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.....

people don't like fire

This is what I'm talking about.

On the back of tin cans of Nescafe Instant Classic, the potent little black powder sold all over West Africa (except my old village), next to the hyper-animated young woman in short dreadlocks, who is nearly spilling her red mug of java in fist-raising-ly exuberant enthusiasm for Nestles Inc., is a list of customer service numbers printed with white lettering inside of a brown, faux-cyber style rectangle. There's a little "play" button symbol beside it, as if it were going to burst out speaking. It lists numbers for 19 countries covering all of francophone W A. and beyond, all the way down the coast, to the reject-countries of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. The writing is in French, though it has an accompanying English translation paired with every blurb,  so The Gambia doesn't throw a fit, the kind which, Scandinavian-style are almost correct, yet still, somehow, not.

The translation for "le bon contact" is "Good to talk" (why, yes.. it is good to talk), the kind of platitudinal non-phrase which doesn't really mean anything, but which you nevertheless would nod your head at if some smiling Dutch blondie said to you, "Aaah, Kowltin - I'm going to let you with the good-to-taalk numbahs. Yes?". The translation for the "le bon conseil " blurb is:  experts confirm that 4 cups a coffee a day is moderate amount and quite safe for most people from a general health point of view!  Oh, I'm so glad. I've simply got to up my Nescafe consumption by 400 percent, in order to drink "moderate amount" and have my "general health" viewed as "quite safe".

Mauritania's name is nowhere present on this can, despite being a francophone country, or a least a demi-Francophone country, given that French has managed to hack-out half of a precarious place from Arabic at the Official Languages court, though the quiet fight between the two still rages. Very hot button. Very now.

Why are we not mentioned? Don't tell me they just forgot. This is only one example of a phenomenon which, if you live here long enough, will come to seem routine.

I remember one occasion, I was staring glaze-eyed, and maybe drunk, at some babbling French news cast giving the weather reports for the all the capital cities in the region. These are basically all on the ocean, unsurprisingly, and so the splashy, 3 dimensional map, which was someone's ill-advised idea of a splurge,  hopped from spot to spot up the coast-line, from Accra to Monrovia, to Freetown and slummy Conakry and earthy Bissau, with all their quaint and quotidian reports of rain, or not-rain, up through Banjul and the sexy mystery of Dakar.

At this point, the computer generated camera angle balked, lifted up into the "air", flew neatly in a one-second pause-hop over the whole length of Mauritania's sprawling desert disaster, including her ragamuffin poster-child, Nouakchott, like they were nothing more than a bad smell, and landed lightly on Morrocan soil to continue on its merry, virtual, way.

This is what I mean: can this snub send any clearer a message? You are not worth our time. In fact, it says  we will go out of our way to snub you, since surely it was more trouble to skip over Nouakchott, than it would have been to throw us a bone in the form of a two second weather bulletin. It wouldn't even have had to be accurate. They could have just printed the words, it's going to be hot. what the hell did you think? and that would have been enough.

Oh M.....get yourself together.

The sad part is, most Mauritanians of the Moor persuasion (who are the only ones who count here) look on the Arab world as their cultural brethren, but I've never met anyone from said Arab world who reciprocates this feeling. Mauritania is almost never considered a member of the larger Arab/North Africa/ Levant/Middle East community, by anyone who knows. I've even heard of Sudan being grouped-in, and not Mauritania, which it sort of below the belt, if you ask me.

A friend who just recently went to Morocco mentioned the disdain with which Moroccans talked about Mauritania. One person did not even know what Hassaniya was (this is the neighboring country), another said, "but the women are all so fat, and the men so tiny....how does that work?" and another: "why are they always chewing on sticks?" Another friend reported that the Tunisians she met characterized Hassaniya as being what would happen if you tried to speak Arabic "with rocks in your mouth". 

Oh, really?.... Only I'm allowed to say things like that. Hassaniya sweetie, you can put rocks in my mouth any day.

and you, a young mistress

Here in Nouakchott we have a stadium (actually we have two, supposedly, though I have serious doubts about the second's existence). It's not far at all from my house, and was named the "Olympic Stadium" Stade Olympique, by some cruel, if prescient, official in the past, or by some digruntled architect, because of course, to quote a friend, "it will never play host to the olympics" .

