Le Stage, and Fun Times at the Ex-Pat Café
What I Do at the Foundation:
The simple answer is not a whole lot right now. I was doing a tremendous amount of work during the festival and during the first month I was here, and while it was very exhausting I had a really a wonderful experience.
Right now, however, there is really not a whole lot for me to do. When the foundation first laid out for me what I was going to do, they made it very clear that the majority of the work I was going to do was going to be with the festival. They sort of gave me indications that there would be things to do after the festival was over, but it was a little vague. What has been happening in the past weeks is that I come into work in the morning, sit at the desk of Julian, and primarily work on my thesis.
Occasionally they have given me some small projects to do. One was to research all of the themes of the past festivals, and put them all into one document. I managed to do this in an afternoon, and after this was done I met with Amel and Naime, the latter being the directrice, to discuss what the title of the next festival would be. Unfortunately, the directrice had her heart set on <<>> (Live and Let Live en anglais) even before the meeting began, and so nothing really got done. Amel and I were sort of dancing around how to say that this was a bad idea, but it seemed that this was really what she wanted.
The other big project I was working on last week was to read about 200 articles in French, and then to write up if they were informative, or if they offered any sort of criticism of the foundation or the festival in general. It gave me something to work on for that week, and the only problem I had with it was the fact that I had two different people, Naime and the person in charge of press relations, Laila, tell me two different instructions, and therefore two different translations in my head, for what I was supposed to do. After a bit of confusion, I managed to get a seven page document done for them, which I hope they find useful.
There also seems to be a civil war in the office between the directrice and the rest of the people who work here. Isham, the man who is in charge of the finances, comes over to my desk daily to rant about how bad a job she is doing. Sometimes, a bunch of them will go into Amel's office or onto the balcony to rant to each other about their experiences. More often than not, they will rant near my window, because it is the furthest from her office, and I will wave hello to them rather awkwardly. I feel that the war maybe has something to do with why I haven't been given any work to do this week, and I hesitate to ask sometimes what is happening. For the most part though, I try and keep my head down.
As of now, it is Thursday, and I'm going to see if I can actually get through this entire week without doing any work for them. Its not that I don't want to do any work, I'd be happy to do something just to feel useful. I feel sort of awkward showing up here every day, using their internet, and working on my thesis. It's not a bad life, but I think it is usually how an internship goes.
Fun Times at the Ex-Pat Café
The area where I eat the most frequently is a place that I have taken to call The Ex-Pat Café, mostly because nearly all of the people who I meet there are travelers, ex-patriots, and foreigners like myself. The area itself is a string of cafés, restaurants, and shops that line the road below the giant blue arch of Bab Boujloud, one of the old entrances to the medina. I have taken to call it one big café because everything is sort of compressed together, for as you walk down that road there is literally one café that is next to another, in sort of a conglomeration of places to eat and drink. If you are not hungry, or are looking for a specific place to eat, it is bit like running the gauntlet as you walk down this road at dinnertime. A lot of people will try their best to get you to eat at their restaurant, “My friend, you are hungry? I make you very good breakfast. Why you not try my food?”
I was first introduced to the Ex-Pat Café when I was working as a team for Julian. On most days for lunch, Jihan, Ismael, and I would go buy sandwiches in the medina, and bring them to one of the cafés to have lunch and tea. In those days, it was not too hot outside, and one could still sip a hot tea outside and still be fairly comfortable. I still drink tea outside, but I sweat a lot more for it. It is actually one of the few places in Fez where there are a lot of restaurants and cafés fairly close together.
The place that I frequent the most nowadays is called Chez Rachid. Rachid himself is an elderly, dark skinned, Berber gentleman, who has a mustache and is missing several teeth. He always wears a white cotton cover over his head, a kufi, that is typical of traditional male muslim dress here. For practical purposes, I’m sure it must keep the sun off of his head very well. He always greets me with a smile and handshake.
