the names of these currencies

(I'm still three weeks behind)

The weekends, we travel.

Two weekends ago we went to Rabat, the capital city, which all reputable sources of travel information like to describe as boring but which really isn't anything like that at all.

7 am: Get up, up, up and brush of the teeth and raze of the head and face, and wash of the body, the body- the one which, absent any repeated form of physical resistance, retreats further into its natural state of thinness. I'm a bean pole, ladies and gents, it's official.

--Did I mention I've found peanut soap here? The one whose ingredients are so base and basic, so only-the-slim-minimum of qualities necessary to be soap that it only just barely exists at all, the one sold in square, inelegant chunks, stamped on the surface with a picture of a sickle, the one that smells like nothing at all in particular (and to me, like two holy years in a wasteland) the one which lathers only half-heartedly but which cleans expertly, the one whose color is the color of sand and hazes- did I mention that I found that?--

My coffee habit is well supported here. A coffee machine and a coterie of cohabitating devotees conspire to help me drink cup after black cup of the stuff each day. Down a few quick glugs and a hunk or two of moon bread and exit.

Split off: We walk to a main boulevard and catch a petit red (cab) after only a moderate amount of hand wringing and watch-checking. On this roll of the dice the cabbie is nice (they're all guys). He's heavy and dark skinned and deep voiced and 50 ish and bearded ; he chats with me a bit and says “Welcome to Morocco”

Reconvene: Fes's temple-like train station has a giant clock on its wide front archway which announces a time with two, thick hands that is not only severely inaccurate, but which would be so in all time zones, everywhere.

Seriously though, the train station is cathedral-esque and full of light and lovely. Intricate wood panels in Maghrebi knots form the center of a sculpted ceiling; light floods; voices echo.

2^nd class: We grab 4 of our 87-dirham seats (consecutive, self-facing) and settle in, and laugh. It bears mentioning that I really have great affection for many of the other students here. It's honestly surprising, because after each point in my life at which I make new friends I become convinced that I'm no longer capable of making friends. But I just follow the script folks, and it happens again. 

The concession stand man squeaks through the aisle and flirts with X and Y, our two beautiful women. He wears a white shirt, with a worn black vest, and black pants, and pushes a flimsy, metal cart packed lightly with snacks, little bags of corn chips, plastic cups of coffee filled half-way – water bottles, sandwiches. Everything overpriced- so that though I am starving, I buy nothing at all.

*****

I love, love, love to watch the people here – men and women alike- interact with Y, our Egyptian lovely. When they hear her strange, consonant-dropping and letter-converting accent -the accent of television soap operas and pop music and glamor- a light enters their eyes. She asks for coffee and the young man bends down, and looks away and prepares one, smiling big enough to break his face the whole while. That's how you can tell: polite smiles fade in the shade, but real smiles are not for the benefit of others, but for one's own. 

*****

The first thing we notice about Rabat: the coolness. Rabat is an exhaled breath.

The second thing we notice about Rabat – the taxis are blue. It hadn't even occurred to me that another city might have anything other than Fes's rat-nosed little reds, which have square, hollow frames of yellow wood stuck on the roof, reading “petit taxi”. I take a moment to briefly imagine that every city in Morocco has cabs of a different color. (Only later travels will show me that this appears to be, at least partially, true. As of yet, I have not found a city with purple cabs, though I believe that if there is a god, he will have made one.)

*****

Rabat's rail station is the equal of Fes's in sleek modernity – breezy, subterranean stone stairwells connect the tracks; signs written in the same slim, precise font used everywhere else in the country, announcements in French and Fus-he Arabic made in a female voice so well pronounced and airy and aristocratic that it virtually squeaks at the top; walkways on the main level have slots of walk-over-able ornate blue glass, from which one can see down to the floor below, and, in my case, get dizzy; an in- house cafe-resto with some vaguely Mexican name advertises tacos; veiled 20 something ladies in sombre colored outfits lean into light laptops on Ikea-like tables.

*****

The train station sits right on the main boulevard of Mohamed the V. Just about every city in Morocco has one, – that and a Hassan II – as namesakes to monarch's past and present.

Our current king's portrait(s) - capturing him in various casual poses of life-doing (gardening, tea-drinking, off-into-the-distance-staring) - inhabits every concert stage, corner cafe and post office. He gave a speech the other night, which was kind of a big deal – amendments to the constitution and such, all against the background of the “Arab Spring.” But since I only understood about every 25^th word, I concentrated more on unimportant details like his utter unkinglyness.

He has a sort of pudgy-cheeked, pinchable face, he wears glasses, his brow sweats, he looks down at his paper while reading his speech -and he stumbles occasionally- he somehow gives the impression of being rather short whether or not he is in reality (I have no idea), he sits on a gaudy throne which makes him appear shrunken, and many Moroccans seem to like him. My (new and terrible) tutor says of the game of dominoes that Arab autocracies have become, that in Morocco at least we have a “nice king, Ma'sha'allah”. And maybe, we do.

*****

Rabat's medina is wide and flat with straight, gray-cobbled streets which intersect one another at right angles. Maybe now would be a good time to mention I have learned the derivation of the Arabic word to intersect (a form VI verb) which tweezes out ever finer threads of meaning from the concept of “cutting” into something which actually means to engage one another in a reciprocal act of cutting off. This is just a peek into the fussiness of Arabic verb construction.

Anyway, unlike Fes's narrow, claustrophobic death trap of streets these are at least wide enough to raise one's voice in, and spacious enough to offer some (vague ) possibility of blending in.

The first thing I buy is sun-screen (okay, I don't buy it- I just borrow some) because I suddenly remember I'm white.

The second thing I buy is a flaky, crusty pastry which looks like a sugar cookie but tastes like peanuts.

*****

The market slowly, slowly climbs an easy hill toward the sea, and shortly before it gets there the road trickles out into a narrow path which threads through a low, stone wall. Behind that is the most peaceful cemetery I've ever seen. It's not the shady, green kind of peaceful- that's something else entirely. This is sunny and hot and dry and bright. It has a kind of stillness which only comes through juxtaposition with something active (a hundred feet away the ocean jostles and slaps on volcanic rock faces). The breeze blows a little. Palm-like shrubs and reedy grasses sprout at the corners of old, white graves. Piles of fresh reddish earth sits in clumps on the sides of new ones, short grave diggers in stained shirts rest on shovels as we wind through wordlessly.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Atlantic......

*****

The beach is filthy but we lay on it underneath rented blue umbrella and sleep anyway. The sand is coarse, almost small pebble -sized grains of varying white and gray shades. It sticks to Y's bare, brown shoulders as I lay beside her. It is the best nap I have ever had, it's under a blue, blue sky and in the sharp, salt scent of the ocean. 

When I open my eyes again I stare (horizontally now) at the little family unit next to us, a blanket under a sand-stuck umbrella, a handsome, shirtless husband in yellow trunks playing with his curly headed daughter, his plump wife, covered veil to toes in pastel pink, looking on.

*****

Then: overpriced scoops of rainbow ice cream and coffee at an oceanside restaurant.

Then: an impromptu art exposition inside a shadowy casbah (fortress). The paintings are each unremarkable and the lovely, thick stone walls of the casbah overshadow them without effort.

