brains, the guides gave half of their extra portion to me and Fatima because they thought we’d want it.  One day on the bus Fatima came on the bus holding a paper cup.  I asked her if it was coffee, and she said yes, then gave me what was left of it.  At one of the rest stops I wandered behind the bus to take pictures of some cactus because there was nothing else to take a picture of.  One of the coolies walked over and struggled with me through a challenging conversation of a little broken French and lots of hand signals, because he didn’t speak English at all nor French very well, and I don’t speak Arabic.  It took us ten minutes of gesturing for him to achieve his goal: to tell me that they eat cactus, and to show me which part they eat.  He was very proud when I finally got it.

I’m not sure if these examples make the points I want them to, but they’re supposed to exhibit sharing, appreciation for small things, and a sense of community that I see too infrequently here at home.  It sounds really self-important and self-serving, but – at the risk of that – there is a fair chance that the totality of what I’m trying to describe is hard to imagine unless you have experienced it.

In any case, it was therapy.

Now I’ll go back to do the last day and a half.  Then will come random stories and tons of pictures and maybe even eventually video.  This email will be the last time I bother you so if you care to keep up, just keep checking the blog.

Thanks for reading.

In general, patience not being tried

On the bus, en route from Marrakech to Casablanca

Friday, March 12

4:25 pm

I’m slowly realizing that the top line of the scene setting at the top of posts really takes any thunder I might have to begin the post.  I can’t say “Here I am on the bus again from here to there” because you already know that.

I’ll do a quick rundown of the less eventful sights from the past two days before I get to the good stuff.  Also, if you’re not into reading long posts and you generally skim once you’ve gotten through the introduction, this is my chance to tell you that when I was going through some pictures I saw bunches that didn’t relate to anything I’ve written about (yes, believe it or not, I have left things out), so once I’m all done I will go through the pictures to find those little side stories and get shorter, illustrated posts up for those.

The past two days – or as that time period is known among us, The Day With the Rain and the Bus – have been in and out of Marrakech.  We went to the postcard-ready Menara Gardens.  That’s the place with the small white menzah (pavilion) and the green roof that reflects in a, um, reflecting pool and there are mountains in the background and an olive grove and whatnot.  It looks like the type of place where you might want to sit and be contemplative but the truth is that the history is just not interesting enough to inspire contemplativeness.  It was built by some sultan as a place to have picnics.  Apparently there is a historical rumor that the pool was built to teach swimming to the soldiers that were going to Spain.  Apart from that, it’s just kind of there.  The water is brackish and poses better for pictures the further from it that you go.

We went to the Menara Gardens.  The Gardens refer to the peaceful olive groves surrounding the main attraction, which are a 19^th century menzah (pavilion) and the reflecting pool that lies in front of the menzah.  Behind the menzah sit the mighty snow-capped Atlas Mountains which while striking are camera shy and elusive to the average wannabe amateur quasi-photographer such as myself.  The Gardens were built by a sultan as a place to hold picnics, whether for just the royal family or for all Moroccans I am not sure.  Regardless if his original intentions of exclusiveness, modern Moroccans continue the spirit of his picnic motivation as there were enough families lounging in the shade of the grove to show that the place is popular for that use but not overcrowded (although it was a Wednesday).  There were also families by the pool feeding the fish in the pool (or whatever aqua-monsters are in there) and enjoying the view.  The combination of locals enjoying both the touristy part of the view (the water, the menzah) but also enjoying the non-touristy natural part (the groves) reminded me of in DC when tourists are filing from monument to museum to monument and locals are there too but probably to enjoy not only that stuff but also the Mall or the paths near the reflecting pool.  That is a pleasant combination.  It was nice to be able to enjoy a site simply for its beauty and simplicity, and not feel like enjoyment and appreciation were being shoved down one’s throat because of holiness or historical significance, which is an unfortunate phenomenon of other sites, particularly when being shepherded like a flock of sheep.

The more observant may notice that the last two paragraphs were different accounts of the same visit.  I wrote most of the first one in earnest.  I reread it and wondered why I sounded so bitter.  I wasn’t sure of the answer so I decided to begin another version of the same story with a different attitude.  It only took a sentence or two to not only feel better but to realize why the first one has the tone that it does.  The reason is that I let myself be affected by the whirlwind nature of this trip.  I wanted to digest the experience in a cocktail of a couple factoids and a couple pictures, which is as impossible as learning the entire energy and healthcare debates in a 30-second sound bite (oops!).  I knew our time there was limited as it is in every place we go, and I don’t mean in a grand existential way.  I had to look, appreciate, and get on the bus.  Next!