“La bes, monsieur, ça va?”
“Hamdullah, Rachid, la bes?”
“Hamdullah, Hamdullah. T’as faim?”
“Comme habitude.”
Julian, who insisted that Chez Rachid was by far the cleanest, the cheapest, and the best restaurant, introduced me to Rachid one night, and I subsequently started going there with Julian often, and sometimes with Celine, the person from whom I am renting this apartment. While Rachid is the restaurant’s only waiter and host, there is another woman in the back, who I assume is his wife, who does most of the cooking. The food is usually quite good, as I enjoy eating their pastilla quite a bit, and it is also cheaper than most of the other restaurants. Since I eat there almost every other day, he usually gives a discount from the price that is printed on the menu. It is a nice place, and I enjoy going to eat there. The only problem is that it is closed on Friday, the Muslim holy day of the week.
Most of the people who I have met at the ex-pat café or around there are nice, level headed people that traveling around Morocco, and just staying in Fez for a few days. There are some people who I have met, however, that have been absolutely bonkers. As I was walking to lunch one day in one of small streets in the medina that leads to Bab Boujloud, an Englishman, who was holding a fairly large map and accompanied by his wife, came up to me and asked me how to get to the Dar Batha museum. This was no ordinary Englishman, however, for he was wearing a long-sleeved, green safari shirt, green, safari-looking, long pants, black leather boots, and a pith helmet. Now, I have only seen people wearing pith helmets in photographs of books with such historically romantic titles as The Scramble for Africa, or in films such as Indochine, and usually these people were colonial administrators of countries that no longer exist. Take Rhodesia for example. He looked like a walking anachronism, and this came up later in the conversation when he was satisfied with the directions I had given him, as I shall recount (accents included).
“I very much admire your choice of headgear, sir.”
“Thehy’re greayt ahren’t they? Thehre desoygned fah this type o’ weathah.”
“Yes, it is very rustic. Very 19th century.”
His face sort of soured at this, and thanked me for my help as he walked away. I’m sorry, but someone had to tell him. I could have been blunter and said:
“My God, man, everyone else your age here, except for maybe the more conservative Muslims, is dressed in a short sleeved, buttoned down, collared shirt with khakis and leather shoes. This is not French West Africa, you are not on safari, and the year is not 1907. You are about a hundred years out of style, and you look absolutely ridiculous dressed like that.”
I think, however, he got the message. What is even odder is that I usually don’t even notice or comment on what people wear, but this was such an extreme case. The fact that this man took himself very seriously was even more comical. (Inquiètes-pas. I will be as equally judgmental towards Americans.)
There are other people who I have met who have been as equally as strange. This one American guy I met over lunch with an English couple and two Australian girls was quite a peculiar creature indeed. He must have been in his twenties, not terribly much older than I am, and quite tall with reddish hair and pale skin, but was striking about him was that he was absolutely rail thin. The width of his chest must have been the length of a pencil. He was sort of picking at his food the entire time I was there, and describing how he had been in Egypt and had gotten sick there.
“Are you all better now? Do you have enough medicine with you?”
“No, I actually don't take any medicine. I had some bad experiences with doctors when I was younger, and I refuse to go to them now, or take any medicine. I think the body has a way of curing itself if I just keep drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.”
And with that, he ordered coffee, pulled out a guilloise, and started smoking it. It is probably the worst medical advice I've ever heard in my life.
Another strange American that I met was at the Kasbah, a restaurant in the Ex-Pat Café, who had come with a group for the music festival from San Francisco. I was sitting with Isabel Carlisle, an English intellectual who I was supposed to look after, and some other American journalists from the Wall Street Journal, when we suddenly started talking with this other group of English speakers. I tried talking to this one girl by mentioning I had a friend from the area, but it did not go over so well.
"Hey, you are from the San Francisco area? I actually have a really good friend from Walnut Creek."
"That's, like, not San Francisco, man."
"Well, same general area of the state, right?"
