The group, an eclectic combination of sixteen kids from various universities in the US, traveled to Tangiers, Asilah (a tiny seaside resort), Rabat (Morocco's capital), and Chefchaouen, a white village that looked exactly like many of the towns surrounding Granada, and which, not very coincidentally, is sponsored by the regional government of Andalucía in Spain. As it turns out, many of the Jews expelled from Spain fled to Morocco, and until very recently, a hybrid Yiddish-Spanish (called Ladino) could still be heard in the town, despite the latter influence from the French. Some highlights of the trip would be my beachfront camel ride on the side of the highway; the lively conversation between four of us and two Moroccan English-translation students in a Rabat cafe, which proceeded very nicely until one of the Moroccans told us that the September 11th attacks were staged and that no Jewish people died in them, which greatly upset the Jewish studies major in our group - I became suddenly and entirely engrossed in my mint tea; and my homestay with a Moroccan family in Rabat. My roommate and I didn't have mountains of food with the family, but what we had was good. We (the two of us and our host-brother, which is to say, the men) were always served by the women of the household, who, in my opinion, were treated a bit like servants, though this seemed to be the norm. The family had no real running water and only a "Turkish Toilet" - read: a hole in the ground. We all bonded very quickly when, on the second night, we went to a hammam, a communal, Turkish bath. Here's the thing - in the medina, the old section of Rabat where all of the homestay families live, running water isn't that common. This is why it is common to go to the your favorite local bath house every time you might want to shower, about twice a week.
My roommate and I, accompanied by our host-brother, entered through a vault-like door into a three-room complex, clad in only our underwear - this is normal. (We later found out that the girls, in their own hammam, were made to go in wearing only the lower part of their underwear - the women's hammam, in Islamic cultures, is a literal opportunity to "let their hair down" and gossip.) We were immediately stared at - of course, as the only two albinos there - by the throngs of naked/similarly clad 400-pound Arab men sitting on the floor performing strange acts of personal hygiene. The furthest is the hot room, which is very hot due to the heated floors, and has a fountain flowing with scalding hot water. The first step in a hammam is to collect about four buckets per person and to wash them out with with the hot water. Then, take one bucket and clean your area of the floor with it - one sits in a hammam, as I would soon find out. This leaves three buckets filled with boiling water. The sitting on the painfully-hot floor can take up to an hour - one wants to be nice and sweaty - though our host brother sped up the process by dumping a bucket of water onto each of us. I screamed and then died a little bit inside, which just provoked more laughs from the men doing two-person Pilates in the corner - it is also normal to stretch, often with a partner, in a hammam. After you are sufficiently sweaty and have been sure that the welts on your skin will actually turn to third-degree burns, you move to the second room, the warm room. You move here, along with your remaining two buckets of now merely scorching-hot water, to take your tar-soap packet and suds up. This should take 20 minutes or so. After you are sufficiently sudsy, your hammam parter takes a glove covered with what I can only describe as sandpaper, and proceeds to exfoliate your entire body. A hammam employee can be hired to do this, you can take a friend with you, or you can find a stranger there and agree to exfoliate each other. Remember - you are now covered in pine-scented tar suds, badly burned after your experience in the first, hot room, and severely dehydrated. In the case of me and my roommate, you are also having trouble functioning after having been force-fed pasta three minutes before leaving for this experience. So. The exfoliation continues until just before blood is drawn from the skin. My host-brother delighted in being able to show my roommate and me the dead skin scraped off of our backs. The girls later reported that their "exfoliation partners" scrubbed everywhere that wasn't covered, which leads me to believe that this was yet more of a traumatic experience for them. "You see?" cheerfully lectured my host-brother, "you in America, you just take showers, but this is why your skin is unhappy. You have to come to a hammam to be really clean!" In some ways, this is true. I have never been more clean in my life, though my experience was far from over. My host-brother left Dan and me in the warm room after his - and it really was a kind gesture on his part - body scrub treatment, to go stretch with a friend. Dan and I, curled up on the floor in the fetal position in a pile of our own dead skin cells, realized that we had to move into the cold room, or risk melting to the floor. As soon as we got there, now with a fresh bucket each, we found the cold water fountain. Salvation! We stood in the corner, dumping bucket after bucket of frigid water over our heads to rinse off the - now very dirty - soap suds. I was so happy to be lowering my body temperature, and so much in shock from the change, that I didn't notice the large man several feet away on the floor whom I was showering with my cold water - he was less than thrilled, apparently, though he only expressed this in Arabic to his friend across the room, who was currently holding his four year-old, naked son on the ground to scrub him. I finally understood when the father, in a kind, paternal way, motioned with his hand at me and Dan to sit. "Douche," he said from the floor while pointing at the ceiling, using the French word for shower, "hammam," he smiled and laughed while slapping his hands onto the wet tile floor and shaking his legs. I can't really describe that moment. In that gesture, I felt really accepted there, if not as someone who belonged there, then as a guest whom everyone was interested in showing the ropes. I felt that way throughout my time in Morocco - though the culture and country, where the state religion is Islam, is different than anything I'd ever experienced, I felt welcome and safe. Islam doesn't allow the drinking of alcohol, which lends a very different feel to nightlife. It requires its followers to pray five times a day, which structures the day in a well-organized, family-friendly schedule (except, perhaps, for the daybreak call to prayer which never failed to wake me up, what with the mosque and minaret next to our house). It wasn't my culture, but I felt less judged as a tourist than I do in Spain. It made me think.
One of the most memorable meals was in Chefchaouen; the group went to an upscale restaurant where I was served tortilla, chicken tangine wrapped in fried dough, covered with sugar and cinnamon. Think fried dough with chicken. Very, very good, but also very, very bizarre. Between that meal and the buckets-full of sugar I consumed in the ever-present tea there, I've developed approximately eight new cavities.