Appreciating late is better than never appreciating, but it’s not the same.  I’ll be back.

Saadian tombs, Museum of Dar Si Said, Badii Palace: 30-second tourism bites.

We went to the Koutoubia Minaret.  While we were there the call to prayer was made.  It was the first time while here that I had heard the whole thing, and I was focused on trying to pick out words that I recognized (which is a voluminous collection of three or maybe four words).  Later, when I heard the entire call two other times, I heard the difference in the cadence of the imam making the call (not to conjure up images of a quarterback on the line or anything, although I’m sure you could go somewhere with that metaphor if you chose).  The first time I heard it, the guy sounded bored, or at least tired.  He cleared his throat into the microphone before he started, then took a long pause, then began speaking the way a 5^th grader says the pledge of allegiance: I know I gotta do this but I’m just doing it to cross off my to-do list, let’s go.  The second time the guy sounded more enthusiastic: Hey! God is great! Time to pray! Up and at ‘em! I’m a ****ing imam!  I wonder if how the imam registers on the enthusiasmometer during the call affects or is an indicator of the mood of the forthcoming prayer.  I guess it’s probably no more or less so than a pastor’s or rabbi’s effect on services, but I think that if I were being called to prayer five times a day over a loudspeaker I would want (or need) it to be enthusiastic.  Of course, theoretically, going to pray, regardless of how many times a day you do it and how energetic the customer service representative of your religious establishment of choice is, should at all times be a privilege and a fantastic thing if you truly embrace your religion, but that is a discussion for another time and probably another blog altogether.

We went to the Ourika Valley to visit a supposedly authentic Berber house.  My cynicism stems not only from genetic predisposition but also from experiences when I was taken to a supposedly authentic rug-maker or marble-cutter or basket-weaver or what have you and the truth is that I was just being taken.  In fact, I had already had several such experiences on this very trip, sort of like a refresher course.  Third world dwellers are no dummies.  They know that we westerners want to feel like we’re seeing the real deal, the hard life, the real life, that we’re fixated on finding authenticity and are willing to pay for it, so they do, as they should.

So when, after we had been to strings of these photo-op manual labor shops “cooperatives”, we were being told that we were going to the house of a Real Berber family and be shown a Real mint tea ceremony and be served Real homemade food, some of which was derived from a Real Berber cow, little bitty nagging alarms were alerting my highly sensitive skeptic nerve.  We were told that it was going to be Real neat because the Berbers are so poor but they’re so traditionally hospitable that they would bring us into their home to show us around, etc.  I wondered how a family that was so poor could fit 80 of us into their house much less give us all food and drink, but what do I know.

As we pulled up the guide reminded us that we would be swarmed with vendors and that they would be persistent and that we shouldn’t engage them and that oh look, here they come, running down the hill! They were in fact running to descend upon the gazelle herd, camel knickknacks, shoe keychains, and mini tagines clanking around wildly.  I assured myself that this was a sign that we were going to a Real poor Berber house; maybe the Berbers were so poor that they could only afford mini tagines, not normal-sized ones, and these guys were their faithful suppliers.

The house was on the side of the mountain. It was several levels.  We were herded upstairs to the deck, which was as large as my apartment.  There were stools and benches with cushions set up for us, which is where we would see the tea demonstration.  The lower level had a rudimentary kitchen setup with various pots simmering over contained fire pits.  Several women were tending to the kitchen as a few children scurried about.  No man behind the curtain down there; that was the real deal.

On the deck, we were wrapping up snapping pictures of the mountains when matriarch of the house trotted out.  I don’t recall her exact age but she was around 80 years old.  She proceeded to make the tea one step at a time; steeping the tea, shoving into the teapot several bunches of mint, followed by an alarming piece of sugar which she can cut off of a large sugar cone (see pictures), adding some sage, and doing a little taste testing.  Once she was satisfied, she poured tea for everyone by pouring it into each glass in an expanding arch, beginning with the teapot close to the glass then raising it higher and higher.  And she did it with a pot in each hand.  At the same time.  It’s a Moroccan thing.

Tea wouldn’t be tea without nibbles.  We were served homemade bread for dipping into homemade butter (from the Real cow out back), homemade honey, and homemade olive oil.  They were all equally delicious.  Fatima and I scavenged for uneaten bread and dips within our arms’ perimeter to make sure no one was offended by having leftovers.  Wouldn’t want to make anyone feel bad.

At this point most of the group had gotten up to wander around the house a little more or to face the feeding frenzy on the way back to the bus.  The casual mention had already been made that perhaps, if we felt like it, maybe we might be able to make a small donation to the family on our way out.