"No, man."
"Oh..."
"Thats not even, like, California, man."
"What?"
My dear, I think that it is time to the put the drugs away. I actually would not be surprised if that was a big reason why they had come. Last weekend I took a weekend trip to a town in the Rif Mountains called Chefchaoen, and no less than 25 different people offered to sell me hash in the day and a half I was there. The best line I used to say no was that I had asthma, which they seemed to understand, but I would not do it on principle because it would further the problem outsourcing. Think about all the hard working American drug dealers that I would be depriving of work if I just went up into the mountains and bought it from the Moroccan growers themselves instead.
This is not to say that all of the people I have met at the ex-pat café have been wildly strange or ridiculous. The greatest group I met there one night were a bunch of Erasmus students who were on holiday in Fez. I recognized a guy who I had shared a room with in Chefchouen, who was sitting with a bunch of people, and went over to say hello. They invited me to sit with them, and I ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night. Two of them were from France, one from Spain, one from Italy, and one from the former country of Lithuania. They were taking a train at 2 AM to Marrakech, and just wanted to hang out until then, so I took them to the nouvelle ville and showed them the way to the train station. We eventually found ourselves in a café and talked until around 1:30 in the morning to go and board the train. They were interested in what I was doing in Fez, what I am preparing to write about in my thesis, and how it was living and travelling alone in Africa. I think I managed to warn them off eating salad after recounting my experiences in the hospital, except for maybe Olga, the person from Lithuania, who said, “I think I’ve had so much vodka in my life that it wouldn’t make a difference to me.”
We had a long conversation about anthropology, ethnomusicology, Sarkozy, language, and Albert Camus. They were undoubtedly, one of the greatest groups of people I have ever met. Olga, the girl from what is now Sweden, even invited me to come and visit her in Sweden in August, which sounds tempting even if just to escape from the heat.
It is getting a little harder to write these. I come home everyday and just collapse from working in the heat all day. But I will try to write at least one or two more.
The simple answer is not a whole lot right now. I was doing a tremendous amount of work during the festival and during the first month I was here, and while it was very exhausting I had a really a wonderful experience.
Right now, however, there is really not a whole lot for me to do. When the foundation first laid out for me what I was going to do, they made it very clear that the majority of the work I was going to do was going to be with the festival. They sort of gave me indications that there would be things to do after the festival was over, but it was a little vague. What has been happening in the past weeks is that I come into work in the morning, sit at the desk of Julian, and primarily work on my thesis.
Occasionally they have given me some small projects to do. One was to research all of the themes of the past festivals, and put them all into one document. I managed to do this in an afternoon, and after this was done I met with Amel and Naime, the latter being the directrice, to discuss what the title of the next festival would be. Unfortunately, the directrice had her heart set on <<>> (Live and Let Live en anglais) even before the meeting began, and so nothing really got done. Amel and I were sort of dancing around how to say that this was a bad idea, but it seemed that this was really what she wanted.
The other big project I was working on last week was to read about 200 articles in French, and then to write up if they were informative, or if they offered any sort of criticism of the foundation or the festival in general. It gave me something to work on for that week, and the only problem I had with it was the fact that I had two different people, Naime and the person in charge of press relations, Laila, tell me two different instructions, and therefore two different translations in my head, for what I was supposed to do. After a bit of confusion, I managed to get a seven page document done for them, which I hope they find useful.
There also seems to be a civil war in the office between the directrice and the rest of the people who work here. Isham, the man who is in charge of the finances, comes over to my desk daily to rant about how bad a job she is doing. Sometimes, a bunch of them will go into Amel's office or onto the balcony to rant to each other about their experiences. More often than not, they will rant near my window, because it is the furthest from her office, and I will wave hello to them rather awkwardly. I feel that the war maybe has something to do with why I haven't been given any work to do this week, and I hesitate to ask sometimes what is happening. For the most part though, I try and keep my head down.
