San Miguel de Allende November 10, 2007

Three weekends ago, my flatmate/coworker and I went to San Miguel de Allende for a day trip.  It was really nice.  It’s a very pretty city, a lot smaller than Queretaro and much more touristy.  The first thing that struck me was how many white faces I was seeing.  And I realised too that, even if a Mexican is really light-skinned or even blond-haired, I can very easily tell the difference between them and an American/Canadian.  There’s just something so specific about the clothes we wear, the way we wear them, the way we do our hair, the way we do our makeup, the way we walk.  I’ve had a German fool me on occasion, but that’s the only exception I can think of.

Anyway, so friend and I caught the bus from here to there (always an adventure) and walked around the town, admiring the beautiful plazas and the handicrafts that seem to fill every shop of every tourist town.  We had some amazing French food at a restaurant run by a couple of French ex-pats.  I had really tender pork medallions (not sure what the proper name of the cut is, but it was little circular pieces of all meat and no bone) in a delicate prune sauce with a mash of buttery potatoes, a puree of sweet carrots, perfectly done broccoli and roasted green beans.  Add to that the amuse bouche at the beginning (two types, actually: a homemade creamy smoked fish spread and a hard boiled egg spread both on slices of baguette) and the lovely glass of French white wine, and I was pretty pleased with both my meal and my bill of 12 dollars.

In the afternoon, it was starting to get a little chilly and we were both pretty tuckered out, so we sat down at a sidewalk cafe on the main square for a cafe and a chocolate.  While we were there, one of the four mariachi bands that had been strutting around the square came and played three ballads for the couple sitting next to us.  The deal with the mariachi bands is that they just hang about, pretending to tune their instruments, until someone offers to pay them for a specific number of songs.  Usually this is a dating couple when the guy is trying to impress the girl.  I say pretending to tune, because I really don’t think they know how to do it.  I’ve heard a number of mariachi and banda groups “tuning” before playing, and it never seems to work.  I think they really can’t hear it.  For example, two violin players waiting for a wedding party outside a church (it’s also popular for a wedding or quincenera party to employ a band to play for them outside of the church) were tuning up together while they waited.  They were both playing the same strings at the same time and they seemed to be listening to each other (they were only two feet away from each other), but they were about a quarter step off from each other.  They “tuned” for about five minutes, just the two of them, apart from the group, but they never actually changed the tension on their strings in a way that put them closer to being in tune with each other.  It was really baffling.  I stood and watched for a while, but it started to drive me a little crazy.  I wanted to go over and just tune the dang thing for them after about three futile minutes.  Luckily, there is truth to the phrase “close enough for folk music,” so the music usually sounds pretty good anyway (although I have heard some out of tune and painful banda music here in Queretaro, so YMMV).

Anyway, so after they played and sang the three sappy ballads for the courting couple, a guy wandered over and negotiated with the band for a minute.  They started laughing, but agreed.  So the eight of them plus the random guy walk into the middle of the street and proceed to do what pretty much amounted to live karaoke.  The guy paid them enough for two of his favourite songs, which he was then able to song along to.  He had a great voice (and a good stage personality), so it worked out really well.  But it was kind of funny.  People stopped to stare and I got the impression that it wasn’t necessarily the ‘done’ thing.  But I enjoyed the performance and the guy definitely enjoyed performing and the band seemed pretty light hearted about the whole thing.  But how neat, to be able to hire a band on a whim to play backup while you belt it out?  I kind of like the idea…

Rajas con crema November 10, 2007

One of my favourite foods down here is the poblano pepper.  It’s a pepper with a lot of flavour and a lot less sweetness than a bell pepper (or capsicum if you will).  It has a very little bit of kick to it, but hardly anything worth noting.  And it’s a very popular pepper to cook with.  You find it in lots of dishes.  For example, the other night I had a taco from this house/cafe a few doors down from my house that was filled was a poblano pepper that had been stuffed with cheese and then deepfried.  That was a pretty amazing taco (more like a quesadilla, really, but who am I to quibble?).

But my all time favourite is the rajas con crema, which is little strips of poblano pepper in a savoury cream sauce.  There is an awesome bakery between my school and the park with the monarchs (see previous post) and they have really good empanadas filled with rajas con crema.  Empanadas here are different than the ones I’m used to; it’s more of a flaky baked pastry stuffed with tuna, ham and cheese, rajas, or chicken mole.  Not deep fried at all.