I’m still not sure that those people really live in that house.  They might.  After all, who knows how property is acquired or transferred or retained up in the mountains of Morocco.  That didn’t matter though – I wasn’t auditing them.  I’m not sure that they don’t make a profit off the little gift shop they had set up.  So what.  I’m not sure that they don’t host multiple tourist groups a day whose interest – real or imagined – they exploit to promote their own well-being.  Good for them.  What I am pretty sure of though is that they live in the mountains, they have very little, that despite those things they seemed genuinely happy, and that they were extremely welcoming.  I also knew that they could use my money much more than I could, so I gave them something for me and for someone else who said that they wanted to give but didn’t have the cash on them.

Note: I’m not telling you this to stroke my own ego.  Like the religion comment, the existence of selfless acts is a topic for another time and forum.  I have to explain what happened because it’s the cause to the effect that really makes the story important.

One of the women asked Fatima if she could exchange dirhams for some US dollars that someone had put into the donation basket.  Fatima didn’t have much on her, so I offered to do it.  Then the woman brought me Euros, then GB pounds, then more dollars.  I ended up giving them very nearly all of my dirhams, and at a good exchange rate – they have no idea what the exchange rate is.  They completely trusted (or at least had enough faith to let them have hope in) my honesty in exchanging with them.  That was an unusual feeling.

So I changed a lot of money for them.  I went to the middle level to take some last pictures of the backyard when one of the younger women grabbed me.  She took me downstairs to the matriarch.  The matriarch thanked me then something to me in Berber that I of course didn’t understand.  So I responded in French, which she didn’t understand.  The younger woman chimed in with Berber also, then we all just stood there.  Finally the matriarch motioned for me to follow her, which I did, and she took me into a back room and pointed to a traditional stove that was fired up and boiling water for tea and other pots.  I made some appreciative noises and she started talking in Berber.  I finally figured out that she wanted me to take a picture, and she posed next to the stove.

I didn’t want to go crazy so I took just a couple (not to mention everyone else had already gone back to the bus and I knew they were probably waiting on me).  I thanked her profusely as we walked away from the stove back to the entrance, and she took me back up to the middle level to where their little gift shop was (which we were not instructed to go check out as a group, surprisingly).  She picked out a metal piece that was a hand with an eye in the middle, the Muslim charm for warding off the evil eye, a charm of protection, and gave it to me.  One of the Moroccan faculty members from our group was in the same room talking to someone else, and she saw what was going on.  I asked her what I should give the matriarch for the piece, and she said that I could give something if I wanted to but it was intended to be a gift.  Berbers are healers, she said, and this is a sign of protection and goodwill.  That meant a lot to me.  

It’s weird to try to thank someone when you’re not really able to use words but you’re not really supposed to physically embrace them either.  I did manage before I left to shake her hand and abuse by repetition one of the few Arabic words, choukran (thank you), that I could remember.

We stopped at a roadside business that produces and sells argane oil and related products like argane oil butter, argane oil acne cream, argane oil hand lotion, argane oil soap, and argane oil.  I’m not really sure what an argane is, but I saw some women cracking nuts open and crushing the oil out of them, so that was neat.  I didn’t buy anything but tried some of the oil and paste they had out to try on bread.  It tastes like peanut butter.

We went to lunch at a hotel up in the mountains.  It was overpriced but the view was nice.  I had rabbit tagine which was very tasty. 

[Note: this was not the end of the day but I’m stopping because in real life the trip is over and I can go over the rest in a catch-all wrap-up.]

Small update, pictures

On the bus, driving into the mountains outside of Marrakech

Thursday, March 11

9:50 am

I just went through and selected pictures to illustrate the last post, so go check those out.  We are in the hills of the Atlas Mountains on our way to go to a Berber house.  All I know about the Berbers is that they are an unofficial nation in Morocco who played a big part in Morocco’s history.  They have their own dialect and they live in the hills.  We’re going to the house of a Berber family who is going to show us what it’s like up there.  The scenery outside is phenomenal: snowcapped mountains rising from green fields and hills.  We have nice weather today, good for taking pictures.  Expect a lot of pictures later of mountains.  Camels are on the agenda today as well.

Hey, this is Africa

[Note: This is very long.  I mean, it’s long.  I will update with pictures later.  It’s also unedited, so forgive small mistakes.]

On the bus between Fes and Marrakech

Tuesday, March 9

9:40 am

This bus ride will be 5 or 6 hours, we’re told. We spent the last two nights in Fes and will spend the next couple in Marrakech.  Let me take you back, as I sit scrunched in my seat with my laptop that only has a couple hours of battery (not the best combination for a tall person who spends lots of time rewriting sentences).

