Erin's Cafe Americain

2008-03-06T09:46:00.000-08:00

At school, I am taking Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Essentially, this is the formal, written Arabic, used in academia and newspapers. In every region, MSA, or fus-ha as it is called in Arabic, remains the same. However, in each region there is a dialect of spoken Arabic, called dareeja. Moroccan dareeja is the most difficult to understand and the most removed from MSA. So. In my homestay, I am taught dareeja. At school, I learn fus-ha. And when I go shopping, or to restaurants, I am addressed in French. The school, however, is great. There are many more Moroccan students studying English, but the students studying Arabic are an interesting mix. My class has five students. Khang, who is originally from Malaysia; Tove, from Colorado; Fraser, from London; and Jonathon, from Mississippi. We spend four hours a day, Monday through Friday in class. In our free time, we hang out in the ALIF garden, outside the school. Tove lives with four other students in an apartment across the street, which I believe will quickly become my home away from my home away from home. She lives with Cameron, from Connecticut; Austen, from California; Alex, from New Jersey; and Melissa, from Missouri. In the pictures, you can see Cameron adjusting the gas in what we call the “death room”: two people have been found dead in their apartment from carbon monoxide poisoning. So they keep the gas locked up in that room, and the windows open all the time. By the way, I gave Cameron a haircut, and it turned out fairly well. Only a tad bit longer on the right. I went on a school-sponsored tour of the Medina with my friends, which ended up being a fairly exciting event. I inadvertently watched a chicken being killed while walking past a poultry stall. It was a tad bit horrifying. Also horrifying was the camel head hanging on a hook. We went back to the same fabric shop, and tried out some of the scarves. I ended up getting one, but I highly doubt I will choose to wear it this way…although I think Tove and I really pull off those colors. We also saw a 54-bedroom riad, a huge house with a garden, that was for sale for 2 million euros. It was in such disrepair, however, that renovations were going to cost about 6 million euros. Still, considering the cost of housing in LA, maybe we could get together with 20-30 friends….We also ventured into the McDonald's, where Fraser was brave enough to try the McArabia. I think it was essentially a burger in a pita. There may have been some chicken. I find it amusing that the McDonald’s employees here wear shirts that say, “I’m lovin’ it.” You would think they would at least translate it into French. Last weekend, Jonathon, Khang, Fraser and I went to a small town south of Fes. We took a Grand-Taxi, which is essentially an old white Mercedes that will take you from city to city for a fairly cheap price. However, they fill the taxi with six passengers, and then drive like a bat out of hell to your destination. I actually feared for my life as the driver chose to pass three trucks and another car while going uphill around a corner. Not to mention I was crammed into the passenger seat with Khang. We decided to sit in the backseat after that, so as not to see what poor decisions the driver was making regarding our safety. And seriously, we payed 10 dirhams each for the trip – which is about $1.30. So I guess you get what you pay for.

Home Sweet Homestay

2008-03-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

My original plan upon arriving in Fes was to stay in the Arabic Language Institute (ALIF) dorms, directly across the street from the school. Unfortunately, they were full. I was pretty disappointed, and wary of committing to a homestay with a Moroccan family. I’m not quite adventurous enough to want to pee in a hole in the floor for 3 months. But I went ahead and set up a homestay through the school. In fact, I went in Monday morning and they told me to be ready to move in by 1 pm. Saida, the mother of my homestay family, met Dad and I at ALIF and we walked to her home. The family lives in the Ville Nouvelle, the same part of town as the school. It’s about a fifteen minute walk. Upon our arrival, we met the two daughters, Fatima (15) and Zeneb(17). The father, Ali, is an artisan who works in mosaics. Saida is an Arabic and Islamic Studies teacher in a primary school. The homestay was a bit difficult to get used to. My family speaks little English, and I speak little French. So communication is a bit like playing charades. Moroccans are well-known for their hospitality. This really presented itself in the enormous amount of food I was expected to consume at every meal. I honestly thought I was going to be hospitalized. I actually considered forcing myself to throw up a few times, because of how uncomfortable it was. And after every meal, I was expected to eat a few pieces of fruit. I have never eaten so many oranges in my life. Moroccan families eat out of the same dish, generally using bread to eat with, rather than utensils. Many meals are tagines, which are a sort of stew with meat and vegetables, named for the cone-shaped dish in which they are cooked. After classes started, I went to a lecture called “Moroccan Survival Tips.” The teacher explained exactly how to eat a meal in Morocco, and it has been a lifesaver. After eating a little bit of food, you sit back and appear to be finished. The mother will inevitably say, “kuli,” which means “eat.” You then acquiesce, and eat a little more. Then sit back. She says “kuli.” You eat a little more. When she says “kuli” again, you sit back, put your hands to your stomach and say “l’hamdulillah.” Which literally means, “praise to God,” but essentially politely signals that you are full. Works like a charm. Praise be to God. Because there was no way I could consume that much food every day for three months. I would have died. The homestay took about a week to get used to, but I’m really enjoying it now. Fatima is learning English, so she and I speak to each other in English and watch Hollywood Insider every night, which I find fairly entertaining. I also end up explaining a lot of things in roundabout ways. For example, she was watching an awful Vin Diesel movie called “Find me Guilty.” It took about twenty minutes to explain what the title meant, and that no one was actually trying to find guilty people. I ended up creating a courtroom in the living room, and explaining juries and verdicts. Oh man….while I am writing this, they just gave me something to drink which I think is the liquid leftover from when they make butter…? That seems to be the explanation I’m getting. It tastes like sour milk. I get bonus points for trying new things today. Anyway, the non-dietary challenges of the homestay include the bathroom. There’s a bidet, which I don’t use. However, sometimes I have to use the second bathroom when the main one is occupied. This is a closet with a glorified hole in the floor. Showering is a whole other issue. While the shower appears to be a western bathtub, the water has to be heated by gas for each shower. In the tub are a stool, a couple of buckets and a bowl. You fill the bucket with hot water, and use the bowl to pour water over yourself. I am used to showering about twice a day…so this has been the biggest change. I don’t want to impose and use a lot of gas by showering every morning, so I generally wash my hair in cold water most mornings, and shower every third day. I think I may start taking secret showers at my friends’ apartment. Don’t tell. All in all, the homestay is fantastic. The view from my room is great, and the food is amazing. And I think it will continually supply hilarious stories to tell…

