Morocco, My Love.

02/07/09

I’ve finished up classes for the day (all four of which I attended in pajamas –first time ever!) and am now watching What A Girl Wants while I type this out; I guess I’m on a Amanda Bynes kick again since I watched my pirated copy of She’s The Man last night –I love her an wish to have all her movies one day. So far I still need Sydney White and whatever other movies she’s done, haha. Anyways, on to Morocco; after we left Spain we stopped around dinnertime to fuel up off the coast of Gibraltar which was a fairly cool process actually. They tie up a smaller boat to the ship and attach a bunch of pipes and stuff and supposedly fuel is getting pumped into the boat –however, it wasn’t until the very, very, end of our pre-port at 10pm that night that The Voice made the announcement that nothing was going on whilst the baby boat was tied up next to ours for a few hours. In fact, the waters were so rough we never even attached to the baby boat and it wouldn’t be until the next morning that we’d get any fuel, which would push back the whole arrival time for morocco –we wouldn’t get in until a 8pm instead of 8am like we were supposed to –but it gets worse! Immigration didn’t want to board our ship that late so we’d have to wait until the next morning, thereby losing a whole day and a half of the measly 3 original days I had with Angie and my Mom who were meeting me there. Oh! And to make matters stranger, for whatever reason none of us could call or text one another for whatever reason. So finally, finally, finally, I pick up my passport from the 7^th deck the next morning –thank god my sea was called first –and I’m rushing to get off the ship, out the port, and to the train station that they told us in our pre-port meeting was only 5 blocks away. Lies! As soon as I get on the dock of Casablanca it’s sketch as shit; there’s mud and poo and trash all over the place, and men yelling all kinds of stuff at me. One guy kept yelling it wasn’t safe for me to wander around the port alone (I was trying to get out thank you) and that I was in danger because I was too cute. So this guy is yelling at me in French and I’m not sure what’s going on, and I figure it’s like in many other countries where the taxi drivers harass female travelers like it’s their full time job so I’m ignoring him and telling him in my broken French I’m fine and I know what I’m doing, which was a horrible lie considering I’d been walking for like 15 minutes and was lost around the huge disgusting labrynth that was the port of Casablanca and I’m flipping out because at this point it’s like 8:40 and I’m rushing to get to the train station for the 8:50 to Marrakech and I’m walking and walking and getting nowhere. So then this one taxi driver just won’t leave me alone, and I keep ignoring him until he says, “are you going to the train station?”So I tell him about trying to make the 8:50 and he says I’m going to the wrong train station –I have no dinar, only dollars, so I’m freaking out, and I keep telling everyone I have no money at all, and it’s bedlam, and then I rush to a bunch of other SAS kids climbing into a taxi and find out they’re going to Marrakech too so I head off with them; they’d already agreed to pay 20 bucks which was completely ridiculous but I threw in 7 bucks anyways. The ride took about 15/20 minutes too, so by the time I got to the train station I’d just missed my train.