Today after work, one of my coworkers invited me to have lunch with her at her favourite taco stand.  It’s a stand just off of a main road near our school and it’s really elaborate.  They have a fairly large seating area and about 15 different fillings that you can put in your tacos.  I chose one with mushrooms, one with carnitas (roast, pulled pork), and one with rajas con crema.  Their rajas were amazing.  They were so soft, flavoured perfectly, and I really felt more like I was eating dessert than a meal.  There’s something that’s just so perfect about the roast poblano pepper with the savoury cream sauce.  Yum.

Dosai October 8, 2007

Eating that Thai red curry reminded me of how many foods and flavours I’ve been missing since I’ve been down here. So, in an attempt at catharsis of sorts and perhaps as a reminder to myself of things I want to try, I’m going to post some recipes of things I wish I could eat and that I might actually be able to accomplish if I put some effort in. Here’s my first installment.

from the Indian Food Kitchen:

(Plain) Dosa

 

• 1 cup plain rice
• 1 cup parboiled rice
• 1/4 cup white urad dal
• 1/2 tsp. methi (fenugreek) seeds
• 1 /2 tsp soda bi carbonate
• 1/2 cup curds
• 10-12 tsps. ghee or oil as preferred
• water for grinding

Wash the rices and dal together. Add plenty of water and methi seeds. Allow to soak for 7-8 hours or overnight. Rewash the rice by draining the water 2-3 times. Grind to a paste. Rawa -like grains should be felt in the batter. Add soda bicarb and salt and mix well. Keep aside in a warm place for 8-10 hours. Beat the curds well.

Add to the batter, add more water if required. The consistency of the batter should be thick enough to thickly coat on a spoon when dipped. Heat the iron griddle or non-stick tawa well. Pour a spoonful of batter in the centre, spread with the back of the spoon to a thin round. Pour a tsp. of ghee or oil over it. Remove with spatula when crisp. Serve hot with chutney and / or sambar.

 

Time goes by, so slowly October 8, 2007

Okay, so not so slowly, actually more like really quickly. Or at least in a haze. I’ve been working for The Co now for over three weeks. My first two weeks were crazy. Working from seven to nine every morning, from four to nine every evening, and then last Saturday from nine to one in the morning. It takes half an hour to walk to or from work, so each day was about five hours of sleep at night, seven hours of work, two hours of walking, and trying to catch whatever sleep I could during the middle of the day. I had been enjoying eating this thing called the comida corrida, which is a three to five course meal, often with fresh limeade (or sometimes pineapple or apple ade), that includes a nice homemade soup, maybe a tostada, an entree with rice and beans and tortillas and some sort of homecooked lovely main dish, and then a small dessert of some kind, maybe rice pudding. This is all fresh and served hot and costs about four dollars. I was really enjoying this routine. But since I’ve started working, I’ve been lucky to get a banana and a slice of wheat bread for lunch. Breakfast has been a banana or a granola bar (actually more like a cereal whole grain bar with no oats; they’re really good) on the walk to work, and dinner is usually some yogurt (which is still really good. there’s this shop down the street from me that makes their own homemade yogurt with fresh strawberries or pineapple or all sorts of flavours including cactus. i’ve been sticking to the strawberry and pineapple). Sleep has been spotty and difficult and there’s never enough of it.

But the past two weeks things have been a little better. My schedule’s been changed so that I have a lot more business classes. I go to one factory in town in the mornings from 7 to 8:30 or 7:30 to 9 Monday through Thursday. Monday and Tuesday night I have a two hour factory class one hour outside of town from five to seven, so I’m “working” for that one from four to eight if you include the travel in the school’s private car with the driver (which they do, so I basically get paid to sit in a car for four hours a week). Wednesday and Thursday I still have a five hour shift in the evening, but then Friday I work from nine to eleven in the morning and then I’m done. I still work every other Saturday, but really it’s been a lot easier so far.

This past weekend was nice.  I didn’t have to work on Saturday, so work finished for me at eleven on Friday morning.  Friday night my roommates and I ordered in pizza and bought some beer from the store down the street.  It was really nice to sit around the house eating pizza and drinking beer, wearing messy clothes, chatting.  It felt very relaxed.  Saturday night one of my roommates (a 29 year old chemist from Veracruz), her friend, and I went to a dance club.  We were definitely some of the oldest people there, but we had a great time anyway.  And I was definitely more in the mood to enjoy dancing with my girlfriends than worrying about dancing with guys, so it ended up working out really well.  They played an interesting mix of pop music from all over (Europe, USA, Mexico, all over Latin America) as well as some hip hop, some banda, some electronica, and some reggaeton.  It was a good night, and a lot of fun to get dressed up and “go out.”  On Sunday, I made it out to a new grocery store (well, new for me) that is out of my way but has a way better selection and better prices than the one on the walk between my house and my work.  They even have a special this month: Tailandia exotica, so today for lunch I had some Thai red curry and rice.  What a treat!