Day one:  It’s a little counterintuitive to characterize a day that took me from DC to Paris to Casablanca as uneventful, but it was.  On the first flight I changed seats twice in the first ten seconds I was on the plane, the first time to accommodate friends sitting a couple seats away from each other, and then to let a mother and daughter seat together.  I ended up next to a girl blatantly wearing a George Mason sweatshirt as a beacon to any fellow travelers to Morocco.  Being the sleuth that I am, I deduced that we were on the same trip and bonding commenced.  A couple hours and decent but not unquestionable plane meals later, we were in La France. We were in Paris long enough to change terminals on the curiously famous moving walkways, use the facilities, and get in line to board the connection.  We were on the second flight long enough for me to fall asleep while doing a crossword puzzle and holding an uncapped pen that liberated much of its ink on my pants, and to eat my then 20-plus hours old sandwich I bought back in Virginia that was still better than the stone cold (and rock-hard) piece de poisson that was served to us.  So that was fun.

Sometimes when I see signs or instructions that are in multiple languages I wonder which language was the original language from which the others were translated, and if anything was lost or added in translation and if there was if it was an important difference.  When it’s a sign like “Caution: wet floor” I can’t imagine there is much room for an error because it’s so simple.  This is not always the case, however.  On the plane there was a self-serve beverage cart in the little kitchenette between sections of the cabin where the crew gets food, etc.  I went to get a Schweppes and saw a sign above the cart that like everything else on the Air France plane was in French and English.  The French looked correct to me; the English instructions said “The trolley in place must be imperatively braked.”  I think more things need to be done imperatively so.  Ex: The pen must be imperatively capped before you fall asleep with it on your pants.

We landed in Casablanca a little after 3 o’clock, just in time to catch the molasses shift at the customs counter.  The passport checker guy did not understand my profession of “paralegal”.

Checker: “What is this?”

Me: “Oh, paralegal.  It’s like an assistant for an attorney.”

Checker:  “Avocat? [Lawyer?]”

Me: “No, assistant.”

Checker: [Very fast, irritated French]

Me: “Oui?”

Checker: [Mumbled, irritated French]

I assumed he was warmly welcoming me to Morocco and trudged on.  At baggage claim the belt that circulates the bags was not moving, so some bags were trapped on the other side of the carousel, away from where you wait to get your bag.  My bag was over there.  There was no reason to believe that the carousel would turn back on soon or in my lifetime.  I began to look for an airport employee that could help me before I remembered that Hey, this is Africa, and just climbed over the carousel.  I could feel TSA agents and US airport employees cringing from across the Atlantic.

About 40 of us were herded to a group of ATMs and tellers to withdraw and exchange cash.  Have you ever seen those nature documentaries about predatory cats? While patiently watching a herd of unaware gazelle grazing they size up the herd to find the weakest one to choose as the victim.  If you’ve seen that show then you didn’t miss anything.  This is less of a comment on Moroccans than it is on us.

[Interlude: It this point in my blogging I had to stop typing.  We were driving through the Atlas Mountains and I experienced motion sickness for the first time in a long time.  I didn’t toss my cookies or anything, but the combination of little sleep and the winding roads and whatnot left me pretty uncomfortable.  It was raining off and on, as it still is.  We had driven several hours towards Marrakech through the mountains only to find that the heavy rains from the past couple days had flooded a river and broke the bridge we were supposed to cross to get to Marrakech.  Of course, there is only one road in those parts to get to Marrakech, so we had to turn around and go back through the mountains for a couple hours to catch another road.  We were nearly back to Fes when we stopped for lunch at about 4 o’clock.  Now we resume our trip to Marrakech, via the other road, the one that goes through Casablanca, which is where we were a couple days ago.  The detour meant we made a net gain of about 60 kilometers in 8 hours.  It is now 5:30 pm and we have 5 or 6 hours until we reach Marrakech.  Hey, this is Africa.]

Back at the airport three days ago, it was beginning to rain.  We got on the two buses that would be our transportation for the rest of our time in Morocco.  At first glance I was pleased with the buses.  They are big ol’ touristy coaches that you have to climb stairs to get into and they have TVs and each seat has its own light and air vent and the guide has a microphone that hooks up to the audio system which secures his ability to prevent and interrupt sleep with jokes and tidbits, and everything else you’d expect from a touristy bus.  The only catch is that the personal lights and air vents don’t work, the microphone’s main quality is that it creates piercing feedback and static, and the TVs have surely never been turned on (not necessarily a bad thing) in fear of the bus breaking down from exerting so much effort.

