Fes, Part Three: The Merdersa

Dear readers,

Here's a glimpse into the other Morocco, that of stunning architecture and craftsman ship. These pictures are from the Bou Inania Merdersa in Fes (a merdasa is a "madrasa" in standard Arabic, or "school"). This was a residential college, where students would study religion, law, science and art, and was built in the 14th century by one Abou Inan, a sultan.

The three pictures show the carved wooden screen and doors at the main entrance (cedar, I believe); the bands of tilework (called "jellij") and calligraphy that encompass the main courtyard; and the projection of light through stained glass onto a door in the prayer hall. (The stained glass was surprising to see in North Africa!)

The square courtyard was paved in onyx and marble, with a large marble fountain in the center, where students would cleanse themselves prior to prayer. We were able to see the small stone cells on the second floor, in which the students slept, each with a little wooden screened window. Not bad at all - kind of like a monastery.

Fes was and is considered the most learned of Morocco's cities, so this merdasa was an important institution, and home to great scholars over the centuries. It's also one of the few Islamic buildings in Morocco that is open to non-Muslims. (As a side note, non-Muslims can enter mosques in most places, for example, the Taj Mahal is a mosque, but here in Morocco, it's forbidden. Why? Well, the French actually made the law when Morocco became a protectorate in 1912. They wanted to reassure the locals that they would not interfere with religious life. When Morocco gained independence in 1956, the new country decided to keep the law in place.)

So, that completes my Fes trilogy. One more post tonight, about Fes' sister city Meknes, and then I'm all caught up on my blog.

This weekend we will travel to the fabulous city of Marrekesh (for which Morocco is named), and the following weekend, we're heading to Cairo and the Pyramids.

Fes, Part Two, or How Moroccans Use All Parts of their Animals

In Fes, we visited a leather shop which overlooked the ancient tanneries. The white vats you see are several centuries old. They are filled with a solution made from guano, which is used to strip the hair from the hides of camels, goats and sheep, and to soften them. As you can imagine, the odor, even from a distance of 20 or 40 yards, was quite overpowering. The tanners are knee deep in the stuff all day! Nearby are other vats filled with natural dyes made from vegetable materials, such as henna and saffron.

Now, the picture below of the camel head in the butcher shop is a little rough to take, and I debated whether to include it; but, it's life in Morocco. You can also see chickens and ducks and pigeons running free in the souk, unwittingly enjoying their last moments of life dodging the feet of passersby.

The other night, here in the Rabat medina (where I went to purchase a better smock for myself for the orphanage), I saw COOKED camel heads, being ground into street food. Combined with the smell, this was the first sight in Morocco (of many possible contenders) that actually made me queasy.



Okay, I'm going to post this, and will do two more posts tonight, insha'allah.

Never Gonna Do it Without Your Fes On, Part One

Hello, dear followers. Before I traveled to Morocco, my Mom gave me a great Smithsonian article about the donkeys of Fes. The streets of this ancient royal capital of Morocco are so narrow that ONLY donkeys can be used to move products and supplies in and out. The author mentioned that she had a tendency to romanticize the animals; she kept asking the owners what they called their donkeys, and after hearing what she thought was a popular donkey name over and over again (something like Rover), she realized that the Fassians call their donkeys "donkey." They think of them like cars, essentially, not pets. Well, you see one here, parked at the side of the road, while his owner does some business in the souks.

We (the same group of five people that has been traveling together: Dev, Lynn, Judy, Jen and I) journeyed by train to Fes last weekend. It's about 2.5 hours east of Rabat. The train was a modern double decker, and cost roughly $10. In Fes, we met up with a guide who, rather dissappointingly, took us to one museum, none of the famous architectural sites, but PLENTY of shops in the souks (markets) in which we were pressured to buy stuff. It was nonetheless amazing to see the city of Fes. The streets are narrow, winding and labryinth-like. They were also surprisingly steep. The main street is "Talaa Kabeera," or "the big climb." A parallel main street is the "Talaa Sagheera," or "small climb."

In Fes, we stayed in our first "riad," a guest house built around a central open tiled courtyard. It was quite lovely; we hung out the first night on the rooftop with the young man whose family owns the place, a student of English, playing cards and drinking tea in the soft weather. For the first time, we heard non-recorded calls to prayer (in other words, "live" calls from the muezzin). There were probably six mosques within a quarter mile, so each call was the same but different: droning, beseeching, boring, scolding.

