Casa and contemplations

Back from another weekend of traveling, this time to Casablanca, which is only an hour south of Rabat. Leaving on weekends is definitely becoming habitual—this Saturday my entire group leaves for our week-long “southern excursion” to Essaouira, Marrakech, the Sahara desert (riding camels and camping), and a few other southern towns. I think I like this trend, because honestly, there are not exactly endless options for weekend activities in Rabat. I would probably wind up watching television and eating perpetually with my host family, which I do enough of already.

So anyhow. I spent the weekend in Casablanca with five of the other students. We took the train down from Rabat early Saturday morning and found a really cheap hotel to stay in—and I truly mean cheap, it was about 8 dollars per person. The rooms had sketchy tiger-print comforters and no toilets--you had to go down the hall to use the nasty general one. But we did specifically ask for rooms with western-style showers, and amazingly, we got them.

We spent most of Saturday just wandering around, stepping into cafes to see what looked promising, and lazing on the grass in the Park of the Arab League (lovely). Also, we’ve all gotten to a point now where we really miss American food, and within a few hours of arriving in Casa someone mentioned McDonald’s. We promptly determined that we wanted nothing more than to eat lunch at McDonald’s. We couldn’t find one just by wandering around, so eventually we hailed a cab (cabs are absurdly cheap here) and told the driver to take us to the nearest McDonald’s. Three of us had gotten into the cab, and a fourth person was about to squeeze in next to me (she had the door open and one leg partially in), when the taxi began to DRIVE AWAY. Terrifying. We had forgotten that Moroccan cabs never take more than three people, and rather than politely telling you that they can’t accept a fourth person, they simply start driving. So we got angry, and the driver got equally angry, and we wound up getting out and giving up on McDonald’s. In retrospect the whole thing was pretty hilarious, especially the fact that we got desperate enough to take a taxi. I hope I never hit that low again in my life.

Moving on. One of the girls I was traveling with, Teresa, goes to Yale, and she knows a Yale alum named Amam who grew up in Casablanca and returned there after she graduated. This proved a verrrry valuable connection. Saturday night, Amam and her friends picked us all up for dinner at an amazing Indian restaurant, and afterwards we all went dancing together—although this part of the night only lasted for an hour, as it was already midnight when we got to the club and it closed at one (way to go, Morocco). It was an incredibly fun night, not at all intellectually stimulating and exactly what we all needed.

On Sunday we slept in, checked out of the hotel, went to a cafe for brunch, and then met up with Amam and her friends again—talk about hospitable. They invited us to an acquaintance's beach house for the day, and we obviously had no objections, considering it was cloudless and 70 degrees outside. When we got to the house, about a block from the beach, we were kind of shocked by how enormous and nice it was. Nicest house I have yet seen in Morocco. Not many people here can afford to live that way. We lounged in the backyard for a few hours, had a Moroccan barbecue, then spent a gorgeous early evening hour on the beach.

So yes, it was a wonderful weekend, but it also forced a lot of reflection. For example, there I was, spending my Sunday at an upper-class beach house, when back in downtown there were street kids accosting us at every corner and asking for money. (I should mention that whether all of them actually need the money is another question entirely—one problem with begging in this society is that some people do it because it is lucrative, even if they don’t need to. Still, some of them desperately do need the money, so it’s impossible to pass judgment.) Not to mention the extensive slums that we passed on the train on our way into the city. The point being, when it comes down to it, there is really no way to balance the two in my mind. Things are just plain unequal around here, and everywhere, and being confronted by it so openly is uncomfortable.

Okay, sorry, I don’t want to bog everyone down with intense contemplations. But I guess it’s honest to include some of them, because not everything that I am participating in or thinking about here is pretty. A lot of it is extremely difficult. Another example: Coming from the culture that I do come from, I am having a hard time coping with the role of women in this society, especially compared with the relative freedom of men. Although educated and upper-class women have a little more mobility, women here in the medina are by and large still inferior to men in the public eye. They are expected to answer to their husbands, ignore the whistling from men on the street, and dress and behave “modestly” (whatever exactly that means). This has to do with customs, it has to do with interpretations of what Islam and the Koran command in terms of women’s behavior—it has to do with a lot things. Even within my SIT program, there are major differences for male versus female students. The girls (the majority of us) are uncomfortable walking around by ourselves after dark, are expected to return home early in the evening, and deal with street harassment at every waking moment. The guys are constantly going to pool halls or bars at night, and they head home at any hour they like.

As an anthropology major and an outsider who does not fully understand gender dynamics here, part of me wants to keep judgment at bay. But it is impossible not to form opinions, and so far my opinion is that change would be a good thing for women here. The alterations to Moroccan family law that the king made a few years ago were a major step in the right direction, but they were not all-encompassing. I’m curious as to how different demographics of Moroccan women feel about this, and I’m thinking about writing my independent study project on this topic.

