Sahara, Merrakech, Essaouria, and more!

   So its been a while since  I last posted thus leaving me with a lot to write about. This past week was the program's southern excursion. Our trip is on the following map and included loads of bus time! I'm just

going to mention the highlights and some of my favorite places and hopefully whoever is reading this can keep up with my scattered thoughts. :) Sorry this one's a doozy. So much to think about.  The southern excursion started early Saturday morning to Azrou which was our halfway stop for the night on our way to the Sahara. Many parts of the drive reminded me of parts of  New Mexico with long stretches of dessert leading up to tall mountains. The first place we stopped for lunch that day was called Azrou. Its a small village a couple hours south of Rabat. Before lunch we had about an hour and a half so the some of the group opted to walk through the village. The house in the village were perched up on the side of a mountain super close to each other. Walking through the village, it was easy to notice that many of the houses were falling apart, and that this was a very poor village. However,  the amazing smells of cooking food wafting out of the houses as we walked through the village told us that although many of these people are poor, they still continue on with with their lived and make do with the means that they have. It was a completely different life than that of the rest of Morocco that I've seen that is impacted by western influences. This was definitely once of those moments of realization of the fact that I was across the world on Northern Africa. I wanted to stop and talk to these people about their lives. This village seemed to be in its own little world, mostly untouched by western influence. But unfortunately, we had to get back to lunch  After arriving in Azrou and spending the night there, we traveled the Sahara desert stopping along the way to look at the Barbary Macaque monkeys before arriving in a village called Rissani in the dessert. From Rissani we had a lunch of what they called "Moroccan Pizza" which was essentially pizza minus the tomato sauce and cheese with extra bread on top of the filling made of beef, egg, and onion. We than got to take land rovers to the dessert.  Before riding to our hotel which was literally in the Merzouga desert in the Sahara, we had a site visit at a local NGO that empowered the local women in the village as well as nomads that pass through by offering language classes and work through selling crafts that they make. The embroidered clothes and crafts they made were beautiful and inspiring. After this we went to the hotel. Our land rover driver was crazy. He would race with the other drivers in the caravan, do donuts around in the dirt, and plough through sand dunes all then while with the same Arabic song on repeat for about 45 minutes.  Might have gotten the slightest bit of whip lash from that ride but it was so worth it! 

And finally, we got to the Sahara. We were only about 15 km from Algeria.  It is hard to explain what I felt during this time except to say that  I absolutely fell in love with the Sahara and the people in it. We got to ride camels from our hotel to some bigger sand dunes which we climbed and rolled down before finally settling down to watch the sunset. The feeling of the warm sand beneath my bare feet and the absolutely and final silence of the desert took my breath away and left me speechless  (those of you who know me well, know how the significance of this). Upon returning to the hotel we sat down in front of a camp fire and had mint tea while we watched a Gnawa band preform. Gnawa music is a type of African Islamic spiritual music originating from the Berber tribes that is meant to put you in a trance. It involves drums, iron castanets called krakebs, chanting, dancing, and a 3 stringed instrument similar to a lute. It is pretty incredible to hear and indeed mesmerizing.  If you ask,  I will send along a video of a song that I took.  We danced and sang songs that the musicians taught us then went on to an incredible buffet dinner at the hotel involving essentially every traditional Moroccan dinner dish at once. In a massive buffet. Talk about heaven. 

      That night after most returned to bed my friend and I went out to go see the stars.  We ended up getting invited to join some of the drivers that drove the land rovers.  They were Berber and one of them was a from a nomadic tribe. We exchanged greetings in Arabic, English and they even taught us a little Berber. They explained how the nomads in the desert travel during the night and use the starts to guide them because in the day, it is much too hot to travel. One of the guys then pointed to the circle of tents that were pitched outside the hotel and said "would you like to stay in my hotel? I have a hotel. The hotel you are staying in is 4 of 5 stars.... but in 4 or 5 star hotel, you don't see any start. In my hotel, you see 4000 stars. My hotel has 4000 stars."I wanted to camp outside so bad even if its meant giving up a bed and shower.  We laughed, talked more and said our goodbyes because we wanted to go look at the stars but they came with us. As we all walked along the sand dunes we ran into another couple of people from our program and one of the musicians from earlier and they joined us and led us to the top of a small sand dune before we all sat down.