I went to the atm in the train station and took out money (p.s. be wary future travelers to Morocco; they don’t separate their amounts with commas so be sure you mean to pull out 100 bucks instead of 10 since the exchange rate is like 8.7 MAD to ea. $) and met up with a bunch of girls going to Morocco, including Cassie’s roommate Liz. We were all trying to make the 8:50 train, and everyone missed it, so there was just a million SAS students all milling around this tiny ghetto train station aimlessly –and Casa isn’t much of a walk-about kind of city, so Liz and the four girls she was travelling with (everyone travels in huge, loud, incredibly American groups it seems…) so we all went for café au lait and mint tea and delicious croissants with chocolate melted inside. Then we all get on the train and we find we’re in a compartment with a bunch of other SAS kids and one poor Moroccan man who at first looked completely disinterested and then once we started playing BS he started laughing at my extreme frustration. It was an okay three and a half hour train ride really, if uneventful. Once off the train I hung around for a bit and said goodbye to Liz and friends and then went out to find a taxi to the main medina’s Bab Ailen gate where the guest Riad was supposed to be a few blocks away from. P.s. When I wrote my directions down I accidentally wrote down “Bob Ailen”so in typical French accent fashion I pronounced it “Bub Ailan”which was very confusing to everyone involved. On the way there though I made pretty good friends with my cabdriver, who even lowered his original asking price he liked me so much (though I should mention that I brought along my fake wedding ring which was helpful to illustrate that my fake husband was waiting for me at the Riad - in the rest of Marrakech this didn’t make much of a difference but here my taxi driver was a lot more protective and nice and significantly less creepy once I told him I was newly married.) We talked about the ship and the rest of the students, about my new young husband, and my classical Islam class –it was kind of a miracle too I think considering how all over the place my French is. I really ought to work on that more before Mauritius. So I get there and the driver pulls into the medina a little more (though this isn’t technically allowed) until the walls get too close to his car and he couldn’t drive anymore. Then he grabs a little boy (maybe like 10 years old?) and yells something to him and tells me he’ll be showing me where the riad is and that I should pay him a very small amount once I get there. I’m kind of skeptical of this kid because he keeps telling me all this stuff about how I’m beautiful and how everyone is staring at me because I am so white and blah blah blah –but remember that all of this is in French and it takes me a good 4-5 minutes to completely piece together sentences and figure out what they’re saying. Anyways I kind of dislike this kid already because it’s just a little creepy when this 10 year old suave hustler kid is buttering you up for a better tip in a straight ghetto of animal poo and mud and all kinds of people shuffling around and or staring at you. No bueno. We finally get to the Riad, which in reality was very close, but all very sketch because I had no idea where I was going and this nutty kid wouldn’t stop blabbering to me using words I really didn’t know. Once there I give him 20 dinar (like $2.30) and he keeps telling me I need to give him more, that his friend has been following us from behind to make sure we aren’t jumped and I need to pay him the same, I tell him that the 20 was 10 for him and 10 for a friend and he says that it’s not enough, so I give him 10 dinar more and this kid goes in to kiss me! Not like a cute aw haw moment on the cheek but like legitimate dirty shit’s real 10 year old pimp move. Luckily I stepped back in time for the guy who was watching over the Riad to open the door, laugh, and let me in. Awkward.

So my cell phone doesn’t work at all –the guy who’s hanging around the Riad says my mom left around 11 and it was something like 2pm then, he offers me mint tea and is extremely nice and helpful despite the language barrier. I loved him. I’d only been waiting about 20 minutes with no clue as to when Angie and my Mom would show up when they did; it was so great seeing them walk through the door and Angie all cool and world-traveler like. They figured I’d be on the 10:50 since they’d taken the same train to get to Marrakech and knew the schedules. We hung out some, had some chicken kebab and fresh-squeezed orange juice and mint tea, and then headed out again to the main centre of the medina. It was a little overwhelming seeing so many tourists again –though few SASers were around at that point, I saw a couple kids I knew but really not all that many... I tried to get Ang to haggle more and the sellers were fairly aggressive, though not as bad as Turkey, they were far more likely to just yell things at tourists walking by. Such gems as “FISH AND CHIPS”(that one just made no sense to me…I guess they thought we were just wondering Brits,) or “SPICE GIRLS!!”or they would tell us what they would pay for us in camels –weird. My personal favorite though is “Beautiful eyes, beautiful prize!”which the guy at the center of the medina selling galebayas (sp) tried to convince me to buy a baby’s pink pantset for 50 dollars. He was going on and on about how the baby’s clothes had just as much detail work as the larger adult sized ones. In the end I think we got it for around 80 diram or 9 bucks. It’s very cute and is for Angie’s littlest sister who’s to be born fairly soon I guess.

Oh and just to interject, I seriously considered buying a mezuzah at some strange jew shop in the middle of the medina for the house next year, haha.

I also ended up buying some pretty baller stuff; a pair of crazy-looking bracelettes with evil eyes and rhinestones and matching rings that’re attached for Erin and Grace, a weird knit hat for Jake and for Ben with traditional colors of Africa (you know, black, red, green, yellow,) and a bedspread with silky lime green and blue (this man loooved me. It was kind of ridiculous. At one point he grabbed the bedspread and held it up to me and him and said, “You are the perfect size for me! Once we are married we shall sleep under many such fine bedspreads! This whole shop shall be yours!”) a pale green handmade ceramic and metal worked pigeon ashtray for the house next year –it’s so cool, I swear. Also I got a wooden box with cutouts that look like the tile work in mosques, and two folksy looking paintings with the hands of Fatima on them –the artist wasn’t incredibly happy with all our back and forth haggling and when I bought them he wrote a bunch of stuff on the back; any friends out there who could translate Arabic for “I kind of hate you, you dumb tourist?”Oh! And another gorgeous brass and multi-colored glass plated lamp for the growing collection after Egypt.