Okay, to sum up and leave off: I’m still having a wonderful time and thinking pretty deeply about a lot of things, which ultimately augments my having a wonderful time, because it’s exactly what I wanted out of this semester. I am learning a lot both explicitly and implicitly.

This is it for a few weeks, since I’ll be traveling all of next week. Also, I should mention that I’ve given up on loading any more photos to facebook for now. Some are already there, so you can see those if you’re interested (let me know if you’re not on facebook, I can give you a link), but our internet at school is dreadfully slow. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll try again. For now, you will have to subsist on my beautiful words.

Love!

Two days in the lap of luxury

So my SIT group spent this past weekend visiting Fes and Meknes, inland cities a few hours east of Rabat, and I had an amazing time. Sorry if this gets list-like and tedious, but as much for my own memory as for my loyal readership, I want to get all of this into writing.

Saturday was a long, packed, awesome day. We met at school at 7:45 in the morning (you can imagine how cheery we were at that point), lugged our bags and huge packages of bottled water onto a tour bus waiting outside the medina, and took off. After two hours of napping and one break at an awesome rest stop (Western toilets and coffee, this equals our idea of awesome), we arrived in Meknes, where we had a hurried bus tour with a few stops at the royal palace and a few other popular spots. I have some awesome pictures from this, but we really didn’t get much of an experience of the city because we were so pressed for time. Therefore we are definitely going back on one of our free weekends.

By noon we were off again, this time to Moulay Idriss, a small mountain village near Meknes. This place was gorgeous. We had lunch there and then passed a few hours on the restaurant’s rooftop terrace, having tea and taking photos. The weather was perfect all weekend, so we had this stunning view of the mountains and the white houses of Moulay Idriss sprawled up and down the slopes, plus sunlight and warmth. Pure bliss. After that we loaded onto the bus (again) and went to nearby Volubilis, an ancient Roman site. It is this enormous ancient Roman city that is fairly well preserved considering its age. We had a several-hour-long guided tour of the entire area. It was exactly what I would have imagined in terms of visiting ancient Roman ruins. We got to sit in ancient hot tubs, walk around the monstrous pillars of what was once a basilica, see the residential neighborhoods, etc. The downside of this was the disgusting bathrooms that we all wound up having to use, considering they were the only facilities for miles around. (Seriously, it’s incredible how much time we spend discussing bathrooms and showers here. You would not think that so many conversations could spring from these basic topics, but relieving and bathing yourself tend to be adventures here.)

Then we headed to Fes. What can I say about Fes...it is ridiculous. Molly studied there last semester, and it must have been a difficult place to live. Awesome to visit, and I would love to go back, but Rabat is definitely a more livable city. One important thing to know about Fes is that it has a beyond intense medina. Side streets barely wide enough for one person to walk through, let alone overloaded donkeys and strawberry carts. Fes is a major tourist destination, too, so the shopkeepers are all over you at every turn. They speak pretty good English compared to the vendors in Rabat, and they consistently try to convince you to pay about ten times whatever they are selling is worth. (Luckily I have learned how to say “I am a student, I have no money” in Arabic, which usually makes them laugh and helps with bartering.)

So yeah, Saturday night was pretty laid-back. We had a formal dinner at a restaurant in Fes's Ville Nouvelle (new town), so everyone got dressed up and we split some bottles of wine and watched Berber musicians, belly dancers, and a creepy Moroccan magician. He dragged one of the girls from our program onto the stage and then pretended he was going to pull a snake out of her shirt. He freaked her out more than was probably acceptable and, on top of that, failed to deliver, so we were in a huff over him. Sunday was exploration day, so we spent pretty much the entire morning and afternoon wandering the medina. We saw the tanneries and visited a family business where they were weaving and selling the most beautiful scarves (I bought one), were harassed by any number of men and street children, worked hard on our navigational skills, and had another bathroom experience too disgusting to go into. Eventually we wound up at a café just outside the medina, people-watching. Some French tourists took pictures of us, which we found very funny, but they didn’t seem to understand when we pointed out that we were American and not really part of the local scene. So perhaps there are now photos of me out there that claim me as a Moroccan.

Also, we stayed in a reallllly nice hotel. Actual beds, a shower that always reached at least room temperature, and a balcony overlooking Fes. It was a little difficult to come back to Moroccan family life after that.

And there you have my weekend. Now it’s back to home stay and classes, but I am determined to travel every possible weekend from hereon out, because I had a purely wonderful time. We have a lot of planned excursions, but also several weekends when we can do whatever we like. Every Moroccan city seems to have a pretty distinct personality, and I’m excited to get around more.

