4/26/10 Ice Cream in Morocco

You'd think a desert country would be filled with cold treats.

You'd be wrong.

If you want American-style ice cream, you're limited to the biggest cities. I've been to a Haagen-Daaz in Marrakesh, where I was so bedazzled by the *glass* *dish* and *spoon* and *napkin* and other amenities that I actually snapped a picture:

In the Jm3 al-Fnaa in Marrakesh, you can get ice cream cones that slide down deliciously, but which always make me feel thirsty. (Maybe extra rock salt was used to make the ice cream?) In Essaouira, you can find gelato by the harbor. In Rabat, a gelaterie is located across from the train station. (You can also get a cone or shake at McDonald's, found in every major city, but would you really want to? They taste just as plastic here as in America.)

There are also pseudo-ice cream dispensers in most of the moderate-sized cities, where for 1DH you can get a cone with a swirl of cold squishy stuff that *looks* like ice cream but tastes like dirty water. (COLD dirty water, though, so I've gotten it more than once, on blisteringly hot days.)

And then there are the ice cream bars. Remember ice cream sandwiches, and chocolate-coated ice cream on a popsicle stick (what are those things called again?), and push pops, and nutter butter cones? They all have analogues here in Morocco.

My personal favorite is the Magnum. Usually available (where you can find it!) in Double Chocolate or Double Caramel, this is the brass ring of Moroccan ice cream options. I've spent many an hour wandering a strange city, questing for a Double Caramel Magnum. Mmmmm. Imagine the usual chunk of ice-cream-on-a-stick, dipped in caramel, dipped in a hard-shell chocolate coating, then dipped *again* in caramel, and again shelled in chocolate. Mmmmmmmm.

When Magnums cannot be found (sadness!), I'll settle for a MaxiBon. This half-ice cream bar, half-ice cream sandwich combines my two favorite cold treats into one delicious snack. Tip: eat the bar half first, because it's easier to hold the sandwich half. Especially if it's *really* hot, and the whole thing will melt in something less than five minutes.

Oh, and be prepared to haggle. Smart hanut owners know that Magnums and MaxiBons make the world go 'round, and they charge accordingly. Don't be surprised if they ask for 20dh apiece. Never pay more than 18dh, and do your best to get the price down to 15dh. (I know the difference is less than 50 American cents, but it's the principle of the thing.)

Bon Appetit!

3/24/10 QotD: "I was the sixth person! Woo-hoo!"

The subtitle of this blog post should be: The Value of Lowered Expectations

As I’ve mentioned before, traveling in Morocco often means riding in grands taxis, 4-passenger wide-body Mercedes sedans that here seat 6 passengers. (Two ride shotgun, four squish in across the backseat. Duh.) The taxi won’t leave until all six “seats” (using the term generously) have been paid for.

This means that if you’re the first person who wants to go to, say, City Z from City Q, then you either get to pay for all 6 seats or wait for five other people to show up who also want to go to Z from Q. Or some combination thereof. The wait can be anywhere from five minutes to five hours, although as a rule of thumb, you should expect to wait about 5 minutes for each missing person.

When the stars align in your favor, you show up at the taxi stand and discover that five other people have already been waiting to get from Q to Z, and you get to hop right in and leave immediately. Hence the QotD: “I was the sixth person! Woo-hoo!” My buddy was celebrating a wait-less travel experience.

It made me reflect for a moment: in the US, land of car ownership and shuttle flights, we’re not really accustomed to waiting for travel. Transportation is on tap, like hot water and mochaccinos and so many other things that just aren’t readily available here in Morocco. We PCVs have become so accustomed to this waiting state of being that when we do get the instant travel we’d simply expect in the US, it becomes grounds for rejoicing.

Maybe there’s something to be said for lowered expectations.

2/08/10 On Marrakesh

Here's a photo of Marrakesh that I snapped last spring.

Note the contrast between the palm trees and the snowy mountains. (I actually shot pictures of cacti in front of the snowy mountains, but they were out the window of a moving bus, so came out hopelessly blurred.)

But note, too, the grassy foreground, behind the brick and iron barricade.

This is one of Marrakesh's fancier hotels. (Not this one, but sadly, Marrakesh has several.) Where rich tourists spend several thousand dirhams per night (ie, several hundred Euros) to be pampered and coddled and to feel at home.

But you're not at home, silly tourists. You're in Morocco. A desert country, where the vast majority of the precipitation falls as snow in the Atlas mountains or else in disastrous, flash-flood inducing fall downpours. Morocco needs all the water it gets. In order to maintain these lovely grassy fields, sprinklers run for hours each morning. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of water are wasted every day, so tourists can forget that they're visiting a desert land, and imagine that they're sipping their morning coffee in their own backyards.

This waste is simply one of the dozens of reasons I don't like going to Marrakesh - the overcharging, sexual harassment, touristy schtick, and dishonest cab drivers are on the list, too - but it's one of the most readily visible.

It's beautiful, no question.

But at what cost?

2/09/10 On Essaouira

One of my favorite Moroccan cities - a favorite with lots of PCVs - is Essaouira.

Essa (in the universal Peace Corps shorthand) sits just two hours away from the overpriced, overtouristed, and usually overheated city of Marrakesh, so therefore often serves as an escape valve for unhappy visitors to that overhyped city.

Essa doesn't seem to offer much, at first glance. It's just a quiet beachfront city.

But that's the point.

Essaouira provides a calm, quiet, relaxing place to hang out, shop for souvenirs, walk on the beach, and generally just chill. The souvenir shopping is some of the best in Morocco, with some of the least aggressive shopkeepers I've found. (In fairness, though, they're still more aggressive than most Americans will be used to, but if you grade on the Moroccan curve, they're positively laid-back.) You can stroll through the shops, wander in and out of cafes, meander along the beach... Essa feels amazingly peaceful, especially in contrast to the energy of most of Morocco's big cities.

(Caveat: I visited in the off-season. Essa may turn into a touristy mess in the summers...I wouldn't know. But it was fabulous in March.)

Here's a typical Essa day:

Wake up in the apartment you've rented for the weekend. Though Essa has hotels, most PCVs prefer to rent apartments in the medina; they're available by the day, and have kitchens and living rooms and other amenities.

Go out to a cafe for breakfast and a pastry:

This is a custard-filled, fruit-topped, puff-pastry tart. And it cost 4 dirhams. In France, you can get the same thing for 4 Euros - ten times the price. Did I mention that Essa is cheap?

After you've munched and people-watched in the cafe, wander down to the shops. Nearly everything handcrafted in Morocco is available here: leather goods (especially bags, but also shoes and coats), jewelry (notably silver, which southern Morocco is famous for, but also handcarved wooden bracelets), woodcrafts of every variety (tables, chess sets, puzzle boxes, desk organizers, kitchen utensils, jewelry, etc), and most famously scarves.

Here's my friend modeling an Essaouira scarf I'd purchased moments before. The vibrant colors (this is actually a muted one, since that's my taste) and high-quality fabrics are typical of Essa scarves.

Isn't my friend beautiful? And so's the scarf, of course. :)

Once you've satisfied your inner shopaholic, it's time to hit the beach.

Here, my buddies and I are playing beach frisbee underneath a full moon. (The frisbee is barely visible, but it's there - look for the red streak that Rachid is reaching for.)

Wait a little longer, and you get to see something amazing:

It's strange for Americans to think about, but yes, here in Morocco, you get to watch the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean. (Think about it for a sec.)

Note the ruins silhouetted on the right - those are remnants of Essa's defensive fortress.

And after a long day of shopping, beachcombing, and eating, it's time for some more quality chillaxing with the buds:

Essaouira doesn't get much mention in the guidebooks, other than in reference to their annual music festival in June, but if you're looking for a beautiful, relaxing, low-key but high-quality time, it's absolutely worth a visit.

9/2/09 Leaving Morocco on RyanAir

They blinked at me. They glanced at each other. With wide eyes and the reassuring tones you’d use on a crazy person, they explained slowly, “It’s not time for Sevilla yet.”