Back to the donkeys, and then I'm going to end this blog and do two more about Fes. (Having trouble when I post more than one picture, so will do separate entries.) Anyway, we visited a caravansary still in business, where rural people bringing goods to the souks stable their donkeys on the first floor, and themselves stay in little wooden cells (basically) on the second. Quite a dilapidated and stinky place, but cheap, I suppose!

Okay, time for dinner, then back for entries two and three. And if you're wondering about the title of the post, it's a line from a Steeley Dan song.

Camel Trek, Part Two of Two

Hi, everyone. Yes, that goombah with the Berber headress and the too-big glasses with a line of camel riders and the Sahara desert behind her is me! (One of my famous self portraits.)

When I last left you, I mentioned that we had crossed alot of Morocco, making our way from Rabat to Merzouga, near the Algerian border.

We arrived at what the owners could reasonably advertise as the "Last Hotel Before Thousands of Miles of Desert!" where we were able to change into clothes suitable for riding camels, have our desert headscarves tied for us in the traditional way by our guide Hamza (a native of Merzouga) and take unnecessary stuff out of our backpacks.

With the help of camel herder Mohammed, we selected our steeds, saddled up and then lurched upward with our camels as they stood, probably sitting about 10 feet above the ground. It's a delightful sensation, really. I felt totally comfortable and safe up there. (As in horseback riding, they use the gentlest animals for these treks. We had no bad mannered spitting camels, only burpers and cud-chewers.) We headed straight into the dunes (which were about 50 to 75 feet high), adjusting our bodies to the slow, rolling gate of the camels, and hearing not a sound except the slight plopping noise of camel feet on sand, the instructions of Mohammed to the lead camel, and some indigestion from a number of our beasts. The sun set within 40 minutes or so, but we kept riding into the darkness, with only starlight, for another hour or so, until coming upon various fires and campsites of other groups. It was quite beautiful, and great to see the Milky Way again.

At the campsite, there was more lurching as the camels knelt for dismount, and then an extended stumble through deep sand in the darkness, until we arrived at our large camel-hair tents, with a long rug, table and large propane lamp (mais oui!) in the center area. Amazingly, we were fed a rather elaborate Moroccan meal (a tangine, which I mentioned back in a previous blog). Afterwards, we had a bit of drumming from Mohammed, accompanied by a teenaged Berber boy who lives in the desert with his father as he guards the campsites.

Sleeping arrangements were simple. All six of us crammed into one long tent, using small mattresses and staying warm with lots of oily wool blankets. It's hard to explain how strange this all was without any lighting, and without bathrooms and pajamas 'n stuff. (We used God's great desert to do our duty, and buried our Kleenexes behind us.)

One of the people in our party has quite a snore, so she was the only one who slept that night! In the morning, bleary eyed but resolved not to be cranky, we climbed an enormous dune (incredibly soft red sand, so quite breathless) to watch the sunrise.

Then another lurch up, and back we headed on our camels. The ride back was simply spectacular. We left at about 7:00 AM, so the light slanted across the dunes in a really amazing way. I have lots of pictures of our camel/people shadows, of Hamza's desert visage, and of the tiny tracks of desert mice and beetles in the sand. (Naturally, we took some sand from the Sahara to display in little Moroccan bottles.)

Anyway, after breakfast at the hotel, the ride back was long. However, it was enlivened by a visit with Morocco's Barbary Apes (or more properly, Macaques). These are tail-less monkeys native to Morocco, and living across the cedar forests of the Middle Atlas.

Last weekend, the same group of us travelled to Fes and Meknes, but I don't have time to write that up now. People are kind of in a hurry to see all that can be seen here (as most will not stay for as long as I'm staying), so we're on a rather crazy schedule! This weekend we're going to Marrakesh, and the following (long) weekend to Egypt to see the Pyramids.

By the way, the ranks of volunteers keeps thinning, so I'm now a hot property at the orphanage, with nurses fighting over me. Today I was pulled away from the yellow nest and into the blue nest so that the nurses could have their break. I peformed a solitary rendition of the hokey pokey in a playpen of one-year olds for about 20 minutes. Can you imagine?

B'salaama. Will try to write tomorrow, so that I get the adventure and blog in synch.