Home stay, hammam, and other adventures

Hey everyone!

A ton has happened since I last wrote! Lots to say…I moved in with my host family on Saturday, spent the weekend bonding with them, and on Monday we started classes (last week was just orientation type things). It has been a busy week—we now have homework to do, as well as families to please and friends to hang out with. I’m a little tired, but also very content because everything is going very well so far. A breakdown:

First off, my home stay. I live with a 30-year-old couple, Hind and Hassan, and their three daughters--Bajia (7), Selma (5), and Malek (3). The girls are adorable, and Hind and Hassan are amazing to me, almost to the point of being overwhelming. Their house is small; the first floor has a parlor/living room (the prettiest room in the house, with gorgeous tiling all over the floor and walls), a "salon" (the guest room), a small side bedroom, and a beyond tiny bathroom (I'll get back to that). Up a treacherous set of concrete steps is the second floor, which has the kitchen and a sitting room where we eat, watch TV, and just generally hang out. The second floor is very simple and very exposed to the elements, which is mostly fine since the weather is generally good here. Hind gave me the first floor salon as a bedroom. This is customary, but it still makes me feel bad, because the three girls sleep together in the tiny bedroom and the parents sleep on the second floor. I definitely have the nicest sleeping arrangements. Also worth noting: No beds anywhere in the house, which is typical of a Moroccan home. Couches line essentially every wall of the salon and sitting rooms, and you remove the back pillows and convert these into beds at night.

I spend a lot of time with Hind and the girls, since Hind is often around the house and the girls have a school schedule similar to mine. I haven’t seen as much of Hassan so far, because he works for a cell phone company and is usually gone until later in the evening. Hind speaks Spanish, which is probably why they placed me with this family, because that's how we communicate. She helps me with darija, I help her to learn a few words of English, but we primarily speak in Spanish. This works out nicely because I'm able to get across to her whatever I need to, but there's still a lot of motivation to work on my Arabic, because her Spanish is far from perfect, as is mine.

Hind spent this entire past weekend leading me to the houses of various friends and relatives and introducing me to everyone she knows--talk about exhausting, but I also felt very welcomed, so overall it was great. She's really more like a host sister than a host mother, since we are relatively close in age (more so than I am to her daughters). In the morning she prepares coffee and pastries for my breakfast, and as soon as I get home at night I find mint tea and more snacks waiting for me. From thereon out she feeds me continuously until I go to bed. We don't eat supper until 10 or 11, by which point I'm usually too full to eat much anyhow. But I'm not complaining, because her food is AMAZING. Tagine, Moroccan salads (delicious--they make these salted tomatoes that are the best thing ever), crepes, fish, meat of every type, soups. I'm going to have to collect some of these recipes before I come home, because the food here is just generally unbelievable. Don't be shocked if I am very round upon my return. If Hind has any say, I definitely will be.

Another thing about my home stay is that Hind's friends and three sisters are in and out of the house constantly. They help her cook, they eat there, sometimes they sleep there--which so far I enjoy, because they all think I'm great fun and some of them speak a little English. Between them and the three girls crawling all over me at every waking moment, I don't get much alone time. That's Moroccan culture: You spend all of your time with other people. If I tell them I need to study, though, I can go to my room and no one will bug me.

I think religion is worth reflecting on here, since Islam is so predominant in Moroccan culture and exerts strong influence over pretty much every aspect of it. I can’t say how religious my family is since we haven’t discussed it, but compared with what I’ve heard from many of the other students on my program, my home stay seems a little more distanced from Islam. They have a Koran in the living room, but they ignore the calls to prayer (which are very very loud and happen throughout the day—the songs issuing from loudspeakers around the city frequently wake me up at 4 a.m.), and Hind doesn't wear a hijab or any form of traditional dress. They’ve never so much as mentioned Islam or religion to me. I wonder if this has something to do with age, level of education, and possibly the more “modernized” urban environment. They’re both literate and well-educated (Hind speaks Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Spanish, and French), they’re younger than most of the other students’ host parents, and they live in one of the most modern cities in Morocco. From what I’ve read and observed and from what my professors have talked about, it seems like the push towards a new lifestyle, differentiated from the traditional Muslim lifestyle, is centered in the population of young and well-educated city people. I don’t want to jump to a confident conclusion, since I’m totally making presumptions here, but it’s interesting to think about.

