Finals week was, while insanely eventful from my perspective, none of it was the kind of eventful anyone really wants to be hear about. A few days after classes were over I flew to Paris to meet up with my mom for Christmas. My host family was really sweet when I left; they all walked me to the main road to help me with my bags, bargained for a taxi for me, then all gave me big hugs before I got in and drove away.
Paris was beautiful. My mom and I spent our ten days in an apartment that my aunt, who makes regular jaunts to Paris as a tour guide and French cabaret singer, had set us up with. It was in a fun funky immigrant neighborhood (that my aunt says is getting more gentrified every year) and up three flights of stairs, looking out over the apartment building’s cobblestone courtyard. Every morning before I got up, my mom would go out and get fresh bread, and we would have bread and cheese and café au lait for breakfast. For Christmas we bought two little Cyprus branches and put them in a Bell Jar on the mantelpiece, and then decorated them with paper snowflakes, foil stars and one long tin-foil chain.
We did a lot of the touristy things in Paris, some of which were less interesting than others, but the highlights include…
Going to Notre Dame for Christmas Eve, which was the first time I had ever been, hearing the choir which was spectacular, and watching the slightly Monty Pythonish animated power point on Christmas, narrated by Gabriel.
The Orsay, and the Oragnerie, which had boatloads of beautiful impressionism.
Taking the train to Chartres the day after Christmas, and spending hours in the cathedral staring at the windows (which my dad described as the most beautiful thing he has ever seen made by humans, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I have to admit he has a point). We sat by one of the enormous rose windows and watched the sunset though it, the windows changing drastically every couple of minutes until they finally went dark.
Being at the top of the Arc de Triomphe at sunset, and watching the light change that way, with a blaze of color in the clouds instead of stained glass.
The flight from Paris to Casablanca was insane, mostly of my stop over in Dakar. I had planned the two trips separately, and so had two different plane tickets, but since I had brought a bulky rolling bag to Paris which wouldn’t work too well in Morocco, I didn’t just stay in the airport for the five hours between flights but instead got a cab to Shani’s house, said hi to her family, tried to repack my Morocco bag since it was too heavy (and stayed too heavy, I am a terrible packer) helped Shani get her stuff ready, and then left my big Paris bag there to take another cab back to the airport. It was a little exhausting.
We got to Casablanca around 7 in the morning on New Year’s Eve, but had to wait around until our friend Leah’s flight came in from Egypt around noon. In the meantime, Shani and sat down at a café, pulled out the pocket guidebook from ’97 my mom got me for Christmas, and realized we knew absolutely nothing about Morocco. Going based on the advice we had gotten from various people (including the random girl I met in the airport on the way to Paris, we were obviously very discriminating) we decided to do a loop around the north of the country, from Casablanca to Marrakesh, to Meknes, to Fes, and back to Casa for our flight out. In a week. And even though I thought it was probably crazy, that’s what we actually ended up doing.
Shani and I had been set on going out in some fashion for New Year’s, but by the time the evening rolled around, jet lag and sleep deprivation (is on just part of the other?) were having their say. Shani finally dragged Leah and I out of bed to a quiet if slightly sketchy café, where we toasted the new year with tea and hot chocolate, while the Moroccans around us completely ignored the beginning of a new decade. We judged midnight by my watch because it was a few minutes faster, then paid the bill, walked through the rain to our hostel, and fell into bed around 12:25. Despite the anti-climax, a very good new year.
The next day we took the train to Marrakesh. I have to say; Morocco’s idea of cheap, comfortable, reliable trains that can take you from any major city to any other in the country struck me as a great idea. Better than Amtrak by a long shot, and a drastic change from getting around in car rapids. One of the big attractions is Djema el Fna, which is a big square in the center of down, where you can find henna artists, food stalls, drummers, dancers, and snake charmers, all dependant on the time of day. We stayed in hotel overlooking the square, which meant, among other things, that it was easy to get our dinner from hopping from one food stall to another. In one night we went to five food stalls and had for dinner: snails, tajilla (a sort of sheep stew), a pigeon pie called pastilla, roasted pepper, spiced spinach, Moroccan soup, sheep brains, bread soaked in sheep fat, rum cake, and ginseng tea. Now might be a good time to mention that despite the sheep brains, I loved the food in Morocco.
