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.....

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....