Today was pretty good and all my classes went well.  I’m really enjoying this one class that is really advanced and all young women.  They are really interesting and a lot of fun.  In the afternoon, though, as I was getting out of the car to go into the factory I slammed my pinkie finger in the car door.  Really slammed.  Hard.  I thought I was going to throw up for a couple of hours after that, I felt so nauseous.  I didn’t break it or anything, but it’s been bleeding since then and the nail is cracked near the cuticle and I’m worried the nail will fall off.  I didn’t have time to do anything for it during the day, so I just had a fingernail caked with blood, but tonight when I got home I tried cleaning it up with a wet napkin.  It’s crazy sensitive to the touch, but I was able to get a good deal of the blood off.  But it’s apparently still bleeding because the nail has gotten bloody again.  Oh well, I guess I wasn’t really using that nail anyway.  At least I don’t feel as nauseous anymore.  That lasted for a good four or five hours.  Anyway, so probably more details than you were hoping for, but it’s definitely what’s on my mind tonight (especially as I’m trying to type capital I’s and apostrophes; I never realised before how much I use my right pinkie finger while typing).

Chicken Mole and English Grammar August 3, 2007

Things just keep getting better.  The first day I was just so hot and confused and found such a bad place to stay.  The heat really messes with the way I think.  I keep forgetting things and my brain feels, well, cloudy most of the time.  But I´ve been getting lots of sleep and taking cold showers two or three times a day and drinking lots and lots of fresh water and eating healthy food, not a lot of fried things and a lot of fruits and vegetables.  Plus I´ve been taking advantage of the afternoon siesta, where you go inside and have a nap instead of try and brave the afternoon sun.  Much better to get things done in the morning and late afternoon. 

Up til now I´ve felt like I was walking in a daze and just struggling to keep things going: make sure I keep sunscreen on and drink water and eat food at regular intervals etc.  But today I´ve done some good things.  I sat down for a few hours with my grammar book and studied some structures that I wasn´t too familiar with.  Well, obviously I´m familiar with the structures themselves, but I had never thought about the formulas behind them.  I´m going to have some serious studying to do in order to be good at this.  That´s a good thing, though.  I kind of miss study, mental application. 

Anyway, the good thing is that my brain is finally functioning well enough to actually sit and study and think about things.  I also managed to get my cell phone sorted out, so that now I have a Mexican number.  I was able to send texts to my mother, so I know it works, but I have no idea how much it costs or how much credit is currently on my phone.  I´m looking at the telcel website right now, but it´s all in Spanish and I´m having a hard time finding the tariffs for international sms.  Or for anything, for that matter.  But at least I figured out how to buy and activate the SIM card!  Yay for little victories. 

Also, I went to this restaurant a block from my hostel.  The backpackers I´m staying at is pretty far off the main drag, much closer to the real main street (avenida 30) than to the tourists´main street (avenida 5).  Here on avenida 30 there are cell phone stores and cheap internet cafes and restaurants that don´t quote their prices in US$ and stores where not everyone speaks English.  Also, on avenida 5 there is always someone calling out to you, approaching you, asking you to take a look in their shop or their menu or get your hair braided, etc.  Here on avenida 30 everybody leaves you alone until you actually come into their shop, and then they´re happy to help you and they´re patient with your broken Spanish and don´t immediately start speaking in English.  The only people who heckle you on the street are the construction workers.  I like avenida 30.  Anyway, so I went to this restaurant just off of avenida 30 near my hostel today for lunch.  It´s always been busy whenever I´ve gone past: office workers on lunch break, fashionable teenagers after school, ladies who lunch.  The prices were much lower than any tourist place, plus they didn´t sell ¨Margaritas! Daiquiries! Corona! Tacos!¨  It wasn´t fancy, but the food was really nice.  I had shredded chicken wrapped in corn tortillas and covered in mole sauce.  It really was covered, too.  Three little tortilla rolls laying in a baking dish that was full to the brim with mole sauce.  At first I thought it was just a bowl of sauce; I had to poke around for the tortillas.  Boy was it good, though.  The sauce was so rich and tasty.  Almost too rich, but not quite.  They also had really good coffee.  I had cafe con leche, which I think was coffee flavoured milk.  Just the way I like it.  And the best thing of all: the place was air conditioned!  How wonderful to go and sit for a couple of hours in an air conditioned restaurant, sipping coffee and reading about English grammar!