As of now, it is Thursday, and I'm going to see if I can actually get through this entire week without doing any work for them. Its not that I don't want to do any work, I'd be happy to do something just to feel useful. I feel sort of awkward showing up here every day, using their internet, and working on my thesis. It's not a bad life, but I think it is usually how an internship goes.
Fun Times at the Ex-Pat Café
The area where I eat the most frequently is a place that I have taken to call The Ex-Pat Café, mostly because nearly all of the people who I meet there are travelers, ex-patriots, and foreigners like myself. The area itself is a string of cafés, restaurants, and shops that line the road below the giant blue arch of Bab Boujloud, one of the old entrances to the medina. I have taken to call it one big café because everything is sort of compressed together, for as you walk down that road there is literally one café that is next to another, in sort of a conglomeration of places to eat and drink. If you are not hungry, or are looking for a specific place to eat, it is bit like running the gauntlet as you walk down this road at dinnertime. A lot of people will try their best to get you to eat at their restaurant, “My friend, you are hungry? I make you very good breakfast. Why you not try my food?”
I was first introduced to the Ex-Pat Café when I was working as a team for Julian. On most days for lunch, Jihan, Ismael, and I would go buy sandwiches in the medina, and bring them to one of the cafés to have lunch and tea. In those days, it was not too hot outside, and one could still sip a hot tea outside and still be fairly comfortable. I still drink tea outside, but I sweat a lot more for it. It is actually one of the few places in Fez where there are a lot of restaurants and cafés fairly close together.
The place that I frequent the most nowadays is called Chez Rachid. Rachid himself is an elderly, dark skinned, Berber gentleman, who has a mustache and is missing several teeth. He always wears a white cotton cover over his head, a kufi, that is typical of traditional male muslim dress here. For practical purposes, I’m sure it must keep the sun off of his head very well. He always greets me with a smile and handshake.
“La bes, monsieur, ça va?”
“Hamdullah, Rachid, la bes?”
“Hamdullah, Hamdullah. T’as faim?”
“Comme habitude.”
Julian, who insisted that Chez Rachid was by far the cleanest, the cheapest, and the best restaurant, introduced me to Rachid one night, and I subsequently started going there with Julian often, and sometimes with Celine, the person from whom I am renting this apartment. While Rachid is the restaurant’s only waiter and host, there is another woman in the back, who I assume is his wife, who does most of the cooking. The food is usually quite good, as I enjoy eating their pastilla quite a bit, and it is also cheaper than most of the other restaurants. Since I eat there almost every other day, he usually gives a discount from the price that is printed on the menu. It is a nice place, and I enjoy going to eat there. The only problem is that it is closed on Friday, the Muslim holy day of the week.
Most of the people who I have met at the ex-pat café or around there are nice, level headed people that traveling around Morocco, and just staying in Fez for a few days. There are some people who I have met, however, that have been absolutely bonkers. As I was walking to lunch one day in one of small streets in the medina that leads to Bab Boujloud, an Englishman, who was holding a fairly large map and accompanied by his wife, came up to me and asked me how to get to the Dar Batha museum. This was no ordinary Englishman, however, for he was wearing a long-sleeved, green safari shirt, green, safari-looking, long pants, black leather boots, and a pith helmet. Now, I have only seen people wearing pith helmets in photographs of books with such historically romantic titles as The Scramble for Africa, or in films such as Indochine, and usually these people were colonial administrators of countries that no longer exist. Take Rhodesia for example. He looked like a walking anachronism, and this came up later in the conversation when he was satisfied with the directions I had given him, as I shall recount (accents included).
“I very much admire your choice of headgear, sir.”
“Thehy’re greayt ahren’t they? Thehre desoygned fah this type o’ weathah.”
“Yes, it is very rustic. Very 19th century.”
