Life Under The African Sun

If there were one thing that I would have to describe as being a principal factor in daily life here, it would have to be the sun. It is something so basic, and yet so important to life that at first one does not notice the routines that people have that revolve around it. I will explain how this works. The day begins for many people around four or five o’clock in the morning when you hear the first call of the mu'addin at sunrise. It is cool during those early morning hours, but it does not last for long. At seven o’clock the sun is already at full force, and it is blinding as you walk outside for the first time. Of course, it is not the sun I know from North America or even northern Europe. It is the African sun. Hot, bright, and blinding, it penetrates all and is almost maddening if you stay under it for too long. You find that most people are generally not outside during the day. You see a couple of people walking around and cars on the roads, but even still there is hardly anybody in the cafés, and it almost seems as if everyone has left for the beach. During the day in the medina, the most populated sections are those that have placed palm tree branches over the street to protect themselves and their shops from direct sunlight. I have not gotten sunburned here, but only because I use a lot of sunscreen, cover myself up, and stay in the office for most of the day.

But there is life under the African moon. Around 6 o’clock or so in the evening, people start to swarm to the public places, and there is a great amount of activity in the streets and in the medina. At place du Batha and place Boujloud during the day there is hardly anyone around, but at night it is thronged with people sitting on benches and enjoying the coolness of the evening. There are even a lot of food vendors that come out only during the night and sell everything from nuts, to egg sandwiches, to corn that they roast on a bed of coals and sell to you right there.

The headscarf here also serves a practical purpose. As far as I can tell, it seems to be something of personal preference as to who wears it or not, and probably also upon the family. With or without the headscarf, I can tell from conversations I have had with the women in the office that there is a lot pressure to dress modestly and even conservatively because it is a sign of respect for one's self and one's culture.

Moroccan Food and Cats

Other than the fact that I would not recommend eating a salad, the food I have been eating here is pretty good, but it is sort of hard to describe because I do not know exactly what goes into the preparation most of the time. The dish I have most frequently is the tagine. The name comes from the kind of pottery that it is cooked in, which consists of two parts: the bowl and the funnel shaped cover that goes over it. The meal itself consists of something you might call a stew, consisting of either chicken or beef with vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, eggplant, and what I think is asparagus. Another kind of tagine is kofte, containing egg and sort of little paddies of beef. Aside from those things, I eat chicken or beef kebobs with rice, or many different kinds of sandwiches. I have no idea what a vegetarian would do here for a long period of time in terms of eating. I’m guessing they would have to go hungry.

I’ve experienced the way the real Moroccans eat a few times, but not on a daily basis. The most fun thing is to communally eat a chicken, or multiple chickens. Once, I was invited to lunch with a friend of Adil, and we ate lunch at the factory of where his friend worked (I think I mentioned it in one of my earlier letters, he is the one who I helped with his green card application and who manages a ceramics factory). The first course was a large bowl of couscous, which everyone shared using spoons, and the second was another large bowl, but this time containing four small chickens covered in sauce. To eat these chickens, one either had to pick the meat off the bones with your fingers, or take a piece of bread, put it between your fingers, and use it to grab some piece of chicken or soak it in the sauce. Despite the fact that I was not really used to eating with my hands, it was quite good. I had a similar experience when I ate lunch with the ladies in the secretary’s office once, only we used forks instead of our hands.

The tea is undoubtedly absolutely delicious. Hot, sweet, mint tea is the most common, and they bring it to you with the leaves still in the glass. It is so hot that usually you have to put a napkin around over the edges of the glass to keep your fingers from burning. Another kind is called Verven, which has a different taste and is usually reserved for after a meal. They make the tea in large pots with the tealeaves and sugar together during the day, so it comes to you already made.

Although I know it is something that I’m not really supposed to be doing, but I do sometimes go to the McDonalds in the nouvelle ville. Surprisingly enough, it is not because I crave the taste of a hamburger. Julian, who left on Friday for France, told me that he went there almost every day for lunch, simply for the reason that they import all their material, from the beef in the sandwiches to the McFlurrys, and he knew that he wouldn’t get sick from there. You do take sort of a risk when you eat something here, and going to Mcdonald’s for him was almost sort of like a survival technique. The irony is absolutely astounding for an American to think of McDonalds as a clean and safe place to eat, but for Julian it is not. Thinking back to what McDonald’s were like in Europe, I can see why. For them, it is not a truck stop joint where you can eat a quick and non-healthy meal. It is rather a well-to-do place to eat the exotic and authentic American hamburger. For me, going to McDonald’s is not quite the same thing, as I do not go there frequently. It is a little far, and is also the most expensive meal in town.