Mostly it just sits there, hulking and derelict, its tall poles of clumped flood-lights, dark, and visible from afar, and in that way it serves a sort of passively-helpful purpose as a landmark, like a shipwreck, given the fact that addresses in the city consist of phrases like 'two streets past the boutique with the Marlboro sign turn left and go until you hit the giant pile of tires'.

I suppose once in a while they must surely hold a soccer game or two, though I've never heard of one happening, and somehow the image of stands full of fist-shaking men in crumpled bou-bous, though amusing, seems to jar with my experience of reality.

Then again, again, the other day I found a couple of jujube seeds on the ground which I am 100% certain is the snack that Mauritanians would be eating, instead of pocorn and hotdogs, if the aforementioned situation were true. Anything's possible.

Lately, (okay, three times, and counting) I've taken to running on the track in the early morning when the air is cool and when the entire place is hauntingly empty, save for a fit, speedy Chinese lady in black shorts and her balding companion. Like any two or more parties of westerners in Africa, we religiously participate in the fiction that the other does not exist, ignoring them completely, which is no skin off my nose because I just pop in my ill-fitting earphones and listen to Pharoahe Monch.

This, along with stuffing myself with as many fruits and vegetables as my body (and wallet) can handle, represents my sad little attempt at reparing some of the surely irreversable shit that Mauritania has done to my body (um, what vitamin is good for UV damage?) because, while having the endurance and muscle-tone of a dead twelve-year old was fun while it lasted, you know...all good things......

Something about the Stade is very beautiful to me in the way that all my favorite parts of Maurtania are beautiful, but it resists explaining. It's a giant symbol (sorry, you knew that was coming) of the country's, I don't know... cluelessness? naivete? predictability? None of those things sound very flattering when listed like that, and I guess they aren't, actually, but nevertheless I think of them warmly. Okay, luke-warmly. They are the only things that still (sometimes) make me smile, after all this time, when someone does the exact, tactless, hillbilly-like thing I knew they were going to do a moment before. Life here is scripted. In fact, the script was written so long ago its authors have been forgotten and though additions have been inserted here and there by clumsy colonists and malcontents, the plot chugs on. I can't believe I just wrote that extended metaphor, but listen...

This is a perfectly adequate stadum with an absolutely average oval of track surrounding a shock of green astroturf. The stands are little cement shelves with neatly painted numbers on the front. There are offices for the Olympic Committee, there are dormitories for visiting teams under a giant clock face which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are locker-rooms. There are box seats. I mean, are you kidding? There are box seats? Oh M..... wake up! And somehow the whole place feels like a slightly used, out-dated and transplanted high-school gymnasium from Ohio.

It's all perpetually locked too, btw, to even further stymie its use by would-be, athletic upstarts, so to get to the track you have to make a little hop-slide over a guard-rail (not hard) whose white paint is worn to black in patches by the actions of previous delinquents who had the same idea.

As of yet, no one's tried to kick me out, but there is a white Moor man who appears in his slept-in bou-bou every morning, and makes no attempt at any form of exercise but rather sits on the edge of the rust-colored track, quite plainly watching me, Chinese woman and baldy go around and around in circles.

Since I don't know, I am forced to give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is possible that he is an important stadium personage, supervising the arena. Though much, much more likely he is just an average, naughty, Joe, lured there by nothing more, and nothing less, than the promise of seeing, as Ginger puts it "ladies' legs".
 
Oh dear. Oh poor, stunted, creepy, dear. I supposed we all have a need to see ladies' legs, but just do us all a favor and keep it in your pants. Em....I mean, sirwaal....

there is no aboriginal stuff

Winter is coming.

That is a statement which, clearly, is good only after being qualified, since the temperature here probably never fails to reach 100 degrees in the sun, at some point during the day, no matter the season, but what I mean is that the coolness, that little, ever present(ly hidden) seed-like locus of cold, which opens, often only for a moment, like a shy flower, around 3 or four in the morning, begins to come a little earlier in the evening with the breeze, to linger a little longer in the morning, like a reluctant lover. Clearly it knows how to artfully foreshadow itself, to those who are watching.