Anyway, back to the rain.  I’ve often wondered why people say “It’s raining outside!” and other clear redundancies.  It’s obvious that if you’re talking about rain you’re talking about something that is happening outside; there’s no need to clarify that.  Sort of like saying “I was thinking in my head.”  Well, our bus proved me wrong.  It can and does rain inside, as it was raining inside our bus.  Someone mentioned this to the coolie (the guy who gets the door, loads and unloads the bags, and protects the bus from the lions while we gazelles are doing our touristy grazing).  He looked at the water coming down, looked at the puddle on the seat, looked at the puddle on the floor, looked at the ceiling, and hit it a couple times.  The leak slowed to an irregular drip.  Satisfied, he went back to the front, mission accomplished.  Hey, this is Africa.

At the hotel an array of cookies and mint tea awaited the weary Americans.  It was my first experience with Moroccan mint tea and found it to be very tasty.  It’s very sweet as well as minty and I’ve since learned that if it’s made well it’s sweet until the last sip.  If it’s not made well the last couple sips are extremely bitter, something similar to what I think it would be like to chew on tea leaves.  After figuring out the rooms and keys situation I found my room and my predetermined random roommate, who had arrived on the earlier flight some hours before.  I was eager to ask him if he had done any exploring but he said that aside from a short walk he had been sleeping since he arrived, so we vowed to explore before dinner.

The hotel is on the beach at the end of a strip that runs along the water.  We walked down the strip along a string of waterfront restaurants that all incorporated “Tahiti” or “Malibu” or something to that effect into their names though they are neither in Tahiti nor Malibu.  The strip ended at a McDonald’s, which we saw several of in Casablanca.  They all sell the McArabia sandwich, which is funny and a little distressing at the same time.

Note: Casablanca is pronounced both casa-blank-a and casa-blonk-a, which is good news for me because I am never really sure which way I’m going to say it until I’m halfway through the word, so it ends up sounding something like casa-blah-unka.  I decided the safest way to do is to try to sound like the corrupt policeman in Casablanca, so I’ve been practicing that.

Dinner at the hotel was fantastic.  There was a buffet of lots of Moroccan dishes of fish, chicken, beef, artichokes, grilled vegetables, rice and shrimp, tomatoes and onions, bread, pea soup, tomato soup, anchovies, beets, carrots, squash, potatoes, and plenty of other things that I can’t remember.  Dessert was oranges, strawberries, and pastries.

After dinner a few of us went investigating the street in the direction away from the strip and found a little place to get more thé á la menthe.  This tea was bitter at the end.

Knowing that I would want to charge my camera batteries in the morning, I whipped out the plug adapter that I had so wisely brought, experienced and savvy traveler that I am.  I brought the adapter for India, not the one for former French colonies.  I slunk into bed.

One area in which the US woefully trails other countries is in showerhead technology.  Other countries have the moveable, freestyling free-range showerhead, while we in the US are stuck most of the time with the rigid and unhelpful stuck-in-the-wall model, which when coupled with low water pressure may be one of the least effective tools to accomplish anything ever, much less take a satisfying shower.  We as a country need to look to the French for tips on shower technology.  However, France sometimes thinks it’s cute to eliminate the shower curtain, so there we maintain an edge.

Breakfast at 6:30 was just as good as dinner had been.  It was a French breakfast with some good croissants, butter, cheeses and meats, fresh fruit, omelettes, and some other standard breakfast fare.  It was a dramatic and welcome departure from my archnemesis, the American continental breakfast.  The American continental breakfast is a serious cultural embarrassment that may prove to be the undoing of tourism in the US, especially when tourists eating that breakfast are already cranky because they just took a shower with a fixed showerhead.

I like our guide Hamid, but, although it’s clear that he has lots of experience shepherding around Americans, he often forgets during his bus lectures that he’s sitting at the front next to the windshield, and most of us are not.  I, for instance, sit in the second row from the back.  He says things like “Right in front of you is a factory where they press olive oil” but the only people that it’s in front of are him and the driver, because we’re on a bus.  Or he’ll say “There’s a villa that belongs to a Saudi prince! There, right there!”  I assume that he’s pointing at something, but I can’t know for sure.

When he does talk about things that we can all see or when he’s explaining some history he’s very quick to mention how friendly Morocco is to Jews.  There’s the only Jewish museum in the entire Arab world.  The Jews have been in Casablanca longer than anyone else.  There’s a neighborhood full of Jews.  That’s where the Jews go to school.  Here’s a Jew synagogue, one of many, in fact!  I wonder why he does this.  Is he marketing Moroccan Islam? Tolerance? Is he worried that we’re all Jewish, or very sensitive about Israel, or that we’re all looking for an easy reason to distrust Muslims?