Camel Trek, Part One

This is a picture of Ghilzan, a nomadic girl of the Middle Atlas Mountains, who was minding her family's tent (as well as their turkeys, goats, dogs and drying laundry), while her parents were off tending sheep. Seeing her was one of many great moments on the drive to the Sahara. (One of the others was when our Moroccan driver Sayeed and guide Hamza switched from Moroccan music to Madonna's "Holiday," one of my all time favorite songs, and one completely incongruous with the scenery. ) Morocco has an extremely varied terrain, and our journey took us from Rabat on the Atlantic Ocean, through the Middle Atlas and then High Atlas Mountains, and then to the desert southeast, about 25 miles from Algeria. The area in which Ghilzan's family graze their sheep is reminiscent of Central Asia: rocky, windswept, with short green grass and bushes. (Rosemary grows wild in the area, and we grabbed some to refresh our closets back at Home Base.) Other parts are what I would call high chapparel, others craggy red gorges, and then long oasis-like, mile-wide swaths of palm trees following the main rivers. The towns in between are dusty, crowded, with lots of construction on the main roads. We did stop to see a traditional ancient Kasbah, which is analoguous to a feudal castle in Europe, and to shop for fossils captured in marble. As far as the people go, they seem quite relaxed somehow, in the midst of what feels like us to be a discombulated environment. It may be the comfort of mostly living in small towns, with traditional roles for everyone, and really, no particular need to chase a buck, because there are none to be found. Berber women in the high country are mostly covered up (not their faces, though) and in addition, wear a black drape over the whole ensemble. The people are so interesting looking (as they descend from all parts of Africa and Arabia), but it is considered rude, or even scandalous to photograph them, so we can only look. Very frustrating! (Ghilzan the nomad girl above was reassured by Sayeed and Hamza, and we left money for her family, for the pleasure of looking closely at, and photographing, their home and animals.) Anyway, the total drive to the Sahara took about 9 hours. We left Friday afternoon (six of us) and stopped overnight in a great hotel in Azrou. (The walls of the main salon and the staircase were beautifully tiled in traditional Moroccan style, and the food was also traditional and delicious.) I took a walk early in the morning, but it was clear that I was the only woman in sight, so quickly returned to the hotel. On Saturday, we made the rest of the trip to the Sahara, arriving at our destination Merzouga at about 5:00 pm -- in time to put on our desert turbans and get on the camels for a sunset ride of one and half hours into the desert. More details will follow in the next one or two blogs. Until then, b'salaamah.

Morocco - Land of Contradictions

Hi, everyone. I'm trying to figure out how to upload pictures, so I hope this works!

I will tell you about my camel trip tomorrow night, but wanted to just send along this picture of two young women looking out from an ancient mosque high above Rabat, to a construction site below (one of the young king's many projects). It kind of captures the incredible complexity of this country. It's simultaneously old and new; African, Arab, and French; secular and Islamic. Listening to the radio as the van takes us to the orphanage every day is quite an experience, and not just because of the insane second-world traffic all around us (you know, people driving on the sidewalk, all kinds of vehicles competing for inches of space, etc.) Anyway, all the announcing is in French; the news is always in the official language of Arabic; and the music is American. Last Friday, as we waited in the van to leave the orphanage, our driver Abdou was listening to the Friday sermon, sort of a soothing, droning monologue in Arabic. It was followed almost immediately on the station by HARD CORE RAP complete with the F-word and quite explicitly sexual lyrics!

Another example is our neighborhood. It's filled with embassies and fancy homes, but any empty lots are a wreck, strewn with garbage. Sidewalks start and stop. The traffic signs show a little green man, indicating "go," but the cars just move on through the intersections, which is a bit unnerving. It's all rather topsy turvy, with things strangely unfinished and discombobulated.

On top of it all is the Moroccan sand - soft and red, and pervading sandals, air, clothes. No matter how neat and new things are, the sand humbles it.

Okay, must go. If you can believe it (I can't), a bunch of us are making reservations on Orbitz for Cairo for the weekend of November 7. Somebody pinch me....

B'salaamah.

Five Days In -- Shared House, Lots of Babies, Camels Next!

As-salaam aleikum from Rabat. To bring you up to date....

My journey here was pleasantly uneventful. As predicted, I didn't really get excited until the wheels hit the ground in Morocco, but did start getting to know others in my group during the flight and while waiting on various customs/passport lines. Our group ranges in age from 78 (a retired nurse from London) to two recent grads who both turned 22 years old this week. There are single people and married couples, mostly mellow, experienced travelers, and more women than men. The group already in the house is much younger; the social divide is stark already!