At a much brisker pace, I’m rediscovering food, or rather, cooking, or rather, cooking is rediscovering me. In America, I used to be permanently tuned to the Food Network, which I still maintain is not girly, but Mauritanian brousse will, and did, put a stop to that sort of foolishness in anyone. It will make you lose your appetite, not gently, for anything but white rice and oil. It will therefore render ridiculous, any attempts to cook, not to mention attempts to do other things too, like live, but that’s another story.

Here, down the street a little ways, past the Chinese restaurant (we have one), past the (one) undercover and un-marked bar-simulacrum, hiding in plain, sunlit sight, past the half-hearted attempt at a supermarket, (which nevertheless sells ice-cream bars) there is a small dark room, squeezed in next to the refrigerator "repair" men, which has a reasonably reliable supply of the standard Mauritanian vegetables for sale. They sell someone's twisted idea of meat too, but if you come later in the evening that's all been sold, and what's left is the ancient, nicked and notched log, stained with old blood, where countless animal carcasses have surely met their fate, being hacked apart, limb from limb, bodies separated from all their constituent parts, each one sent to a new home in a tiny green plastic bag. Yum

The little guy who sells me vegetables -while his mother sits in the dark shadows, is about 13, maybe, with a voice that's beginning to change, and plump, lisping lips, and big hands with rough, elephant skin- wears the same, unwashed red shirt every day and is aggressively dirty, which is only logical since he spends all day sweating in that hot, sweltering hole of a room, where the wind does not penetrate, puttering around wilted vegetables, sticky, raw meat and occasional fat chunks of a fish which may or may not, be "grouper".

He speaks Hassaniya with a subtle accent, which I can't identify, but which I think must be the lingering echoes of some Pulaar grandmother speaking ghost-like through his mouth.

To pass the time, I've cultivated a casual friendship with him, which I am wont to do, and which represents my only real skill. The skill is, not, (creepily) 'forging relationships with children' so much as infiltrating the lives and routines of others, by imitating their voices, and gestures, and habits, until I seem to blend into the background. By another name, it's called mimicry, and it's all, in the end, a result of my splendid, machine-like ears, and if I've had any success at all here, (a big if) it's due to that fact alone.

Sometimes children will surprise you with the extent to which they guilelessly buy it all, this illusion of mine, and the other day while I was picking through turnips, veggie-boy asked casually if I had finished school already, and if I therefore had any leftover 6th year school books he could use.

-I asked, “Which ones? Like, Science? Math?” I handed him a bunch of turnips to weigh. “History?”

-“It doesn’t matter. Anything.” he said.

I looked away to keep from smiling, because his adorable assumption, even if only in one irrational part of his brain, that I would have used the same Mauritanian school-books as he, was oddly heartbreaking.

Someone must have overheard the exchange and set him straight, because two days later, when I came again the first thing he said to me was, “What country are you from?” It had taken him a month and a half to ask the question which most people ask within two seconds of meeting me, (right after "are you a Muslim?") and I responded in the way I sometimes do, just to mix things up: I cocked my head, and thought for a moment, my eyes upturned. Then I gave a quick shake of my head and said, “Yaa....I dunno. I forgot.”

I couldn't tell you his name, I don't think I've ever asked. I constantly bug him to give me a good price, in the persistently rude and brusque way of Mauritanians that is now mine, and I tell him if he doesn't I'm going to "nitarsh" him, meaning, roughly, "to smack upside the head", which is a word related in that patiently Arabic, tri-consonantal way to "atrash", which means deaf.

He sells lentils, a graceful, wonderful pulse I hope to never again take for granted, as well as gooey bags of tomato paste from a giant can, and garlic, and homemade peanut butter, and lettuce and cucumbers, green-peppers, fresh carrots from a Moroccan plastic sac, and beets. If you don't like beets, I hope that you will go and re-evaluate your life, because, as if the fact that they bleed a deep scarlet-red juice were not reason enough to adore them, they happen to taste like the actual crumbling earth itself, which is a good thing. Repent, beet haters.

