My Parents Saw the King
Hey guys... I'm working on the picutres for this but things have been a bit hectic here this last week so I'll try to do it saturday... Sorry for the delay.
Hey All,
How are things going? I apologize as it’s been more than a month since I last managed to write. It’s been kind of a busy time for me with a new site placement, getting to know people and surroundings, and a visit from the parents. Good times! First though let me reiterate that I would LOVE to hear what’s been going on with all of you lately. I get so little news so feel free to write me. I have internet with remarkable regularity now (At least once a week!) and a stable post office box with now strings attached. If you need/want the address feel free to let me know.
So, as I said things have been busy for me. Of course, busy in Morocco is something of a relative term. I suppose but I've gotten so used to it that just a few "events" a week makes it seem busy. I'm going to be so screwed up when I get home that someone should sell tickets to watch me for the first few days. You never really think about culture shock going the other way. Then, most people don't spend quite this long away from their own culture. But I digress.
When last I wrote I had just moved into my new place. Now, having lived there for a few months I still feel like I 'm just beginning to get to know the place. I still haven't met too many people despite trying to put myself out there every day that I'm in the village for at least an hour or two. This is not as easy as it sounds. "Tassa," as I've affectionately taken to calling it, lacks the centrally located meeting place that my other village had. Generally, I have been just going to the shop to meet people but most families send their kids to buy stuff so its not really all that great a method. I have been doing alright with the kids though. My efforts haven't really been helped out by the onset of the month of Ramadan which started in the last week of September and ends around the 23rd of October. While it means that more people are at home in the village it also means that the level of outdoor activity drops significantly. As an example my host family watches at least 12 hours of TV per day. Annoyingly the TV room is located directly beneath my bedroom but at least they go to bed fairly early. Ramadan itself has been going pretty well. I fasted for the first part of the month just because its such a good integration tool and conversation starter (During Ramadan fasting is often the ONLY conversation starter.) but I stopped when my parents came to visit a couple of weeks in. (but don't tell my villagers!)
I must say that while meeting people has been more difficult than I had hoped the people that I have managed to contact I've been able to establish pretty good relationships with. It helps being able to speak (more or less anyway) the language when you arrive instead of dealing with a six month learning curve. It has also helped to have the advice of the volunteer that lived in my village before me. All this to say that I'm happy there whether I manage to get any work done or not, and in just a few months I've managed to get myself more connected and more a part of the community than I did in a year and a half in my former location. My host family seems too poor to feed me on the same type of regular basis that my last family managed during Ramadan, but I have eaten down there a few times. Have also had some good conversations with my host dad and mom about the goings on in Morocco and in the world in general, observed my host moms cooking techniques and played endless camp games with my siblings over bits of hard candy that I've managed to smuggle the ones that aren't fasting. Good times all around.
My house is a couple of small rooms on the roof of my landlord's house. I like it but the emphasis is definitely on the word small and the rooms are connected by an exterior courtyard instead of an interior hallway. The centerpiece of the courtyard is my landlord's skylight and I can communicate with the people down below quite easily. The kitchen is a wonderful improvement on my old one but I'm definitely lacking in adequate storage space for all my clothes and belongings in the bedroom. I have light bulbs now, which is great but I don't actually have a lot of electronics to use any more and I find that I rather miss my candles when I read in the evening time. My bed doubles as a couch and I picked up a couple of stools and a small table at the local market town to round out the furnishings of the place. I like to sit out on the courtyard in the evenings after they turn out the streetlights and watch the stars. It's an amazing place. The sun rises on one end of the valley and sets at the other which does neat things with the light. Everywhere you look there is mountains and trees and green. There is a Barbary sheep reserve at one end of the valley and I'm going to try and get up there one day with my host dad. If I stand up on the roof I can even get cell phone reception which means that I'm so connected now comparatively speaking that I hardly know what to do with myself. (of course this isn't all great… there were some advantages to not being reachable when it comes to PC and its policies).