Then: Two gangly, goofy, gelled-hair, macho teenage boys strut down the street with unchained rottweilers. Old women glare and young children cower.

*****

We wander back in a rough circle toward the point of origin, past the light house and along the hook of the coastline. We enter the medina again, this time choked and clogged with evening hordes doing their shopping. It's crowded, crowded, crowded and everyone presses all around me, and it's hot and loud and confused, and I'm in love.

We branch off a bit down a sparsely occupied little way in search of a much signed-about restaurant (which does not, in reality, exist). Instead we discover a mother and her daughters making round, greasy pancakes on a hot griddle, on a raised platform inside their closet sized food stall. Each one has a bright and easy smile, and wears their hair covered in milk-maid fashion -in a flower patterned kerchief- up on top of their head, their throats naked. Each one wears a short sleeved dress and white apron. Their bare arms are steady and unhurried but strong. They look capable. Each has dark eyebrows and solid, emotional lips.

*****

Here's what happens: I buy one little pancake (about the size of a large English muffin) and have daughter # 2 smear it with triangular, Laughing Cow “cheese” and roll it up into a little tube and wrap it in brown paper. Then I have a bite or three of Y's, which is drizzled with honey instead, and which is seven times better. Then we sit on a doorstep right beside the stall and take pictures and giggle and watch the women work, and smile and say a few cute words to them as we munch our pancakes, and watch the people pass by on their way to do utterly every day things.

*****

After 10 minutes daughter # 3 arrives, with her particular interpretation of this family's sombre and lovely face, with her fushia, velvety jellaba, with her two young children, with her youthfulness.

Y's vibrant magnetism attracts things- people's attention, bemused stares- today it attracts this woman's baby. We hold it for thirty minutes cooing and petting it while sister # 3 visits loudly with her family. The baby's older brother, a cute five year old named Hamza can't decide whether he wants to hide behind his mother's legs or come out and play. I tell him to shake my hand, and he grins, and I ask him if he wants me to take his picture. He agrees, but every time I raise the camera he brings his own greasy pancake to his mouth and freezes in the act of eating.

Daughter #3 starts to stroke Y's arm, and ask her her name, and tell her emphatically about Islam, and show us her baby's sixth digit- a functionless, knob of flesh (complete with fingernail) attached to his left pinkey, which she flicks with her forefinger. We leave.

*****

We wander some more and have one last meal: it's all chicken and fries and rice (how surprising) grease on the tables, football on the TV, strange smirks on the waiter's face, and cockroaches in the bathroom. End scene

*****

Return: Our morning train was cool and uncrowded and bright. The evening train is none of those things. For the first hour we wander around from one over-crowded, over-heated train compartment to another like rail road nomads, searching for seats. We get stuck in the windowless rear of the car with a young, bad-postured man who, despite the heat and airlessness, lights up a Marlboro. Smoke immediately drifts around us in gray twists, and people begin to cough.
Eventually we thread our way out to the hallway where the air moves, where the windows crack open at the top, and where we can press our noses to the glass, watching as the darkening gloom zips by minute after minute towards home.

and he covered his eyes and shrieked

A few days ago I met Idriss, a skinny little man in a golf cap who perpetually roasts a spectrum of nuts and seeds in front of a corner shop. It's about a two minute walk from our residence, (straight down a street which zig-zags a bit as it crosses another, until it meets a main-ish sort of road  lined with a couple of gas stations - Mobil and Shell- airy cafes, money changers, electronic shops, cell phone branches, travel agencies and never-open airline outlets. It's called Avenue Abdelai Benchekroun.

By coincidence, the day before in class we'd read a text with this name in it, scratched out in five spare minutes by my burly, bearded and excellent tutor. Except in this story Idriss was a senior in high school, had a mother who worked as a secretary at a "big bank", and 3 siblings who all studied commerce, economics, or literature at university. It's a running joke among our students that virtually everyone in our bible-like, hegemonic textbook can be described by recombining the preceding sentence. Anyway thanks to this, I even knew how to write the name "Idriss". It looks like this:إدريس

I never met anyone with this name in Mauritania, which is sad for me, because I love it wholeheartedly. Conversely it's very common here, which isn't much of a surprise when you consider that it's the name of mythical founder of Fes, Idriss the First, who was also the great-great grandson of the cousin of the prophet, and the person who brought Islam to Morocco. So, let's dog-ear that one.

*****

Idriss stands behind a little counter, set up just in front of the shop as one rounds the corner. It's few steps past the live-chicken factory, which stinks of death, death, death. On the front of the counter are a couple rows of square, clear, plastic bins, the kind you find in the bulk section of grocery stores, except these don't open out or have big scoops attached by curly-cue wires; their contents are only displayed through the clear plastic, scratched and dulled with age.

On top of the counter he has a little scale, the kind with two, sea sawing metal plates. He uses it to weigh out however much you'd like or whichever substance you care for. Each nut or seed has its own price, and they're all filed inside of his neat little head. He roasts dark, dagger-shaped sunflower seeds, pale, beige teardrops of pumpkin seeds encrusted with white salt, curly, knotty cashews, rust colored peanuts, chick peas, and a black, hollow-seeming nut which looks like it just fell from a tree in the forest. He sells dried banana chips and some version of a trail mix like concoction, but I never see anyone buying that, so maybe he only makes it once in a while.

Idriss is about 5"9' and has one of those mouths whose teeth you can't see even when it's smiling. He has a broad shiny nose, smallish eyes and the kind of bright mocha colored skin which appears pore-less. It's stretched tight across his features and seems like it will always be, no matter his age. In fact, his age is indeterminate. He might be 25 (though I think he isn't) and he might be 35. He appears boyish; he's kind of adorable.

Anyway, he's always trying to give me free samples of seeds - whatever he's roasting when I stop by, which mostly seems to be the black sunflower seeds that have pale stripes running down the middle. I guess they're popular.

*****

The owner of the shop he's perched in front of is sort of a piss-ant - constantly sitting slumped on a high stool behind his counter, cell phone glued to his ear, neck cocked. He just returns my attempts at greeting with dour looks and stony silence. Moroccan customers get a (slightly) more lively response but that's not surprising.

His son (I'm just guessing) or whoever the 15ish-year old who works in the shop and actually, you know, carries out transactions is, isn't un-nice though doesn't smile that often either. He has a narrow, big-nosed face, a thin mustache and looks vaguely like a weasel. 

The exact nature of the relationship Idriss shares with this store is unclear to me: is he actually this man's employee, is he a traveling nut-salesman who just rents this space? Is it something else entirely? So many pressing questions....
 
*****

Idriss roast things in a sawed off piece of a metal barrel, over what appears to be a coal fire. Inside the barrel slice is maybe one or two kilos of whatever he's roasting, mixed in with a bunch of salt (it looks like sugar, but it's not- I asked once). He stands over the roasting pan in shirtsleeves. He stirs and worries the mixture of salt and seeds or nuts with a flat, rectangular paddle made from a fin of plastic. He is endlessly doing this. After a while, the salt changes from white to dusky white, to gray to brownish gray, I think from the influence of the sawed off bucket - it's not too rusty-ish, but whatever. The seeds taste just fine and I had a tetanus shot a few years ago. I think.