None of these things are necessarily unique to Nouakchott, and can be found in most regional "capitals" in the rest of the country, but to me, coming from the brousse of all brousses, I find myself continually amazed by the city's humble, and ubiquitous, wonders.

The one thing I've come to depend on, in order to keep my life worth living, is "tigi digi", the (Pulaar?) word for a peanut-butter-like substance (Moors don't make it) which appears throughout the country in various guises, ranging in taste from "unpalatable" to "better than nothing", but which has surely reached its ultimate zenith here in the bloated, greasy bags of the stuff sold in this little man's shop.

They keep it in an old, yellow Jumbo-cube bucket, buried amongst the hot peppers, so now I just go and help myself to a couple of bulging bags while my little guy is occupied, chopping up some fat, veiled, vampire-of-a-white-Mooress's fish steak.

This peanut butter is oily enough to be creamy, but not whipped into the synthetic pansy-ness of, say, Jiffy, and it is bitter and ballsy and unapologetic, and I love it. Every morning I slather it on fresh bread loaves, bought from the toothless old shop-keeper across the street, drizzled with honey (thick, impure stuff with actual dead bees in it, which Ginger brought us from Senegal in a vingear bottle), and sip real coffee, reading a children's book in French, about 'N'zi, the Great. Warrior of Africa', or sit basking in my electric fan's benediction.

I have a good life. I don't say it enough, but I do. Now if only having a good life had even the slightest connection with having a happy one, we would be in business.

But at the moment, I'll make do with lentils and say ilhumdulllah.

by tacit agreement they ignored the remarks

Today I met a young man from Syria, (the shadowed, mysterious country of so many staid CNN broadcasts) whose name is Hazaa, like that weird old word for ‘hooray’, which is a name I’ve never heard of before, and which sounds like it’s spelled with a ‘hamza’ (glottal stop) at the end, but isn’t (he told me) so now I’m stumped.

I met him by chance (like I do almost all my assorted acquaintances) on the street as I was walking along, trying to figure out how to send phone credit to someone who had asked for it (this happens all the time - people whom you may not have heard from in months, will call you and say, “Hi. How’s your health? How’s the heat? Send me credit? Click) and as he passed me I looked up, and after he had passed he said, "Bonjour" and then I looked over my shoulder and said "ish-haal-ak?" (how are you?) and then he looked back and smiled at my Hassaniya, and I looked back at him smiling, and then I smiled and then we backtracked, walking towards one another and shook hands and did greetings.

This would be weird in America, but strangely enough I do this all the time, and with people I couldn't tell from Adam, so when I said that we met by chance, it was a lie, and what I meant was that we met because I gave chance a chance. Even though that sounds like a lyric from a Karen Carpenter song, the question remains: why did I look over my shoulder? Why did I go back? More on that later....

Anyway, on his head, Hazaa had a ball cap, well worn to frayed-ness and with a bent brim, from under which his great crop of dark curls was visible, curving delicately around his ears and shading his black eyes. He looked Greek, maybe, or maybe he just looked like I think Greeks look, but Syria (in my mind) is off over there, in that part of the world where the difference between "Arab" and "Mediterranean" becomes more a question of the proper lighting.

In fact, it's usually very easy to spot people who are actually Arab, (as opposed to Moor which isn't the same thing), from North Africa or otherwise, and not just because they are usually lighter-skinned, (which they are) but also because of more subtle and complicated factors, like 'base tones' and 'color warmth' and all those science-things which are hard to describe though easier to recognize.

He was good-looking, clearly, though I don't remember specifically why, other than his square, clean-shaven chin, and interesting lips, which were not unicolor, but which instead contained patches of varying shades of pink.

He had a good voice though, clear and mellow and pleasant, which is something I am always quick to jealously notice in others, given the diffuse, fickle, chameleon of an irritating purr that I've been cursed with. Now I'm just hoping someday he'll speak to me in Syrian Arabic, while I sit there attacking a plate of humus, or twiddling my thumbs.

His clothes were all dirty, like he'd just come from work, which I later verified, sleuth-like, when he said "I've just come from work". He said he's a "builder" - one of those vague job descriptions people are so fond of using here, that could mean anything. I'm sorry, a builder of......? Toy helicopters? Sports stadiums? Grammatically incorrect sentences?