“This line is for Belgium passengers.”

Their voices overlapped as they competed to talk the psycho (me) off the ledge.

“Sevilla will check in over there.” “Later.” “You’ll need to wait.”

They acted like I’d tried to check in for my flight a month in advance, not two hours. Two hours! Exactly the window recommended and often required for international travel leaving from the US.

I took another look at the monitors. The listed flight, the flight that folks were allowed to check in for, was scheduled to depart in less than half an hour. Check-in had officially closed 20 minutes ago. I looked at the boards hanging over RyanAir’s other lines. They were for flights leaving 30 minutes after this one. There were no lines for anyone hoping to check in more than an hour before scheduled takeoff.

I nodded, picked up my Leaning Tower of Possessions, and headed in the indicated direction. Maybe 15 people lingered, loitered, chatted, and generally waited in a line-like cluster that looked no more nor less like a line than anything else I’d seen. Queuing, I have concluded, is an acquired skill that many Moroccans have yet to acquire.

I dropped my stuff and slumped against a column. I’d carried two huge backpacks across half of Morocco yesterday and half of Fes today; I wasn't picking them up again until I had a firm destination.

I pulled out my journal:

So here I sit, waiting. I awakened early this morning, visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. (Dude, I’m flying to the land of sushi and guacamole and ice cream. If that’s not Christmas morning, what is?) I’d set my alarm for 6:15, but popped up at 5:45, and decided to roll with it. Why 6:15? Back calculations: 9:40 flight to Sevilla means 7:40 check-in. Bus to the airport takes half an hour and leaves on the hour from the train station, so I have to be at the train station at 7:00. The train is ten minutes across town by petit taxi, but there aren’t many taxis around at that hour, so I should be out by 6:30. No morning shower means speedy morning routine, hence the 6:15 wakeup call. My entire morning was planned around the expectation that checking in two hours before your flight is, you know, a *good*idea*. Turns out that the good folks at RyanAir think it's a specimen of insanity. Sigh.

My morning had gone as planned. Having the extra half hour meant that I got to repack carefully and take my time, but still got out onto the street by 6:15. No taxis at the Bab Bou Jeloud, so I walked out to the main street, about two blocks away, and found one.


“SbaH lxir. MaHta l-tren, 3afak?” Good morning. Train station, please?
“You speak Arabic?”
“No, I don’t know Arabic. I know Tamazight, and a few words of Arabic.”
“Are you fasting?”
“Yes, I’m fasting.”
“Do you pray?”
“Yes, I pray.”
“Are you Muslim?”
“No, I’m Christian.”
“Then you don’t really pray.”
“I do pray, but I don’t pray like you. I pray like my parents.”
Etc.

Just another morning in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer…except that this particular morning, I’m headin’ to America! (OK, yes, heading to Sevilla, Spain. But only as a stopover en route to America.)

8/31/09 The Tick-Tock

According to West Wing, the minute-by-minute accounting of the President’s day is routinely distributed to the White House Press Corps, and is known as the Tick-Tock.

Yesterday was quite a day. I won’t give you all 1440 minutes of the day, but here are some highlights, compliments of my memory and the journal I kept close to hand all day. [Update: This got way longer than I'd intended. I'll bold the most interesting bits, for ease of s

5:45 Pop up abruptly. Check time, realize I have 30 minutes till my alarm goes off. Decide to stay up.
6:10 Exit hotel.
6:15 Find petit taxi.
6:16 Petit taxi picks up Korean tourist Ho, who’s also on his way to the train station, to go to the airport, to ride the same flight to Seville. Small world.
6:24 Arrive at train station. Wait (with Ho) for bus to airport, which leaves on the hour…and rumor has it, on the half hour, too.
6:25 Grande taxi driver offers to drive me to airport…for 10x the price of the bus fare.
6:35 Ditto.
6:45 Ditto.
6:50 Bus 16 to the airport arrives!
6:58 Bus 16 departs train station. Good thing I didn’t cut it to-the-minute close!
7:24 Arrive at airport, x-ray bags, walk through metal detector, queue up for RyanAir bag drop*.
7:41 Get to front of line, and am told that I can’t “check in”* yet. Told to wait.
8:00 Check-in for my 9:40 flight opens up.
8:05 Drop off bag, boarding pass gets stamped.
8:06 Queue up for customs.
8:10 Get to front of line, am told I need to fill out “Immigration Card”.
8:11 Fill out Immigration Card.
8:18 Return to customs lady, who waves me through to the line for the passport people.
8:25 Passport people won’t allow me through to the gate area – told to wait.
8:27 Eat breakfast of bread, cheese, and juice.
8:45 Gate area opens for passengers on my flight.
8:51 Passport guy stares at my passport like he thinks he sees a watermark pointing towards buried treasure. Eventually asks if I’m a resident of Morocco. I say I am, and hand over my carte de sejour receipt. After much confusion, he stamps me through. I have now legally departed Morocco.
9:01 Walk through metal detector, x-ray carry-on bags (shrug off déjà vu). Security officer grabs my bulky cargo-pants-pocket and barks, “Do you have a cell phone in here??” I actually had it on the other leg, but after being grabbed at by a strange man, have no urge to confess this. Walk on through.
9:03 Boarding pass (aka crumpled printout) examined for the last time; gate check officials tear off the bottom half and wave me to the tarmac.
9:04 Walk across the tarmac. Reflect that walking up to a giant airplane feels waaaay more satisfying than going through those weird extendable tunnels universally used in American airports. (They have a name I’ve forgotten…jetway?)
9:05 Climb onto plane and survey sea of yellow-and-blue seats. RyanAir has open seating, like Southwest Airlines, so it’s first-come-first-get-the-good-seats.
9:06 Stretch out in the emergency exit row. My seat doesn’t recline, but I have acres of legroom.
9:38 Plane rolls off towards the runway. I turn off my phone and therefore have no more timestamps.
9:45ish I leave Moroccan soil.
9:50ish I gape at the Mediterranean Sea. For a while.
10:25ish I arrive on Spanish soil. Bienvenidos à España, Kauthar!
[Two hours magically vanish, thanks to the miracle of time-zone-change. Morocco hasn’t been on Daylight Savings Time since Ramadan began, but Spain still is, so that’s one hour, plus Spain is one timezone west of Greenwich.]
12:55 Make it through customs. The EU-citizen line flies, but the non-EU-citizen line moves at about 1/10th the speed. It’s also only about 1/20th as long, though, so I still make it through before most passengers from my flight.
1:05 Retrieve my backpack.
1:10 Start to board bus to downtown. See sign saying the fare is 2.30 €, and realize that I have no Euros. Return to airport.
1:20 Find the one lonely ATM in the Seville airport. Which rejects the ATM card from my Peace Corps bank account. I realize I have no idea what the PIN number is for the American bank account that I opened only a few days before leaving the US. Stomach tenses.
1:25 Ask at Information, and learn that there are no official money-changers in the Seville airport, but one of the airlines will do it unofficially.
1:30 Learn that that airline has no desire for Moroccan dirhams. Stomach twists. Abruptly remember the $20 bill I’d found while packing and tucked into a wallet on a whim. Give gratitude for the “whim” that’s saving my tuchus.
1:35 Am sad to discover that US$20 is only worth €13.20. I need to pay my hostel €17 to stay the night, so … mushkil.
1:40 Wait for next bus to downtown. Spot lots of folks from my flight – figures that if they’re taking a budget airline like RyanAir, they’re taking the bus instead of a taxi to town.
2:00 Bus arrives. Climb onboard. Only about half of those waiting get on; I hope another bus will come soon, for everyone else.
2:25 Get to downtown Seville. Note for other people taking the Seville Airport Bus: the final stop is officially the Prado San Sebastian, but when you get there, you won’t see anything telling you it’s the Prado San Sebastian. On the side of the bus stop you’re pulled up to, you’ll see Av. El Cid in big letters. I asked folks on the bus, who mostly shrugged. One guy told me – in Spanish – that it was the ultimo stop, which I’m pretty sure means the last one. Since the Prado San Sebastian is the airport bus’s last stop, I went ahead and climbed off. There’s also a city map stuck to every Seville bus stop, just like in DC, so I was able to study it for a minute, reassure myself I was in the right place, lhumdullah, and then start walking the mile or so to my hostel.
2:30 Pass time-and-temperature sign telling me it’s 41°C. Plus, it’s humid here.
2:35 Pass internet café. I stop in with the €11 left in my pocket, and start digging through emails to find the PIN number that I know Mom emailed me a year and a half ago.
2:45 Give up and Skype-call Mom, who comes to the rescue.
3:00 Pull €100 out of my American bank account. Heave giant sign of relief.
3:33 Check in at Friends Backpackers Hostel in Seville. The location is amazing – just steps from the breathtaking Cathedral of Seville – but the hostel’s services are pretty rudimentary.
3:40 Stash my stuff in the in-room locker, change my Moroccan-modest-long-sleeved-shirt for a tank top, and hit the streets of Seville.
3:46 Ogle Cathedral…take lots of pictures.
3:59 Buy ham sandwich (pork! I can eat pork here!) and banana smoothie (not nearly as good as the ones I get for 6Dh in SouqTown).
4:15 No internet café in sight, so I stop into a “WorkStation” and email Mom & Dad that yes, I found an ATM, yes, the PIN number worked, so I’m OK. Also shoot out a couple of work-related emails.
4:45 Begin wandering Seville.
4:50 Wander through park, watch pigeons.
5:10 Wander back towards Cathedral.
5:17 I’m a sucker for Gothic architecture. In I go.
5:18 Browse the gift shop. I’m a sucker for museum gift shops, too.
5:35 Wince, but pay the €8 admission.
5:36 It’s worth it.
5:49 Figure out the camera setting that will let me take pictures of stained-glass windows.
5:51 Sit on floor, lean head backwards against fluted column, look up it at awe-inspiring ceiling. I do this with massive trees – look backwards up the trunk – so why not do it with redwood-sized columns?
5:52 Oh, right, because cathedral docents are as inflexible as art museum docents. Whoops.
6:00 Discover the sign pointing to the Giralda Tower. I start up the gently inclined (fully wheelchair and stroller accessible!) walkway. Each stretch is numbered, so halls 1-4 take me on a full lap around the tower. Halls 5-8 repeat this, higher up.
6:06 Hall 15. How many halls are there, anyway?
6:13 After the 36th hall, I reach the top. It’s worth it. So worth it.
6:25 Return to the main body of the cathedral. Try to ignore the docents shooing me out.
6:35 Wander the orange tree grove, enclosed by this largest of cathedrals. Ignore docents.
6:45 Buy another souvenir or two in yet another cathedral gift shop, then accede to requests to leave.
6:55 Find and purchase a flamenco dress for my little sister. :)
7:00 Wander Sevilla for a while...
7:45 Perch on the corner of a public fountain and begin writing in the journal I acquired at 6:45.
8:15 Walk the entire perimeter of the Cathedral twice, once standing back to look at it, then back around, running my fingers over it. Because it's not real till you touch it.
9:00 Tapas!
10:30 Listen to street music for half an hour or more.
11:30 Wander back to my hostel.
11:35 Chat in my nonexistent Spanish with Sevilla native.
12:00 Sigh with contentment over one fantabulous day.

