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...
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...
Posts
1 comment:
Yay! Colton the "flowery writer" (in Dr. Jemison's (Jamison? Jenson?) words) is back! This one kept my attention and made me laugh no more than three times, so you're on the right track. Also I know that my validation is highly valued by you. Your descriptions of the place (not the people) make me want to be there too. It sounds nice, in an emotionally annoying sort of way. Please find a rag on the street and clean that mold with water or alcohol or pee that has turned into ammonia or something. I hope you are making friends an learning useful Arabic.
Post a Comment