Welcome to Morocco! January 7, 2005

Hello, everyone! Well, we finally made it, after all the flight delays, but we’re here safely now. Things are really good, except for the crazy french keyboard that is making me type really slow. our flight left tuesday afternoon at 5, and we got into casablanca at 5:20 yesterday morning. we took a train from the casa airport to the main casa train station and then the four and a half hour train ride to fes. neither of us could sleep on the plane, although i made the effort and closed my eyes for an hour. i also slept on and off for a couple of hours on the train. abby was incredibly tired when we finally got here. luckily, we did very well getting to fes and lindsay and lahcen met us at the station and negotiated the taxi.

Lindsay is well and i really like lahcen; he’s very friendly and tries to make lindsay happy, which (luckily for us) includes helping us out a lot. he speaks limited english, though in the past two days he’s proven to be it better than lindsay thought he would be, and abby speaks limited french and i speak only english. at first it was really awkward hanging out because of the language barriers, but it’s starting to seem normal. i’m starting to understand some of lindsay and lahcen’s french conversations, and he can understand almost all of our english conversations. he’s been trying to get us to practice language: abby french and me arabic. i can say some useful things now, but i can’t understand responses or hold any conversation save “hello, how are you? i’m good, thank you” but that usually makes people more friendly. the unfortunate part is that then people start talking to me in arabic, see my blank stare, start talking in french, see me straining to understand, then get really disappointed. then they usually say something in mixed french and english, and i reply in the same with small smatterings of arabic thrown in to keep me on their good side. it’s amazing how surprised and happy people are when you speak even a little arabic, and it makes you realize how many people come here and rely on french and expect everyone to speak french to them. Lahcen is determined to teach me more arabic, and i’m very excited to learn. he’s a very good teacher: he teaches me phrases that i can use right then and then he drills me on them as we’re walking. he keeps joking that i’ll be bargaining in arabic by the end of the week. he’s doing the same to abby in french, but she’s not as interested in learning it; I think she’s still shell shocked from her high school language class experience and is convinced she will never learn any of it.

lindsay’s place is nice, if a little cold. it’s actually very cold. i slept with two sleeping bags and a blanket last night. there is no heat and the high stone walls cool it a lot and keep the sun out. it would be perfect in summer… i’m always surprised when i walk outside and find out how warm it is. i’m having a great time. it’s really an amazing place. very different, yet strangely similar. it definitely seems like a third world country in a lot of ways, and some things that we take for granted are very difficult here. take heat and hot water for example. i had to get up first for my shower this morning, which meant getting out of my by-now-almost-warm bed into the freezing air, going downstairs, turning on the gas for hot water, waiting for ever for it to warm up and still not having it get very warm, being absolutely freezing because the air is freezing and the tile is freezing and the water is perhaps luke warm at best, shivering for half an hour after the ordeal was over. i’m also starting to feel like i have a cold and i’m positive that it’s because everything inside is so damp and cold. it never dries out or warms up. but there are lots of absolutely amazing things as well. i’m so happy i’m here; i’ve never experienced anything like this before. I’ll try to say more about that next time. But for now, my hour at the cafe is up.