This is our first day in Tangiers - I love the picture because it highlights the strange relationship in Morocco between French and Arabic. Interestingly, Arabic isn't indigenous to Morocco, but rather the Berber language, of which there are three main dialects in the country. Also, the Arabic there isn't "classical" Arabic, but a Moroccan dialect. I got along nicely with French in the interior of the country, but Spanish is more prevalent in the North. Pretty confusing linguistically.
More Tangiers.
There was a baby camel as well, which was falling all over itself to keep up with its mom. The scariest part of the whole experience is when the camel "kneels" for you to get off, because it starts with just its front legs. This leaves the rider hanging on for dear life at a rakish angle, while the camel's back legs are still fully stretched.
We stopped to at a tiny, isolated village in the Rift mountains to have lunch at a family's home. After we ate, we climbed to the top of a mountain with the local kids, who were very happy to make us crowns of flowers, even though we couldn't really communicate with them. The older of the two boys here spoke a little French, which helped a bit, because myself and one other girl on the trip could translate. Everything went fine until we attempted to ask one of the little ones how old he was, when he burst into tears and fled down the mountain.
My chicken "tortilla."
Chefchaouen, which is partially famous for the beautiful blue color of the lower parts of the walls there. This is an awful picture, but you get the idea.My arrival back in Granada coincided with the start of Semana Santa (Holy Week), which is the weeklong celebration of Easter, a bigger holiday here than Christmas. Semana Santa also brought my Mom over from the US, with whom I was able to reenact one of those dramatic reunion scenes in an airport as I waited amongst all the limo drivers for her to emerge from customs. Easter here isn't at all like in the States - the idea is to be in the streets celebrating and drinking, not sitting at home with family. My host mom from last semester, who made my mom and me paella on Easter Sunday, told me the Spanish have a saying about their two biggest holidays - "Christmas at home, Easter in the streets." Works for me. One of the Spaniards from my French class asked me, "As an American, does it scare you to see the penitents [the name they give the people who wear the traditional costumes in the Holy Week processions] walking down the street, since you live with the KKK in the US?" "No!" I replied. "Of course not." That said, it was strange. Intellectually, I know the two have very little in common (the exact origin isn't really known, but some suggest that the costumes have their roots in the Spanish Inquisition), but they are intimidating nonetheless.
My program here has its office on one of the main plazas in Granada, and so we had unas tapitas while we watched the Maunday Thursday processions. [Side note - here, every day of Holy Week is referred to as Holy Whatever, so Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, etc. Maunday Thursday, "maunday" being a corruption of an Old French verb "to beg," comes from a tradition in England when the king washed and gave alms to a number of poor people on Holy Thursday, and has little to do with anything else.] There are a number of different processions here, and each has its own day: one is a "gypsy" procession which descends from the mountains, another is a silent procession in which the penitents walk through the streets at midnight, barefoot and bound by chains, but all have several things in common. Each procession is put on by a cofradia, a "brotherhood" of men who sponsor the icon which will be paraded through the streets, and who practice all year (by carrying cinderblocks) to support the massive weight of these things over several hours - the largest icons can be supported by over 80 men. Usually, a Virgin and Jesus appear in each procession, and the themes of the processions change throughout the week, to tell the story of Jesus' capture and crucifixion through the diorama-like processional platforms. The processions all take different routes, but they all end up in front of the town hall and the cathedral at some point, and stop frequently. In the stops, children run up to the penitents and collect wax from their candles, which is made into large balls. Another option the kids have, in addition to the thrilling pastime of collecting wax, is to run up to a costumed participant and scream, "Give me some candy, Penitent!" This is an acceptable request, apparently, but to me is hilarious.
This happened to be a special year in Granada for Holy Week - the 100th anniversary of the first official processions was celebrated by repeating all of the processions from the entire week on Holy Saturday. While very cool, this all made navigating the city, especially in taxis, nearly impossible. My mom and I were lucky enough to stumble into the cathedral at one point, where many of the platforms were kept before or after their respective processions. These things are unbelievably detailed, and drip with gold, silver, mountains of flowers and, sometimes, trees.
It was phenomenal to see my mom, and it was great to finally be able to show her around the city where I've been living. It's hard to compress the week into the blog, but some highlights: we stayed one night inside the Alhambra, in the monastery-cum-hotel where Queen Isabela was first buried; we had dinner with my old host mom, where I translated for almost three hours; we rented a car and saw the breathtaking natural park in Cabo de Gata, a strange combination of desert and beach; we got hopelessly lost in said rental car, despite the useless GPS system, on the way to our hotel amongst never-ending greenhouses, on unpaved "roads," when we finally stopped and asked a toothless shepherd for directions, when he laughed at me and told me we'd never find our way out of there - we almost didn't; we finally arrived at our hotel in Mojácar, a beachside town built on a mountain with sweeping views of the Mediterranean.
All in all, it was amazing to see her. Since then, I've been back at class, to a solar power research station with a group of Spanish kids, and as of today, back from the Alpujarra, the gorgeous mountain region near Granada where our program heads each semester. This time, instead of losing power and being snowed-in at our hotel, we hiked in a wintry-mix for two hours, even though it was 50 and dry all day down in Granada. Still, I had a great time. I've been busy, but pretty happy. Sorry this post is such a hodgepodge of thoughts - I'll try to keep this more up-to-date! Stay well - Tom
2 comments:
Wow, sounds like you got quite the set of experiences during your short time in Morocco. And your time with your Mom sounds lovely -- especially the dramatic airport reunion scene -- love those! Take care.
I was going to make a blog... but i'll never be able to write as much as do.
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