Riding the Rails...

2008-02-27T02:41:00.000-08:00

We took the train from Marrakech to Fes. It was a fantastic way to see the countryside. It's amazing to me how different peoples' lives are in the city from those in the country. Outside of Marrakech, people had wells and sheep and cooked over fires. The countryside is beautiful, and full of farms and orange groves. The trip was not without it's moments of excitement. At one point, the window outside of our compartment shattered....we're pretty sure it was a rock, not a bullet. But I guess you never know. I did think about the film Babel for a moment....The train ride was a little over 7 hours as we went northwest through Casablanca before turning east towards Fes. Once we arrived, we went straight to the International Youth Hostel, which had super cheap rooms surrounding a beautiful courtyard garden. They only had a vacancy for one night, but the school referred us to the Hotel Olympic, which had fairly cheap double rooms with private bathrooms, and.....TV! With ONE station in ENGLISH! It was, however, the international version of CNN, which pretty much repeats the same story every 3o minutes or so. But hey, news is news. And I miss it. So, we settled into the Hotel Olympic for the weekend, since the school was closed and couldn't arrange for more permanent lodgings until Monday. We spent some time exploring Fes, when it wasn't pouring rain. Which wasn't very often. I think Fes may in fact be the Seattle of Morocco. And when it rains, it pours. We're surrounded by mountains, so it's beautiful when you can see them. Fes is divided into three sections; the Medina (the old town), the middle town, and the Ville Nouvelle (new town). The school is in the Ville Nouvelle. The Medina in Fes is a World Historic Site recognized by UNESCO as the largest pedestrian-only urban center in the world. Also, the oldest Medina in the world. It is massive. It was founded in the 9th century, and is home to the oldest university in the world. 200,000 people live within the walls of the Medina. And there are no cars. Although, plenty of donkeys. We hired a tour guide, Najib, who showed us some of the sites. There are 2,000 mosques within the walls of the Medina, and the oldest universities in the world, called "medersas" are connected to them. While non-Muslims aren't allowed to enter the mosques, we could see the medersas, which are in the process of being restored by UNESCO. We also saw a few of the many gates, or Babs, that allow you into the wall of the city. Fes is the handicraft and artisan capital of Morocco, and we saw artisans working in bronze, leather, weaving, embroidery, etc. And of course, they all tried to sell us things. Prices aren't set in Morocco, and you're expected to bargain. Which can take a very long time. Also, as a side note, Najib was asked how many camels my father wanted for me...a couple of times. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure they were joking. Fes is known for it's leather - camel, cow, goat, etc. We got to see the huge open-air tanneries where the hide is scraped, treated and colored in large pits. We were given some mint to help with the smell, which was perhaps the foulest smell to ever assault my nose. Dad wanted a leather bag, and ended up bargaining with the shop owner in German, since it was a language they both knew. We ate lunch on the terrace of a restaurant by one of the main gates. We didn't make it to the Jewish section, but I will probably head that way soon. Dad caught a train to Casablanca early in the morning on Thursday so he could catch his flight back to Madrid, then home. He was able to have lunch with my homestay family before he left, which is good. By the way, thanks for the trip Dad! I'm sorry I was sick the whole time. But I enjoyed it. And the antibiotics I finally procured from a pharmacy were miraculous.