* RyanAir requires passengers to check-in online and print their own boarding passes. REQUIRES. If you fail to do this, they levy a stiff fine at the airport. I now know why: they don’t use computers at the airport. No computers! I gaped at them in shock. When you “check in” at the airport, they just scan a printed list of passengers’ names and passport numbers, then cross you off and issue bag tags.

7/14/09 Ouarzazate

Ouarzazate - pronounced Waar-zuh-zat, rhymes with Car-the-cat - is an often-overlooked city in southern Morocco. Perched on the edge of the Sahara, it used to be known as the Bab Sahara - the gateway to the desert - since every caravan traveling across the great desert would stop here to take advantage of the rivers and palm trees.

Ouarzazate looks like what tourists imagine Morocco will look like. Low buildings with crenelated roofs, scattered palm trees, huge expanses of scrub desert... Also, it's within an hour drive of a dozen different desert subecosystems (scrub desert, sandy desert, New Mexico-looking-desert, oasis-in-the-desert, etc), which is one of the many reasons it has become the filming destination of choice for most desert movies.

If you've watched a film made in the past 20 years with a desert scene in it, odds are it was filmed in or near Ouarzazate. Which we PCVs call Oz for short (and which suddenly makes me wonder if there's any connection between the nickname and the film industry...enh, probably just a coincidence). Kingdom of Heaven. The Mummy. (All the Mummy movies, for that matter.) Gladiator. Lawrence of Arabia (which, I know, is way more than 20 years old - it was the birth of the Oz film industry). Babel, which is one of the few actually set in Morocco. Charlie Wilson's War. Thanks to Hollywood's recent interest in desert-set movies (Rendition, Charlie Wilson's War, The Kingdom, Three Kings - notice a theme?), dozens of film crews come to Morocco each year...and over the years, a true film industry has grown up in Oz. There are hundreds of Moroccans trained as grips, sound boom technicians, sound engineers...all those names at the end of the movie? The ones that aren't actors or special effects guys? Yeah, those people. Morocco now has hundreds - maybe thousands - trained to do all that stuff. Plus, Oz citizens get to be extras a lot. Moroccans are mostly golden-skinned, black-haired, and black-eyed, which means that, especially in crowd scenes or in deep background, they can pass for most of the world's ethnicities. Mexican, African-American, Arab...

So that's the film industry. Which has been immortalized in Ouarzazate's Museum of Film History, well worth a visit.

But there's also the casbah - a gorgeous, if crumbling, testament to Oz's strategic importance in past military conflicts - a half-hour walk from the center of town.

There are the juice places, where you can get any conceivable combination of juices blended, smoothie-style (though without ice). *Any* combination. I usually play it safe with something in the mango-orange-peach-banana family, but some of my friends swear by the avacado-almond, and my sister fell in love with the mint juice. Yeah, you read that right.

And there's my all-time-favorite-place-to-shop-in-all-of-Morocco, the Fixed Price Store.

Of course, there aren't any useful posted signs or anything...just look for the shop to the right of the SuperMarche on Boulevard Mohammed V. (Oz has at least 3 supermarche's, I know, but only one on MoV. It's also across from Chez Dmitri's, a famous - and famously overpriced - restaurant.)

At the Fixed Price Store (not a real name, just what my friends and I call it), you can buy all the same things you'll find at other shopping-friendly cities (like Essaouira and Fes), but with posted prices that you don't have to haggle for. And the posted prices are *fair*. Not a ripoff for you, not a ripoff for the artisans. Fair prices. (Happy sigh.) Plus, if you buy a lot, as I tend to when I'm there, the owner will drop 5-10% at the register anyway. Although...that might be the discount for those of us who speak the language. So if you don't get the extra reduction, don't feel bad. The prices are still excellent, plus you don't leave with that icky Did I just get ripped off? feeling that dogs me whenever I haggle.

These days, there aren't many caravanseri crossing the desert on camels. Oz fills its role as the
Bab Sahara by providing treking tours. You can explore on foot, on camel, in a 4x4, or some combination thereof. Resist the urge to ride a 4x4 through the desert. Desert polish - that scrubby, weather-beaten surface - is actually incredibly fragile, and host to a surprisingly delicate ecosystem. In some places, the desert winds can repair damage from 4x4 tires within weeks or months...but in others, you can still see treads from WWII convoys. So go hiking or take the once-in-a-lifetime camel ride. :)

7/13/09 Miscellany: CASH / Money in Morocco

More than one traveler to my adopted country has tripped up on the question of money.

Money.

Floos.

Cash.