I've been killing the free moments between my integration efforts catching up on my journal, exploring my surroundings (there's a neat fire tower up on the mountain behind my house) and picking up on my other writing. (I've decided to try and write a few articles just for my own enjoyment as well as some for the PC morocco volunteer magazine) I've tried to make myself more organized with some good results but I'm not sure how long it will last. My parents helped me pick up some much needed furniture and materials for some home improvements and brought some snacks from the US. So, for the last week I've been painting and sewing curtains and eating cheese-its!. They also brought me a broken down computer that still works for writing and the occasional bootleg DVD movie, so that’s cool too.
Of course, better than the material goods that I scored when they visited was the visit itself. It was so GREAT to have them here for a few days. It was nice that I finally got to show them the things that I've seen and done and experienced first hand instead of only trying to explain it with words. They were very excited to hear and see all the good things and very understanding of the problems that we in PC face with PC itself and with Morocco. I definitely appreciated their support and suggestions. I'll tell a little bit about the trip and I'll get the illustrated version (from the 700 or so pictures that they took while they were here since my camera is still in the shop) up on my journal site (http://atibbs.blogspot.com) as soon as I get a chance. (sometime this week)
I took the train to meet them at the airport in Casablanca where we rented a car from a very nice man named Tyeeb who met them there. We traveled to Meknes and started getting caught up on old times in the car. The first night we met up with my girlfriend Carly at the Meknes Ibis hotel and ate at McDonalds. Normally McDonalds wouldn't have been my first choice of restaurants but because it was Ramadan not much else was open to us. This was to become a recurring theme of the trip, though I think that we did very well in overcoming the difficulty.
We checked out the main sights in Meknes the next day, including a neat mosoleum where they took the picture that was on the front cover of my guidebook and a giant gateway built by a tyrant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and never managed to actually bring the city to the prominence that he envisioned.
After we finished there we moved on to lunch at Volubulis, the ruins of the southernmost roman outpost at the height of their empire. It's famous for its mosaics and its bronze statues. The best of these have, of course, been moved to a museum in Rabat but the mosaics that remained were indeed impressive. There were a few other tour groups there but the site was quite large and we weren't crowded. Like most attractions in morocco though it definitely lacked in interpretive qualities. There were no maps and only very few signs telling us what things were. My mom and I had done some research before arriving there but it was hard to match it to details on the ground. We probably could have learned more if we had hired a guide at the gate but my distrust and distaste for Moroccan hecklers didn't really even allow me to consider this possibility. We did alright on our own though. It was a neat site but the day was really hot and hazy and we moved on to Fez (Fes) fairly early in the evening.
We did hire a guide in Fez and after some difficulty finding him he led us all through the old city Medina where we saw mausoleums, centuries old universities that taught religion, astronomy and mathematics all under the same roof(makes you wonder what happened there…), the ancient tanneries where workers cure and dye hides in foul mixtures of pigeon excrement the same way that they have for centuries and, of course, had tea at a carpet merchant (but didn't buy anything). It was a pretty impressive place.
When we finished there we moved on to Carly's village where we had a few days of Berber culture and her host family was nice enough to have all of us over for the breaking of the fast meal at sunset. This was an interesting and rewarding experience, especially for my parents, but also for me since I've been trying to experience the breaking of the fast in as many different regions as possible. Her host mom put out a fantastic spread and Carly and I made a stir-fry for the later evening meal as our contribution to the meal and as a thank you. We used Carly's house as a jumping off point for a tour of nearby lakes and some bird watching as well as a shopping excursion to the town of Asrou and an afternoon picnic in the cedar forest surrounding the town. Mom really enjoyed the Barbary monkeys that we discovered taking advantage of the tourists beside the road. (and you wonder why we have 700 pictures).
From there we moved on to the Cascades d'Ouzoud. I had never been to the region and I wanted to see these waterfalls at the same time. It was a long days drive and more difficult to get to that I anticipated but my dad held up well behind the wheel and it was totally worth the trip. Thanks to a tip from a volunteer in the region we got set up with a decent hotel and Carly and I made friends with the owner as well. My parents also finally got to experience some real, non-Ramadan, Moroccan cuisine and my mom enjoyed bargaining for trinkets in the shops beside the trails. The road there twisted and turned its way through some beautiful gorges and the falls themselves were spectacular. We spent a bit longer there than I had planned because we were captivated by them and because it was a great spot to just lounge and relax.