After he asked if I was French (always everyone's first question) he said that I looked like the brother of some university professor he knew, and then we talked for all of 5 minutes about nothing in particular, which I am oddly good at only in foreign languages, all the while holding hands - a culturally appropriate habit I'm going to miss, but that I'd better learn to break before I return to America, lest I become some kind of touchy-feely freakazoid whom people avoid at social gatherings.

Part of what's involved in having conversations about nothing is posing questions you already know the answer to, and so I asked if Hassaniya was quite different from the language in "Sooriiya". He said yes, because it totally is, even though this is a fact many Mauritanians whom you meet will steadfastly deny, insisting that they can be understood all the way to the Saudi peninsula and back, but nevertheless, he seemed to speak it just fine, only more lightly and gracefully than natives, for obvious reasons.

One thing he did was pepper his phrases, Mauritanian-like, with "yaa, khu-ya" meaning "my brother", as in "where did you learn Hassaniya, yaa, khu-ya?" which is another thing I am going to miss dearly, as it has the instant effect of making one feel better, but sadly it's something that I don't think is very common in the US outside of maybe, parts of the black community, and like, monasteries, neither of whom, I think, would let me in the door.

I should listen to Mom, and not speak to strangers, especially the ones who are eager to speak to me, as he could have been a theif, a seller of something I didn't want to buy, or much more likely, and almost worse, annoying, but I'm a big boy now, and as it turns out he wasn't any of those things.

Still.... why the second look?

One reason, in particular, I acknowledge to be more or less ignoble, (which is to say, would I have turned and looked had the person in question been a Plain-Jane? I think we all know the answer to that question) but A) I ain't no saint, and B) that is not within the scope of this entry.

But aside from that, I have a possibly not un-dangerous tendency, it seems, to follow the course of events wherever they may lead, or more specifically, to selectively encourage those events which seem to have the best chance of coming to an intriguing end. Now that I've set that down, I realize I said it in what is possibly the most boring way possible, and also that there is nothing noteworthy about wanting interesting things to happen in one's life (not that I am at all averse to writing about 'nothing noteworthy.')

I guess the only reason I'm thinking about it is that if I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I don't separate dangerous from interesting. Having said that, the sunbaked streets of Nouakchott at 3pm are surely less threatening that a rural road in New Jersey, but I've found (read: put) myself in plenty of situations here which either did, or could easily have gone sour, and I was led there not by my better judgement, or even necessity, but by the simple truth that I would rather be anything, anything, but bored.

Well, I'm nothing if not a fool, though we knew that already.

like the street loves slang

There are two kinds of taxis. Well, clearly that's a lie because there are many more than that, but the only two I'm concerned with are the kind that are cheap, and the kind that are cheaper.

Every day now (except weekends, which, because we are so Muslim, means Friday and Saturday) I go to our bureau (I'm sorry, is that even a word in English? it means office) to work, which is in the tallest building in the country, all of nine storeys, and which, with its glass, automatic! doors and shiny, snazzy steel, and three, count them, three elevators, one of which lights up at night, is quite unmistakably Mauritania's version of a (pretty, but needless) chunk of glittering, national diamond in the sky, known otherwise as bling.

The building is called 'el khayme' which can translate literally as 'the tent', and is located just far enough away so that I can take a cab without feeling very guilty, but not far enough away so that I must. I live one street over from Chinguitel (as in Chinguit(ti) tel(ephone)) the company who, with their bright blue signs depicting a starburst, and their air of both new-mystery, and an urbane Arab-ness which no one can resist, started moving in on Mauritel's virtual monopoly over phone service sometime last year-ish, and has, ever since, been scaring their pants off. They also happen to be a subsidiary of Sudatel, which is owned by the Sudanese government, so it's like " watch out....".

On the other side, in a diagonal shot from my doorstep, is the restaurant slash English-school-with-creepily-subversive-Christian-undertones, "Equinox". It's housed in a gorgeously restored home with Arabesque filligree work, and plaster moldings on the ceiling, and tiles, more suitably located in some country with actual culture, like Morocco, (ooops!). The sign out front, in green and black, the "o" made into a half moon, looks more like that for an insurance agency than an eatery, but the food's good, so all is forgiven.