Up to now I´ve always felt quite young.  Save for Steak ´n Shake, I´ve almost always been the youngest person at my work or in my flat or in the hostel.  Or at least I never felt like the oldest.  But it seems like most of the people in the backpackers are children: 18 and 19 year olds on their gap year after high school, or traveling about during the summer after their first year in college.  They all have so much energy!  They run about during the day, diving in cenotes and parasailing and climbing ruins and scuba diving, then they come back to the hostel and go out drinking all night long.  There are a couple of other people more my age and we seem to drift towards each other.  I never know it at first by sight, but the people I end up talking with always turn out to be in their mid 20s.  They don´t seem to have the same need to always be doing something, always be entertained.  They are calmer, they don´t have something to prove.  It´s a bit strange feeling like an old fuddy duddy all of the sudden.  But the kids do kind of annoy me after awhile.  Partly because they are so hyper active and I just want to tell them to get the hell of my lawn, but also because they provide such a stark contrast to me that I feel very slow and lazy around them.  I hate the “so what did you today?” in the evening.  “Well, we took the bus to Tulum and we ran to the top of the ruins and then we took another bus to this other town and we went snorkling and then we ate all this fried food and drank a whole lot of beer and now we´re going dancing” (it´s always “we”, never “I”) “What did you do today?”  Well, I took a shower, went grocery shopping, walked along the beach for awhile but that got too hot so I took a nap for a couple of hours.  Then I took another shower and made some food.  I think I´ll read for a bit and then go to bed.”  I´m not cut out to be a tourist.  I hate cramming as many things as I can into a couple of weeks.  Some of these people have been doing this for months, too!  They´ve been traveling around Central and South America and Mexico for months, going to various beaches and ziplining through the rainforests and hiking the Inca Trail and climbing lots of ruins.  For months on end.  Damn kids. 

asima January 28, 2005

so the surprises in the aisles. there is a big sign that says “canned tomatoes” (in french actually, something like preserves de tomates, but i know what it means) hanging over the aisle. there are a whole 10 feet dedicated to canned tomato products. that’s pretty normal, right? so i thought it would be pretty easy to make a decent tomato sauce: get some canned tomatoes and some canned mushrooms and some onions and garlic and voila. but all, ALL the cans are tomato concentrate. there are tons of sizes, lots of brands, lots of pretty pictures of tomatoes, but all the cans contain concentrated puree. there was one brand that had one size of non-concentrated puree, but that was it. apparently people here use a lot of tomato paste and absolutely no chunked tomatoes. there are other weird things (weird to me, probably not weird to moroccans). but altogether probably one of the most western experiences you can have in morocco. it’s really kind of comforting, and i enjoy going there. it’s a great field trip.

abby and i are going to walk to the bou jeloud gardens which separate the medina from fes el jdid. we haven’t been into el jdid at all, but there are extensive palace grounds there, not open to the public, and the old jewish quarter with some old synagogues. they say that most of the inhabitants are no longer jewish, so i’m not sure if the synagogues are functioning or just attractions. not much else is going on. i’m reading paul bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky. i like it. i relate a lot to the things he’s talking about. he doesn’t give a lot of description of the culture so i think you would miss a lot if you had never been here. i think that’s part of the point. it’s the story of some americans who wander into north africa without knowing much about it and their observations are scattered and they sometimes miss really important things, things that paul bowles of course would have noticed. it leads to some confusion on their part, which is completely understandable.

have you got the january edition of national geographic? the french edition has a big story about the berberes of maroc and i’m hoping the american edition has the same story. there were some amazing pictures in it; some of them reminded me very much of amellago. i’m going to get going; walking around helps warm me up. hope everything at home is well.

Re: Are you back in Fes? January 26, 2005

i am back in fes. we got in late last night from amellago to rich to fes. it was a long day of traveliing. thanks for your e-mails; i’m starting to get kind of lonely for home and it’s nice to hear familiar voices in my head when i read my e-mail. that’s funny that you (mom) remember me riding a camel when i was a little kid. i think i vaguely remember that too. about the eid: we were at a cafe in rich when the slaughter happened, which was ten in the morning on friday. so we didn’t see anything or hear anything, which was nice. i think abby would have completely flipped out. the one thing we did notice was that, since we had arrived in morocca there has been a constant presence of sheep and goats. every market has zippers of sheep/goats for sale, people are dragging their family’s sheep through the streets (they pick up its hind legs and just start walking and the sheep just struggles to keep its front legs moving so that it’s face doesn’t drag on the pavement as it’s being hauled behind its new owner), every street you walk through, every house you go to, there is the constant sound of bleating and baahing. well, when we emerged from that cafe, the main thing i noticed was a complete silence. not a bleat or a baah to be heard for miles. the massive sheep/goat presence we had experienced the weeks before was very suddenly completely gone.