Our first day in Marrakesh, we had several palaces we wanted to visit, so we left the hostel, walked purposefully through the square, and got completely lost. We ended up in front of a primary school asking directions, while the kids teased the confused white people wandered around, while their mothers tried to give us directions while laughing at us, which didn’t work very well since they didn’t speak French or Egyptian Arabic, which was about all we had going for us. Eventually a young guy who spoke French figured out what we were looking for (we were drawing quite a crowd by then) and pointed us in the right direction. We found a beautiful garden in front of a guarded walled area, which we assumed was one of the palaces, but when we tried to approach the guards would shake their heads and their fingers at us, and shooed us away. Eventually the guards who would talk to us sent us along a street lined with lights, until we
got to the other side where those guards sent us right back to the other side. We did eventually find what we were looking for, and the tomb, the ruins and the palace that we were looking for were worth it, though we had to wait until after the lunch break to get in. The ruins had huge storks living in mountains of twigs at the top of its dilapidated retaining wall. They would strut around moving branches, and fly in 10 feet over our heads. The tombs and the palace were both the perfect example of intricate Moroccan architecture, with stylized Arabic writing praising Allah along the edges of the walls, simple colorful geometric mosaics that become intricate by the sheer scope of it, and the wood and stone detailing ornately and carefully carved.After Marrakesh we went on to Meknes and Fes. We didn’t stay in Meknes very long, since were anxious to get to Fes, and we were staying across the street from the Imperial Door, the ornate and opulent entrance into the old Imperial City. (I wonder how many more ways I’ll be able to find to say big and fancy?) We did wrangle our way into a meal at a very fancy restaurant we never could have afforded without the “student price.” (People in Morocco have obviously heard the “I’m just a poor student!” argument many times before.) We not only got a lot of fancy sides with our Tajine (which is the most common Moroccan dish, meat and vegetables cooked forever in a clay vessel) but we got a view of the city at sunset from their rooftop terrace.
Fes, which is lauded as one of Morocco’s most beautiful cities, lived up to its name. The city rests
in a bowl shaped valley, climbing up the hills on wither side, so that every time you turn a corner there is another spectacular view. We did a lot of our souvenir shopping in Fes, since it was close to the end of our trip (I say we, I had already blown most of my money on the plane ticket) and it was difficult to switch from Senegalese to Moroccan bargaining. In Senegal the best way to get a good price is to be very friendly, use as much Wolof as possible, maybe even flirt a little, and if the price isn’t going down pretend to walk away. Moroccan bargaining seemed so angry. Vendors would act insulted and huffy after you gave your opening bid, yell that the reason you had seen the same thing at a lower price was because this was quality, not the crap the other guys had, and most of the time when we tried to walk away, they would just let us go. We had come in thinking it would be no problem since were so used to haggling in Senegal, but I think we probably got ripped off a couple times, just because we were so unprepared for how different it would be.Our last full day in Morocco we went hiking in the cedar forests in the mountains south of Fes.
The whole time we were in Morocco, I was set on going to the Sahara and spending a night camped out there. Eventually I had to let it go; it was expensive and time consuming, and we didn’t have the equipment. But I still wanted to do something fun and outdoorsy. Leah and I found a travel agency who could do a day trip into the cedar forests and surrounding towns for something we all could afford, so we sprang for it. Unfortunately, I forgot one of the basic laws of physics: the higher you go, the colder it gets. None of us except Leah had really been prepared for how cold and rainy Morocco would be, and didn’t have the right clothes. The cedar forests were beautiful, and magical, like something out of Narnia or Lord of the Rings—and also very cold and very wet. One of the main attractions of the forests is the barbary apes who live there, but unfortunately for us they seem to be smarter than to be traipsing around on the cold and rainy days, and had found somewhere else to be. We did see one ape before even reaching the forests; our driver pulled off the road to some small huts, where berber vendors were selling jewelry and fossils we had been told may or may not have been real. While we were looking at geodes when a little furry monkey with his front paw bandaged, about knee high ambled into the shop. (Side note: I do know that ape and monkey or not synonymous, and he was in fact a barbary ape, but the word ape has all the wrong connotations for the cuddly looking fuzz-ball I’m trying to decribe.) The vendor told us that his paw had been hurt when a car ran over it. Since it was clear he had no problem with people, I knelt down next to him, and he hopped up onto my lap. His fur was damp from the rain. He almost absent-mindedly grabbed for the zipper of my coat, and looking around with eyes so big that he seemed forever slightly perplexed and apprehensive. Shani knelt down too, and the vendor shooed him over to her knee, then after he decided we had had enough monkey time, we shooed him back into the rain and tried to get us interested in his wares again. As we were leaving, I saw our friend’s silhouette against the sky, hopping from the roof of one hut to another.Our last day in Casablanca was a bit of a letdown after that. We were there because the city had the cheapest airfares, but as a tourist destination the city doesn’t actually have much to offer. We walked to the city’s Grand Mosque, which while is supposed to be the world’s second largest mosque after Mecca but didn’t look nearly as big as the Mosque in Touba. On the way there we passed Rick’s café, which Shani had been set on going to until she learned that the place had only been opened in 2004, and that all of the movie Casablanca was in fact filmed in Hollywood. She said that it looked nothing like the café in the movie.
And now I’m back in Dakar. This week has been pretty uneventful, both because my internship hasn’t started yet and because I’ve been sick ever since our last day in Morocco. As some of the other girls keep reminding me, I only have 7 weeks left here. I am determined to make them phenomenal.