Also worth noting: Hygiene. Our bathroom has a Turkish toilet, a very low ceiling so that you must stoop to enter, maybe 4 by 4 feet of space, and a WINDOW looking onto the stairs (??). Again, no privacy. We don’t have a shower, so I sit on a stool in the bathroom and take bucket showers every few days. It was strange the first time around, but now I kind of like it. The reason we don’t have a shower is that most Moroccans bathe at the hammam. Which leads to a description of my hammam adventure.

I headed to the public bath with Hind, Malek (the youngest daughter), several of Hind’s friends, and Meghan, one of my SIT friends, on Tuesday. Two and a half hours in a steaming hot public bath with something like a hundred women, from toddlers to 90-year-old. (Yes, everyone was either naked or only wearing a pair of underwear. Sorry if this is too much information, but I know you’re all wondering.) It was quite the experience, and I have never felt so clean in my life. You fill massive buckets with steaming water, sit on stools or mats, use these little scrubby things to force off all of your dead skin, and do whatever else you want—shave your legs, shampoo your hair, etc. They have three sauna-type rooms that get progressively hotter from one to the next, so you just move back and forth when you get too hot or too cold. I came out exhausted, clean, and really interested in this whole aspect of the culture. Moroccan women are expected to be so modest in most situations, but this is a place where women from all walks of life hang out and cleanse themselves. Everyone lingers for a very long time and chatters--it is more than just bathing, it's a social occasion.

Well, I think I’ve provided everyone with enough reading material for now. Despite some difficulties, like the street harassment and the lack of privacy, I’m having a marvelous time and really trying to soak in everything that is going on around me. Living in the medina is a huge jumble of sights and sounds and smells, plus I get lost every other time I try to go somewhere. It’s mentally stimulating to the point of exhaustion. Not to mention that I rarely get to sleep through the night; last night there was something really loud going on in the street outside my house, and while I was too groggy to know for sure, I think it was a bunch of street animals making a racket.

This weekend our SIT group heads to Fes and Meknes, with brief stops in a few other imperial towns that I can’t remember the names of. I’ll write next week to talk about that.

Love to all!

Morocco Part 1

Hello everyone!! I just wanted to write quickly and say that I am in Rabat, Morocco and loving every minute so far! This place is really fascinating. We are finishing up orientation week right now, meaning that there is intense group bonding going on (between the two SIT Morocco programs, there are 45 people), lots of wandering the city trying to get our bearings, and lots of briefings and lectures from our program directors letting us know what to expect in terms of academics, getting us ready for our home stays, etc.

We actually meet our home stay families this afternoon, for which I am both very excited and very nervous. We have a tea reception as an opportunity to get to know them, and we move in with them tomorrow. It will be quite a change from the relative luxury of our hotel (which is already quite a change from the relative luxury of the U.S.), but I'm not sure what to expect. Some families have Western-style bathrooms and showers, while some have Turkish toilets and no showers. Some will give us our own bedrooms, some will not. No way to know until I get there tomorrow. BUT in any case, it's going to be great.

We've also started learning some Arabic (darija, the Moroccan form of Arabic) this week, and I successfully bartered for a pair of earrings in part-darija, part-English yesterday. Our hotel is just outside the medina, and our home stays will be IN the city, which is the old, labyrinthine part of Rabat. Think high walls, narrow and twisting passages, packed markets...it's quite the experience just to walk around, and living in the medina will be fascinating.

Our program is mostly girls, so we've certainly already been exposed to the street harrassment that I had been warned about. We had a seminar discussion about it yesterday, and I feel much better about it now that I understand its cultural implications (since males and females can't often meet in places like bars here, soliciting women's attention on the street is totally cultural acceptability, and often leads to dating and marriage). It's harmless, sometimes funny (they apparently like to quote American pop songs, although I haven't encountered this yet, mostly just "nicccccce" and "hello hello" type things), and sometimes annoying. But also interesting. I'm thinking about studying something related to this issue for my Independent Research Project at the end of the semester. Either that or the women's rights movements, focusing on the recent changes in family law--just a few years ago the current king made changes like upping the legal age of marriage for females to 18, making it easier for women to intitiate a divorce, removing the requirement that a woman get a male family member's permission in order to get married, etc. It's all very interesting, and plenty of women here are pushing for even more progressive changes. Another interesting issue is Western dress versus traditional Islamic dress. While traditional hijabs and djellabas (robes) are more common here in the old medina, you also see plenty of women in Western dress. Even more so outside of the medina, in the Ville Nouvelle and other newer neighborhoods.

There is so much more to say already, but I don't have unlimited time (we have wireless at our school but not much free time so far), so I'll stop here for now. Once I've been with my home stay family a few days, I'm sure I will have a zillion new observations to share and write about!! Thanks for reading, I miss everyone and I hope that Macalester, Milwaukee, Chicago, or wherever you may be is treating you well!