Especially Americans. America is rapidly moving towards a cashless society. Before I joined Peace Corps, I almost never carried cash. I paid for everything from a $1.85 Borders' Cafe Chocolate Bundt Cake (wow, I miss those) to a $100 shopping spree with a credit card. And even if I had a bundle of cash in my pocket, I'd never have attempted to register at a hotel, or rent a car, or ... any other of a host of transactions ... with anything but a credit card.

Morocco is different.

I won't say that you can't use a credit card anywhere - because the biggest, fanciest, most tourist-friendly hotels, restaurants, and stores will probably accept them, and I know Marjane does, too - but I will say that I have used a credit card exactly once in Morocco. And I've lived here for almost 17 months now.

So expect to pay for *everything* in cash. Hotel stays. Restaurants. Transportation (petit taxis, grand taxis, buses, and probably trains, though they might take plastic).

Fortunately, cash is easy to come by here.

The Moroccan Dirham (Dh or dh, formally MAD but nobody uses that) is not internationally traded, which means that it's virtually impossible to acquire them outside Morocco.

It also means that it has avoided the currency fluctuations that have been sweeping much of the world this past year.

Every major Moroccan city has Currency Exchange places where you can swap your dollars (or Euros, or whatever) for dirhams. Exchange rates vary from spot to spot; to my surprise, the exchange counter in Casablanca's Mohammed V airport gave us one of the best rates we found anywhere. (That was 7.98:1 Dh:$. Other times we changed money, we found 7.95:1, 8.1:1, 7.8:1, and a deeply depressing 7.5:1 - this last at a bank that didn't have its change rates posted. Grr.)

It's also incredibly easy to find ATMs here. My little village doesn't have an ATM (though we just got Western Union! Woo-hoo! Um...does anybody use Western Union anymore?), but my souqtown does, as does every other town (though not village) I've visited in Morocco.

So just walk up to the machine, stick in your good old American (or German, or Australian, or whatever) ATM card, and extract as many dirhams as you want. OK, I should qualify that statement. As many as you want up to your daily withdrawal limit. My Moroccan bank (BMCI) won't let me pull more than 2000dh a day (about 250 bucks) - but then, I've never wanted to. I could probably change my limit if I tried. But you might want to double check with your bank before you leave. You should also ask your bank what their fee is for international withdrawals. It's probably 2-3%, but some banks are mean about this kind of thing. Plus, the ATM itself will charge a fee - standard is 7dh (about a buck).

And how much should you expect to spend? It depends entirely on your lifestyle. As a Volunteer, my monthly stipend is 2000dh, plus rent. 2000dh covers everything I eat, drink, buy, travel to, etc, with enough left over every month that after a year, I had a ginormous surplus hanging out in my account... But when I was traveling with my family, living like a Stinkin' Rich American, we burned through that much in a week. Sometimes less, depending on the souvenir shopping.

The hotels I stay in when traveling are usually 30-50dh/night/person. That gets me a bed in a dorm-style room. (Often, I get the whole room to myself - Morocco is a popular tourist destination, but I avoid the cities and therefore spend most of my hotel-nights in mostly-empty-hotels.) No towels, no en suite bathrooms - there's usually a squat toilet somewhere on the hallway - and shared showers whose hot water is never trustworthy.

But I'm a Volunteer. I signed up for this. (And for the record, just getting *access* to a potentially-hot shower makes hotel stays feel pretty luxurious. At home, I have water for two hours a day - which still puts me ahead of a lot of PCVs who don't have running water at all - and if I want it hot, it involves butane gas, a stove, a kettle, and five minutes.) And while 50dh makes a decent chunk of *my* monthly salary, it's only 6 bucks to an American. For 20 bucks a night (per person - and that's another oddity of Moroccan hotels, they nearly always charge per person, not per room), you can get four-star accomodation. So it's all in what you want to spend.

Same for restaurants. When I travel, if I'm not in a PCV's home, I invariably get egg-and-cheese-and-veggie sandwiches for lunch, and either lentils or chicken for dinner. Because that's what's available at the cheapo places I frequent. I can get a filling sandwich for 7dh (it'd be 12 if I ot it with meat) or a plate of lentils for 7dh or a quarter of a chicken (remind me to post more about this later) for 15dh.

If I'm in a biggish city, I'll look for shawarma or pizza. Those are going to cost 20-40dh/serving, but I accept it for the splurge it is.

Basically, I live on a dollars-to-dirhams budget. That is, here I make 2000 dirhams a month, excluding rent and tax-free (because we're well below federal poverty standards!). I made something like 2000 dollars a month in America, after rent and after taxes. So what I can spend in dirhams is just about what I could spend in dollars. 5dh for a cup of cocoa in a cafe? Yup, I've dropped $5 at Starbucks more mornings than I should admit. 25dh for a ride into my souq town? That's comparable to Zipcar prices. Buying clothes, staying in hotels, eating out...if I could have afforded it in dollars in America, I can afford it in dirhams here. The PCVs who get into trouble are the ones who keep translating things back into dollars, and thinking Wow, this is so cheap!

Example: Taxis in Marrakesh. Taxis are supposed to be metered. But about 2/3 of taxi drivers claim that their meters are broken (or they break them themselves!) and then charge you whatever they want for the ride. The first time I took a taxi from the bus station to the J'ma al-Fna (Marrakesh's version of Times Square *and* Central Park)... Well, I'd been warned not to pay more than 10dh. So I walked up to the first petit taxi I saw and asked if they'd take me there. "Of course! Get in!" How much? "30 dirhams." I laughed and started to walk away. But in dollars, it's about 4 bucks. Which a New Yorker would find a bargain for a taxi ride across town. Which is why the taxi drivers can get away with asking for it. Not wanting to lose the fare, the driver called after me, "What do you want to pay?" 10 dirhams. Then he laughed. I turned to walk away again. He called, "OK, 25." 10. "20." 10. "OK, get in." 10? "Yeah, yeah, yeah..." And it only worked because I literally burst out laughing and turned to walk away each time. I was perfectly willing to find another taxi - even if it meant walking out to the street to find a cab willing to use its meter - and he knew it. [[Side note: I also carried little enough luggage - a medium-sized backpack and a slung-over-the-shoulder purse - that I could have walked downtown, if I'd had a mind to. Travelers who show up with more luggage than they can carry are at a massive disadvantage here.]] The one and only time I've had a driver use a meter between the bus station and the J'ma al-Fna, the ride cost 6dh. I gave the guy 10 just out of gratitude for his honesty.

So that's my take on Money In Morocco.

Bring cash to convert or just bring your ATM card.

Leave your travelers' checks at home (nobody but NOBODY accepts them).

Don't expect to be able to use your credit card. (You might be happily surprised once or twice, but if you show up expecting to be able to use it...you'll encounter frustration.)

If you want to benefit from just how cheap this country can be, stop converting everything to dollars (or Euros, or Canadian dollars) in your head, and be willing to share a bathroom.

Oh, and don't be afraid to sass the taxi drivers. Haggling: it's not just for souq day anymore.

PS: Srf. Srf is the word for change, as in "Here's your change!" and also for any small currency. Moroccan currency consists of tiny brass coins, which are tiny fractions of a dirham, and then 1/2 dh, 1dh, 2dh, 5dh, 10dh (all silver or silver-and-brass coins) and then 20dh, 50dh, 100dh, and 200dh bills. Srf is your friend. Keep some on hand at all times. For one thing, cheap little sandwich shops probably can't make change from a 200dh bill. (Imagine trying to buy a cup of coffee with a $100, in the US. Even though 200dh is only 25 bucks, it *feels* like a 100dh bill, and causes as many awkward cash-register moments.) Also, you'll spend srf all the time - 5dh for every piece of luggage on a bus, 5dh for a cup of coffee, 2dh for a packet of cookies (travel food!), 2dh for a packet of tissues (since toilet paper isn't always provided, either) - and you'll have a much smoother, more harmonious experience if you're not asking people to make horrific amounts of change all the time.