He's a sweet man. He was sweet right from the first time we came by, even though the shop's proximity to the American language school, the French embassy, the French Language Institute, and I guess, for that matter, France, means that we're likely only one brief cadence in a parade of outsiders who bustle through ungracefully during a break from some thing else. And who think, or more generously hope that a few pitifully inadequate statements in Arabic gives them a right to expect some kind of authentic experience with the locals. That's what I'm afraid of anyway, but maybe not as many people talk to the peanut guy as I imagine.

*****

Another student at the school, X, was with me the first time- we've become fast friends and she's lovely (looking) in a way I could see being very appealing to Moroccans. I have no doubt that I'm not nearly as interesting to Idriss as she is, but that's only natural- the flush which attraction inspires in us just can't be replicated in other sorts of interactions, it puts a red gloss of magnetism on everything it touches.

A few days after our first meeting with him, X passed by on her way to somewhere else and Idriss offered her his phone number, written in square, blue little characters, with the funny French numbers- the 9s that look like Gs- on a little scrap of corrugated cardboard. In retrospect, accepting his number was a mistake but it's hard to blame X for wanting to be kind; I don't think she realized how weighty such a simple gesture might be. After handing her the number, Idriss asked "are we becoming friends??" Let's forget, I suppose, that friendships between men and entirely-unrelated women aren't exactly a central part of the social structure, and that he had known X for a total of 6 cumulative minutes.

*****

A few days later I came home from class to find X studying at one of the little round tables -curving iron legs propping up mosaic discs- which are scattered across our wide porch. X glanced up from her textbook, and smiled, and fished something out of her spacious purse. "Look what Idriss gave me!" she said, and held up a key-chain in a piece of brown paper. It was a short, slender solid tube of a translucent orange capped at the ends with winding silver work.

It was probably made of plastic, or some kind of silica composite (though it looked like a jewel) and the ends were probably only tin, and not any kind of silver. It probably wasn't very expensive, but it was very lovely, and the fact that this little Moroccan gentlemen had thought about it, had bought it with his own modest earnings, and wrapped it in brown paper, made it very beautiful indeed.

....Or maybe he just had it lying around the house gathering dust, or maybe he borrowed it indefinitely from his sister, what the hell do I know? But not for nothing - a few days later, while walking down a sidewalk littered with street sellers, camped out along a restaurant strip, I saw a piece just like it, placed among a bunch of other shiny curiosities on a white bed-sheet., I entertained stopping to see how much one might go for, but then thought better of it. No sense in allowing reality to needlessly shatter my illusions.

*****

That night it was time for an intervention. Our glamorous and vivacious Egyptian-born matriarch laid down the law over a plate of calamari at one of our favorite places: the adorably-named "Chicken Mac"

"You cannot see him again. You cannot walk by the shop." She dipped another fried circlet in mayonnaise and popped it in her mouth, her glossy ringlets, falling around her face. "You'll just make it worse."

I eyed her meaningfully across the table and nodded in agreement. "She's right. Everyone just wants to get married. Just assume everyone wants to marry you and move to America." I took a sip of my water and squeezed a lemon over my fries. "You're the jackpot, no red-blooded eligible bachelor is looking for a pen-pal, my dear.....

*****


The next time I walked by the shop I stopped and greeted Idriss, I shook his hand, reaching over the line of assorted, brightly packaged cookies which, stacked up, formed the border of his little counter. I have virtually no Darija vocabulary at all besides a few of the greetings, but it doesn't have nearly as many as Hassaniya, and when I try recycling them over and over again like I would do in Mauritania it begins to feel awkward.

I almost never have anything to buy in his shop, and there are only so many salted pumpkin seeds one can consume (fyi- it's not that many). I was about to leave when he handed me a white plastic bag, bulky and heavy with small packages. "What's this?" I asked. He said "It's for your friend. Please, bring it to her." He turned his head to the side and downward. "Please."

*****

Back at home, in the breeze of the fan, at our kitchen table, we opened the bag and discovered it was full of wrapped offerings in cones of wispy, white paper. The soap I buy gets wrapped in paper recycled from other purposes, embroidered with typed French paragraphs about random subjects - but this paper was new, dedicated, and blemish less. Almonds, cashews, pistachios, sunflower seeds, raisins- each enclosed in a white, plain sheet; each sufficient unto itself; each a flower. A bouquet, really. This was Idriss's equivalent of roses. It was heart-sinkingly sad. And funny and touching and awful and sweet.


And delicious. Later that night, after a little glass (or two) of vodka-caressed lemonade, (we have a lemon tree. We have a lime tree, and fig tree too. Did I mention I live in paradise?), X and I talked together and imagined that the addictive seeds had been doused with a secret love potion. We stood in the middle of our kitchen at midnight, staring at each other wide-eyed, wordlessly eating one wonderful, graceful almond after another.

the tragedy is centered in the bull

Still posting from weeks ago. Catching up though

I'm starting to get the hang of it.

I seem to have good luck with people named Yusef, in general. First among them of course, is my one and only, habibi, far away in El Qidiya with his family, and his rock chisels, and his un-stylish hair. The mere fact that I meet so many is not, itself, so surprising. The sparsely populated Muslim name universe means I've got a one-in-ten chance of meeting one with every man who passes.
 
Anyway, I've met two very kind bearers of the name since I've been here in Fes - the second being a waiter at a food stall I frequented for the fifth time in a row today. It's just a little place, nothing special, about a half mile away from the Arabic institute and my home, sandwiched between an abandoned, trash-filled Mobil station and a tea shop and perched off a 3 cornered v-like intersection where cars and mopeds whiz by ceaselessly. Yusef the waiter returns my smiles and greetings, and shakes my hand. Everything else is just icing.

I started off by just going to the restaurant for lunch, but now I've given up trying to find something original every day (it's exhausting). Of course, this city suffers from no deficit of places serving some kind of refreshment, even if it's just a handful of square feet plating up a few hundred calories of one ingestible substance or another. But finding one that fits all my criteria is considerably more difficult.

A partial list includes those establishments which are: not expensive-looking, not actually expensive, not entirely empty, nor extremely full, one where the proprietor is not creepily over-attentive/English speaking (which is often the same thing) nor one at which he is glaringly rude, absent or brusque, one which has chairs, one which looks like those chairs are used by customers, one which has food, one which has food I can identify and thus order, and perhaps most importantly, one from which I can determine all of this information in the time it takes me to traverse its stretch of side walk, or 5 seconds, whichever is shorter.

Let's not mention for the moment that these criteria exist only because I'm a bizarre and neurotic fool, and for now just agree it's no wonder why when I find a place which fits them all, I stick with it.

*****

Yusef is 23 (I asked yesterday and then made fun of him for being young) and wears a sort of long, maroon over-shirt garment, on which he wipes his hands while working, so the bottom is very stained and dirty, like an apron.

He's very handsome (are you surprised?) but in a high-school athlete sort of way. His eyes are just regular sized and not very deep set, and dark, dark brown like almost everyone else's. He has a broad, almost American-Indian-esque sort of face, nice teeth, and dusky, full eyebrows. I'm coming to realize that everyone who I think is handsome now has great eyebrows- dark, full, dramatic, active, expressive eyebrows. Stick a pair on a potato, I guess, and I'm all how you doin??