One thing that you cannot help but notice when you go out at night is the abundance of cats. There are literally hundreds of strays in the streets that live in garbage cans, or cracks in the manholes, or anywhere they can find a place. They are there for a purpose however, for as Julian said to me one day, “If you look carefully, they are no rats,” which is something I had not really thought about before. I knew that this city had been around since the Middle Ages, but I did not fully comprehend it until I considered the age of this symbiotic relationship. Cats must have been an important part of the city in the beginning hundreds of years ago, and they continue to be an important part. They look like the typical tabby cat that is common in the states, but they are small, abundant, hungry, and come in every type of color. When I go out to eat every night, at least half of my dinner goes to the cats.

The neighborhood in which I live is respectable and nice. I live across the street from a barbershop, and the guy who owns it usually sits outside when he is not cutting hair. He is very friendly, knows everyone in the neighborhood, and greets them as they go by. There is also Saïd, who runs the cyber café off the main road and is the landlord for the apartment I’m living in right now. I think he is the unofficial head hauncho of the neighborhood itself. He helped Julian find his apartment, so I was introduced to him as someone who was living in Julian’s apartment, and now Celine’s apartment. Despite the fact that it is nice to have a place to myself for all of July, I actually loathe living here. The kitchen is dirty, grungy, has no light, and the sink leaks water all over the floor. I have a Turkish toilet, which I have to clean frequently because it smells, and doing laundry takes about an hour and a half by hand, and my clothes are still dirty afterwards. But it is a roof over my head, and I think I can hang on for a month.

Asilah

This past weekend, I went to Asilah as sort of a miniaturized vacation. I wanted to go someplace this weekend, and since my plans to go to Rabat sort of fell through, I decided on going to this beach town by train. The train system itself is surprisingly cheap, it was a four hour train ride each time, and it only cost me about $20 roundtrip in the second class compartments. The trains themselves are relatively nice and clean, but you run the risk of not getting a seat if you buy a second-class ticket.

On the train-ride up, I transferred at Sidi Kacem, and made my way up through the foothills of the Reef mountains to the seaside. Much of time on the train I looked at the rolling landscape, herds of cows or sheep, farms, and mountains in the distance. One has to remember that much of Morocco is not part of the Sahara desert, and that this part of the world was once the breadbasket or the Roman Empire. A few weekends ago, I made a daytrip to Volubilis, the last permanent roman settlement in this part of the world, and it was surrounded by very rich countryside. Something that I found interesting also was that like Volubilis, many of the towns I passed were sort of built into the hillside. I suppose one obvious answer would be that the hill or the mountains provide shade for the sun.

As the train made its way around the bend of the last hill before arriving at Asilah, one could suddenly see the water of the Atlantic Ocean as the direct sunlight and the reflection of the sunlight on the water hit the train as it curved around the track to the right. A few minutes later, we were at the train station, and from there I took a taxi to the town. With the help of a guide found a youth hostel in the medina that had a terrace overlooking the harbor. The town itself is an old trading post built by the Portuguese in the 16^th century, and it still has that sort of colonial atmosphere. In the section of the medina that overlooks the ocean, one can walk along the ramparts and look at the blue and white painted old houses that face the sea. There is even an old, though relatively small, fort but it is closed to the public. At around 5 or so I made my way to the beach.

One thing I was sort of curious about as I made my way out there was how Moroccan women dressed for the beach, and you can probably guess why. Surely this would have to be the place where they would make an exception to the headscarf and the modest dress, right?

Wrong. Almost all of them wore it, and I only saw one or two or them wearing a bathing suit. In fact there were almost no women in the water itself, and it was mostly guys who were out, running around, playing soccer, or in the water. To top it off, everyone was off the beach at 7 PM sharp and into the mosque. I swam in the ocean for about an hour and a half, and it felt great. After being in the hospital the week before, I needed a weekend adventure like this for my mental health, and this suited me perfectly. In the evening I went out to dinner and explored the town itself on a Saturday night. I found the same sort of ritual with the sun, in the sense that there was no one out during the day, but at night it was absolutely thronged with people doing their shopping. Of course, I was asked the same sorts of questions:

“Hey, my friend, Hâlo? Where you come from?”

“C’est un mystère.”

“Un mystère? Haha! Tu veux acheter l’hashish?”

“Non merci, Monsieur. Il est mal pour la tête.”

“Mal pour la tête? Haha!”

In the morning, I packed up my gear, ate some coconut cakes that an old woman was selling near the entrance to the medina, and made my way out again towards the beach. The train station is only about 4km up from the town on the coast, so I took off my shoes and walked along the beach with my blue backpack. The sky was clear over my head, and in the distance to my left dark clouds loomed over the ocean’s horizon. The water was at low tide, and the sand was cold and flat beneath my feet. At one point, I was walking with a man, his son, and the two dromedary camels they trained to give people rides on the beach. I didn’t have enough money for the ride, but I was trying to talk the son into letting one of the camels carry my bag. He would have done it, but there was no way to attach the backpack to the camel without it falling off. I do not think the camel was particularly happy with the idea either. So I continued on, making my way eventually to train station. By one o’clock, I was on the train back to Fez, and here I am writing in my apartment under the African sun.

-Adrian