Also, waving big bills is an invitation to the unscrupulous. Even the smallest bill - a 20dh note - can get you into trouble. Example: My friend "Ali" put his bag on a bus and got hit up for the usual 5dh. (Technically, it's a tip for the jumper, and therefore you don't technically have to pay it ... but **everybody** does, and if you try to fight it, you will end up with an actual fight on your hands.) He pulled out a 20dh, expecting change - and the jumper immediately said, "Oh, of course, for 20dh we'll keep this baggage compartment just for you - nobody else's bags will be near yours, and nobody will have a chance to steal your things!" and pocketed the 20dh. Ali tried to explain that he really didn't want to rent out the baggage compartment...but the jumper suddenly lost all ability to understand Ali's (excellent) accent. Le sigh.

So keep some srf in your pocket at all times. Good places to break the big bills - and most ATMs will dispense either a mix of 100s and 200s or else all 200s, so you're going to have to deal with this, just like I do - are teleboutiques and large stores. If they balk at making change - although most will happily help you, if you ask with a polite Srf, afak? (Change, please?) - just buy something cheap. I've discovered some yummy 2dh cookie options when trying to break a 100dh bill. :)

7/12/09 Azrou

Azrou is one of my favorite places in Morocco. It's big enough to have all the amenities I miss in my village (restaurants serving western food, shops that sell *everything*, trees) plus it's in a lovely part of the country, in the forests of Ifrane National Park, in the Middle Atlas mountains. It's close to Fes and Meknes and Ifrane (a swiss-chalet style town that rich Moroccans retreat to in the summer - it's like the Martha's Vinyard of Morocco) while being remote enough to feel cozy and intimate and just friendly.

We stayed in Azrou for several nights while visiting Ifrane National Park. There are some inns deeper in the park, but they're priced for tourists. In the Park, you can find Barbary Apes - sad, tourist-spoiled little monkeys* that will flock to you if you toss them bread - as well as gorgeous ceder forests (mostly secondary growth, but reforestation is succeeding well) and some lovely lakes. The lakes are year-round homes for several unusual species of waterfowl, and are key nesting habitat for a few endangered species, so bring your binoculars and prepare to be impressed. I think 90% of the life-birds that my Dad, an avid birder, added to his "life list" in Morocco were spotted here in Ifrane.

Lakes Aoua, Hichlat, and Ifrah are well known and mentioned in every tour book, but I want to mention Lac d’Afennourir, a RAMSAR site that doesn't get nearly as much ecotourist attention as it deserves. Like the other three, it hosts many species of waterfowl, amphibian, fish, etc, plus it's tucked farther away from agricultural and population centers, and is therefore much healthier as an ecosystem. All of the lakes are difficult (if not impossible) to access by public transportation. This is one outing where it's worth hiring a guide and/or renting a car to get around.

I want to give a quick shoutout to our Inn, the Auberge du Dernier Lion d'Atlas (The Inn of the Last Atlas Lion), for its extraordinary hospitality. The rooms are airy and clean, the food (breakfast and dinner are both available) is plentiful and yummy, and the host/owner, Aziz, is a prince. He adores Peace Corps, which would give him a special place in my heart anyway, but he's just a kind, thoughtful, genuinely helpful man. His inn is about 2km away from the Azrou bus/taxi station, but it's an easy walk or else a cheap petit taxi ride (I think 4 or 5 dh). You can find his place online at www.dernierlionatlas.ma or call them at 0535561868.

* Yes, I realize, Barbary Apes are technically *not* monkeys - they don't have tails - but everybody calls them that, and it's hard to refer to such little creatures as apes. That word calls to mind gorillas and orangutans, both of which are about 10 times more massive than these little simians.

7/10/09 Fes Medina

Disclaimer: I haven’t spent any time in the Ville Nouvelle of Fes, so really can’t speak about it. It’s a modern city, complete with McDonald’s and office buildings. Whoopdy-doo. If you come to Fes, head straight for the medina. It’s cooler than the New City in the summer, because the cramped alleys prevent much sunlight from penetrating down to street level, and warmer than the City in winter, because the close press of bodies traps lots of human warmth in the streets.

So you want to visit the north, or else you’re interested in the cultural heart of Morocco – or both. Fes feels to me like the intersection of New York City with Williamsburg. You can buy nearly anything in the cramped streets of the medina, from artisans who are practicing crafts identically to the way their great-great-grandfathers did. Skills and trade secrets have been handed down from father to son (no, sadly, almost never to a daughter) for countless generations. Countless millennia, quite likely.

Fes served as Morocco’s capital hundreds of years ago, and remains its cultural and artisanal capital today. No matter how resolved you are not to buy anything, you’ll likely find yourself seduced by the jewelry, the herbalists’ wares, the woodcrafts, or especially the leather.

Moroccan leather is internationally renowned, and with excellent reason. The tanneries of Fes have been treating and dyeing sheep, goat, kid, cow, and camel skins for thousands and thousands of years. You can get leather shoes, purses, pappasans (cushion seat things, sometimes called ottomans), and leather jackets for a fraction of what you’d pay in the US. And the quality…you can’t fake that kind of quality. We watched our eager seller threaten a scrumptious leather jacket with water and fire. No kidding. First he poured a glass of water onto it, to show that it simply beads up and runs right off (and he neatly caught it back in the glass, to show the next batch of wide-eyed shoppers). Then he struck up a lighter and held it up to a leather jacket. I wanted to throw myself between this gorgeous coat and the clearly insane man who wanted to torch it…but the leather was impervious to the flame. These guys know what they’re doing, and they guarantee your leather product – jacket, bag, etc – will last fifteen years. (Of course, I doubt anyone travels *back* to Morocco in the event her purse sustains water damage, so that guarantee might not be quite as impressive as he wanted it to sound.)

Navigating the maze-like medina is easier than it first appears. There are two major streets running almost parallel to each other – Talaa Kebira and Talaa Saghira. The Big Street and The Little Street. They run at a steady incline down from the Bab Bu Jeloud, the most common entry point to the medina, where you’ll find lots of inexpensive hostel-style hotels (my favorite is Hotel Cascade, 0635638442) and some moderately priced restaurants. Because Talaa Kebira and Talaa Saghira run steadily downhill, if you find yourself lost, all you need to do is walk out of whatever alley you’re in and find a street running uphill-downhill, then keep walking back uphill until you’re back at the Bab Bu Jeloud.

One famous Fes landmark is the Medersa Bou Inania, one of the few mosques in the country (or, for that matter, in the world) that non-Muslims are allowed to enter. For a modest entrance fee (10dh/adult), you can come in and see the gorgeous architecture and breathtaking design elements of this Merenid masterpiece. It’s easy to find – it’s at the uphill end of the Talaa Kebira and Talaa Saghira, which run along two of its outer walls. It’s also next to Fes’s famous Water Clock, an engineering marvel that functioned for centuries before grinding to a halt; modern engineers are trying to get it going again, but the technology is long lost.

Down a well-marked alley from the Water Clock is my favorite Fes restaurant/café, Café Clock (0535637855). Its owner, a delightfully peripatetic Brit named Mike, will cheerfully chat up any and all customers about Fes, his latest project, or the café’s upcoming events – their social calender might even surpass the menu in its array of interesting offerings. The food (and prices!) are European, which makes it a huge splurge on a Peace Corps budget, but the 90dh camel burger and 25dh smoothies are absolutely worth it. And always get the dessert special of the day – you’ll thank me later. :)

For the museum-minded and history buffs, the Armory is Fes’s must-visit. (Follow signs for the Borj Nord.) Overlooking Fes from a hill to the north - and therefore offering unparalleled panoramas - this rebuilt architectural masterpiece (inspired by Leonardo de Vinci) once defend the walled city from attackers, and now houses arms and armaments from the past millenium. It’s the most sophisticated/modern museum I’ve visited in Morocco, with the one minor drawback that all the exhibit information is in French and Arabic. But even if you can’t read either language, the swords, daggers, muskets, flintlock rifles, pistols, modern rifles, and cannons (some several meters long) make for an impressive visual display.

