前途: A Year in Morocco

As an earlier entry indicated, I’ve spent the past two weeks traveling throughout Morocco, accompanying a friend and fellow ETA, Eric, who teaches in Oman, on a tour of my host country. He was on break from teaching. We’ve all been experiencing long breaks; mine, in part because I did not have to be involved in giving and grading finals, has lasted nearly two months. In this time, I’ve celebrated Christmas in Errachidia for a week, went to the Marine house (and bar) for New Year’s, traveled around Jordan after our regional ETA seminar in Amman, was trapped in my house by the rain for almost two weeks, and then traveled to many places in Morocco where I had not yet been. Whenever I connect with my students via our Facebook group, they comment about how much I seem to travel. I tell them that crossing the Atlantic is a big deal, and so I am taking advantage of how convenient it is to go many places while I am living here.

Here’s what I did on my most recent trip.

Meknes: A day trip by train from Kenitra, we had lunch in the neighboring Moulay Idriss and then visited Volubilis, one of many Old Things to see in Morocco. It is a Roman ruin, unique for its well-preserved mosaics, and was only abandoned in the 1700’s when Moulay Ismail decided to dismantle it to build other stuff over in Meknes. At this point, I must emphasize to any potential travelers the necessity of having a guidebook with you, because signs in this part of the world are frequently nonexistent, inadequate, or not in intelligible English. Lonely Planet and Rough Guides are great, and I had much fun using the book to explore the site. Returning to Meknes, we had dinner before taking the train. We got harira, a Moroccan tomato soup, bread, boiled eggs, and makouda, a type of fried potato thing often served with harira. The bill for two meals was about 3 USD.

Fes: Fes was my absolute favorite part of traveling Morocco. It is the ultimate experience of a medieval Arab city, and is rich with sights, sounds, smells, and opportunities to talk to Moroccans. It is also full of Old Things, which I enjoy seeing. Even more awesome, it hosts a large contingent of our fellow Fulbrighters, and we were able to see most of them during our 3 days there, and the meeting and greeting also included an internet viewing of the Super Bowl (although I went to bed after half time).

Fes, foodwise: We ate at Café Clock, run by a British dude, which is a popular hangout spot for expats and very hip young inhabitants of Fes. I tried a Senegalese stew (which reminded me of my mom’s West African Ground Nut Stew), other menu items included camel burgers and ricotta pancakes. We had bastilla, Fes’s specialty, although I declined to try it with pigeon due to the price. We ate dinner at some places where we got a reduced price “Moroccan” menu, due to our friends’ relationships with the store owners, and we bought Moroccan breakfast foods, harsha, malawi, baghrir, etc. Also, Ms. Lily made us an awesome jerk chicken, and Matt’s roommate made several batches of delicious pizza. Matt made tasty lemon pie, and also took us to an awesome chicken place, where we got quarter rotisserie chickens with rice, veggies, and loubia, Moroccan white bean stew.

That paragraph is making me hungry just writing it!

Back to Errachidia: I have a fondness for Errachidia, particularly the awesome company of Tracy, Brother Harun, and several local Peace Corps volunteers. We took a night bus from Fes, got in at about 4 am, and didn’t get up again until at least 10. We went to a café which has the my favorite breakfast in all of Morocco: expresso, fresh OJ, two eggs sunny side up and drenched in good olive oil, crusty bread to soak it all up with, and the Marrakechi pastries, which are the most awesome thing on the face of the planet and they’re so damn good, but I don’t know quite how to describe them! Furthermore, Tracy had bacon and Sirracha for me (shout out to Syed for bringing the Sirracha all the way from the US) and I was able to relax, do laundry, visit the hammam, and cook dinner for 11 (a red pepper/paprika flavored potato/tomato soup) while Eric made a run out to see the dunes at Merzouga.

We went to bed after a couple hours of visiting and raucous game-playing,  and Tracy’s black cat Ninja tried to keep me awake. In retrospect I am wondering if it had to do with the fact that I probably smelled like bacon, since I had cooked it and turned it into bacon-tomato-egg sandwiches for breakfast on the road the next morning. I had to kick him out of the bedroom, which started a good thirty minutes of mournful meowing which was only dramatized by the hollow effect created by the echoes off the tile floors. Lulz.

Marrakech: after our 10 hour bus ride through the High Atlas, detailed in the last entry, we landed in Marrakech. Heading out the next day, we wandered through the medina, saw a few Old Things, ate Friday couscous in Jama al-Fna. We also met up with some more friends who were in Kech for the weekend and went to this crazy restaurant where there were belly dancers, some with trays of candles on their heads, and men and women in tight, short, bright white sailor costumes. The bill for this dinner was around $40 USD, and it is for this reason that I say you can spend as much money as you want eating in Morocco. In conclusion, Marrakech is a little like the Las Vegas of Morocco, and I found that it was not as much my personal cup of tea as many of the other places we visited.