Yusef is solidly built, though he's not exactly muscular, and he has nice, wide hands, which he has the habit of clasping together in front of him at stomach level while roaming the sidewalk tables, refilling tea and greeting new customers. (He's actually a very attentive waiter.) His handshake is only so- so.

He has thick, wavy black hair, which is, you know, like at least 1/4 of his good looks. It's good hair, the kind which shines with a subtle luminosity, the kind which looks interesting and charismatic even when just lying there, the kind which seems to require no care whatsoever beside the occasional pass-through with a comb, a la Fonz, the kind which I become increasingly envious of as the weeks, the years, tick by, the kind which seems to be the birthright of most Moroccan men I see, until it begins to leave them of course.

*****

Yesterday I ordered bissara, which was not what I thought it was. From the description of my snazzily-dressed, mascara-wearing Arabic professor, I thought it was just the proper name for the seasoned white beans which I've been eating for lunch. What Yusef brought me looked more like library paste. He plopped down a shallow bowl holding a blended mush of fava beans, topped by a a quarter inch of olive oil.

Despite its rather inauspicious (but also, I think, somehow striking and beautiful) appearance, bissara isn't half bad. I mean, there isn't much to it, of course- it tastes like a bunch of beans thrown in a blender and coated with like, half of a shot glass of olive oil. Surprise!

On every table, there are two of those kind of shakers one might find in a pizza place, the kind which hold somewhat-less-than-fresh oregano and Parmesan cheese, have over-sized holes cut in the plastic top, and thick handles on the side like a coffee mug. One of the shakers here has (completely redundant) sea salt, and the other has a crumbly red powder which looks like cayenne, but which doesn't actually seem to make anything more spicy. Or maybe the fava beans' blandness repels all flavor assaults.

*****

Today's lunch was lentils (il 'adis) in a reddish brown sauce of spices and cilantro, ladled up, soup- like in a shallow bowl, scalloped at the edges with soft curves and decorated with a pattern of blue concentric circles. Beside that, a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes and onions all diced up into little cubes and pyramids dressed in slivers of cilantro. And moon bread.

Food that comes in different parts is wonderful to me, for some reason I haven't yet identified. Little bowls, little plates, little baskets, little glasses- of tea and water. It's all nine dirhams, which is maybe a buck twenty, tops.

As he served plates, I saw that Yusef was wearing a little banded circlet of gauze on his left wrist, and because making conversation in just-barely-grasped foreign languages involves talking about anything one possibly can, I nosily asked what had happened to him. And by that I mean I pointed to his wrist, shrugged and said "Maal-ak?", hoping it had a vaguely similar meaning in Dariija as in Hassaniya. It means, "what (the hell) is wrong with you?"

He told me he burnt himself (he works in a restaurant, so like, what were the odds, right?) He assured me that it would heal soon, insha-allah. He used the verb "yabra" for to heal which is Hassaniya too.

*****

There is another waiter who works in the shop, who seems equally glad to see me when I come -big toothy smile and all- but who somehow lacks Yusef's warm, fraternal appeal, and whose name does not touch deep associations in me with my other Yusef, he of the soft, kind eyes, and sincere, prolonged handshakes. 

I asked Yusef the waiter's name but then put my finger to my lips. I didn't want Tewfiiq (that's it) to be offended that I didn't remember his name from the first time I had asked. He knew mine without hesitation, strange and alien though it is, after just one meeting.

When he told me I got out my flimsy little graph-paper filled, African notebook, to record it for all eternity, in a romanised transcription system which looks more and more graceless, insufficient and awkward the longer I live here. It works well enough though when I want to write something quickly: Arabic writing takes me forever.

Yusef sat down at the table across from me without asking, and when he did I could see for the first time the lines around his eyes, like little knife slices curving out in sun bursts around the slope of his upper cheek. He's still young at 23 but I guess African sun + 11-hour work days might put a little more stress on one's skin than can be soothed by a few cucumber slices.

Then Yusef took the pen and notebook from me, and wrote Tewfiiq's name in those perfect, practiced, voluptuous, and effortless Arabic letters which I've been trying to make all week, but which I sometimes feel I won't ever be able to. Mine are all hard-pressed, finger-aching, third grader characters the sight of which makes me cringe, and the shapes of whom are so ill-formed I can barely translate them back into usable sound. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but my version sounds more interesting)

We chatted for a few minutes, even though that word exaggerates, by a magnitude, the fluidity of our conversation. Neither of us speaks much of anything in any language which means much of anything to the other. He knows no French, a couple of English words, lots of Dariija, and a little Fus-he. I know way too much English for my own good, a fair amount of French, an interesting quantity of Hassaniya and barely enough Fus-he to make a fool of myself with.

He's a kind, warm man, who is friendly to me though he probably has every reason to be uninterested in talking to foreigners. As we spoke, once in a while he would slide my notebook over to his side again and write something down for me - a word or two I didn't understand, an expression. He - making slow, careful bows with my Uni-ball. Me- following each swoop of the pen, each ancient permutation of the line and the dot.

not unfitting to the structure of the animal

Forgive my stream of consciousness.

Cafés hulk on every corner and take their names seriously - they serve only coffee, or tea, or other drinkables, but not food of any kind deserving of the name, so please don't ask. The coffee comes in something the shape of, and 3 times the size of, a shot glass with smooth, clear sides bulging out a little at the base to form subtle, sloping ribs. It's on a dainty little saucer (today mine was white ceramic, yesterday- aluminum). On one side a gleaming spoon reposes asymmetrically, two rough edged sugar cubes (more accurately called rectangular cuboids) lean into the glass. A cup of water comes along in a cup about twice the size of the coffee.

The coffee is good enough for people to call it il qahwa (the real Arabic name); in Mauritania nobody drank the stuff anyway -you couldn't pry their tea away with a crowbar- except occasionally in cold weather. But even then they couldn't be bothered with real grounds, and only imported a few cans of Nescafé instead, whose shittiness barely managed to inspire a half- hearted French bastardization. We just called it Kaava.

(Okay, I'll stop talking about coffee after this, but) it's impenetrably black and elegant, and somehow its bitterness doesn't have the sharp, sour, nauseating angles of say, an un-ameliorated cup of Chock full 'o' Nuts. It's smoky and chocolate, and the more sugar you add the more chocolaty it becomes, the deeper it sinks into itself. Btw it's worth noting that I write this (fairly pretentious sentence) being almost hopelessly far from a coffee snob: I literally drink Maxwell House at home, and, when necessary, instant.

Anyway, the cafés all have a crop of silvery tables spilling across the groove-tiled sidewalk, populated by acres and acres of surly-looking middle aged (or older) gentlemen with departing hair, smoking, talking, watching sporting events on televisions hung high on walls, but mostly, in my mind, glaring at me as I walk by, talking under their breath, emitting sharp barks of laughter, and daring me to enter their midst.

I mean, as much as I like to create a fantasy in which everyone's thoughts are permanently engaged in fashioning ways to cause me distress, their intimidation factor is fah real, sis. No joke.