Because Fes is home to so many m3lims (artisans/craftsmen), some city guides will err on the side of showing you storeroom after storeroom, where these gifted craftsmen silkly turn into gifted salesmen, and suddenly this delightful city feels like an overpriced mall. Be straightforward with your guide about whether your interest is in crafts/shopping or landmarks/history (or a combination). He’s almost certainly getting a cut from every store he takes you to, so his interests and yours may not align perfectly. If you get a licensed vrai guide (pronounced vray geed, and featuring ID cards around their necks), you’ll likely get more of what you want than if you go with a faux guide (foh geed), who could be anybody trying to make money off tourists. (Didn’t you see Slumdog Millionaire?)

In short: I’ve spent more time in Fes than in any of the other Big Six cities, for the simple reason that it’s my favorite. Ancient and modern blend beautifully in this city, where you can find the oldest university on Earth and farmer’s market produce fresh-picked this morning, and everything inbetween.

7/02/09 Moroccan Cities: The Big Six

Morocco has villages of a few households and cities of millions, and everything in between. It therefore defies broad generalizations and sweeping statements. As your faithful blogger, though, I try to describe snapshots and windows, hoping to paint the big picture Seurat-style, dot by dot.

I’ve spent most of the past year talking about my Moroccan village. Today, I’m shifting gears to introduce you to Morocco’s major cities, which I refer to as The Big Six. In no particular order, they are Rabat, Fes, Meknes, Marrakesh, Casablanca, and Agadir. If I were to expand it to The Big Seven or Eight, I’d add in Tangiers and Oujda, but I’ll keep it at six.

These cities house and/or employ the vast majority of salary-holding Moroccans. (Most farmers grow enough to feed themselves and their families, but they don’t have a cash salary, so getting real “employment” statistics is a little tricky.) Many of my fellow PCVs’ small villages are depleted in men, because most or all of the males between 15 and 75 are off in one of these cities working, coming home to their wives and families for holidays or the odd long weekend.

If you read tour book blurbs on these cities, they’ll tell you that you can visit the walled medina, which they usually translate as old city. The truth has more nuances, as it usually does. Morocco has been inhabited for most of human history. Just this year, archaeologists unearthed 80,000 year old shell-bead jewelry up in Tafoughalt, a lovely off-the-beaten-path village in the northeastern corner of Morocco.

In its millennia of history, Morocco has been home to cave dwellers and city folk, Berbers and Arabs, pagans and Jews and Christians and Muslims, and seen the entire pagent of humanity. It was part of the Roman state of Mauretania Tingitana but never part of the Ottoman Turk empire.

It has had many capital cities – including most of the Big Six, at one time or another – and most of those cities had giant stone walls around them. In an era when conquest by sword and spear was the rule, not the exception, all cities were designed to be fortresses. Within these walls, shops and houses cluster and meander, making straight streets rare and twisty alleys common. Some are paved with asphalt, more with pavingstones, and a few with only packed dirt.

When the French began to make their influence felt, back in the 19^th century, they took one look at these maze-like medinas and threw up their hands in cultural surrender. Rather than venture through the giant vaulted archways of the bab gateways, they constructed their own cities, featuring broad, straight roads and spacious, modern buildings, next to them. So now the Big Six have new cities, aka Villes Nouvelles, flush against their original cities, still called medinas.

But medina means city, not old city, and in these original cities you find the heart of each of the Big Six. The Villes Nouvelles can have their palm trees and McDonald’s and villa-style homes. In the darker, shadowy (and therefore cooler) alleys of the medina you’ll find artisans creating crafts exactly the way their forefathers have done for centuries or millennia. You’ll find tiny Berber ladies, still wearing their traditional chin tattoos, haggling down to the centime. You’ll find families living in houses that have been in their families since longer than anyone’s grandfathers can remember. This crowded, noisy, bustling, thriving medina is far from being old, especially in the somewhat condescending way that tour books make old city sound like a quaint little historical tourist stop, like Williamsburg or Plymouth Plantation. It’s ancient, yes, but it’s still very, very much alive. Explore and enjoy. :)

One other thing: Every city (and most towns) in Morocco have an Avenue Mohammed V, which is usually the biggest street around. But isn’t the current king Mohammed VI? you ask. Yes. Mohammed V was his grandfather. Some find this confusing, and wonder if they’re confused or if they’re misreading the signs. So why is Mohammed V - the monarch's grandpa - so beloved? From what I’ve been told, he’s the one who was removed from power by the French, in their brief attempt at formal colonialism here, and who was reinstated to huge acclaim just a few years later. He didn’t rule long before being succeeded by his son, Hassan II, but his return to power is still celebrated on Moroccan Independence Day (November 18). He’s viewed with the same nostalgic reverence as, say, George Washington, America’s first leader after colonialism. :)

July 1, 2009 Vacation Planning

Friends, I’m going to let you benefit from my recent (and past) trips all over Morocco, to help you plan your own visit to my adopted country. I’ll spend the month of July – leading up to everyone’s favorite vacation month, August – writing a travel-related post at least every other day. I’ll tell you about some of my favorite cities, some that are popular with tourists (because no, there’s not much overlap there), some information about getting around the country, etc. I’ll show photos from my own travels and those of friends, to illustrate my stories. (I’ll also borrow a few of their stories and write them in the first person, since I haven’t yet been to all of these cities, just FYI.)


Some of the topics I anticipate covering (in alphabetical order, though I probably won’t write them in this order, and this list is subject to revision/additions/deletions/whatever):


Azrou
Casablanca (Dar el-Beida)
Ceuta/Septa
Chefchaouen
Essaouira
Fes
Ifrane National Park / Birding in Morocco
Imilchil
Laarache and Lixus
Jbel Toubkal
Kela’a Magouna
Marrakesh
Meknes
Midelt
Miscellany: CASH
Miscellany: Tipping in Morocco
Moroccan Cities: The Big Six
Ouarzazate
Rabat
Tangiers
Transportation: Grands Taxis and Tranzits
Transportation: Petits Taxis
Transportation: Trains and Buses
Volubilis

June 26, 2009 SRAs vs PCVs

June 26, 2009 SRAs vs PCVs

A new acronym is born: the SRA.

Peace Corps, like most governmental organizations, loves the acronyms. The CD and APTO came to IST, along with PCMO. I saw friends I hadn’t talked to since CBT in PST. Etcetera.

So without further ado, I introduce to you: the Stinkin’ Rich American.

I suppose it could be extended to Stinkin’ Rich Westerners in general, or even Stinkin’ Rich Moroccans, but right now I’m traveling with Americans – my parents and sister – so SRAs it is.

Of course, “rich” is all a matter of perspective. After a lifetime in academia, my folks aren’t exactly dot-com billionaires. But here in Morocco, where a Volunteer (a PCV, to use the official acronym) can live on 250 dollars a month, you don’t have to be a billionaire to get to live awfully well.

What do I mean? It’s the little things. The four of us have been renting out the six-person “grands taxis” when we go from city to city. We stay in hotels where the bathrooms with ***western toilets*** are *inside* the rooms, and even have luxuries like *toilet paper* and *towels*.

Traveling with my SRA family has highlighted just how much I’ve wllf-ed to my Peace Corps life. I’m used to being squished when I travel. I’m used to having to walk down a hallway while carrying my own toilet paper, to use a squat toilet with questionable plumbing. I’m used to having to wait the minutes or hours for taxis and tranzits to fill up with fellow travelers. My SRA family, by contrast, walks to a taxi stand, picks out a car, and gets whisked away immediately.

But even more than getting to live in the comparable luxury of a bathroom *in*your*own*hotel*room*, SRAs get to go wherever they want. Not limited to routes available to public transportation, they can just wander the countryside.

In the company of my parents, I’ve gotten to seen parts of Morocco I’ve only ever heard of. Places like wildlife preserves and RAMSAR sites and other locations never served by public transportation. Without the deep pockets of my favorite SRAs, my only chance of visiting these spots would be hitchhiking, hoping for a passing dump truck to carry me within a few miles, then hiking the rest of the way. (Oh, yeah, and hitchhiking is a violation of Peace Corps policy, so if I did it, I’d be risking expulsion from Morocco.)