The Road to Morocco...

2008-02-26T03:27:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Madrid was kind of boring. I was sick. The only Spanish I know is from Taco Bell. But finally, we were on a flight to Marrakech. Marrakech is one of the four imperial cities in Morocco, and by far the most tourist-friendly. There is a huge square, called the Jemma el Fna, which sits in the middle of the Medina, or the old walled city. At night, the square is filled with food vendors, selling snails and goat's head, as well as figs, dates, fresh-squeezed orange juice, Moroccan mint tea, and a little bit of everything else. The square is also home to storytellers, drumming circles, snake charmers and performing monkeys...so it's pretty much right out of a movie. When we got to the airport, we hit the ATM for some Moroccon Dirhams. The exchange rate is about 7.66 Dirhams the dollar, so I often feel rich. Of course, most things aren't that much cheaper than in the states, so a few hundred Dirhams doesn't really get you too far. But it feels nice to have HUNDREDS of Dirhams.; One thing that is seriously cheap is taxi rides. When we left the airport, we were going to take a bus to our hotel in the Medina, but three college students from Chile asked us to share a cab with them. So we crammed four of us in the back with Dad in the front, and the cab ride cost us about $2 a piece. The cab driver drove like evryone else in the middle east - I thought we might die at any moment. There are also literally hundreds of motorbikes and mopeds on the road, and no one wears a helmet or obeys traffic laws. I honestly don't understand why I have yet to see someone's brains all over the street. The students from Chile had nowhere to stay, so they came with us to our hotel to get a room for the night. By the way, if you are a student from Chile who shared a taxi with two very white Americans in Marrakech....we owe you money for the cab. We never got their names, and no one had small enough bills to split the cab fare. So one of them paid for ours. And we were going to pay them back, but we never saw them again. Maybe they tried to ride a moped... Anyway, the Hotel Ali was fantastic. We had our own western bathroom and two twin beds, with doors that opened into a courtyard. From the terrace on top of the building, you could see the whole Jemma el Fna, as well as the minaret of the Khoutoubia Mosque, from which we could hear the call to prayer. Breakfast was included with the room, and about 8 or 9 cats wandered the hotel. The cafes on the square had tables out front, and I have to say the best introduction to Morocco was sitting at a cafe, drinking a cafe au lait, and watching people go by. It was exceptionally relaxing. Marrakech also has a big red open-topped tour bus, and I am not ashamed to say we bought tickets and fully embraced our role as tourists. It was a great way to see the city, complete with an English audio tour guide. We got to go the new city, or the Ville Nouvelle, and go farther out of the city to where the huge fancy-pants resorts are. We wandered through the Medina a bit at night, and mostly had a fantastic time getting acquainted with Morocco. We purchased train tickets to Fes, choosing to bypass Casablanca as I was still sick and eager to get settled in Fes.

Hola from Madrid...

2008-02-25T08:41:00.000-08:00

The saga continues. Very nearly on my deathbed, I flew to Madrid, via Heathrow in London. The flight from Chicago to Heathrow was only about a quarter full, and I watched Sense and Sensibility. Quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, I didn't sleep. When I got to Heathrow, I had no idea what gate my connecting flight was from. I don't know what is going on at Heathrow, but I walked so far in makeshift, temporary terminals, that I thought I was going to end up in France. The gate for my flight was announced 20 minutes before take off, and of course, I had to be that idiot running to catch my flight. Which was full. Fortunately, it was only a couple of hours. Upon arriving in Madrid, my father and I had a foolproof plan to meet up from our separate flights. I would...find...him. Really, it didn't seem like such a stupid plan at the time. I was supposed to have a couple of hours before he flew in to find out what baggage claim to meet him at. However, my plane had sat on the runway at Heathrow for a verrrry long time before taking off, and Dad's had been on time. And, as it turns out, I was in a different terminal that was a fairly long bus ride away from his. AND, at the Madrid airport, you can't get into baggage claim unless you're a passenger disembarking. Needless to say, there was about an hour of confusion and wandering around until Dad and I finally bumped into each other. After finding each other, we braved the metro and found our way to the International Youth Hostel, where the very cranky woman who spoke no English checked us in. The hostel was fairly nice, but also expensive. I think we paid about $20-25 a night each to share a room with seven other people. Who were mostly drunk French students on a weekend trip to go night clubbing in Madrid. I don't remember very much of Madrid as I was so sick I only wanted to sleep. And my sleep schedule was a disaster. I woke up every morning at 4 am and went down to the lobby to read. Dad and I did go on a few adventures in Madrid. We went to the Prado, which is the large art museum. They had a really great exhibit of Velazquez. We also saw the Palace and government buildings. And we went to see In the Valley of Elah, the movie about the Iraq war which Tommy Lee Jones received an Oscar nomination for. It was even in English. We ate paella, which is mostly a lot of rice and various chunks of meat. Oh, and we saw the man in this picture, who apparently was making a public service announcement. Turns out he was incorrect. I also put a lot of miles on my Morocco shoes, seen in the picture here. I think we may have collectively lost about 20 pounds from walking.

