More on the Moroccan desert

What ideas did you have about Morocco before you started reading my blog? If you imagined deserts, sand, camels, and nomads and their tents, you weren't alone.

As I hope my blog has illustrated for you, though, Morocco is a geographically diverse country. I didn't see any camels until I had been here for a few months, and my recent trip to the desert was the first time I saw a landscape that I thought might be described as "stereotypically" Moroccan or North African.

The transition to a desert landscape really begins south of Midelt. The mountains are always close by, but the land slowly becomes dustier, and the vegetation becomes more sparse and scrubby.

There was an unexpected number of hotels along our route from Midelt to Merzouga. Some of them were shockingly (and, we all agreed, too optimistically) grand. As we drove by these hotels, we saw that the vast majority had virtually empty parking lots.

We had originally made reservations at such a hotel (although not nearly as new as the one pictured to the left) in Erfoud. It was such a depressingly outdated and empty place, though, that we quickly ditched it for a smaller and grubbier – yet less deserted and more comfortable  – hotel.

The way people look changes, too, as one approaches the desert. Skin gets darker, and by the time we got to Erfoud, we hardly saw the faces of any women, most of whom were covered from head to toe with abaya-like black garments, some with brightly colored embroidered patterns on them. The Rough Guide to Morocco says that Erfoud gives one "a first, powerful sense of proximity to the desert, with frequent sandblasts ripping through the streets." We arrived in this normally dusty town during a time of unusually strong winds, and the coating of grit that quickly accumulated on my body, along with a  constant sense of impending danger to my eyes, made me immediately understand the benefit of full body coverage.

In a nutshell...

...a tiny, oversimplified nutshell.

Things I forgot to say in my previous post

I was in such a rush last night to get pictures of our trip to the Cascades d'Ouzoud up on my blog that only later did I realize I hadn't written about half of the things I had intended to. So here are some of those things, in no particular order:


- Even in places in Morocco where the landscape looks familiar (T and I have, on multiple occasions, been reminded of Wyoming and Montana), there are frequent reminders that I am in a foreign country. No matter how remote a road seems to be, there will always be pedestrians, hitchhikers, and people on donkeys traveling along that road. I often wonder where they're coming from and where they're going.

In remote locations, one is also likely to encounter people trying to sell things. When we got onto the mountain roads not far from Ouzoud, we started seeing people along the road holding up little bundles of fresh herbs and making a variety of mysterious gestures which we assume meant something like, "Please buy these herbs! I really need money. Don't you feel sorry for me?" And we did; we felt sorry for them.

Many of these people – many more than I would have guessed – were children, often very, very young children. As we drove, we discussed the pros and cons of stopping to buy some of the herb. (I think it was some kind of mountain thyme, but I'm not sure.) I imagine they couldn't have been selling the little bundles for more than one or two dirhams each, and I wonder what could possibly have been the maximum amount of money someone might bring home at the end of a long day of standing by the roadside. Seeing these people was a reminder both of how difficult the job situation is here (it's unimaginably worse than in the U.S., I guarantee) and of how hard people try to come up with ways of having even a tiny income.


- I should have taken the opportunity yesterday to spend a little more time explaining exactly what a riad is. Basically, a riad is a large, multilevel house with a central area that is open to the sky. Most of the riads I have stayed at (many have been converted into somewhat upscale bed and breakfasts) have had some form of covering on the rooftop terrace to provide some protection from the elements to the central patio/garden, but this is not always the case.

In the United States, indoor and outdoor spaces are usually carefully separated from each other; "indoor" and "outdoor" are mutually exclusive categories. This is not true in Morocco, and riads illustrate well the lack of a clear distinction between the two. As I mentioned in my previous post, the riad we stayed at has a full-sized orange tree growing in the middle of it. Above the orange tree, at the level of the rooftop terrace (another characteristic of a riad), a clear plastic tarp has been stretched to provide some protection from the rain (although there are a few inches on all sides that are not protected by the tarp, which means that one can get rained on while standing in certain places on the ground floor). At the center of the tarp is a large plastic tube that goes down to the base of the orange tree, so that when it rains the water follows the tube and waters the orange tree!

This lack of separation between indoor and outdoor means that, when the weather is nice, a riad is a lovely place for hanging out and relaxing. But when the weather is cold, the riad is also cold; many owners go to great lengths (and, I'm sure, expenses) to try to bring their riads up to Western standards of comfort regarding winter temperatures.