Accordingly, this morning I failed to take up their wordless, imaginary challenge yet again and opted instead for a café slash restaurant, which promised to serve food in addition to coffee, and in fact, to do so at "à toute heure!!" - Fes's version of an all night diner?

It was situated in a more secluded little nook off the intersection of a couple of side streets, and virtually deserted when I came. The owner was a neat little 50ish man with  a black vest, a white button-up, and a damp rag, said bonjour like he meant it, and smiled at my order of qahwa kahla (black coffee - at least in dialect). Plus the coffee was just as good as anything else I'd had at less inviting establishments, so I'm fine. Thus, welcome glass number 2.

Okay seriously folks, this little cup of black is stronger than it looks. Two cups wouldn't even come to the halfway mark of my regular morning coffee "C" cup and I'm already vibrating.

*****

I've been drinking the water. I hope I'm not pushing my luck, since it has been two and a half years since I left the continent. Nevertheless, 1) I have a steel stomach (at least in terms of resisting bacterial invasions) 2) I never get sick, 3) I used to drink some pretty nasty H2O in Mauritania, mostly in various shades of mud-brown, 3) buying bottled water is expensive and 3a) makes me feel like a girl, and 3b) really cramps my efforts to live cheaply while in Morocco, which I'm attempting in the knowledge that what I don't spend here I can spend afterward during my 6 week tramp through other places in Africa which I actually like. (J/K but not?)

Every moment I spend here I remember more Hassaniya, each minute ticks and brings forth a word or two I would have said were I in the RIM, but whose sparks would light no flames in the eyes of Moroccans.

Moroccan Arabic (Darija) is almost entirely unintelligible to me, it's like Hassaniya with the cassette run backwards, or too quickly, or with the tape patched and crumpled. It has shorter, tight-mouthed, ungenerous vowels. It somehow comes out sounding something like an emotional, mouthy European language, like Portuguese, which I always think sounds Slavic anyway. It sounds nothing like Fus-he (the classical Arabic I learn in class), which is clear, and aristocratic and cold.

*****

The little man in the black vest brought lunch: brown paper is both a place-mat and a napkin here, 5 or 6 slices of the stuff, rolled in a cone and stuck in a little juice glass, are usually brought out for hand wiping. One larger brown rectangle was the place-mat, on which vest-man plopped a flimsy miniature fork and a knife on either side of a small, round, scalloped plate of saffron/turmeric yellow white beans and onions. Or something.  Also present : a wicker basket of moon bread, sliced only halfway through into quarters, and a bowl of Salade Marocaine- basically a salad Nicoise-like arrangement of lettuce cabbage, onions, tomato, beets, cucumber, boiled potato, shredded carrots, white rice (inexplicably) and, I suppose, anything else they had lying around the kitchen. It was dressed with what I'm convinced was mayonnaise mixed with water; it didn't really impress, but that's basically the same thing I can say for most of the food I've encountered. After every meal all I think is, that was fine. 36 dirham for everything though, and 4 dirham for tip just because he was nice.

*****

Several people from Harvard are here at the program, though some are more conspicuous than others. One mentioned that they were from Harvard about 3 times in the first five minutes I knew them (I'm sorry, where again?)

Basically everyone has a more prestigious pedigree than I do in studying Fus-he : 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc. I chose a simple 200 intermediate level, even though in a technical sense, I'm a beginner. I just couldn't bear to spend six weeks going over the alphabet, the sounds, and like, personal pronouns or something, when my mouth once knew Fus-he's country cousin like my own name.

*****

There is a city bus system here involving large, plainly un-aerodynamic and punishing looking buses, who roam the streets clogged with standing room only gaggles of passengers.

The buses are painted in just two colors: a tired looking maroon and a faded beige, running in two broad swathes across each side. Somehow, they look decidedly, and appropriately, developing world to me, compared with the shiny green or blue, or red buses, painted with jazzy diagonal logos, which might attract low-budget customers in the US.

Yaa touraa, I wonder if the children take them to school, of if there are school buses proper (though I haven't seen anything that might be mistaken for them) or if maybe the kids just walk, or use bicycles, or if their veiled mothers bring them in tiny little cars, or if older brothers cart them along, begrudgingly, on the backs of their mopeds.

Moroccans are assertively unyielding but not unpleasant, self sufficient, but not entirely closed off, steadfastly- though not loudly- pious, and rather elegant in a way that comes from being a member of a rich, old, and admired society. Mauritanians they are not.

It seems stupid but I've always wondered how it feels to be part of a race in which everyone has the same hair color. In which everyone has basically the same eye color, and most have the same skin color. And then how it must feel for all of those people to inhabit a largely homogeneous country of their own. The first part maybe means nothing, but the last part surely does.


More soon....

The sequence of motion and fact

This is all from more than a week ago, and many things have changed since then. Slowly but surely I'm typing this up, so pipe down.



I slept for 13 hours, trying to rid myself of the puzzling exhaustion which results from traveling faster than time itself. Immediately after opening my door the next morning the short little hotel owner jumped up and pounced on me, asking whether I might stay another night, and wouldn't I prefer to pay up front? And because I didn't want to lug my bloated, shoulder-killing bag around town again, and because 100 dirhams is about 12 dollars, I agreed.

I sauntered across the street for breakfast. Ordering coffee with bread created too much confusion (did I want pain au chocolat? Bread with cheese? Bread with something else on it??) so I settled for a basically perfect cup of coffee: ridiculously black with an ashy brown scum of foam on top, 3 rough sugar cubes nestled beside it and a little silver spoon with which to stir it all, everything placed delicately on a cheap, dully shining tin saucer. Bitter, complex and mellifluous, self possessed. The only category in which my normal coffee can compete with it is, like, gross tonnage.

The weather is so strange here: periods of bright sun followed by little drizzles or small showers. In other words I suppose, normal weather. In Mauritania rain comes in 3 to 4 huge gushes per year -the dark sky like a upended bucket emptying- and after that, it's ovah, girl.

Sitting here at coffee, I see patches of tourists pass by every few minutes, in groups of 2 -4, walking across a constantly down-sloping plane of vision to my left, descending into what I'm thinking of as the bowels of the market. I'd like to say that they all look awkward and obese and hilarious, and that there exist any characteristics by which an observer could tell us apart, but I can't. They mostly look just fine, like middle class white people, which is another way of saying not very remarkable at all. However this makes me realize that when I feel as though everyone is staring at me as I pass on the stage-like cobbled path, they actually are - people watching is fun.

The mint tea ordered by the man sitting next to me, folded paper on his knee, smells so strongly of mint, that that, coupled with my current feeling of extreme alien-ness, makes me think of my first days in Mauritania, like those of the hut, and the heat, and the children, and the dirt, and the loveliness. But no foam here- just a few sprigs of mint stuck haphazardly in a little glass of (weak-ish) tea. That, to me, seems lazy. Etaay maa-he vi-ih ruqwa!!

After coffee, I wandered, out beyond a big open, sunny square adjacent to the medina and found huge, manicured gardens with people strolling throughout, and young couples sitting on secluded benches along their broad brick paths.

There are quite a lot of people- most of whom I'm pretty sure are Moroccan. Is the country actually large/rich/interesting enough to have its own tourists/a domestic tourism industry? Picturing any of the Mauritanians I know going to visit scenic locations in their own country is laughable. Then again, maybe this is just a nice place for locals to walk in the strong sun, and young couples to canoodle in the shade of tall palms.