I also get to eat reeeeally well. We’ve been mixing it up, food-wise. A few times, we’ve eaten at the super-cheap sandwich shops I usually frequent…but then, a few times, we’ve eaten at places serving cheeseburgers and pizzas (which count as a splurge here). We stopped once at a super-zween restaurant featuring pastilla (a Moroccan delicacy) and Italian food and luxurious tagines. The décor alone was worth the price.

…to those with the pockets for it. My meal cost a reasonable percentage of my monthly salary…but it was still only a few dollars to someone living on an American budget. Even with the weakened dollar, Morocco is just plain cheap. I routinely stay in hotels/hostels costing less than 10 dollars a night. My usual haunt in Souqtown is less than 4 bucks a night. You can buy pastries for pennies, kilos of farmers’ market produce for quarters… My folks are spending more than they’d anticipated, but that’s because we’re enjoying luxuries like en suite bathrooms. And they’re still paying a quarter to a half of what they’d pay for a comparable room in the US.

So, friends, come visit my country. Revel in the luxuries that feel cheap to American pockets (though astronomical to my Peace Corps budget). Eat better food than you’ve ever had, for pennies on the dollar.

Get to live like a Stinkin’ Rich American. Because by local standards, you *are*. :)

June 25, 2009 Birding in Morocco

Morocco gets plenty of visitors from Europe and the US, but not enough birdwatchers. This means that there’s pitifully little information available to birders in Morocco. One of the best resources is Bird Guide: The Most Complete Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, published by Harper Collins. It has a pro-Britain bias, so includes statements like “This bird is only a summer visitor here, but winters in Spain and Africa,” but even so, its maps – available for *every* bird in the book – include the entire Mediterranean rim, including all of North Africa.

That one pairs well with Birding in Morocco, which is not meant to be a field guide. It cuts Morocco into a few dozen regions and tells you what to look for in each region. There are a handful of maps to the more remote sites, but is mostly useful for the lists of birds you can expect to see in each area. Partnered with the Bird Guide mentioned above, you can actually figure out what you’re seeing.

That said, neither book is 100% accurate. It’s not really their fault; Morocco is a big country – the size of California – and has dozens or hundreds of different microclimates and micro-ecosystems. This means that we have birds that haven’t yet been noticed by the nice folks writing the books. So if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has webbed feet, don’t worry if the map says that it’s never found south of France. :)

My dad is a devoted birder who has several hundred birds on his “life list”. I’m a tagalong birder; when I’m with him, I’ll do the field guide thing and have a fair eye for diagnostic details, but when I’m on my own, I tend not to pay too much attention to our flapping feathered friends.

But in just a few days with the family, I saw dozens of species of birds that I’ve either never seen before or just never noticed before.

Even the most bird-blind visitor to Morocco can’t help but notice the enormous storks (some say “cranes”) atop nearly every mosque in the country. These gigantic birds nest on the highest thing around and ride thermals on sunny afternoons, meaning that they’re nearly always visible, and always striking in their glossy black and radiantly white plumage.

But it turns out that they’re not the only black-and-white birds in my skies. There’s also a tuxedo-colored bird of prey, known in French as a beuze (spelled phonetically) or busard according to my French-English dictionary. Then there are the Eurasian Coots, which are all black except for a streak of white down their faces, and Black-winged Stilts, which look like skinny penguins teetering on stilts, just to name two more.

And colored birds? Ooooh, boy. There’s the blindingly yellow Golden Oriole, the radiant turquoise-and-rust Roller, the rust-bellied Moussier’s Redstart, and the multi-hued Eurasian Chaffinch (North African race) - not to be confused with the Blue Chaffinch, which is, yes, mostly blue.

In a day spent in the Ifrane National Park, visiting four lakes – Dayet Aoua, Dayet Hichlef, Dayet Ifrah, and Agoulmem Afenourir – we saw countless birds. Hundreds for sure. Probably thousands. The other species we’ve so far identified include…

(Eurasian) Common Kestrel

Lesser Kestrel (I spotted this one!)

Cattle Egret (these fill trees in Azrou, near the bus station, and are found *everywhere* up here)

Great Crested Grebe (a truly gorgeous duck-like creature)

Turtle Dove

Ruddy Shellduck (striking black and white wings while flying, but the wings vanish when it sits on a lake; then, you just notice the rusty neck)

Eagle (probably the Booted Eagle, but we’re not sure)

Alpine Swift

Coal Tit

Mistle Thrush

Willow Warbler

Black Kite

Red Kite

Little Grebe

Eurasian Coot

Red-knobbed Coot (incredibly rare – nests only in these lakes!!)

Black-eared Wheatear

Black-billed Magpie

Barbary Partridge

We saw more, but couldn’t ID them in the field. Dad snapped pictures, though, so we may work them out later. Stay tuned…

6/3/09 Hotel Zween

As I may have mentioned before, zween is a useful adjective that can mean cool/stylish/fancy/high-quality/chic/attractive/exciting/etc.

And zween is the best word to describe a truly gorgeous hotel I recently saw, in one of Morocco's bigger cities...

The hotel has the word "gold" in its name. That should have been my first clue.

But when the taxi pulled past a guardhouse, through a gate, and up a private drive, to stop in front of a group of pale-skinned, silver-haired, shorts-wearing tourists...I knew I'd stepped through the looking glass.

I'd left the Morocco I know and love, and entered the Morocco that wealthy tourists see.

I walked cautiously into the lobby. I held my breath, waiting for someone to shout, "Interloper!" and swarm me with guards to hustle me out of the lushly-appointed lobby.

No one did. I guess my own pale skin and hair gave me an all-access pass to the halls of privilege, despite my general grottiness. (I could rant about this for a while, but I'll leave it at: Sigh.)

For the record: I was clean. Everything I was wearing was freshly out of the laundry. Even my hair had been washed just the night before (for the first time in nine days, so I'd actually shampooed it three times.) But when I caught my reflection in one of the many ornate mirrors bedecking the elaborate lobby, I looked seriously out of place.

Something in my ensemble - long-sleeved T-shirt over hiking pants over seriously abused hiking boots, with a zween Essaouira scarf draped in the usual loose triple-wrap over my shoulders, with a scuffed pack on my back and a faded, handwoven woolen satchel on my hip... The pretty, barely-worn new earrings I'd picked up for 10Dh in Marrakesh's Jm3a al-Fna (my favorite thing about Marrakech, in all honesty, is the selection of 10Dh earrings), couldn't counterbalance the general aura of ... grunge. In fact, the earrings are fairly hippy and funky, so they might actually have made me look more granola-y, and even less suited to the fancypants hotel.

How fancypants was it?

It had overstuffed chairs. Lots of them. CHAIRS, I tell you, not floor ponges, or even the fancy knee-high ponges, nor plastic patio-furniture chairs, which you see in cafes and such...but CHAIRS. Armchairs. Squishy ones.

Sofas. Hosting people wearing jewelry. Using laptops. (Invisible, but evident: wireless Internet.)

Thick carpets. (OK, that's pretty normal for me. Though these were way more elaborate than I'm used to.)

A swimming pool. I stopped and stared at the pool for a while. The water is so ... blue. And there's so much of it! It's like a lake with walls!

The hotel had multiple restaurants inside it. *Multiple*. I didn't dare set foot inside, lest I commit myself to a 20Dh glass of orange juice or something. (Fair price: 6Dh. Best deal in Morocco: 3Dh OJ from a stand in the Jm3a al-Fna.)

Behind the hotel, I found an enormous formal garden. I got nailed by the sprinklers, both because I was distracted by all the greenery - there was grass! Actual wiggle-your-toes-in-it, thick, lush, grass!! - and because I needed the tangible confirmation that I was looking at an honest-to-goodness sprinkler. This desert country gets all its moisture from the snow and rain that fall on its three mountain ranges...which means that the meters of snow I weathered last year (pun intended) have melted, flowed away, and been converted to irrigating grass so that wealthy westerners could feel at home. In Morocco. Isn't the point of going to Morocco to see, y'know, Morocco? If you have grass in your backyard, do you really need it behind your hotel, too? But I digress.