The Cross Cultural Solutions house (aka “Home Base”) here in Rabat is what I would call “perfectly adequate.” It's in a fancy neighborhood in the suburbs, with embassies and such like all around, but by U.S. standards it's upper middle class. There are nice houses and Mercedes, but empty lots with litter in between. Sidewalks are inconsistent; where they are not, you just march through the dusty red Moroccan sand, and negotiate around the cactus and wild bougainvillea. We're on a busy street and Moroccans drive like maniacs, so I'm trying very hard not to get run over as I walk near the house. It would be totally ridiculous to come this far only to be run over by a Moroccan taxi!

If I have time/skill, I'll upload pictures of the house and my bunkbed digs. Outside of being terrified that I will snore or worse during the night, I'm sleeping fairly well. Plenty o'closet space; the bathroom not TOO gross; shower water usually at least warm. Almost all toilet seats in the house are broken or loose (I don't think Moroccans sit down), so THAT's a little disconcerting!

We are being fed wonderful Moroccan and Mediterranean food; we eat together (about 25 of us) in a large salon, with couches around the outside and short tables with small ottomans in the middle. Meals are precisely timed, so we are already Pavlovian in our response to the bell that's rung at mealtimes, jostling each other to line up at the buffet. At 4:00 PM, mint tea is served, along with small semi-sweet pastries (sort of like pancakes).

Now, about the volunteer work....Each morning, 14 of us are taken into downtown Rabat (near the ancient Medina) in a big white van to the Lalla Meriem Home for Abandoned Children. Some of the “children” are actually adults of indiscriminate age and severely deformed. The other 200 or so range in age from 0 to 6. The orphanage is in decent condition; what you'd expect from any such institution. The nurses are efficient, a bit rough by our standards with the kids, but basically kind. I have opted for the easiest gig I could think of, which is to help with the 6 to 12 month-olds. There are about 12 children in our area of the orphanage (what's called the “nid jaune,” or “yellow nest”), and I and another female volunteer help the nurses from 8:30 to 12:30 daily. You can pretty much imagine our work, as it's universal -- changing stinky diapers; wrestling just bathed-limbs into too tight clothes; comforting or distracting inconsolable screamers; bottle feeding; and cleaning up milky vomit. What makes it all a bit weird is that the nurses are trying desperately to tell us what to do in either French or Arabic, and then realizing we speak neither competently, using emphatic hand gestures and nods. The other thing that's quite odd is to see how docile the babies are. They're quite normal, but for the most part, they know that crying doesn't really pay off. They all wait patiently while the others are held, bathed, changed and fed.

We also spend a large chunk of time minding the babies in a 10' by 10' playpen. We just sit in there with them (which is of course no small feat with my creaky body). They roll over each other, cry, poop, throw up, suck their thumbs, touch the others gently, or just snooze. We keep them cleaned, and entertain them with songs and funny faces. We're also trying to touch and caress them a lot, in the hope that some small bit of the experience will make them think later in life that they deserve to be loved.

Back to Home Base and Rabat...we're getting Arabic and Moroccan history lessons, and have been taken on a quick tour of the Kasbah and the medina (old city), where all the souks (markets) are. The CCS managers who work with us speak classical Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French, Berber and English; they are excellent sources of information, and we're allowed to ask any question, no matter how dumb or culturally inappropriate. Mainly, I request from them the Arabic words for diaper, bottle, feed, sleep, don't cry, etc.

This coming weekend, I am traveling with six other volunteers to the edge of the Saharan desert , for camel rides and camping. Should be a blast – we'll drive through much of this beautiful country, including the High Atlas mountains, and will see great music, visit with Tuareg people and other local stuff. (If you have a map of Morocco handy, you can see our route from Rabat on the northern Atlantic coast to Merzouga in the south east of the country, near Algeria.) I'll fill you all in next week about the journey.

I think that's all for now. I'm enjoying myself, unwinding, not thinking AT ALL about my life before or after this trip (perhaps dangerously so). I'm just moving along, even letting other people plan all the weeekend side trips. I am so enjoying not being responsible for anything, except little Ahmed, Omar, Aaliyah, et al.

B'salaamah.