On things being guarded

One of the things that struck me soon after moving to Morocco was the fact that there are guards everywhere. The University is guarded at all times by at least one security officer who stands attentively outside the large gate through which one must pass to enter the University. (Sometimes the gate is halfway closed, requiring even closer scrutiny from the security guard. I clearly remember it being closed for a couple of days after the bombing in Marrakesh last spring.) How they know who is "authorized" to enter campus and who is not remains a mystery to me, but I have been stopped a couple of times and asked to give my name and reason for being on campus ("Jennifer Sheridan, my husband is faculty.") We have joked with friends about how the security officers seem to be satisfied if we simply tell them our names, as if they either have memorized a list of authorized names, or they really just want to know if we know our names.

Now the University library is guarded, too, with security officers who search the bags and purses of all individuals entering--to make sure they aren't sneaking in contraband water bottles or snacks.

We have driven on the tollway at times when, the best we could figure out, the King was about to pass through. There were guards stationed every few hundred meters along the road, just standing there, waiting for the King's motorcade to go by.

How would you like it if this little box were your workplace?

The perimeters of cities are guarded. The building downtown in which we live has a guard. The bank has a guard (who also serves as a chaos-preventer). The new Morocco Mall in Casablanca is heavily guarded. Grocery stores have guards.The King's palace in Ifrane is, of course, guarded.

And, most interesting to me, many private homes are guarded. Our building is at the end of a quiet street lined with large, expensive, and mostly empty homes. Outside of several of them are these little huts, really just big enough for one or two men to stand in. While the houses sit empty, guards huddle outside in the huts at all hours, in all weather, chatting with each other, listening to music, and drinking mint tea. This job is one of the most difficult for me to understand. First of all, why can't they just hang out inside the houses? (As if I don't know the answer.) And what are they guarding the homes from?

My admittedly uneducated impression is that many of the guards in Morocco serve the purpose of keeping the poor separated from the rich. Some of the guarding, such as lining the streets when the King passes through, seems largely for show. (What are they guarding the roads from? Is there a danger of some guy with a knife jumping out of the bushes and attacking the King's motorcade?) The guards are certainly not concerned about me; by definition, because of my skin color, I am not a threat. (It's strange to be subjected to less scrutiny because I am a foreigner, since in my own country, foreigners tend to be the subject of more scrutiny.)

Ultimately, I feel very safe in Morocco, but not because of all the guarding. It's something I'm still not used to, and it still makes me feel uncomfortable at times. But, as T has just pointed out to me, "It's a job." So maybe I need to let go of the class separation I sense behind it and just accept it.

On living in a negotiation culture

About three weeks ago, our friends/neighbors--we'll call them "Ryan" and "Tara"--decided they would get a pet cat. At the time, pets were not, in the strictest sense, allowed in the downtown apartments. But Ryan and Tara opted for the "better to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission now" philosophy. Ryan emailed the head of housing to say that they were getting a cat, they would take full responsibility for her and for cleaning of the apartment, etc.

Yesterday, those of us living in the downtown apartments received the following email. Before you read it, keep in mind these points: 1) Up until the day this email was sent out, the University policy was that no pets were allowed in downtown apartments, and 2) Ryan and Tara live in one of only four two bedroom apartments in the downtown building.

Residents living in Downtown Residence can keep cats as companion animals; yet they need to abide by AUI housing rules and regulations regarding this issue:
- Residents who want to have indoor cats need to be residing in a two bed room apartment. They are allowed to have 2 cats in maximum. No other pets are allowed in the Residence,
-Cats should be vaccinated in order to provide the safest protection for the pet and for the environment. The residents should provide a proof of medical history of vaccinations of the pet,
-A cat should not leave the apartment, please ensure that the cat is secured within the apartment,
-A cat should wear a collar, this will facilitate the identification of her owner in case of loss or accident.

Best Regards

Supervisor of Downtown Residence 

These are reasonable rules and regulations, but when I read this email, I laughed; I had a feeling that something quite Moroccan had happened. I don't want to overemphasize cultural differences, but in general, culturally speaking, we Americans expect and value equal treatment and equal application of policies, rules, and regulations. Consideration of individual circumstances may be seen as favoritism and as unfair. Moroccan culture, on the other hand, is a negotiation culture. There is more of a sense that each individual case should be considered separately, in light of individual circumstance, personal connections, and the quality of the argument made on one's behalf (by one's self or by a representative). 

The above downtown residence pet policy was clearly created retroactively just for Ryan and Tara, and I found it to be a clever and delightful (and face-saving) solution to the (potential) problem Ryan and Tara created by getting a cat without permission.