we went to lahcen’s sister’s house in rich for lunch, though, and had very very fresh lamb kabobs. it actually wasn’t all that tasty (lahcen says that meat is always better the second day). i was really uncomfortable at the house, too. lahcen was really uncomfortable, too, so that didn’t help. then his sister’s husband drove us out to amellago. it was a really different experience from anyplace i’ve ever been. the town has no electricity and very few stores, certainly not anything with normal operating hours or signs or regulations. i have never been so far out of reach. there was one phone in the village, but it was always busy and there were certainly no internet cafes. lahcen’s family is really lucky because they have solar panels on the roof for lightbulbs at night. they also had gas tanks that you could put a mesh thing on top of and then when you light it it will function as a lamp. the house was made totally out of mud, there was very basic plumbing: one of the toilets that’s a porcelein footstand and there was a small family style hammam that was heated with a wood fire. none of this was automated, of course. the family is very fortunate in that they have a private well in their own courtyard, so in the morning one of the sisters has the chore of drawing up water from the well and filling these large plastic barrels. one of the barrels is placed in the toilet/hammam area. there is a small bucket next to the toilet, and when you use the toilet you take water from the bucket using the cup that sits in it and pour it down the hole. this essentially flushes the toilet. it really works out pretty well, but it’s not as much fun when you’re throwing up all night because you have to squat over the toilet (the ground is dirt and the stall has no light and there’s no place to sit and nothing to rest against except for the toilet flushing bucket). the entrance to the hammam is right off of the toilet stall. it is a fairly good size room, definitely big enough for a few people to bathe at the same time, and the ceiling is almost high enough to stand up straight (i had to crouch a little, i think lindsey could stand). the room juts out onto the central courtyard and there is a place in the courtyard where you can build a fire underneath one of the walls of the hammam. there is a large water container sitting above the fire (which you fill up from the well), so after the fire has been going for about half an hour the inside is very steamy and warm. you take a container of cold water in there with you and your own personal bucket and they have very low small wooden seats to sit on so you are not sitting on the floor. you use a plastic cup with a handle to scoop water out of the hot bucket and then add a little cold water so it doesn’t burn you and you sit on the stool and pour the water over your head. i was really glad i had been to the big city hammam because i had a much better idea of how to bathe myself. that family hammam was really such a luxury. i would love to have something like that at my house one day, but perhaps tiled instead of made with mud.

most everyone is the village is a subsistance farmer, so when we had chicken for dinner one night we heard the bird being killed that afternoon out in their barn area, which was conveniently adjacent to our room (i think that squicked abby out a little). i got food poisoning and threw up in the middle of the night; that sucked. i just started eating food again today. almost all the food came from their house: we had milk from their cows, eggs from their chickens, cous cous that was hand rolled by their mother, vegetables from their garden, etc.

his family was super nice, at least i think they were because they only spoke tamazight (the berber language) and a little bit of arabic. they always smiled at us. his brother was awesome, though, and treated us really well. he spoke french really well and a little english, so we were able to communicate a bit. maharoc, as he is called ( his official name is mohammed, his berber name is maharoc, and it is a statement to go by your berber name rather than your official arabic name) was really really kind to us and showed us around and kept us fed. i liked him a lot. lahcen has three little sisters who are still at home (seham, 9; miriam, 12; and suehad, 14); the two younger are still girls and are very sweet, but the oldest i thought was at least 18 when i first met her. she was kind of rebelious towards lahcen, i think because she has started wearing a head scarf since he was last home and he was chiding her for it. many berber women do not traditionally wear hijab and he is slightly upset that his sisters all do now. while in amellago we hiked around the gorge and walked through the fields and just generally lived. i got a big gash on my forehead when i was out walking in the gorge in amellago (it’s in the high atlas mountains) and i’ve been trying to find hydrogen peroxide since we got back to fes. it’s not horrible, more of a big scrape than a gash, really, but i really don’t want it to get infected. people are giving me weird looks in the streets, though, and that’s kind of fun. it’s cool to have battle scars.