In the affluent neighborhoods all of the street signs are blue with white text, just like in Paris except that these also have Arabic as well as French.  Outside of the affluent neighborhoods the signs are a bit rattier and are green.  There are stray cats everywhere, and occasionally there are stray dogs.

We went to a church with some terrific stained glass windows.  I took a lot of pictures.  I was the last person in there, snapping away, when I noticed that there was a parishioner praying in one of the pews, and I felt terrible.  I hate it when that happens.  It’s my own fault for not being more vigilant, and I feel guilty.  Unfortunately that’s not the first time that’s happened.  I wonder what those people think when they see me taking pictures of their church.  They’re either flattered that I think their church is so beautiful or they’re pissed because not only am I interrupting them but I am not using their place of worship for its intended purpose.  I don’t know which way I would feel if I were in their position.

We went to a palace next.  There are palaces here like there are Starbucks in the States.  They’re all over the place.  I took lots of pictures of the patterns that surround doors and that are on the sides of buildings.  Often within the patterns or on their own panels are blocks of Arabic text.  I’ve gotten into the habit of asking Hamid, when he’s not hiding from me, to translate the Arabic for me.  There was such a block of text at the palace so I asked him.  He translated and told me that it was a verse from the Koran (I’ve since found out that not all but most of the text on buildings is text from the Koran).  This particular verse included Allah Akbar, which means “God is great”.  He said that it’s what Muslims say during prayer, and that it’s akin to “When you say amen.” He then realized that he had made an assumption and said “You’re Christian, right?” When I shook my head no, he said “Catholic?” Shake. “Your own religion then.  Well, whatever you say instead of amen, that’s what Allah Akbar is.”

He didn’t say anything explicitly but he definitely made a face while he was running through the religions he thought that I could be.  His face fell more and more and he looked more and more confused as he went through his list and I continued to stare blankly.  I’ve found that religious people would rather you tell them that you believe in a competing religion than in no religion at all.  I’m generalizing here, but to a religious person it must seem there is more of a chasm between them and a nonreligious person than between them and a competitor because at least a competitor lives a religious life.   You’d think, though, if that were true then there would be less war between religious groups and more war between the religious and nonreligious.  I guess the hole in that argument is that the people who wage war in the name of religion are generally more extreme in their views than the people I’ve spoken to.  Also, the people who have a history of waging war over religion live in societies where the nonreligious constitute an extremely small minority, if present at all, so there would be no one to wage war upon.  Anyway, if I were a very religious person I think I would feel a strong sense of community and togetherness with other religious people, regardless of whether they subscribe to my particular religion.  As a nonreligious person, this gives me hope that maybe eventually the people who have the power to wage war over religion will agree with me.  Then, of course, I have to continue to hope that the urge to wage war is not an instinct that cannot be cast away, for then the nonreligious could easily become the target for wars waged just for the hell of it.

We went to a park across the street from what amounted to city hall.  The park looked like a hangout for the locals.  There were families milling around while their kids played with the pigeons.  There were some guys walking around dressed up in what I think was traditional dress from somewhere up in the mountains.  Their gig was to bang on little plates of metal that hung from their clothes and generally look like something tourists would want to pose with, and then they would get tipped for being in pictures.  They were running a fine racket as many of our group took pictures.  I was taking pictures of pigeons when an older man, a local, walked up to me.  (I’ll paraphrase here the broken English into non-broken English for the sake of clarity.)

“Nice hat,” he said, pointing to my Nats hat.

“Thanks,” I said.  “I like yours better though.” He was wearing a typical white cap that Muslim men wear.

“Maybe we should trade,” he suggested.

“Really?” I was surprised.  I reached for my hat.

He laughed.  “No. I need this.” He paused, then said “You should tip that man,” pointing to the guy with the metal hanging from his shirt.

“Oh, yeah, I know.  I wasn’t getting him though, I was taking pictures of the birds.”

“Oh, oh, I see, okay,” he said. “Well, make sure that all your friends tip the men if they take their pictures.  We are after all the last century.  Do you know this? The last century?”

I shook my head no.

“The people who came before us are gone, their time is gone.  Their centuries are gone.  Now it is us.  It’s our century, and we are the last.  You have to be a good man, good to your fellow man, and good to the earth, and good before God.  It’s very important.  We are the last century.”