     On that sand dune in the Sahara desert I had  easily one of the best nights of my life. The singer called himself "Timbuktu" and he was absolutely hilarious yet incredibly inspiring at the same time. We sat in a circle and exchanged jokes, and stories. He would tell us half of a joke and then make us go around in a circle and try and guess the answer. If we didn't know the answer we had to each respond with a different animal noise. It sounds ridiculous but it had me in fits of laughter the entire night. Interspersed with the jokes he would slip in quotes. I want to share them with you and hopefully even though you are not sitting in the immensely silent and phenomenal desert you will appreciate the beauty in what he said. One of the quotes he had us guess until we completed it was "It's nice to be nice; it's important to be nice, but it's not nice to be important".  The song he had us sing every time one of us started to get sleepy sounded so light hearted and fun but when he finally at the end of the night interpreted it for us, I was moved. It goes like this: "Halle, Halle, bischeetwelle, ya habibi"I don't remember the rest of the Arabic but it means: "Make your mouth sweat, so you can come back to people. With these words you make my heart crumble in your hands". In other words, think about what you say  and work hard before you open your lips to speak. Make the words that you say mean something, so you can always return home to the people you meet. Additionally he ended the amazing evening with the somewhat paraphrased quote:"Today  I didn't know I was going to meet you all and we would end up in the Sahara tonight    
together. You may call it coincidence, you may call it destiny but to me this is what life is about:           meeting people from around the world and connecting through  songs, jokes, and laughter. Will             we see each other again?  I do not know but we had tonight in the moonlight. Inshallah (God                 willing) we will meet again."
I felt that this summed up this amazing evening perfectly. Inshallah, I will return to the Sahara to do a week excursion on camels by the end of my trip. Plans are in the making. 

     The next morning, with about 3 hours of sleep we woke up early to see the sun rise over the sand dunes and for once last glance (for now) of beautiful desert. After breakfast we hopped back into the land rovers for a hella bumpy ride. Our driver was bumping to some tunes from his mp3 player and I was blown away when a song came on that was in Hebrew, Arabic and English. It was the most amazing reggae song. It was incredible to hear Hebrew, in the middle of the desert, after such a long time of not using it besides when a few words accidentally make their way into my broken Arabic. 

   We then proceed on to Ourzazette, which everyone calls the Moroccan Hollywood because it is where many movies are filmed including Lawrence of Arabia. I'm not going to go into detail but I got pretty sick for the next couple of days. In Rabat me and some of the guys had this meat sandwich three weeks ago. We now refer to it as the infamous "Street Meat" or "Mystery Meat"  I only had one Hamdullah! (thank God) but the guys had way more than that and one even ate it continually throughout their time in Rabat. All of us got sick afterwards. To be short it kind of tore me apart unexpectedly. I was not able to eat or drink anything without stomach cramps and other like symptoms for about 3 days. Our group has become very comfortable talking about our bowel movements.  In Marrakech I was able to see a doctor and got some medicines. I am doing better but still couldn't eat much cooked food besides steamed veggies and rice along with bread and bananas for the rest of the week. Hamdullah I was able to keep the amazing cookies in Marrakech down when we returned this weekend! 

     Marrakech was pretty amazing. It was here that I fully realized the sincerity of the Moroccan people. Majority of the shop keepers in the souk wanted to just talk to us more than they wanted to sell something to us. If we said that we didnt't want something many would say in Arabic, no problem, and thank you, or God bless. People were just so kind and friendly. We were lucky enough to be led by one such shop keeper to a Berber pharmacy. This is a store that specialized in natural herb remedies, cosmetics, every spice you could think of and some you couldn't think of, and perfumes. Just about any ailment that someone has, they have an herbal cure for. I took a picture of the store but this was one wall in the entire store. We spent a day just shopping in the souk and hanging out in the square, where there are stands that sell the best fresh squeezed orange juice I've ever tasted in my life, and souvenirs of every kind. There were also snake charmers, musicians, dancers, etc. The next day we hit up the tourist sites such as the Majorelle Gardens, the leather tannery (smelly! but they hand you a bunch of fresh mint leaves to hold over your nose and mouth. They called it the Berber gas mask!), a tajine shop, and the Saadian tombs. It was a wonderful day even though I was still really sick. 