we took the local bus from amellago to rich. it was like a vw minibus except that there were rows of seats on it. abby and i got to sit in the front seat, but lindsay and lahcen sat in the back. apparently a woman in the back was throwing up into a bag for most of the hour journey. i felt really badly for her. the little bus is packed full of people and really stuffy and rattles and jumps a lot as it goes over the unpaved sand road. in rich we got another local bus company to take us to fes. it kind of sucked, definitely not as good as the ctm bus company, but it got us here safe. the ctm buses are the only buses that run on a schedule; all the other buses wait at each stop until they are full again before they take off. but apparently they just stopped the regular ctm run to rich, so we had to make do. at least the bus filled up pretty quickly at each stop. now back in fes we are planning to go to volubilus sunday and casablanca monday and then home tuesday. there is a mosque in casa that abby wants to see so we are going there a day early. we are thinking of trying to catch a football match on saturday if they are playing in town. we haven’t planned wednesday, thursday, and friday yet. it’s weird to think that it’s just that short. i’m excited about coming back home, but i’m also getting used to being here. i guess that always happens: you get used to your new place and it seems strange to be going home. i’m just about ready, though. i really like hot showers on command and being able to understand people on the streets. it’s great to be here but i don’t know how i would do it for more than a couple of months.
i should get going. i’ll be in better contact now that i’m in fes, so you should write me.

Food and scenery, what more could you ask for? January 13, 2005

Abby and I are leaving tomorrow early in the morning (hopefully) to go down to merzuga and see the sahara desert. there are apparently 700 foot dunes down there. i have a bit of a cold so i’m hoping the drier, warmer air will help to clear that out. lindsay talked to one of her friends there this morning and he said that it’s 24, 25 degrees celsius down there. that sounds really nice right now.

azrou was good. it was nice to be out of the city and in the country. the bus ride tomorrow between rich and erfoud is apparently really beautiful. there is some amazing landscape in morocco. when we were leaving azrou it was dusk and it was so pretty. all the hills around the town were lit up in orange and pink. i’ve never seen anything like it. i just wanted to keep looking at it. the guidebook says that the dunes are even prettier and that some of the mountains we drive through to get there are unbelievable. there are a couple friends in merzuga that we’re meeting up with and then we’ll go to a little town with a g name (gamalila or something like that) and then we’ll go into the valley of the roses with another friend. it’s really nice that we have friends all along the route. we’ll be gone from tomorrow morning (friday) to thursday night probably. it’s funny to think that that is almost as long as we’ve been in morocco. but then the first few days are always the longest.

lindsay and i went to a hammam this morning (abby wasn’t feeling well so she stayed home). it was amazing. it’s like a big communal bath, with the whole room as the bath yet not a pool. it is a pretty large tiled room that is very warm and kind of steamy. there was a fountain of hot water on one side and all the women sit around with buckets of water. you fill your bucket at the fountaina and then sit down anywhere on the tile (the whole room drains out so there is no standing water) and you pour the water over your head and wash your hair and just keep washing yourself over and over and pouring lots of hot water over yourself. it was the first time i’ve been warmed to the core since i’ve been here. i even got to shave my legs, something that isn’t remotely possible anywhere else since it’s so cold. lindsay and i paid a little extra and this older woman came in with us and washed our hair with this little brush thing and then rubbed us down with soap. we stayed in there for over an hour, washing and pouring hot water over our heads. some hammams are very touristy, but this had only neighborhood people and us in it. there were two mothers with their daughters, the old woman who works there, and this woman named latifah. she struck up a conversation with lindsay. it was very friendly. it is near impossible to meet women around here because it is all men in the cafes and the women on the street are going somewhere and don’t talk to anybody. but it was really easy in the hammam. they were really friendly. and whereas here people are very shy about some things, bodies are not one of them. this woman washed lindsay and i up and down while latifah casually chatted with us and washed herself. i don’t think people in the states would go for the hammam thing because everyone is naked in one room together (separated by sex of course) and bathing but here it seems very normal. i brought lotion along with me and after my bath i slathered up. i feel cleaner and fresher than i have in a week.

we came back after that and got abby and got lunch at the local sandwich counter. they finally half understood the tortilla style thing that lindsay was asking for, which is turkey and egg and pommes frites all grilled together (she’s been promising it all week to us, saying it’s really good, but no one seems to make it right); they put the egg in but not the pommes frites, which was fine because the fried egg was really the thing i was after. abby is having lots of problems with her stomach; hopefully her body will get used to the food soon. we’re going to lindsay’s class tonight to talk to her intermediate group. we’re supposed to tell them about who we are, where we’re from, what we do, and what we think of morocco. i’m really looking forward to it. the class has mostly 17 and 18 year olds. i’m getting really cold down here in this basement internet cafe i use, so i think i’m going to go back up into the sunshine now. i’ll write again when i can.