The gardens are bright, warm and tranquil (though bird calls are intermixed with the sounds of traffic from just beyond the trees). But aside form modern fountain-age (a word? No?), the gardens are pretty timeless - cobblestones of varying levels of smooth roundness abound, roses, eucalyptus, evergreens, thyme, bamboo, aloe, carnations, lavender, daisies and a strange kind of orange, lumpy and puckered with gray ish spots all over its surface. Or maybe it's just insect damage.

After taking a taxi from the large, circular fountain near the Bab Boujloud, (by chance the same one as E., an English teacher at the school I'll be attending, who is of indeterminate, but probably Scandinavian, origin) I was dropped at the door of the shady American Language Center.

I handed the cab driver ten Euros instead of ten dirham, a mistake I only realised when he supplied me with an exorbitant amount of change. Damn these countries and their colored money. E. briefly showed me the registration desk, which, she informed me might be staffed a few hours afterward, but whose (genuine but) rather surface-y hospitality extended no further.

Wandered a bit to find someplace to eat. (I.miss.random.women.selling. cheap.bowls.of.rice.or.whatever) In a restaurant, spilling chairs across the sidewalk: when asked what I'd like to order, I didn't/don't know enough about anything (yet) to return something other than a blank stare. In the end though, I succeeded in obtaining a uber tender chicken part (whose anatomical origin was not clear to me) topped with onions and frites, all oozing yellowy, saffron-tinged oil, and whose rather solid unimpressiveness was somewhat mitigated only by the amount of salt used to cook it, and moon bread. And sugary tea. All of which means I came out about as parched and preserved as a dried banana chip.

After lunch I finally made it to the school (open despite their firm, email warnings that they would not be). The housing coordinator is a young man in his 20s, medium-skinny, nice hair, handsome ish and who is either a little snotty, or whose accent just makes him sound that way. His office doubles as the school's computer lab, peopled by rows and rows of young Moroccans checking Facebook.

As he left me for "5 minutes" to go take care of something more important, I checked email on one of 20 computers all inexplicably running Ubuntu. (Like, what the hell is that anyway?) I tried my hand at being friendly to other people: another young man in the room, named Yusef, smiley, crazy-handsome in a California sort of way, too-cool-for-school without the sunglasses, tall, and speaking nearly German-perfect English. In the course of 5 minutes (really ten) he talked to me about Columbus, Einstein's "relativism theory" [sic], and Amerigo Vespucci, the last of which seemed a little show-offy.

Though I had already been forced to fork over payment for another night at the Hotel Mouretania, I moved out anyway after I finished with the housing man: I didn't want to stay another night, if possible, on a bed out of which I'm almost certain something crawled and bit me several times. Though I'm not too finicky, I'm still hoping it was just a deadly spider (like the one I later found soap-drowned in my toiletry bag (read: gallon Ziploc)), and not something worse like bed bugs.

My room in the spacious, marbled, sunlit villa which serves as the school's residence is lucky #9. In the basement. T., the moody housing man tried to play it up by saying "it stays cool in hot weather" and I politely played along.

It also remains rather damp. I'm ill pleased to report that there is a rather robust looking patch of mold, in health-hazard white, growing on the rotten rattan wall-lining by the head of my bed. Now let's watch and see how long it takes the microscopic mold spora to asphyxiate me .

To be continued...

Muddle your water

Casablanca

Finally here. Customs was a breeze, or rather non existent at 8 o clock in the evening.

Really (insert deity here), I appreciate that everywhere I go now, it's raining: Indianapolis, Newark, Upstate, Paris, Morocco. Is there something you'd like to tell me?

The airport has an ATM machine. Good thing, although who the hell knows what kind of exchange rate Chase bank is giving me.

When I exit I pass by a modest line of taxis, hulking in the misty gloom, none of whom say a word as a lone, back packed traveler crosses their path. Excuse me, whose honor does a girl have to insult to get a cab around here? Feeling slightly silly, I doubled back, trying to look purposeful and approached one. And because I've apparently forgotten everything I once knew (and because I feel like I've never slept in my life) I take the first price given to me. 

Ahh, I missed cars with curtained back seats. This one is driven by a neat little old man in a blazer, who I can tell doesn't speak that much French, even though I keep chattering anyway. He has placed patterned rugs and magazines in the back seat ("Paris Match", and "Style", which I think are really just free airport magazines, though he's fanned them out Martha Stewart style to play up their sex appeal).

Mohamed V airport is needlessly far from the city, like 40-50 minutes. Really? I'm running on fumes here, trying not to fall asleep in the dark and cushioned car. We pass a Jaguar dealership. Stop it. That is not necessary.

I get out at a "Chinese" restaurant called "Le Nid D'Hirondelle" (the swallow's nest), and pop into boutiques though no one can explain to me why the perfectly valid (Moroccan) SIM in my (Moroccan) phone won't work. I say Asalaamu Aleykum to people, but after that I'm lost, my tongue sticks in my throat. All my greeting space has been hollowed out.

The streets have signs, the buildings have numbers, aka: actual addresses. Omg. Omg. One can imagine how much easier this makes finding things. Point Colton.

Staying with my friend Yohan: a Cameroonian living in Casablanca, previously for university, and now for no particular reason I can decipher other than to disdain Moroccans from up close. His apartment has that weird quality of relative luxury one finds in a place which is really nothing special at all, but which exceeds expectations.

He has a microwave, hot water, a washing machine and a dryer, lots of floor space, a television permanently turned to MTV, a wooden dining table with heavy chairs, soy sauce in the pantry, and mixtures of rich and tacky furnishings: miles of nicely upholstered, embroidered sofa cushions whose effect is marred by the enormous tweety bird pillow plopped in their midst, a glossy black entertainment bureau with cabinets on either side of a large television, stacked with unopened bottles of a black beer in a forest of chunky highball glasses, in some vague attempt at class. That sounds snotty, but I actually find it endearing.

Yohan: short, muscular, fluttery, high voiced, possessed of impeccable French and that slight creepiness of a deauthenticated African, so glossed over with a thin layer of appropriated modernness that I feel dingy and unsophisticated in comparison.

Next morning: Because I'm so much less molested here, it took me quite a pretty minute to catch a cab to the Fes train station ; I kept waiting for passing cabs to honk or shout at me as I walked. Nice cabbie though, we talked a little, I told him to drive more slowly (just for conversation, not because I care) and he appeared politely embarrassed for me when I peppered my French with a word or two in Hassaniya.

The train was quite easy to manage- I stood in a swiftly-moving line for less than five minutes  bought a ticket for 110 dirham and walked out onto the track. There was even an electronic schedule board. I mean, are you kidding?

The train is fast and very clean, the downside is that the seats, two by two, face one another, something that is both needless and awkward, given my penchant for completely avoiding any and all eye contact with everyone ever. Kidding, but not?