     After Marrakech, we continued on to Essaouria, which will get its own post because I need to go do all the work I put off for a week, and because it is so far my favorite place in all of Morocco! Next couple of posts will hopefully be coming pretty soon because I still have so much to write about this past week!!!

Meziane Bissef!

I'm so happy and content right now so I figured it would be a good time to write a blog entry! I'll start with what happened Friday though.

On Friday I had to miss Darija (the class where we learn the Moroccan dialect) because I had to go to Casa Blanca to get my bag that was seized by customs. Long story short it was a disaster. I was lucky that a teacher from my school came with me because I would not have been able to get my bag or even figure out where it was. Long story short- we got to the airport and then they told us to go the DHL so we took a taxi. We ended up hitch hiking back and forth across Casa Blanca, because at one place  I had to open my bag and show them everything, at a different place we had to get the receipt stamped, at a different place we had to pay, then go back to the first place to get the bag. It was pretty ridiculous. We left at 8 in the morning and got back at 4pm after two train rides each way. So that is my experience with Morrocan Customs...

On Saturday, my host family and I went to Casa Blanca (again) to visit some of their family there.  There I met some more cousins ( I have like 40 thousand cousins. Every time I think I have met all my cousins I meet someone new!) We went to the Grand Mosque built by Hassan II and then had a huge lunch at the family's house, napped, and then went to the Moroccan Mall. The car ride out and back was supposed to be and hour each way but somehow we ended up driving for about 3 hours each way. The whole time Arabic Music and the occasional Rihanna song were playing with the volume all the way up. I think we listened to this song about 13 times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBUQRI9NUow It was a long but good day.

Sunday was also a good day. In the morning I had my first surf lesson! It was a really hard to pop up from the board. I only was able to do it once but I was still pretty proud of myself. After surfing, me, my sister Imane, her mom, and about 10 of our cousins went to a beach a bit further away. The beach was way less crowded, cleaner, and the waves were HUGE! I mean huge. I got knocked around quite a bit while swimming. We spent all day at the beach and ate lunch there. I tried to do some required reading for school bit wasn't incredibly successful. It was a very relaxing day.

Today (Monday) was the first official day of school. We had been taking Darija since Wednesday but today was the first full day with our human rights and multiculturalism class. After school (done at 3 every day!), I went to a cafe to get some tea and try and do some homework before surfing. Today I absolutely fell in love with surfing! Although all the paddling is tiring (probably good for water polo), and my eyes burned from the salt water, theres really something to waiting for the perfect wave and then being able to catch it! Today I did way better and was able to pop up and stand most of the time The last wave of the evening that  I caught I rode all the way in. I was way too excited about it but I felt so accomplished! After surfing I came home around 8 and had a quick snack of tea and a pastry before I headed to the hammam (the bath house) with my host sister and a girl who is here from Spain that is staying with the family. In Morocco, people go about once a week. Because they don't shower every day, they stay in the hammam anywhere from 1-3 hours (the women stay much longer than the men). Going to the hammam is quite the experience! You wear only underwear and bring soap, and shampoo, buckets, and a mat to sit on. There are usually 3 different rooms. A hot room (like a sauna) a medium room, and a cold room. There you sit and wash yourself and your hair and you can have the ladies who work there scrub you. They use a wash cloth type thing that is rough like sandpaper and they scrub you raw. The amount of dirt that came of me was pretty impressive but my skin was so soft afterwards! I felt so clean and relaxed and it was the perfect thing after surfing (even though I'm going to go tomorrow and get all salty again). Dinner was around 11:30PM again. This meal schedule makes for long days but good days.