As a result we rolled into my village in the late evening after dark after a shopping excursion to pick up some goods in Marrakech on the way. My parents enjoyed spending some time exploring my town and visiting my house. We didn't really get any invitations to eat anywhere so I arranged for food for them at the hostel where they were staying. My mother helped me organize stuff in my house and find some shelves for my clothes in the nearby market town. It was nice to have them there and get them to see the place, but I was at a loss for what I should do with them there otherwise. We did manage to stay busy though.
After a few days in my site we went to Marrakech in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel near the center of town. Marrakech is my town now but I haven't really had that much of an opportunity to get to know it yet. Still, we visited some of the bigger tourist attractions (and discovered that some of them were not as interesting as we might have hoped) and since several of us were feeling a bit under the weather we decided to take it easy for the afternoon and just hang out around the pool until evening. After sunset we went out and explored the markets and endless vendors of the medina and watched some of the street performances on the square over delicious ice-cream. We would return to Marrakech but first we went to check out my old haunt of Ouarzazate.
As it happened the king was visiting Ouarzazate to do a number of things and we had trouble finding a hotel room as a result. It all worked out great though because we had to stay in a couple of really nice places that I might not have discovered otherwise. Our time in Oz was relaxing and I spent some time shopping with my mom in a lot of the little tourist boutiques, showing them were I had spent a lot of time and checking my mailbox there. We even saw the king as he drove by twice! Not many volunteers' parents can say that they've had that opportunity! It also meant that they got to see Oz at its best, with all the flags flying and all the fountains working and all the buildings and storefronts newly painted.
We spent our last day together back in Marrakech expanding on our previous experiences and getting me a few more things for my house that we had missed the first time.
All told it was an amazing experience and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. As I said, look for the illustrated version soon. As it is its time for me to go buy my vegetables and catch my transit van back up the hill. You're probably relived anyway since this has dragged on a bit. Still, I hope that it finds you well and happy and I hope to hear from you all soon. Stay well.
Much love and luck in everything!
Cheers!
-Andy
Hey All,
How are things going? I apologize as it’s been more than a month since I last managed to write. It’s been kind of a busy time for me with a new site placement, getting to know people and surroundings, and a visit from the parents. Good times! First though let me reiterate that I would LOVE to hear what’s been going on with all of you lately. I get so little news so feel free to write me. I have internet with remarkable regularity now (At least once a week!) and a stable post office box with now strings attached. If you need/want the address feel free to let me know.
So, as I said things have been busy for me. Of course, busy in Morocco is something of a relative term. I suppose but I've gotten so used to it that just a few "events" a week makes it seem busy. I'm going to be so screwed up when I get home that someone should sell tickets to watch me for the first few days. You never really think about culture shock going the other way. Then, most people don't spend quite this long away from their own culture. But I digress.
When last I wrote I had just moved into my new place. Now, having lived there for a few months I still feel like I 'm just beginning to get to know the place. I still haven't met too many people despite trying to put myself out there every day that I'm in the village for at least an hour or two. This is not as easy as it sounds. "Tassa," as I've affectionately taken to calling it, lacks the centrally located meeting place that my other village had. Generally, I have been just going to the shop to meet people but most families send their kids to buy stuff so its not really all that great a method. I have been doing alright with the kids though. My efforts haven't really been helped out by the onset of the month of Ramadan which started in the last week of September and ends around the 23rd of October. While it means that more people are at home in the village it also means that the level of outdoor activity drops significantly. As an example my host family watches at least 12 hours of TV per day. Annoyingly the TV room is located directly beneath my bedroom but at least they go to bed fairly early. Ramadan itself has been going pretty well. I fasted for the first part of the month just because its such a good integration tool and conversation starter (During Ramadan fasting is often the ONLY conversation starter.) but I stopped when my parents came to visit a couple of weeks in. (but don't tell my villagers!)