Fes

I don't really like Fes (nor, I think, Morocco) so far. There, I said it, just let me come around in my own time. After landing in the train station - a huge, cavernous, and modern affair- I was horrified to see a white tourist pee in the bathroom's water faucet trough, and then wandered around what is decidedly not the sleepy cousin of Marrakech, or whatever the hell Lonely Planet likes to call it. This place is bigger and much more involved than Nouakchott, proper. Okay Morocco, you've got game.

Catching a cab here is a (relative) bitch. Have I mentioned that? Where are all the earnest, eager honking cabs of Nouakchott? First one I managed to flag down, I offended the young cab driver by brutally low-balling it. 15 Dirhams? No way it's 5!! - *drives off* Whatever happened to negotiating?

After I pissed off the first, I waved down a second and didn't even know he had stopped for me until I noticed him waiting a half block away, making the wtf gesture with his hands, like "are you coming, or not?"

I jogged up and huffed out my destination, and when I asked how much, he simply pointed to his rate "counter", a little Back to the Future-style red digit display, which temporarily reassured me, (enough to get into the car) until I realized that the counter is meaningless without any agreed upon standard. Clever little man. Edit- since then, for the same trip one counter charged me 15 dirham, one charged me 8 and two cabbies disregarded it altogether. So.

PS: Everyone here seems slightly pissed at me already. Maybe the degree to which people dislike the French and/or tourists (of which I might as well be one) is proportionate to the amount of time they have had to spend with them.

I took the cab the Bab Boujloud, which means the door/gate to the Boujloud, which means something or other in Arabic (what am I, a dictionary?). Five minutes on Google in a no-frills cyber had turned up a few promiseless hotel names- I picked the Hotel "Mouretania" for good luck, but I needn't have bothered. When I got there I asked the short, stout, mustacheoed (sp?) little man if he was Mauritanian, and he seemed mildly offended : "No no no, it's been a long time since the proprietorship has changed. I assure you I am an authentic Moroccan." Well, so much for my Hassaniya discount. :(

The hotel is perched right inside (one of) the entrance(s) to the old medina, which is a winding, serpentine and extremely old labyrinth of stone buildings and cobbled streets, descending perpetually downward on a hill side, and pervaded with shade, cats, cat pee, askance glances, and gloom (I'm sorry, did I just write that?)

After dropping off my cumbersome bag and taking only the valuables (money, passport, Melatonin) I wandered looking for a place to eat dinner, but all I found were discouragingly expensive-looking places, and over eager young men trying to herd me into one of them. The first I agreed to enter was entirely vacant, cavernous, and gorgeous = not what I'm looking for.

Finally, I found a greasy looking, humble, and startled little establishment run by a deaf-looking old man and his girth-y wife. Not having any idea what to eat (and they, not having much of an idea what to serve me) I just pointed at things and was served a teeny plate of cold fries, chilly blackened eggplant slices and charred lifeless fish, virtually all of which was seemingly seasoned with like, an IV drip of salt. Plus, an incredibly good bowl of "louba" or, I guess, white beans in some kind of red sauce? and what I'm going to call moon bread from now on- the round, disc-like bread with a slightly gravelly crust which one finds here everywhere.

Back to my "authentic Moroccan" hotelier, wash face, brush teeth, remove clothes, and SLEEP.

to be continued

Allons-y

Newark

-Flying stand-by with a flight attendant (Tony) on trans-Atlantic flights has its perks- and they include: two miniature bottles of wine and an ice cream sundae.

Charles de Gaulle

- There is an "Alarme" button in the bathroom,  (the first thing I encountered upon exiting the Continental terminal), bright red and shiny, in case of what, exactly? The bathroom had one individual stall, with a fully closing door, like a little room. This makes me wonder how ghastly American bathroom stalls must seem to someone accustomed to these, so invasive of privacy with inches and inches of space at the bottom of every door, enough to see the next person's shoelaces, their slouched pants. Ugh.

-All the signage is lettered in soft-looking, glowing characters against blue backgrounds, directing one everywhere calmly in both French and (British) English translations ; terminals are called "Halls," something which is more confusing than you might think

-Extremely simple airport shuttle, whizzing me all the way to the metro station. Yes, please.

-Teeny weeny subway tickets, barely bigger than a slip of fortune cookie paper, made from stiff, magnetic-stripped card board, listing one's origin and destination in small, neat script. Zip, zip.

-Metro train cars inside are all dingy chunks of primary colors -yellow, red, blue- and oh, mine was completely empty, save for a surly, hooded youth in the back, making it drip with ripeness for a mugging. It dipped under and over ground again and again and again.

-We pass lots of really crappy suburbs, run-down houses, lots of tiled roofs in rust color, a preponderance of yellow-beige paint on houses, adding to an already vaguely 70s -ish feel.

-Tons of graffiti in uninspired block letters, with predictable shading (I'm sorry, a 3rd grader could have done that, boys). Shouldn't foreign graffiti be more unintelligible than domestic, given that even the American kind seems to be constructed of mostly arcane proper nouns and internal references? In reality, it's about on par.

-Wow French subways have their own version of people making their "Attention, ladies and gentlemen" announcements, to beg for money. Sorry folks, the smallest I have is 20 Euros and I'm not parting with that - even though you do look pretty pathetic.

-Jesus, graffiti everywhere.

-Lots of industrial buildings, a forest of acronyms like CEPRIM and MIDAR.


-Paris metro in general = an uneasy, clammy gloom I've never felt in NYC subways.

-(From the window) It's hard not to overgeneralise, but the cars really are all smaller, dehydrated little snouty-nosed, malnourished continental things.

-Orly Airport is in the south of Paris, and it's where they put all the "other" (read: southern hemisphere) outbound flights (ahem).

-Though it's almost startlingly easy to get from Charles de Gaulle to Orly, stopping midway at St Michel/Notre Dame, just because you feel like you should use your interminable layover to get around a bit- have a coffee and a pain au chocolat- while a worthy goal, will detract significantly from the easiness of your trip for the following reasons: a faulty memory (in general), a horrible sense of direction, an un-clearly remembered and complex web of up/down/sideways/all around escalators, and (slightly snippy) ticket agents hidden behind voice-muffling glass giving directions in casually-pronounced French.

- Back in the train (after at least ten vaguely excited minutes). Transfer to the OrlyVal, an absurdly high-speed shuttle train (the kind with the two sliding glass doors and the wooshing and the elevated track). I tried to use the wrong miniature ticket (I had now accrued 3 of them) to enter the shuttle's turnstile. Thrice. And though in a beautifully constructed French sentence (my only one of the day, or since) I reassured the attendant emphatically that it had to be the right one, closer inspection revealed that it wasn't. Fail.

Orly

-Red-walled shops

-The super advanced, "stick-your-hands-in" kind of hand dryers

-Checkered bags (the plasticky, dollar store kind) being used as luggage. Hello again, Africans.

-Shiny, shiny floors

-Cafes displaying an assortment of limp, reserved, and austere French sandwiches

-Terminal 24, departing for Casablanca, all the way down miles and miles of vacant airport corridors, past passport check fences made to corral hundreds of cattle-like travelers, now empty of everyone but me, strolling leisurely through them like a ghost.

-Dozens of patron-less, duty free shops, even this deep into the airport, with bored attendants in shirts and ties, and in pant suits, each store front spilling expensive-looking light into the dim hall, oozing around wine bottles, and bright sporty-colored shirts, and glinty watches.