 Today was also a great day because I was able to get home from school without getting lost! The school and my home are in the median (or the old city) which is surrounded by walls build in the 12th century. Essentially it is a labyrinth. The narrow streets are lined with homes, shops, and markets.  Every time my host sister walked me to school she took a different way to show me all ways but it really just got me more confused! Many people also ride motor bikes and scooters which you always have to watch out for when you're walking. I saw a woman's purse get hooked on one going by and she got pulled on a for a ride for a while. She was ok so it was funny. However, after that whenever I hear a bike I try to look all around me and move out of the way as quickly was possible. Another hazard of the streets is because people live in the home that line the street, you have to pay attention above you. I was walking home from school today and someone was chiseling in their window sill. A big piece of stone fell and hit my backpack. I was lucky it missed my head! All of these experiences bring me to love Morocco even more. There is a also a huge chance that  I will become a surf bum this semester! More soon but now I'm off to bed! Sabir L'hir! (good night!)

First night with host family!!

     Last night our program had a welcome dinner for us. The meal was incredible! It was pastille which is basically a pie with filo dough and it was chicken with almonds, saffron, and and chopped nuts and its was super sweet delicious. As a surprise the center had a band come play traditional Moroccan music it was amazing! Also because it was Rosh Hashanah me and two other Jewish girls that I met hunted down some apples and honey and ate them by the river. It certainly wasn't my traditional New Year but I think I'm off to a sweet start so far :)
     Today  I met my host family and tonight is my first night with them! In my immediate family is my mom, two sisters one who is 19 and one who is 29 and a host brother who is 30. My host sister Imam picked me up from the school today along with her little 4 year old cousin, her cousin who is 7, and her cousin who is 14. Imam explained to me thamt she lives in her grandmothers house with her brother, and her mom is in her aunts house. When we first got to the house I wasn't sure of what to do so I kind of awkwardly sat down while we watched television for a while. Our homestay coordinator explained that in every Moroccan house, the television is like another member of the family because it’s always on! After awhile Imam and I went to the beach with her cousins best friend and her best guy friend growing up. It was nice to finally be able to hang out with guys and not be harassed, checked out, or made fun for being American. The two guys were very nice and funny and they picked on Imam like she was their sister, pretending to throw her in the ocean and playing with her hijab.  We all went to the beach  and walked around. Tomorrow after school we are going to go back and go swimming! Luckily enough Imam speaks English pretty well but no one else in here family or her friends that I’ve met really does. Because I don’t speak Arabic or French I was just content to listen. Imam is so sweet and would hold my hand sometimes when we crossed the street or so I wouldn't feel left out. She also calls me “Meelo” because she can’t really say my name. So to all her friends and family I am  now "Meelo".

            The traditional time that Moroccan families eat dinner is anytime between 9-11:30PM. They do lunch around 1 or 2 and then do tea and a snack of bread or cake around 7 or 8.  After the beach Imam and I went to her aunt’s house for tea and I met more of her cousins and her mom. I love love love her mom. My host mom I guess. She is so funny and just kind of plays rough with all the cousins and smacks them around lovingly. She also makes funny faces and dance moves randomly. She is quite the character.  We ate dinner at 10:30 which was an early dinner for them. It was a tajine which is a stew of chicken and potatoes and then Imam and several of her cousins and her mom and I went down to the river because there is a carnival with rides for children there. My host family is big and crazy! The entire night  and on our way down to the river and back we all sang and danced and beat boxed and played football with empty bottles and trash with the little kids. Selma who is 7 is quite the dance and her brother Amman who is 4 is adorable. By the time we got the river, the carnival was closed except for the bumper cars. So we got to ride bumper cars. Around 12:30 we started to make our way home. Even walking through the medina the family was paying and laughing and singing. Swear that at one point there was a conga line formed! I'm so happy to get what I'm sure is the biggest craziest host family out there!

 What a day! Also today was my second day of Arabic and I absolutely love it. I feel that I am picking it up pretty well I can’t wait until I can speak with Imam and her family and friends soon!

First post from Morocco!

Alright finally got to some reliable wifi and wanted to take advantage of some down time to write down my expectations as well as some of my first impressions!