The guy did not sound crazy at all.  He was well dressed, clearly not homeless or even poor.  He was just philosophizing to me.  He sounded religious and he sounded apocalyptic, and he sounded like he was offering earnest advice.  That’s all he said.  He didn’t elaborate and didn’t look like he cared if I had questions (which I did).  He just stood there and watched the pigeons for a few seconds, then walked away.  I expected him to vanish into thin air, but he didn’t.  I’m not sure if that makes it more or less bizarre and fascinating.

We went to the Hassan II mosque.  I’m having a hard time figuring out how to best begin describing it.  It is the third largest mosque in the world, only after the monstrosities in Mecca and Medina.  It can hold 20,000 worshipers inside its walls, and an additional 80,000 outside.  It is immaculate.  It is enormous.  It is awesome in the truest sense of the word.  It is on the water’s edge and there is nothing on the opposite shore so when you look at it there is only the sky behind it, which emphasizes the size of the minaret.  It was so big that I wonder if it’s taller than the Washington Monument.  The designs and patterns on it are green and yellow and it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  When I looked at it I got the same feeling as when I visited the Taj Mahal and Stonehenge.  It is otherworldly.

It is terribly ironic and very sad that many Moroccans at least have at least some contempt for it because the taxes levied on them to finance the mosque’s construction were severe to some and burdened them all.  The state says that it was funded by “donations from Muslims worldwide.”

We went back to the strip by the hotel for lunch, to a sit-down sandwich place.  I was working on translating the French menu for some at the table, but was stuck on a couple of the words.  One of our trip leaders, Fatima, came over and she translated that of the dishes I couldn’t translate, one was lamb testicles and the other was lamb brains.  I must have made a curious face because she said “Actually, I would get the brains if you all weren’t here, but I don’t want to gross anyone out.” (She’s Moroccan.)  I offered that not only would I not be grossed out, but I would get them too.  She didn’t believe me, and ordered chicken.  When it was my turn I ordered the lamb brains sandwich, much to the surprised of the waiter.  Fatima quickly changed her order.

The consistency of lamb brains is what threw me the most.  They were sort of like mushy scrambled eggs, except maybe more soft than mushy.  It was definitely new and similar to eggs but not exactly like them nor exactly like anything else I’ve ever had.  The taste was good.  They came on a sandwich with olives and an herby tomato sauce that is a common condiment in Moroccan cuisine, simply “sauce tomate.”  We had preceded the sandwich with lamb liver sausage, which was very tasty.

We went to the mausoleum of Mohammed V (referred to as “Mohammed Five” or “Mohammed Cinq”), the much beloved king.  Everything in Casablanca is named after this guy.  His mausoleum, in which his brother is also entombed, is a spectacular shrine that is set below the site of an ancient unfinished mosque.  You can still see the unfinished minaret, which dates to the 12^th century.  The whole compound is guarded by men on horses.

On the way back to the bus a Moroccan girl quickly walked up to me from the side and grabbed my left wrist.  Thinking she was trying to steal my watch, I yanked my hand away.  I was ready to yell at her when I saw that she had in her other hand a tube of henna; she was trying to henna my hand.  She babbled at me in a language I didn’t catch and even though I didn’t understand her I knew I had played this game before.  (See: London blog, entry on the Africans at Sacré Coeur in Paris.)  I said “No, no,” to which she responded “Ah, English!” and continued to follow me for a few feet before she dove at someone else.  I wasn’t even finished shaking my head when I saw a couple of my fellow travelers standing next to a couple other henna girls, with their hands fully designed in henna, apparently haggling over whether they were going to pay the pirate henna artists, if anything.  I’m not spoiling anything by telling that they got seriously ripped off.  Lesson learned, I suppose.

If only they had made it back to the bus, someone said, as if the henna victims were a baserunner in a pickle that almost but just didn’t make it back to the bag in time to beat the tag.  The bus is like a mobile command center, it’s a safety zone, it’s our very own sterile environment.  If you’re being chased by a henna pirate, run to the bus.  If it’s raining, run to the bus.  If you’re being begged at, run to the bus.  If you have had enough mint tea, run to the bus.  If you’re being sold a camel trinket that you don’t want, run to the bus.  To escape the dirt, the sun, the wind, the cold, run to the bus.  Another way to escape all those things -- the perceived inconveniences that make experiences real – you could watch a documentary on TV.  You don’t have to come all the way to Morocco to stay sterile, to run to the bus.  You could just stay home, stay on the bus.  I don’t like the bus.  Every time I get on the bus I feel like I’m leaving Morocco.