Still Going… January 11, 2005

Yes, mom, to answer your question, Asrou is only an hour and a half from Fes by car. It is different though in a very lovely way. Morocco isn’t too big, but there are large variations throughout the country because of the four different mountain chains, the two coasts, and of course the sahara desert. The air here is really fresh (i didn’t realize how polluted the air in fes is until i got out of the car in asrou and could breathe well for the first time in days). The sun is really bright and things aren’t so damp. I’ve been feeling a little sick for a few days, i think because of the cold and damp, but i’m rapidly feeling better up here. We came here the way most Moroccans would, by a grand taxi. It’s basically an old Mercedes, just a regular sedan, but they put four in the back seat and two in the front passenger seat for seven total in the small sedan. It’s very cramped, but slightly cozy in a weird way. Abby and I sat in the back with two men and Lindsay sat in the front with a woman who was sniffing something from a little tin off of the back of her fingernail and using the mirror on the back of her cellphone to watch. It was very strange. She was Moroccan and young and dressed in modern clothes. We have no idea what it was, but it looked like some kind of dried plant (maybe tobacco? can you do that?). It was a beautiful drive, going up through the mountains. And a grand taxi is really cheap. I paid 25 Dh to get to Asrou, which is the equivalent of three dollars. It’s by far the cheapest way to travel short distances.

We’re staying at this really nice hotel in the center of town (it’s a very small town) with some heat and warm showers (a rarity). it’s definitely spartan but at least it’s not freezing, and it’s very reasonably priced. Lahcen used to work as a chef in a hotel in asrou, so he knew about this place and encouraged us to stay here. His uncle lives in town and he is very close to his uncle. His family is Berber, and they are famous for their hospitality. When he told his uncle that we were in town, his uncle actually came down to the hotel and waited outside for us this morning. We didn’t know, and we didn’t get out til noon, so we missed him, but he insists that we come visit with him at his house tonight. He has three children: Hamsah, Mohammed, and Miriam; who apparently adore Lahcen. Lindsay says that when they visited before Christmas, the children hung all over him and hung on his every word and wouldn’t leave his side the whole time. They are 11, 9, and 3. We’re bringing twix for Miriam, the youngest, and we hope to get some kind of card together that the kids can decorate or sign to bring back for Lahcen.

It’s funny: everytime I introduce myself or am introduced to a Moroccan, their eyes light up and they look at me a bit closer and then lean in and say “you know that Miriam is a Moroccan name?” It seems that everyone here has a sister name Miriam. We visited some of Lahcen’s friends who work in a carpet store here, and we sat in their shop and drank mint tea and ate little chocolate pecan treats (very french seeming) and chatted. They were very impressed to learn my name, and then when they heard Abby’s they decided to call her Abir instead so that we could both have moroccan names. Abir means sunrise.

On to the food. Last night we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was very nice and kind of upscale (at least the most upscale place we’ve been yet). It seemed very french in it’s set up, but the food was a mix of Moroccan and French I think. We had a potato soup to start off which was pureed potatoes, carrots, and leeks. It was very tasty. I think there must have been some butter in it, too. Then we wanted to get the house specialty of a tajine of rabbit and prunes, but they were all out of rabbit, so we got a tajine of veal, prunes, tons of peas, and carrots. I had seen the pictures of the tajines full of peas but i hadn’t seen one yet. I was kind of disappointed when i saw them. At least they were a little smaller than american peas so i actually had a couple bites of them. We also got a side dish of sauteed potatoes, which were lovely, and then creme caramel for dessert. the whole meal: three soups, a veal tajine for two, sauteed potatoes, three sodas, a liter of water, and three creme caramels plus the bread and butter cost only 200 Dh total. that is maybe 23 dollars. I had never really had veal before, but it was really well done and it tasted okay. it went really well with the prunes. it sat pretty heavy in my stomach, but i was able to digest it. That is really the first red meat i’ve eaten because it’s usually really easy to get chicken, but red meat is very common in morocco so i figured i should try it out. Then this morning we went to a patisserie and had fresh orange juice, cafe au lait, croissants, yogurt, and a baguette with cheese (a soft white not very strong cheese; it was tasty).

Speaking of stomachs, though, poor Abby is having some stomach problems. She has been very careful about not getting strawberries in her panache (you don’t peel them) and about not eating uncooked peppers or things like that whereas i have been throwing caution to the wind and enjoying my full flavoured panache, but she is the first to get sick. She woke up early this morning with dry heaves (which was weird because she hadn’t thrown up or anything, we don’t know why they were dry) and has been having trouble all morning now. She just left the internet cafe to go back to the room and lie down. It’s lucky that our hotel is in the middle of town, because we are just down the street from the patisserie and the internet cafe and those things. I think she’ll lie down until 4:30 when we are going to meet the uncle. We will probably have atay there (atay is the arabic name for the ubiquitous mint drink; it is difficult to find regular black tea, or “the lipton” as they call it in french – the is french for tea) and they might ask us to stay for dinner. There is a big market (the once a week souq) in Asrou on Tuesdays, so we will check that out. Asrou is a Berber town and one of the best places to buy the Berber rugs, which are really beautiful. They also make these cloaks called gilabas which are head to toe ordeals with pointy hoods that many Berber men wear. They are made out of the same weaving that the carpets are. They are really warm and water proof. I should get going. I’ll write when I get back to Fes. Write with more questions. There is so much going on that I’m much better when I have prompts.