Scattered throughout the grassy, tree-filled garden were rose bushes. So I did what I always do in the presence of rose bushes: take literally the advice to Stop and smell the roses. I inhaled the rich, enveloping, heady aromas, and ultimately decided that the red-and-white ones looked the prettiest, but the pure white ones had the richest scent. (Brides, take note: have some of each in your bouquet and you're set.)

The sun hadn't been up for too many hours, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to have the garden to myself...but I was. I wandered alone through an acre or so of lush, luxurious greenery (and in a dry country, is there a greater luxury than sprinklers?). The few awake hotel guests I saw were sitting on the veranda, looking at the garden without walking in it, or else sitting in an indoor restaurant, far from the sights or smells.

On behalf of all the guests whose overpriced hotel rooms were paying for this indulgence, I wiggled my toes in the grass, and smelled the flowers, and rested in the shade of the giant palms.

It might seem hypocritical of me to find the gardens a massive waste of resources and yet enjoy their beauty...but I felt like I *should* take the time to appreciate them. Otherwise...it's like buying a Lambourghini and leaving it in the garage. Inheriting an egg-sized ruby and locking it in a bank. If someone has invested this much in something - anything - the only moral choice seems to me to be to gain some benefit from all that cost. I can't recoup the spent (not to say wasted) water or money...so all I can do is appreciate what it has created.

6/2/09 Zayd Tas3at

We're back on the whirlwind that is Daylight Savings Time. Still usually referred to as "New Time" vs "Old Time", and sometimes called zayd tas3at. Add an hour. Because you take the time it really is, according to the sun and habit and the call to prayer and everything, then add an hour.

* * *

I looked at my bus ticket. 17h had been scrawled in the box labeled Heure. A giant 4 was scratched over the whole ticket. "Dghi, dghi," people kept insisting. Now. But my cell phone showed 3:45pm. The man who had guided me from the bus station door to buy my ticket and then escorted me onto the bus - a routine service provided by the bus lines - pointed to the scrawled 4, and assured me that the bus was about to leave.

It pulled out at 4:01, according to my phone. So the big 4 was right, and the 17h was wrong...? I sat there, marveling at the miracle of the first EARLY departure in a year.

And then I remembered zayd tas3at. Lhumdullah, a friend had mentioned it on her Facebook status update, which I saw this morning. Peace Corps had warned us a while back, but I'd long since forgotten. Lhumdullah, in Berberville, nothing much is actually scheduled. Prayer calls are based on the sun, not the digits/hands of a clock, and everything else happens...when it happens. School is done for the year, and nothing else follows a timetable that strictly. The post office. The health clinic. They'll probably close an hour early than people expect. Other than that... Life is life.

5/30/09 Greetings

I know I talk about the greeting ritual a lot, but I don't think I've ever explained it in full. I'm prompted to by this exchange I heard between newbies:

Newbie #1: It took me *two*weeks* to learn how to say hello.
Newbie #2: It *takes* two weeks to say hello.
Newbie #3: It doesn't take two weeks to say hello. It only takes two weeks if you want to say it *right*.
:)

In truth, exchanging greetings is a long and complicated process, but one which all residents and visitors need to know. (That's a hint to any of you planning to come here.) Let me walk you through it. All the even numbers are the same person, all the odd numbers are the other person.

1: Salaamu 3alaikum! (Peace be upon you!)
2: Wa 3alaikum as-salaam! (And upon you, peace!)
3: Labas? (How are you? Literally, are you fine?)
4: Labas. (I'm fine.)
5: Bixir? (Are you well?)
6: Bixir. (I'm well.)
7: Kulshi bixir? (Is everything good?)
8: Kulshi bixir, lhumdullah. (Everything is good, thanks be to God.)
9: Lhumdullah. (Thanks be to God.)
10: Aud shm/shi? (And you? - km or shm if you're speaking to a woman, ki or shi if you're speaking to a man. As I've said before, my region treats k's and sh's as interchangeable.)
10, cont: Is labas ghorm/ghorsh? (How are you?)
11: Labas. (I'm fine.)
12: Bixir? (Are you well?)
13: Bixir. (I'm well.)
14: Kulshi bixir? (Is everything good?)
15: Kulshi bixir, lhumdullah. (Everything is good, thanks be to God.)
16: Lhumdullah. Aud familia? Is labas ghors? (Thanks be to God. And your family? Is all well with them?)
17: Labas, lhumdullah. (All is well, thanks be to God.)
18: Lhumdullah. (Thanks be to God.)

If you know other family members by name, you can ask about them individually. My host mom always asks about my parents and usually about my sister. Because she's pregnant, I always ask how the baby is doing. She always grins at this - apparently it's outside the norm - but she doesn't seem to mind at all, and I like expressing interest in the wellbeing of my future sibling. :)

OK, so now the pronounciations.

1: Salaamu 3alaikum. Salaam sounds just like salami without the i. 3alaikum sounds pretty much like allay+koom. So if you remember it as salami allay koom, everyone will know what you mean. If you remember to drop the final i from salami, and make it salaam-oo instead, you get a gold star.

2: Wa 3alaikum as-salaam. Almost the same as above, just rearranged. The first sound is like the beginning of What, and is exactly like what authors represent as "Wha--?" Wha allay koom salam.

3, 4, 11, and 17: Labas. The first syllable is like lob, as in "Wow, she really lobbed that ball across the net!" or the first syllable of lobotamy. The second rhymes with the Spanish word mas (more), and has a soft ahh sound followed by a soft sss. Lob ah ss.

5, 6, 12, 13: Bixir. Bi- as in "big" or "bitter". The x represents the back-of-the-throat sound you hear in words like the Scottish "loch" or the composer Bach or the German "nacht". It sounds kind of like radio hiss to me. -ir sounds exactly like ear. Rhymes with year. Bi ccchhh ear.

7, 14: Kulshi bixir. The second word is the same as above. The first sounds exactly like cool followed she. Cool she bi ccchhh ear.

8, 15, 16, 17, 18: Lhumdullah. This is pronounced differently in different regions, so you get a lot of latitude. :) Most commonly, it sounds like you're saying the short French word le, an almost invisible syllable, followed immediately by hum, as in "Will you stop humming already?" Then do, as in "Do as I say, not as I do," then a prolonged llll, and a final ah. Alternatively, you can put together the words duel or dual with la (as in, Do re mi fa so la ti do), and it'll sound pretty perfect. L hum duel la.

10: Aud shm/shi? Aud actually means repeat, but it's commonly used to mean how about you? It sounds like the second half of aloud or the first half of Audi. Shm is like the first syllable of shimmer, and shi is indistinguishable from she.

10 cont: Is labas ghorm/ghorsh? Is has a soft s, and rhymes with kiss. Labas we've already gone over. Ghorm involves gargling deep in your throat, and is close to the French r (that weird sound that makes Louvre almost impossible to pronounce for Americans). If you just say horum (rhymes with quorum and forum), people will probably understand you. rghrghrgh orum. That's if you're addressing a woman, as I usually am if I'm going through the whole greeting ritual. The suffix changes from -m to -k if you're addressing a man, and of course, here in Berberville, k's and sh's are interchangeable, so you'd say rghr oruk or rghr orush. Yeah, Tam is fun. :)

16: Lhumdullah. Aud familia? Is labas ghors? The only new words here are familia, which comes from Spanish and French and therefore sounds pretty much exactly how it looks: fam-ee-lee-uh, and ghors, which starts just like ghorm and ghorsh above but ends with a soft s. It rhymes with force.

So there you go. All the pieces you need to fully and properly greet someone in the Classical Arabic/Tamazight/Darija blend spoken here in Berberville.

So, you're ready to come visit! Marhaba! (You are welcome / Come on in / Help yourself / What's mine is yours / I'm glad you're here / etc)