I really liked Morocco, it felt like a mix between Egypt and India where I kind of actually understood what people were saying! Should I ever end up taking Arabic back at school it’d be perfect for me! The people there weren’t incredibly overtly friendly and it wasn’t an easy country by any means but it was so interesting and the people I met there were just really cool. I want to go bad for sure if I ever get the chance… When I was leaving on the train it was just one other SAS kid (so freaking many of us ended up in Marrakech it was ridiculous…) and 4 other Moroccans –they were really interesting guys, one was some famous historian everyone seemed to know, a guy who was working in France on some kind of business between them and morocco, a bunch of other men who spoke zero English and what seemed far more Arabic than French, and one relatively young guy who spoke okay English, he said he’d been in Texas for a year or two –he kept saying weird American expressions like, “Yeah! Sure as shit!”and was now in Switzerland doing something I didn’t really understand. Anyways though, we started talking about how I was a religion major; they thought it was a completely wild idea that I wasn’t religiously affiliated at all and yet was studying all religions. I kept telling them I was trying to make an educated decision and they would laugh and say something like “Only in America!”We spent a lot of time talking about Islam and eventually they asked what religion I would pick if I had to pick one and I told them Judaism –the younger guy said, “Only people say that if they come from a family of Jewish people.”Which I thought was kind of interesting, and then the quiet, sweet old guy working in France turned to me and pulled out his wallet and showed me a little old coin with a gold hand-made looking star of david in the center, he started talking really fast and the younger guy had to translate for me, “He said it is a coin from Morocco –from the 11^th century.”I started freaking out and turning it over and over and babbling about how it ought to be in a bank or in a museum, and the historian guy who I’d thought was sleeping says, “Such coins are all over morocco –some in banks and museums…Some in pockets. He keeps it for his happiness.”How cute is that? He pulled out a binder from his briefcase and showed me all these photos and notes laminated and scribbled all over with different coins from all different eras –he even showed me one he said was from some BC time where the gold had been tested to be at 99.9999% pure and the only way to date it was through the wear and the teeny tiny percentage of carbon in the coin. He said they rolled out the gold’s impurities like they would a pizza’s dough and that the gold came from the south of Niger, he showed me all these maps and charts…It was so cool.

Then I got off the train, grabbed two bags of paprika chips and two bottles of juice and headed towards the dock while it rained and I had all this stuff in my bags, I had the hardest time ever finding a taxi and once I did –my taxi driver was so confused and such a jerk and kept criticizing my French. He took me to the wrong part of the dock and then once he finally did figure it out he wanted more money for his time. What a hassle –I made it onto the dock with like 40 minutes to spare though, thank God.

So now I’m just chillin’. Watching Blood Diamond at 2am with the roomie. In four hours all the stewards will frolic throughout the halls banging on pots and pans all dressed in blue and silver (youtube semester at sea Neptune day, ish is crazy.) . Tomorrow is Neptune day and I could pee my pants I’m so excited. This is the email they sent all of us:

SUBPOENA to all POLLYWOGS,

You are hereby requested to appear before the ROYAL COURT OF THE REALM OF NEPTUNE, in the DISTRICT OF EQUATORIUS, because it has been brought to the attention of HIS HIGHNESS, NEPTUNE REX through his trusty SHELLBACKS, that the good ship M/V EXPLORER is about to cross the equator and enter those waters accompanied by passengers who have not acknowledged the sovereignty of the RULER OF THE DEEP.

THEREFORE be it known to all Slimy Pollywogs that The Royal, King NEPTUNE REX, Supreme Ruler of all citizens of the deep, will, with his Secretary and Royal Court, meet in full session on board the offending ship M.V. EXPLORER on the 9^th day of February, A.D. 2009 at 0900 on Deck 7 aft, to hear your defense.

 

Regards,

-King Neptune and His Royal Court

 

In addition: All pollywogs with hair longer than 8 inches who wish to donate their hair to a worthwhile charity, should do so BEFORE undergoing the initiation ceremony, as only clean hair is able to be donated.

 

If there are any pollywogs who have brought hair clippers on board, your services are hereby solicited by King Neptune and his Royal Barber. You may help by bringing your clippers to DECK 7 aft, tomorrow morning. 

 

 

YESSSSSSSS!

xoxo,

Jennifer