The North (Tangier, Tetouan, Ceuta): Tangier is kinda cool, and we wandered through Tangier itself for a few hours, where I had one of the best pain au chocolats that I have ever experienced in Morocco. We then visited Grecia in Martil, a Mediterranean beach town which is popular in the summer and quiet this time of year and is about fifteen minutes by grand taxi from Tetouan. Getting to Tetouan involved an hour long grand taxi ride, two people in the front and four in the back. Once we reached Martil, we went with Grecia and co. to a Spanish-style fish restaurant, where we had small dishes of paella, salads, olives, bread, and an impressive grilled fish spread (2-3 types of whole fishes, prawns, calamari) which was ay-may-zing. We returned to Tetouan later in the afternoon, and spent a short hour wandering through the medina, and I am definitely going back because it is an awesome place to shop.

The day after, we headed up to Ceuta, which is technically part of Spain and involves a border crossing, although the city itself is still part of Africa, so we were in Europe and Africa at the same time. They speak Spanish there, and the streets are clean, and there are trash cans outside, and no one stares at you or tries to give you directions to the tannery! After wandering for a while, we decided we were starving, and it was at this point that we discovered that EVERYTHING in Spain, except a few bars, closes between about 4 or 5 and 8 or 9. Oops. So we ended up in a bar named Charlotte overlooking the harbor, listening to 90’s soft rock and drinking spiked smoothies and sangria. I took advantage of the situation to also order a ham and cheese sandwich, as well as a brownie with Spanish ice cream (which is literally one of the best things on the planet). It was all kinds of delicious sin!

Feeling pretty good, we rinsed out our mouths and broke out the chewing gum (so as not to offend our Moroccan taxi drivers back on the other side of the border), and headed back to the border crossing, which required me to explain where we were going in Spanish without knowing the word for border, which the taxi driver kindly provided even though he understood me completely. Always nice to learn a new, useful, word. As usual, I delighted the border guards with my chatting in Arabic and we were back in Morocco in no time.

Casablanca: We left for the train station in Tangier around 10 am the following day, but due to late trains due everyone and their dog traveling due to the holiday of the Prophet’s (PBUH) birthday, we arrived in Casa much later than we had intended to. We had cocktails and dinner (I got duck) at Rick’s café, which has actually just been built based on the movie, and then wandered down to see the Hassan II mosque lit up against the backdrop of the Atlantic surf at night.

The next day, after Eric’s early morning departure for the train and the airport and Oman, Natalie and I slept in quite late. We breakfasted at a French café, I had quiche, and then reported for volunteer duty at the Dar America booth at the annual Casa book fair. Natalie staffed a table for AMIDEAST, and I helped for a while. Wandering off, I informed her that I’d return in about an hour.

Then I got Morocco’d. In other words, I met someone interesting (a retired Moroccan English teacher and her husband), got invited for tea, made conversation, waited for and met some of the family, received a signed copy of her husband’s book in Arabic, then exchanged phone  numbers and got an invitation for couscous in Rabat. I wandered back to poor, abandoned Natalie, two hours later.

I then went out to see the Japanese booth, and chatted for a bit in Japanese and English with an older Japanese fellow and some Japanese-speaking, anime-phile Moroccans who were his students, learned about a comic expo in Tangier, and got some contact information. I also later bought two novels in English from the fairly limited selection of English-language novels across the whole fair.

After the book fair we went looking for a Korean restaurant, for which Natalie had seen a sign in passing. We not only found it, but it turned out to be run by a Korean lady and therefore pretty legit (Asian restaurants in Morocco are rarely authentic). I was able to satisfy my five-month-un-assuaged craving for kimchi. We ordered kim bap, dumplings, haemul pajeon, bulgogi, japchae, and kimchi chigae. And beer. And the meal came with rice and six(!!) banchan. I was so, so happily stuffed!

We went for a walk the next morning and looked at some art deco. We sat at a café all day and ordered mocha frappachinos, which were amazingly delicious, and worked on our blogs and emails. We went out for Italian food and I continued cheating on my non-dairy diet with some excellent cheese ravioli in cream sauce. We bought strawberries (apparently their season starts now, they taste better than any you’d find in the US this time of year) on the way home and had them for dessert around 10 pm.

I hopped on the train the next day, stopped off in Rabat to have Friday couscous with the Boren scholars and their friends, and then came home to find that a new concierge had been hired! I think he is still kind of confused by me. I still have not been informed of when school starts, but a conversation with one of my students indicated that they don’t know either, so I will have to figure it out.

And that was my two week adventure!