I must say that while meeting people has been more difficult than I had hoped the people that I have managed to contact I've been able to establish pretty good relationships with. It helps being able to speak (more or less anyway) the language when you arrive instead of dealing with a six month learning curve. It has also helped to have the advice of the volunteer that lived in my village before me. All this to say that I'm happy there whether I manage to get any work done or not, and in just a few months I've managed to get myself more connected and more a part of the community than I did in a year and a half in my former location. My host family seems too poor to feed me on the same type of regular basis that my last family managed during Ramadan, but I have eaten down there a few times. Have also had some good conversations with my host dad and mom about the goings on in Morocco and in the world in general, observed my host moms cooking techniques and played endless camp games with my siblings over bits of hard candy that I've managed to smuggle the ones that aren't fasting. Good times all around.
My house is a couple of small rooms on the roof of my landlord's house. I like it but the emphasis is definitely on the word small and the rooms are connected by an exterior courtyard instead of an interior hallway. The centerpiece of the courtyard is my landlord's skylight and I can communicate with the people down below quite easily. The kitchen is a wonderful improvement on my old one but I'm definitely lacking in adequate storage space for all my clothes and belongings in the bedroom. I have light bulbs now, which is great but I don't actually have a lot of electronics to use any more and I find that I rather miss my candles when I read in the evening time. My bed doubles as a couch and I picked up a couple of stools and a small table at the local market town to round out the furnishings of the place. I like to sit out on the courtyard in the evenings after they turn out the streetlights and watch the stars. It's an amazing place. The sun rises on one end of the valley and sets at the other which does neat things with the light. Everywhere you look there is mountains and trees and green. There is a Barbary sheep reserve at one end of the valley and I'm going to try and get up there one day with my host dad. If I stand up on the roof I can even get cell phone reception which means that I'm so connected now comparatively speaking that I hardly know what to do with myself. (of course this isn't all great… there were some advantages to not being reachable when it comes to PC and its policies).
I've been killing the free moments between my integration efforts catching up on my journal, exploring my surroundings (there's a neat fire tower up on the mountain behind my house) and picking up on my other writing. (I've decided to try and write a few articles just for my own enjoyment as well as some for the PC morocco volunteer magazine) I've tried to make myself more organized with some good results but I'm not sure how long it will last. My parents helped me pick up some much needed furniture and materials for some home improvements and brought some snacks from the US. So, for the last week I've been painting and sewing curtains and eating cheese-its!. They also brought me a broken down computer that still works for writing and the occasional bootleg DVD movie, so that’s cool too.
Of course, better than the material goods that I scored when they visited was the visit itself. It was so GREAT to have them here for a few days. It was nice that I finally got to show them the things that I've seen and done and experienced first hand instead of only trying to explain it with words. They were very excited to hear and see all the good things and very understanding of the problems that we in PC face with PC itself and with Morocco. I definitely appreciated their support and suggestions. I'll tell a little bit about the trip and I'll get the illustrated version (from the 700 or so pictures that they took while they were here since my camera is still in the shop) up on my journal site (http://atibbs.blogspot.com) as soon as I get a chance. (sometime this week)
I took the train to meet them at the airport in Casablanca where we rented a car from a very nice man named Tyeeb who met them there. We traveled to Meknes and started getting caught up on old times in the car. The first night we met up with my girlfriend Carly at the Meknes Ibis hotel and ate at McDonalds. Normally McDonalds wouldn't have been my first choice of restaurants but because it was Ramadan not much else was open to us. This was to become a recurring theme of the trip, though I think that we did very well in overcoming the difficulty.
We checked out the main sights in Meknes the next day, including a neat mosoleum where they took the picture that was on the front cover of my guidebook and a giant gateway built by a tyrant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and never managed to actually bring the city to the prominence that he envisioned.
After we finished there we moved on to lunch at Volubulis, the ruins of the southernmost roman outpost at the height of their empire. It's famous for its mosaics and its bronze statues. The best of these have, of course, been moved to a museum in Rabat but the mosaics that remained were indeed impressive. There were a few other tour groups there but the site was quite large and we weren't crowded. Like most attractions in morocco though it definitely lacked in interpretive qualities. There were no maps and only very few signs telling us what things were. My mom and I had done some research before arriving there but it was hard to match it to details on the ground. We probably could have learned more if we had hired a guide at the gate but my distrust and distaste for Moroccan hecklers didn't really even allow me to consider this possibility. We did alright on our own though. It was a neat site but the day was really hot and hazy and we moved on to Fez (Fes) fairly early in the evening.