As I mentioned earlier, a vast majority of the important buildings that we have seen that have decoration on the outside incorporate Koran verses into the designs.  (At one palace that we visited yesterday the text was a poem, not a Koran verse.  I have yet to have someone translate the whole thing for me, but I will.)  Even on buildings that don’t have ornate decoration or that aren’t as important as a palace, there are Arabic characters strewn about, most commonly the two that are Allah Akbar, God is great.  God is great.  God is great.  Imagine seeing that everywhere every day.  Islam and Allah are so intertwined with daily life that half of all text in the country would disappear if someone decided to take white-out to every mention of God being great.  It’s amazing.

There is an un-quantifiable amount that I don’t know about Christian symbolism.  I mention this because perhaps there is Christian symbolism everywhere in the States and other western countries and I just don’t see it.  I don’t think that’s true despite the conspiracy theorists and Dan Brown fans who claim otherwise.  Surely it’s partly a product of that good old separation of church and state, but I have to believe that it goes far beyond that.  Christianity is not an idle faith; there are people who are as crazy and/or devout about Christianity as the people who are crazy and/or devout about Islam.  So where’s the gap?  Occasionally you see an overt proclamation like “JESUS LOVES YOU!” spray-painted on an overpass or written on a park bench, but it’s not on every other street corner like Koran verses are here.  It really makes you believe that Allah is omnipresent because you literally see everywhere the words that claim it to be the truth.

Based on very unscientific and incomplete observation, I conclude that Christianity in the modern world is simply beyond that stage in its lifecycle.  When I see the Koran verses everywhere I think that maybe Christians exhibited this sort of overt expression centuries ago, and Islam is just now getting to that point.  Whether that is due to Islam being predominant in lesser-developed countries, several of which are outright theocracies, or it’s because Islam is just a younger religion, I don’t know.  My point is that the saturation of religion here makes me think that I’ve traveled back in time.  It also broadens my understanding of Islam and the differences that exist between the overall – not just religious – cultures of predominantly Islamic countries and those in the west.  It makes it easier to see how even moderate Muslims could instinctively react to western propaganda or speeches or actions as religious rhetoric, how they can hear religious connotations where we westerners don’t.  We’re not wired to think that way, and they are.  That’s a tough fundamental difference to deal with.

Sunday afternoon we drove to Fes.  Dinner at the hotel there was a letdown after dinner at the hotel in Casablanca the previous night.

In Fes we spent most of the day at the medina, the old city that is now a mix of market and housing.  The place is a labyrinth.  In a relatively confined space inside the old walls there are over 9,000 alleyways, 200,000 residents, and over 300 mosques.  It is busy.  Even though it was raining while we were there, a healthy crowd was pushing its way through the alleys.  And I mean pushing.  The locals do not wait for anyone to move out of the way, they just plow through you like an offensive lineman.  The speed at which they move is incredible to an outsider because speed suggests that you know where you’re going, which seems impossible.  The alleys are narrow, windy, confusing, and nameless.  For this one particular tour the tour company hires extra guides to act as extra tourist shepherds, to make sure that no one takes a wrong turn and to perpetually count heads.  The combination of the alleys and the wooden poles holding up buildings and the unidentifiable substances on the ground and the puddles and the goat heads on the meat counter and the flies and the people scurrying around and the smells and the mules and the lack of motor vehicles and the stray cats and the stares and everything else attacking your senses gives the place a profoundly old world feel.

I can’t type much more.  It’s 2:30 am and I would finish this tomorrow but I want to post it instead.  There’s not much more to that day.  We had lunch in the medina, got whisked around to some “cooperatives” where most of us sat around while a select few (the same select few at every stop) shopped for rugs, leather, pottery, scarves, or bronze, depending on where we were.  It rained, we got wet, we saw a synagogue, we saw a mosque but couldn’t go inside, we were bugged by some persistent kids trying to sell crappy little ceramic shoes and crappy little stuffed camels, we got back to the hotel, ate the average dinner offered by the hotel, and went to bed.

Today we had the bus debacle, finally arriving at the hotel at about 11 o’clock.  (After one of the later pit stops, the guide said in response to some passenger whining, “We have about 175 kilometers left, which is about exactly less than two hours.” That’s a quote.)  Turns out the other bus braved the bridge, which was not broken but rather just had some water running over it, and beat us by about an hour.  We ate a better dinner than we had yesterday, and now I’m ready for bed.  Tomorrow we hit up the big square of Marrakech for most of the day, and have a fancy dinner and show in the evening.  The internet does not work in the rooms so this will be posted pre-dawn Eastern time.

Thanks for reading.  Goodnight from Marrakech.