A Moroccan Good Time January 9, 2005

so, to answer your e-mailed question, i have not yet bargained at a market. the kinds of stores we have been to so far are not bargaining stores. we have been to juice stands and restaurants and things that might be called drug stores or general stores or corner stores. but one doesn’t bargain at these kinds of stores. we have walked through the markets of the medina (which is the medieval part of the city that we live in, famous for its markets) but we haven’t bought anything there.

today was the first day that abby and i really went out on our own. lindsay and lahcen are working all day today, so abby and i caught a taxi from the medina to the ville nouvelle or new city. we had lunch and juice (you can get fresh squeezed juice from little juice shops that are all over the city: orange juice “cheen” or “panashay” which is a mixture of orange, strawberry, avocado, melon, banana, and possibly other things) and sat in the sun and talked. sitting in the sun is very nice because we are very cold. the medina is very very cold because the walls are high and made of stone, so it’s like being in a cathedral where the sun never shines. no wonder so many women prefer to stay on the roof and do housework there because it’s so much warmer when the sun shines on you. le ville nouvelle is a bit better because there are more wide boulevards and modern streets and not as many tiny alley/passageways as in the medieval part, and so more sun gets to the ground level in that part of the city, but it’s still cold inside lindsay’s classroom because the building is made of marble and shaded by trees. it would be lovely in the summer.

then abby and i caught a cab home and went out into the medina exploring. some people had warned that people should not go exploring in the medina because they would get lost. but lindsay and lahcen said that was rubbish and that as long as we stayed to the two main streets we would be fine (the two main “streets” are more like sidewalks than streets; no cars because it is too narrow so everyone carries their goods in and out on donkeys). they were totally right. we went in, found a neat little wood crafts museum with a fantastic view from the roof and then found our way out of the medina again a different way quite easily. we were a little proud. we were also quite flattered, because everyone in there told us how nice we were and how pretty our eyes were. it seems like there are always many men ready to give us extravagant compliments. they are especially friendly on those main drags (tella kubira and tella seghir run parallel and are the main streets of the souk).

it is nice that the people in lindsay’s neighborhood are getting kind of used to seeing us, because now the corner store, sandwich shop and beignet shop people say hi but the random men who seem always to be hanging out on the street visiting with each other just keep talking to themselves instead of trying to get our attention. it makes me feel more like a person.

as far as other trips, there is a national holiday this weekend, so lindsay has a three day break. we are going to go to asrou tomorrow morning together and hang out there for sunday, monday and tuesday. there is a big souk there on tuesdays, so we might get to bargain then. we haven’t figured out exactly how we’re spending the rest of our time. lindsay and lahcen don’ t have many good friends in fes. one of the reasons they bonded was because both of them are relatively new to the city. lahcen is originally from a berber town down south and just moved to fes a couple years ago. none of his family lives here. we did get to meet one of his friends, though. hussein and lahcen both are the caretakers and lahcen is also the chef of two riads in the medina. they are like bed and breakfasts. from what we can tell, europeans buy them and then hire a moroccan man and a moroccan woman to take care of them. the woman is the housekeeper and of a lower class and the man runs the establishment and is considered fairly high class. but they do all the work. we hang out in lahcen’s riad a lot because it is heated. we also got to visit hussein’s riad. we sat on the roof and drank mint tea. it had a lovely view of the medina.

now, speaking of mint tea, we get to the food. mint tea is really good. it is black tea with tons of fresh mint floating in it and loads of sugar. it’s kind of a tradition. there is a whole ceremony of sorts that goes along with drinking tea, and you drink it everytime you get to a new place. then there’s the juice. i really like the juice. we’ve also had couscous, which is different than what we call couscous. is is the grain, but it’s also a whole meal with meat (we got the chicken) and vegetables and sauce stuff on it. quite good. also chicken tajines, which is kind of like the chicken at la teresita, very soft and falls off the bone, cooked in this teepee looking thing with pommes and this thing kind of like celery. there are lots of sandwich stands on the streets which have a hot grill and take various kinds of meat and grill it and put it in a hoagie. pretty good.

time running out, more later.