We did hire a guide in Fez and after some difficulty finding him he led us all through the old city Medina where we saw mausoleums, centuries old universities that taught religion, astronomy and mathematics all under the same roof(makes you wonder what happened there…), the ancient tanneries where workers cure and dye hides in foul mixtures of pigeon excrement the same way that they have for centuries and, of course, had tea at a carpet merchant (but didn't buy anything). It was a pretty impressive place.
When we finished there we moved on to Carly's village where we had a few days of Berber culture and her host family was nice enough to have all of us over for the breaking of the fast meal at sunset. This was an interesting and rewarding experience, especially for my parents, but also for me since I've been trying to experience the breaking of the fast in as many different regions as possible. Her host mom put out a fantastic spread and Carly and I made a stir-fry for the later evening meal as our contribution to the meal and as a thank you. We used Carly's house as a jumping off point for a tour of nearby lakes and some bird watching as well as a shopping excursion to the town of Asrou and an afternoon picnic in the cedar forest surrounding the town. Mom really enjoyed the Barbary monkeys that we discovered taking advantage of the tourists beside the road. (and you wonder why we have 700 pictures).
From there we moved on to the Cascades d'Ouzoud. I had never been to the region and I wanted to see these waterfalls at the same time. It was a long days drive and more difficult to get to that I anticipated but my dad held up well behind the wheel and it was totally worth the trip. Thanks to a tip from a volunteer in the region we got set up with a decent hotel and Carly and I made friends with the owner as well. My parents also finally got to experience some real, non-Ramadan, Moroccan cuisine and my mom enjoyed bargaining for trinkets in the shops beside the trails. The road there twisted and turned its way through some beautiful gorges and the falls themselves were spectacular. We spent a bit longer there than I had planned because we were captivated by them and because it was a great spot to just lounge and relax.
As a result we rolled into my village in the late evening after dark after a shopping excursion to pick up some goods in Marrakech on the way. My parents enjoyed spending some time exploring my town and visiting my house. We didn't really get any invitations to eat anywhere so I arranged for food for them at the hostel where they were staying. My mother helped me organize stuff in my house and find some shelves for my clothes in the nearby market town. It was nice to have them there and get them to see the place, but I was at a loss for what I should do with them there otherwise. We did manage to stay busy though.
After a few days in my site we went to Marrakech in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel near the center of town. Marrakech is my town now but I haven't really had that much of an opportunity to get to know it yet. Still, we visited some of the bigger tourist attractions (and discovered that some of them were not as interesting as we might have hoped) and since several of us were feeling a bit under the weather we decided to take it easy for the afternoon and just hang out around the pool until evening. After sunset we went out and explored the markets and endless vendors of the medina and watched some of the street performances on the square over delicious ice-cream. We would return to Marrakech but first we went to check out my old haunt of Ouarzazate.
As it happened the king was visiting Ouarzazate to do a number of things and we had trouble finding a hotel room as a result. It all worked out great though because we had to stay in a couple of really nice places that I might not have discovered otherwise. Our time in Oz was relaxing and I spent some time shopping with my mom in a lot of the little tourist boutiques, showing them were I had spent a lot of time and checking my mailbox there. We even saw the king as he drove by twice! Not many volunteers' parents can say that they've had that opportunity! It also meant that they got to see Oz at its best, with all the flags flying and all the fountains working and all the buildings and storefronts newly painted.
We spent our last day together back in Marrakech expanding on our previous experiences and getting me a few more things for my house that we had missed the first time.
All told it was an amazing experience and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. As I said, look for the illustrated version soon. As it is its time for me to go buy my vegetables and catch my transit van back up the hill. You're probably relived anyway since this has dragged on a bit. Still, I hope that it finds you well and happy and I hope to hear from you all soon. Stay well.
Much love and luck in everything!
Cheers!
-Andy
posted by Andy & Erin | 1:44 PM
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