On the lack of privacy (or "JABS goes off on a bit of a rant")

Last night, I was up until almost three because I had to "attend" one of my classes from 12:15 to 2:15 AM Greenwich Mean Time. Because I need a very minimum of seven hours of sleep per night, I got up late this morning (and still didn't get my sleep minimum). When I came out of the bathroom after my shower, I heard female voices coming from downstairs in my apartment.

If this had happened to me in my house in Wyoming, I would have been utterly confused and rather frightened, because there would never be any reason for someone to all of a sudden be inside my locked house without my permission.

Here, however, this seems to be a weekly occurrence (and some weeks it happens more often than once). There are lots of people with access to our apartment – the building staff, the cleaning ladies, and the maintenance men, at the least. And there seems to be an infinite number of reasons for them to come into our apartment.

Closing day

Well, it's over. Yesterday was closing day; we successfully sold our house. The cat, Sierra, is safely deposited with her new family. The remaining yard equipment has been passed on to the neighbors.

T and I haven't seen the house in a year and didn't sign the closing paperwork, so it doesn't feel entirely real to us. That has made it easier to avoid waxing nostalgic, but I'm not sure whether that avoidance is emotionally healthy.

Closing day on the house is the official closing day for a particular dream and a particular path which our life has turned away from. It may be years before my memory of the house settles into simple fondness. Right now, I feel relief, but also a painful longing, a slight itching of regret, vague apprehension, and a disconcerting feeling of being entirely untethered.

I look forward to the perspective that time and distance from the experience will give me, the perspective that I think Robert Frost writes about in "The Road Not Taken." It's not that I've clearly taken the better path, but I do look forward to the day when I can tell myself that I did.

Buy this house

Two or three weeks ago, our property manager contacted us to let us know that our renters would be moving out. Our renters? I thought. We still own that house?

 Indeed, we do. Being halfway across the world from the house that we still own in Powell sometimes makes it easy not to think about it. But the e-mail from our property manager was a reminder of something big that still ties us to the United States in a very tangible way.

And what kind of surprised me is my ambivalence toward the whole thing. Of course, I want to sell the house. It is a fairly significant financial drain on us, even with renters. If the house is left empty without renters, it will quickly cause serious problems for us. Our lives would be much easier if someone would buy the house.

But there is still a completely irrational part of me that doesn't want to let go. This is the first house that I have owned (and by "I have owned" I mean the bank owns it and allowed us to paint the walls whatever colors we wanted). It is probably the only house I will ever own. T and I worked hard to make that house our home in the three years that we lived there, and, like many homeowners, we had grand plans for the house's future. I had to let go of all of that when I moved out of the house.

I can't go back to it. This is not only for practical reasons, like those related to employment, but for emotional and psychological reasons. Most of the belongings that I associate with that house are no longer my belongings– in fact, for all I know, some of you who read my blog may be the new owners of some of my former belongings. The house that I sometimes think I want to go back to can no longer exist for me.

Somehow, the fact that it is spring also seems to be playing a role in my complex feelings. Maybe this is partly because it has always been in the spring that T and I made plans for the future. Whether it was trying to decide where to go for graduate school, whether to move to Powell, what to plant in the garden, or whether to move to Morocco– all of these decisions were made in the spring. And spring is when I really start to love my house. The grass starts turning green, the lilac bushes get big buds on them, the red-winged blackbirds chat with each other in the backyard, the robins hop merrily in my rock garden. Notice how I can't stop calling it "my" house? And I can't stop wondering… Are the tulips coming up yet? Is the cat coming out from hiding, suddenly friendlier as she always seems to get in the spring? Where will the robins build their nests this year? If I planted a garden, would that white tailed deer return and eat everything in it?

I suppose I'm just going through a normal stage of culture shock, still. Or maybe just a normal stage of…being human. But I will be totally okay when it's time to move on from this stage. And I think I will be okay when it's time to sell my house.

On bugs

I think that a lot of Americans (myself included) convince ourselves that we can avoid bugs. Many people go to great lengths (mostly chemical) to keep spiders, flies, and every other crawly little thing out of their homes. Some people, and some city governments, apply chemicals to reduce bug populations out-of-doors.

We also convince ourselves that we can avoid bugs inside our bodies; in other words, we think we can avoid eating them. In fact, we have so strongly convinced ourselves of this that we find it worth remarking upon if, on a walk or bike ride, a bug enters our mouths. We might exclaim, surprised, "I swallowed a bug!"

Well, here in Morocco, I am having to make peace with bugs. I am under no such delusion that I do not eat bugs. In the U.S., if I bought food with bugs in it, I returned it. Here, I have picked through a whole bag of rice to make sure I wasn't boiling (very many) bugs with my rice. I have spent an hour picking through white beans. Only once did I throw out something because it was bug infested; I had purchased a kilo of dried chickpeas, and every single chickpea had a little bug in it.