It's the only restaurant that I know of in the city (read: country) which is owned and run by an American- a middle-aged, white ex development worker- and there are three things which would tell you this even if you didn't already know: their french-fries are crunchy, like something out of someone's ideal of a mid-western diner, smoking is prohibited, and when you sit down, they bring you ice-water (as in, "water with ice in it") which is, if you didn't know, notoriously American to everyone except Americans themselves. They also have white pepper (wtf?) on the table, and meatball sandwiches, so I just ignore the Christian reading material, and stuff my face.

The thing about walking to work is not the distance, but the heat - I'm sorry, it's hot here. Did you know?- but more than that, it's the humidity. This might seem like a joke, because Nouakchott's humidity, as a desert city, is doubtless extremely low compared to the rest of the world, but it's on the coast, and I just came from living two years on top of a sand dune, so anything wetter than, say, 'deathly parched' makes me feel like I'm swimming. Shneeks.

I feel as though modern living, and houses, and mores are not compatible with this place on the earth. There is a reason people live in in tents in the rest of the country. In the village I had one little room with two doors, six feet apart, who exchanged the breeze with one another, and everything I owned was practically within arm's reach, and I had my white howlie to protect me from the sun. Here, walking down the almost tree-less streets, I feel self-conscious, and like a grotesque, "mitbaadi" (hick-like) Frenchman if I wear my howlie, and I feel like the sun hates people, literally hates them, pouring down distaste, instead of light. Why else is it so HOT? Why else would the heat get trapped in my labrinthine, over room-ed house each night instead of escaping up into the stars.

But this is all a lie, because in Nouakchott I have (sporadically) running water, and bananas, and the other day I made a green salad with cucumbers and golden raisins. Fuck the village.

If I walk to work I am a soaked, overheated disaster by the time I walk in the lobby, with its snooty (S)watch kiosk, and international time clocks, and even my newly bought, painfully distressed, Chinese-made jeans, and faux Armani black T-shirt with rivets can not disguise it. Meanwhile, there is Cheikh G. -the tall Wolof angel of graceful goodness, who smells, always, distinctly of heaven (I'm not kidding) and whose skin is perpetually cool to the touch, as though internally air-conditioned underneath his flowing robes- who works regular miracles in the transparent office next to my little "fly-by-night" dictionary-making station, so what's one to do?

Anway, the taxis- it's one of those things where after you notice something, it's hard to believe you never noticed it before, but virtually all the cabs in the city are the same kind of late-model mercedes (that name doesn't mean the same thing here) painted in either green and yellow, or not, and occasionally pimped-out, complete with hub-caps, and driven by what invariably turns out to be a young Senagalese cutie in a tanktop listening to Mbalax. These taxis will, without fail, charge me 200 ougiyas to get from here to there; the extra 100 is added because, and only because, there is a 90 degree turn involved.

That much I knew- the part I didn't notice was about the taxi "tout-droites" (meaning "straight (ahead)", ironically) which are all decrepit Renaults -skelatally bare-metal, and looking like the French contemporary of the Model-T- and since someone pointed them out to me, they are now as easy to spot as shining, rusting, belching beacons in the proverbial dark. These are shared, fixed-route cabs, which cost 80 ougiyas, look something like a hatch-back, and exist to ferry low-budget commuters, everyday, between capitale market and somewhere else I could care less about. The important thing is that I catch them, with almost reverent devotion, on the main route, 30 seconds from my house, and I can disdainfully ignore all the futile honking of the Mercedes, thinking, "200 ougs, my eye", until one of these perilous relics rolls slowly by. I hiss them down, and point for good measure, and try to act nonchalant as I hop chic-ly into what is, to all appearances, a vehicle made for not-me, smelling (for the moment) faintly like imitation Hugo and clean-ness, dressed in black pinstripe and scrubbed converse all stars, and pondering, just briefly, the fact that I may be cheap, and even poorer, I may be a fault-riddled, neurotic, catastrophe, but damn, sometimes, I've got style.