Finally....the blogging begins.

2008-02-21T05:20:00.000-08:00

I am finally set up here in Fes, Morocco. I have been incommunicado for a couple of weeks now, so I apologize if I appeared to have dropped off the face of the earth. In many ways, I feel like I did. There is so much to write about, I think I will have to break up this first post into sections. Section the first: Chicago.

Ah, Chicago. I was met upon my arrival by Anna and Chris, who were kind enough to let me stay in their swank downtown apartment, complete with a door woman and indoor pool. To my delight, they have a garbage chute, much like the one in the tv show Friends. There's something entertaining to me about listening to garbage slide down 40 stories. I learned many things about Chicago during my visit. It's absurdly cold. And icicles can kill you. Especially if they fall from the top of the Sears tower. Gotta watch out for that. Also, crazy people love the 7-11 on the corner of Dearborn. Looove it. I have never seen so many crazy people in one place in my life. There's the one-legged crazy man who hits you with his crutches if you're in his way. And the old crazy man who wears flamboyant suits, or a big fur coat. Or the crazy woman who grunts constantly. Pick your poison. Or your crazy, as it were. Also, in Chicago they put the pizza sauce on LAST. It's just an upside-down sort of place. I had high hopes for visiting a number of museums and sites, but sadly, I developed a severe case of the plague. I don't actually know what it was - I'm guessing some sort of mutant version of the common cold on steroids. I got a sinus infection, possibly an ear infection, and didn't move off the couch for about two days. In fact, I just got some antibiotics yesterday because I still haven't recovered. I merely transported it with me right through customs. Chicago's gift to Spain and Northern Africa.

Before I was devastated by illness, I was able to visit the International Museum of Surgical Sciences. This may not be most tourist's first stop in Chicago, but I guess I'm not most tourists. I of course managed to show up at the museum on Super Tuesday, and it was perhaps the most inept polling place I have ever seen. They tried to get me to vote, and when I replied that I was there to see the museum, they stared at me in disbelief. I guess it's not a high traffic site. The polling booths were set up in the middle of a few exhibits and the gift shop, but I still managed to take in some of the displays. They had an iron lung, which was interesting. On the way out, I was tempted to cast a vote on the machine directly in front of the postcard rack - but I settled for buying some fairly humorous postcards I still haven't sent to anybody.

Heather and I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was...interesting. But not so much with the art. I know that art is entirely subjective and blah blah blah...but there was an entire exhibit of pieces of buildings that a man in the 1970's essentially stole. He would just cut a piece out of a wall, or floor. And that was his art. His name was Gordon Matta-Clark, and I'm sure he's very famous and very artsy and very deep. This picture, entitled "Hair," shows him right before he cut his hair off in front of a private audience at his apartment . He labeled each section, and was going to make himself a wig out of the hair he cut off. Unfortunately for the world of art, he died before he was able to construct his wig. But that didn't stop the museum from displaying the chunks of hair he cut off. I actually thought the information on his views and motivations was fascinating. Looking at pieces of buildings, was not so much. It's kind of like me cutting your toaster in half and displaying it as my art and as a political statement about the way we view bread. I didn't make the toaster, and I didn't ask permission to take it: but it is my art. Anyway, Heather and her boyfriend, Sam, also took me to Howl at the Moon where we watched dueling pianos and kept tabs on the Super Tuesday results. BTW....how in the name of all that is good and holy is Ron Paul still managing to get 5-10% of the Republican vote in most states? What is wrong with people?

Chris also took me out to Chinatown, on what was kind of a creepy, misty night. But we found a fabulous restaurant, and took this delightful picture of us and some fish. I am so glad I got to spend time with Chris and Anna, even though I was mostly on the couch watching episodes of The Office. Other highlights of the trip were seeing the other Moscago kids. I watched Lost at Jamie and Luke's apartment. I met Brian's roommate, who is obviously a good person since her name is Erin. I did not get to see Jonny B and SaraJo - something I will make up for on the way back through in June. Also, I vaguely remember saying high to Brian T, but mostly being asleep on the couch. Anyway, thanks for the hospitality and the germs. Next stop...Madrid.