-Waiting in terminal, I followed a sign marked "toilettes" and found an echoingly empty bathroom with pink painted cows grazing across doors painted like a dreamy, pastel field. Only later did I find out that I went into the women's bathroom by mistake. The mens' room was painted with blue cows. Of course.

- Okay, after being up for 24+ hours, I can barely stay awake. My body keeps feeling like its skin is a suit of clothes it wants to fall out of. Now, when I need not just coffee, but a quantity of coffee, a deluge of coffee, these damn Parisians keep charging me the equivalent of 6 dollars for, like, a Dixiecup full of (admittedly excellent) coffee. Cela ne marchera pas.

-And boarding. Here we go.


To be continued. More about everything, soon.

Le retour

I'm back! Briefly, that is.

A flight at 6 tonight begins the journey- six weeks in Morocco, then six weeks (ish) after that of random West African travels, lived out of a dusty back pack and a series of Ziploc bags.

Stay tuned.

Love,

-C

wada'a nak il mulaana

Hello! Goodbye!

This is my last post in Mauritania, and though I have many more things to say, though I have inumerable things I want to communicate to you, my dear loved ones, and to record for a largely indifferent posterity.....I am, as usual, late. I'm rushing out the door.

The other night I was walking down a dark street, and the moon was full, and clear (mostly because I've started wearing my glasses again) and the stars were sharp and severe, and ....I felt so many things, and one of them was sadness at leaving, a bit of sadness at ending this two year exercise in the horrible, the wonderful, the alien, the hot, the frustrating, the life-changing, the (insert abstract noun here).......

I've been weepy, believe it or not. Yesterday I was packing and my eyes were significantly wet for at least ten minutes. That's a lot for emotionless robot over here. I was listening to Beyonce while doing it, and still got weepy, so ya' know it's the real deal.

Anyway- I don't have time, I don't have time- I am incomplete and under-prepared and frantic and fragile and damaged, but I don't have time anymore.

Goodbye my hot, dirty, desert love. Goodbye.

---Look for me on the horizon....or, you  know....at my house or something. I'm on my way.

Go

Today I went to the French Alliance to sign up for classes.

It's located in an unassuming compound, on a side street, a few turns after (or before) the big supermarket and I only ever discovered it by chance, after getting lost once. I am perpetually getting lost, even when I know where I'm going. Or rather I thought I knew. I swear I could get lost in an empty orange juice bottle.

For a while now, I've been meaning to go, ever since I learned that they offer French classes, but I've also been meaning to do a lot of other things, like fix my bathroom faucet and, become a nice person, and of course those dreams are still on layaway. Still, today someone must have spiked my re hydrated milk-drink, since I arbitrarily decided to buck the trend and get on the ball. I scurried over there at 9 am, with a sum of not less than 10,000 ougiyas burning a hole in my distressed pocket, and sealed the deal. They probably do other things there, in addition to teach unsuspecting victims their accursed verb conjugations, but about these I have no knowledge and even less interest. Though frankly, when it comes to whether or not any of those goings-on could possibly warrant their use of the rather over-grand word "alliance", I remain doubtful.

I had fully expected them to tell me that I was too late (foo') and that the registration period had closed, though as it happens they were more than eager to relieve me of my wad of cash because classes did not start until a week later. So one down....

They were all very nice in an assertive way, which is always a pleasant surprise, because the mood which tends to greet you, whenever you enter an establishment here for the first time, is less "How can I help you?" than it is, "What the hell do you want?". It can take some getting used to.

The tall Pulaar man at the desk had me fill out a form including my name, my generously-called "job" and the paragraph or two which passes as my address. Clearly, they have had trouble getting a hold of people in the past, because he looked at the phone number I had written and said, "Does this phone number work?" and I said, "Yup", and then he said, "Is this your real phone number. I mean, if we call it will we get you?" and then I said "Yup", again and pulled my phone out of my pocket to illustrate. "See?" I asked, brandishing it, "it's a real phone. It's always on me."

This is true and in fact, after blowing through two other phones on this continent, one of which I lost to stupidity, and the other to theft (and stupidity), this sucker is quite literally tied to me, with a little piece of elastic band which is hooked around my belt loop. The same goes for my house key, and/or anything else which I am reluctant to part with.

Then he sent me along into the next room, a French-door'd office in which I could see a little woman in a flowered muleffa, sitting at her desk.

The woman was so tiny, and so in-the-process-of-being-swallowed-up by her bright pink mummy sheet, that it wasn't until I was in the room and halfway to her desk, spouting off greetings in Hassaniya, that I noticed she wasn't Mauritanian at all, but some old French granny is sheep's clothing. God. She looked at me blankly, and I sort of sputtered out, and took a seat. I felt a little dumb, but then A) I constantly feel that way, and B) I was like, eh....she's the one wearing the muleffa.

*****

Later that afternoon I came back at four, as told, and waited in the hot lobby with five or six other stuffy looking men in white bou-bous. The guy at the desk gave me a number, literally, a big "5" printed in shades of ink-jet grey on a slip of white paper, which I thought was cute, but a little over the top, and one by one we ascended the stairs for a short little nonsense interview with the teacher person.

Afterward we were herded into a tiny mock school room, to puzzle out responses to a little test which looked as though it had been photo copied from a 6th grade textbook, and which made demands like: "write a paragraph about a cultural event you have recently organized" (just one? well....how could I possibly choose?) Then we listened, attentive as choirboys, to a scratchy red-plastic audio cassette, squeaking away on a flimsy boombox, which rumbled incomprehensibly about things like "Madame Duvall's" availability for baby-sitting", the schedules of hauty restaurants (are they open on weekends? can you make reservations by phone?! ) and whether or not Los Palmas had experienced a drop in visitors in recent years...

Well, obviously these are pressing concerns, both relevant and relatable to all Mauritanians, but as for myself I must say I was more interested in the white, pointy-toed dress loafers with tassels, as long as clown shoes, that the jean-jacketed young Moor next to me was wearing. These things were about as cool as a winter breeze, and I'm telling you, I considered theft. In the end though, I left the poor young thing alone with his awesome skiffs and busied myself with writing a fake RSVP for a night of "Mexican Food and Culture!" to "Gerard" who, my test paper informed me, was a good friend.

*****

Our instructor was an older Pulaar man, maybe 50, who was ten minutes late the first day. His name was Mr. Kane, it probably still is, and he wore a ratty old bou-bou, a garment which tends to look ridiculous on everyone, by virtue of it being completely unnecessary, but which looks even sillier on black Africans, because they have perfectly fine, and indeed, beautiful clothes already. They've got no business wearing these tacky Moorish flops, but go figure.

Mr. Kane had a little pot-belly and wicked coke-bottle glasses, like for real, which made his eyes bug out intensely. He had a big space in his two front teeth, and a face which looked simultaneously young and old. I realized after a moment, that this was because he looked like a child from my village, Cheikhani, or rather he looked like Cheikhani would look in 40 years. Sort of disconcerting. Especially given that one day I chased the same terrified child around the garden, and grabbed him by the collar, for calling me nasrani, and now here was his time-displaced doppelganger, prognosticating about indirect objects.

to be continued.....