His face sort of soured at this, and thanked me for my help as he walked away. I’m sorry, but someone had to tell him. I could have been blunter and said:
“My God, man, everyone else your age here, except for maybe the more conservative Muslims, is dressed in a short sleeved, buttoned down, collared shirt with khakis and leather shoes. This is not French West Africa, you are not on safari, and the year is not 1907. You are about a hundred years out of style, and you look absolutely ridiculous dressed like that.”
I think, however, he got the message. What is even odder is that I usually don’t even notice or comment on what people wear, but this was such an extreme case. The fact that this man took himself very seriously was even more comical. (Inquiètes-pas. I will be as equally judgmental towards Americans.)
There are other people who I have met who have been as equally as strange. This one American guy I met over lunch with an English couple and two Australian girls was quite a peculiar creature indeed. He must have been in his twenties, not terribly much older than I am, and quite tall with reddish hair and pale skin, but was striking about him was that he was absolutely rail thin. The width of his chest must have been the length of a pencil. He was sort of picking at his food the entire time I was there, and describing how he had been in Egypt and had gotten sick there.
“Are you all better now? Do you have enough medicine with you?”
“No, I actually don't take any medicine. I had some bad experiences with doctors when I was younger, and I refuse to go to them now, or take any medicine. I think the body has a way of curing itself if I just keep drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.”
And with that, he ordered coffee, pulled out a guilloise, and started smoking it. It is probably the worst medical advice I've ever heard in my life.
Another strange American that I met was at the Kasbah, a restaurant in the Ex-Pat Café, who had come with a group for the music festival from San Francisco. I was sitting with Isabel Carlisle, an English intellectual who I was supposed to look after, and some other American journalists from the Wall Street Journal, when we suddenly started talking with this other group of English speakers. I tried talking to this one girl by mentioning I had a friend from the area, but it did not go over so well.
"Hey, you are from the San Francisco area? I actually have a really good friend from Walnut Creek."
"That's, like, not San Francisco, man."
"Well, same general area of the state, right?"
"No, man."
"Oh..."
"Thats not even, like, California, man."
"What?"
My dear, I think that it is time to the put the drugs away. I actually would not be surprised if that was a big reason why they had come. Last weekend I took a weekend trip to a town in the Rif Mountains called Chefchaoen, and no less than 25 different people offered to sell me hash in the day and a half I was there. The best line I used to say no was that I had asthma, which they seemed to understand, but I would not do it on principle because it would further the problem outsourcing. Think about all the hard working American drug dealers that I would be depriving of work if I just went up into the mountains and bought it from the Moroccan growers themselves instead.
This is not to say that all of the people I have met at the ex-pat café have been wildly strange or ridiculous. The greatest group I met there one night were a bunch of Erasmus students who were on holiday in Fez. I recognized a guy who I had shared a room with in Chefchouen, who was sitting with a bunch of people, and went over to say hello. They invited me to sit with them, and I ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night. Two of them were from France, one from Spain, one from Italy, and one from the former country of Lithuania. They were taking a train at 2 AM to Marrakech, and just wanted to hang out until then, so I took them to the nouvelle ville and showed them the way to the train station. We eventually found ourselves in a café and talked until around 1:30 in the morning to go and board the train. They were interested in what I was doing in Fez, what I am preparing to write about in my thesis, and how it was living and travelling alone in Africa. I think I managed to warn them off eating salad after recounting my experiences in the hospital, except for maybe Olga, the person from Lithuania, who said, “I think I’ve had so much vodka in my life that it wouldn’t make a difference to me.”
We had a long conversation about anthropology, ethnomusicology, Sarkozy, language, and Albert Camus. They were undoubtedly, one of the greatest groups of people I have ever met. Olga, the girl from what is now Sweden, even invited me to come and visit her in Sweden in August, which sounds tempting even if just to escape from the heat.
It is getting a little harder to write these. I come home everyday and just collapse from working in the heat all day. But I will try to write at least one or two more.
posted by Adrian's Fabulous Name Goes Here at 11:16 AM
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