I had to zoom way in to get a picture of this little guy.

In my home, too, I am working on making peace with the bugs. I have no problem with the teeny tiny spiderlike bugs that, for some reason my human brain cannot comprehend, love living in our shower. I usually don't even bother anymore trying to kill silverfish, and those guys creep me out more than earwigs do.

I would rather they found some other apartment to live in, but I am also, for the most part, okay with the colony of ants that check out our kitchen daily to see if we have left any molecules of sweet foods for them. I would much rather put up with the ants than with the alternative of someone coming in and spraying copious amounts of a chemical in my apartment, which is what I'm 100% sure would happen if I complain too much about the ants.

It took me a long time to figure out that these were living things.

A couple of months ago, when T brought home a house plant that was completely infested with mealy bugs, I'll admit I was irritated. They are very disturbing. But rather than immediately banishing the houseplant to the outdoors, as I probably would have done in the U.S., I spent hours that day picking off the bugs and their millions of eggs. And eventually I became okay with the fact that I had probably missed some.

Even cockroaches don't bother me as much as they used to (this relates to the decrease in my standard of cleanliness which I think is a coping mechanism). After a nice vegan meal in Essaouira with our friends Brian and Sara, T instructed Brian to shake a cockroach off of his hat. As I watched a second cockroach climbing on the wall behind Brian, I noted with surprise that I didn't really feel much of anything. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't disgusted. I wasn't regretful. I thought, It's a food establishment. Just as it attracts cats and dogs, it attracts other food loving creatures, including cockroaches.

My advice to everyone: try to make peace with the bugs. Your life will be easier, and you will be happier. The bugs will be, too.

Toilets and tofu

Part I: Toilets
 
Just as part of the "fun" of owning a home is fixing things yourself when they break, part of the "fun" of being a renter is relying on other people to fix broken things. And when you throw in language barriers and different cultural standards related to maintenance and repair, the situation can be even more interesting.

Our toilet with its new drainage pipe

When T and I got back from our vacation, one of the things that greeted us was a small pool of water under the drainage pipe of our upstairs toilet. It has always been clear that this toilet had problems in the past. The pipe from the toilet appeared to be made almost entirely of cracked caulking and was sticking out of a fairly substantial and disastrous-looking hole in the wall.

When the plumber saw the leak, he seemed to suspect the caulking-covered pipe sticking out of the wall. So what did he do? He covered the whole thing with a fresh, thick layer of caulking. Pipe-frosting. I cleaned up after him, put the bathroom back together, and watched for leakage...

Which, of course, there was. The leak wasn't coming from the drainage pipe; it was coming from something in the wall behind the toilet. Remember, this wall has always had a substantial hole knocked out of it, allowing for back-and-forth passage of all kinds of things, including water, between the wall and our bathroom.

So it was back to the apartment office to tell them the leak remained. I took everything out of the bathroom again.

How would you fix this problem? Cover the entire hole with caulking, of course, which is what the plumber took several hours the next day to do. I don't know much about caulking, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't designed for that.

The leak got worse. I took everything out of the bathroom again.

Yesterday, day three, the plumber returned and undid all of his beautiful caulk-patching by pulling out the toilet. He was in there making loud, violent-sounding banging sounds all afternoon. As he was leaving, I asked him "mezyan?" (That means "good"). He responded, "mezyan" and said something else in Darija, and I took it all to mean he was finished.

I cleaned up the bathroom, which took quite a bit of time and even more bleach.

And this morning, when I got up, I found water on the floor. This time, it is coming out of the little metal knobby-thing that you can see in the picture to the right.

I took everything out of the bathroom again.

(Of course, when I told a member of the housing staff about this, he said the plumber told him yesterday that he wasn't done with the work. Well, it's not like anybody needs to tell me that. I just live here.)

Fourth time's a charm?

Part II: Tofu

On a much happier note, I now have – thanks to my husband and some very attentive family members –a year's supply of vegetarian jerky. Go protein!

Welcome to apartment 10!

Wait, didn't I post an entry very similar to this one, like, four months ago? Why yes, I did. But since I so kindly welcomed you to that apartment, I thought I had better welcome you to this one.

Our new apartment is inside what many people in town call "the bank," as (apparently) the property used to belong to Banque Populaire. It is now called the "Al Akhawayn downtown residences." Most of the building  contains small apartments (they're basically studio apartments), but on the ground floor there are four duplex apartments, and we now live in one of them.

Packing again

Didn't I just do this?