Expectations:

- To grow as an individual on this program and become more open minded and independent
- To become proficient in Arabic and the Darija the Moroccan Dialect
- To at times be completely overwhelmed by cultural differences
- To feel lost and overwhelmed at times or get frustrated by inability to communicate
- To eventually feel at home and comfortable here
- Form lasting and meaningful relationships with my host family, students and staff on the program as well as the locals around Rabat
- To apply both my majors to my study and grow academically
- To drink lots of Moroccan tea :)
-To try something new whenever possible

Arriving into Morocco I was super happy to meet everyone and for the first time in three weeks not be in charge of planning out the schedule for the day, or meals and accommodation. Everyone of the program is very friendly and equally excited to be in Morocco. After our first Moroccan dinner we had the night to ourselves and a group of us decided to explore the souk (the market). There is just so much to take in:  the sights of the different types of people, the smells of spices, and sounds of roosters (theres one next to our school building) the chickens being weighed in the market, the languages of French, Arabic, and Berber and the call to prayer every day. Morocco is also hot and sweaty especially because as women we cant't wear anything shorter than our knees or have our shoulders show. Learning how to not trip over my long skirt has been quite the experience as has trying to communicate with people in the souk or on the street. Most only speak French or Darija so well see how fast I can pick up both! I got to run to dinner but more to come! We start learning Arabic this week and will meet out host families soon!

Brief accounts of London, Italy and Spain

After three weeks of traveling, I finally made it to Rabat, Morocco where I’ll be spending the next four months studying. Traveling through London, Italy, and Spain was overall an incredible experience but I’ll only give a short summary of my time in each country before addressing my hopes/ goals for my time in Morocco.

London: I got into London August 11^th and spent the week there. I felt London made for a pretty smooth introduction to my travels because it was abroad but everyone spoke English. This made getting around and navigating the tube pretty easy. My two friends and I knocked out the main tourist sites such as, The London Eye, Buckingham Palace, and The London Tower Bridge but because one of my friends had a cousin in London we also got see things outside of the city such as Stone Hedge and the town of Oxford. In London crossing the was streets was terrifying because we always looked the wrong way and might have walked into oncoming traffic a couple times. London was great to see but by the end of the week my friend Lindsay and I felt ready to move on to Italy and see Europe!

Italy: Travelling around Italy was a completely different experience than London. Neither my friend nor me knew any Italian and many Italians did not speak English. This made navigating and finding streets a little difficult.  Italy was really the country we got to see the most of and I feel got the best feel for. We hit Milan, Florence,Venice for a day, and Rome. The things that stuck out about Italy were the incredible Cathedrals or Duomo’s we saw, art and sculptures by famous artists, the Vatican and Sistine Chapels as well as the Coliseum. Italy had breathtaking views in every city accompanied with endless pizzerias, pasta and of course gelato!! There really was nothing like the Italian pizza we had but by the end of our stay in Italy we so were tired of it that for dinner out last night in Rome we had Chinese food! By the end of our stay in Italy I acquired a pretty decent Italian accent as well as some random Italian words and phrases but had my phone stolen in Rome which was kind of a bummer.  

Spain: From Italy to Spain we caught a ferry to Barcelona. The ferry was 19 hours long and was quite the experience. My friend and I wanted to save money so we just bought passage on the boat rather than getting beds. In the end we ended up sharing a pitcher of sangria and crashing on some random café couches after some karaoke.  When we finally got to Barcelona we were hungry, tired and incredibly excited to be in Spain. My friend Tyler came out and met us for the duration of Barcelona and Madrid. Barcelona was great because I finally got my beach time and got to swim in ocean. Madrid was an incredible city with lots of plazas and incredible architecture. I definitely got my dose of culture in Spain from hitting several famous art museums, going to a concert, and seeing live Flamenco accompanied by a fancy dinner! Some of the art and paintings were amazing and we saw everything from renaissance art to the modern art movement (i.e. Picasso).  I would look up the ones I loved but there’s no wifi in our hotel in Morocco. Leaving Spain bittersweet when I left this morning. I was incredibly nervous and anxious for Morocco along with excited. However despite having to nervous pee every five minutes  I made it safely to Morocco, met my group and got a good nights sleep at the hotel. More to come!