I guess it was quite a bit different last time. Then, I was packing all of my things either to go into long-term storage or for international travel. This time, I am "packing" my things to move them one or two kilometers away. Then, it was very difficult for me to say goodbye to the place I was leaving. This time, I am completely indifferent to the apartment that I am moving out of. Then, I knew I was coming to Ifrane, Morocco, but I didn't know exactly what my apartment would be like. This time, I have visited the apartment I am moving into (it's in downtown Ifrane).

This time should be easier. Right?

The U

Today I was supposed to do laundry. I have been putting it off for a few reasons. First, the hours of the two laundry facilities on campus have changed more than once even in the 10 days we've been here, so it hasn't been clear to me when I could do laundry. Second, the facility is, oh, I don't know, maybe a quarter of a mile away. I have no problem walking that far, but I've been procrastinating walking that far with a giant bag of laundry (especially since I've been paranoid that I'd get there and the facility would be closed because the hours keep changing). Finally, I know that some small thing will go wrong--I won't know how to use the machines, or I'll ruin one of T's work shirts. Something. I'm not being a pessimist here, and I'm okay with something going wrong, but I've still wanted to put it off.

So instead of doing laundry, I wandered around campus. The original purpose of my wanderings was to try to find a 4 kilometer nature trail that supposedly goes around campus. That purpose was not fulfilled. But I did get some pictures of campus. I focused on buildings that I haven't seen pictures of online, like the auditorium, which I think is a very interesting mix of Moroccan and European architecture:

People who actually know anything about architecture are invited to leave intelligent-sounding comments describing the architecture of this building.

All of the buildings on campus look like this one, with the red tile roofs and yellow walls. Actually, almost all buildings in Ifrane have a similar look. This is not typical Moroccan architecture.

Because all buildings on campus look the same, differentiated only by a small sign somewhere on the building indicating its number, it is very easy to get lost on campus.



Appearances are clearly important on this campus, so I was pleased to see a little "funkiness" in the form of artwork on a few of the buildings.

T is in building 10, on the second floor. He was busy working hard in his office while I wandered aimlessly around campus.

All of the computers on campus have French keyboards, which are just similar enough to QWERTY as to be rather confusing. The French keyboards can be reset as QWERTY keyboards, though. As long as T can type without looking at the keys, I guess he's okay.

 I thought I'd also post some pictures of the views from our apartment windows, to give you a better sense of the scenery.

View of student and faculty residence halls from our guest bedroom window.

View of another residence hall (which pretty much looks exactly like our building) from one of our living room windows. In the distance, we can see the auditorium.

This is the rest of the view from our living room window. In the distance is Michliffen Hotel, Ifrane's newest luxury hotel, which allegedly costs $7000 Moroccan dirhams a night--that's over $800 U.S.

School starts tomorrow for both T and me--he'll be a teacher, and I'll be a student. Tomorrow, real daily life in Ifrane will begin for us. This evening, as I hear the crows (which sound more like musical squeak toys than cawing American crows) calling to each other on the building rooftops, as the sun slowly moves toward the horizon, infuriatingly indifferent to the hungry and thirsty Muslim mouths waiting for its disappearance, I feel a strong sense of waiting, of suspension. Tomorrow I will begin to know what it will really be like for us to live here, when we will have to balance work (or school), and shopping, and laundry, and cooking, and all the daily things we had to do in the U.S., but that were done differently. Tomorrow!

Welcome to apartment 304!

The first thing to keep in mind is that, when you are going to visit someone in an apartment on the third floor, you must go to the fourth floor, because the order goes ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor.

When you come in, you can leave your shoes in the hallway.

Then, if you're tired, you can go straight into the yoga room (and maybe office if we figure out how to get wireless Internet). This will be your room while you're here.

Gotta love that institutional furniture!

Right next door is our bedroom.

Note that here, a "double bed" is just two twin beds pushed together.

 Across the hallway is the bathroom. Guessing how long you'll have water pressure is a fun game to play while taking a shower.

Can you guess how to flush the toilet?

I think you have already been introduced to the lovely kitchen.

Keep going down the hall, and you'll be in the office/dining room/living room.

The desk has to go here for now because this is where our ethernet connection is. I wonder if we can find a router in Fes?

We can borrow the TV for a month for free, but after that it costs 100 dirhams a month. There are 3 or 4 stations that have English programming. Last night we watched the last half of Queen of the Damned with Arabic subtitles. Good stuff!

We did finally finish unpacking, but as you can see, we weren't able to add much character to the apartment. We have to decide if we want to settle in here or request an apartment in the off-campus housing once one becomes available.

My next post might be about being a vegetarian in Morocco. Uggh!