Day 3
On third day we awoke bright and early and had another awesome meal sitting around couches dipping warm bread into a communal bowl of honey.
Stomachs full, pants tight, and feet covered with pee, we walked over to our meeting spot to begin the day. The first stop was the brand new IES center in Rabat. IES, for those of you who may not know, is the program I am with here in Granada. It is an international study abroad non profit with around 30 programs. This semester is the inaugural semester for IES Rabat, so I was eager to see what type of kids would choose Morocco for a semester and what the center was like. Much like ours, the building and the facilities were incredible, and, from what I gather, in a pretty good, convenient neighborhood. Unfortunately only 3 of the 15 students showed up, but it was still incredibly interesting to hear from them. I don’t think I could do a whole semester or, as in the case of one kid, a whole year there.
Afterwards we headed over to Mohammed V's unfinished mosque and met with a tour guide who was to show us a couple landmarks around Rabat.
Instead of being a nice breath of fresh air from our awful tour guide, he was just as bad, if not worse. “Children, gather, please, I won’t yell please, we are here, please, listen, please.” Just because you say please, sir, does not make you less annoying. That’s a fact. Look it up. We saw Muhammad V’s tomb, and it was the single most decorated room ever.
There isn’t even one inch of the walls, ceiling, or floor that isn’t decorated with different Islamic Art techniques, most of which we have learned about in class. For Moroccans, Muhammad V is a symbol of independence, and because of this is buried in such a public way. Outside of the tomb there are four guards at the four entrances. One looked exactly like Barack Obama, so I took a picture with him. Naturally.
Our next stop was an old Roman Ruins. En route from one landmark to the other our guide, who, by the way, was wearing a white hat with a huge sparkly star on the front, talked incomprehensibly into the microphone of the bus.
I understood 0% of what he said, but I doubt it was that interesting considering the fact that as we drove past a beautiful cliff and view of the ocean on our left he was talking about how ugly the American embassy was on the right. Whatever. Our Roman ruin visit was cool, but after a couple of hours of our tour guide I think we were all ready for a little lunch.
When we got home, we sat down to a lunch of couscous, just what we had been waiting for since we arrived the day before! After it’s on the table already, they spoon some extra broth/sauce stuff all over it and everyone digs in. We had been eating for a couple minutes when I decided to go for a sweet bite I had been eyeing. It was just couscous and broth, and it looked like a great bite. What I didn’t realize was the following:
A. The broth was what was making the whole dish spicy, so a spoonful of it might be a little more than I could handle.
B. The food at the bottom is the hottest because it is insulated by all the other food on top of it, so the broth at the bottom is essentially the temperature of boiling water.
Not realizing these two very important facts, I put the whole huge bite into my mouth. I can’t know what noise or what face I made exactly, but there was definitely a noise and definitely a face that made everyone at the table begin to laugh. And they continued to laugh as I began to sweat and tears gathered in my eyes from the spice and the heat. The dad, who had previously been pretty quiet, started to talk to me and poke fun at me as I wiped my brow and fanned my face with my hand. Then they taught us the words for spicy (har) and hot (schun). It was actually, despite the fact that I couldn’t taste anything for the next two days, a really great moment.
In the afternoon we met with some young Moroccan men who wanted to work on their English, and went for a walk through the market place. I was terrified. Jake bought a knife. After our walk we headed to the Hammam, or the Arab Baths as we know them. Everyone walked into the tiny changing room armed with their scrubby tool and a packet of soap. Tentatively we began to get changed, some with full bathing suits on, others not so much. Then someone herded us all into the giant steam room, which was, let me tell you, REALLY hot. There were already two women in there soaping up (all over, if you know what I mean), and we all got our own bucket and were instructed to sit down, rinse off, soap up, rinse off again, and then scrub. What initially were signs of shyness and discomfort disappeared immediately, and within moments we were all washing off topless and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of this communal cleansing session. Several brave hearts opted for a massage from these ladies and it was, to say the least, very thorough. Some people may or may not have left with injuries. Although the image of the sweaty ladies washing off in the steam of the Hammam is one that I will NEVER forget, in a weird way, the whole experience seems like kind of a dreamy blur. Was I really in that room full of naked ladies? Did I really wash my hair sitting down on the floor of a huge steam room? Did the masseuse really massage Mary so hard that she pulled her hamstring? Who knows.
In any case, after our bath we headed off to get Henna (which I chose not to do) and then went home. Early the next morning the group met up at our meeting point, and piled onto the bus for what Anna said would be a 45 minute to a 1 hour ride. Remember how I said that Anna was two things and one of them was “not nice?” The second of the two is completely incompetent. During the course of the trip she had known nothing about any of the places we had been, had arranged for a terrible Moroccan tour guide, had gotten us mixed up in some sticky situations with her lack of Arabic, had read to us off notes that she carried in her pocket, had handed out silly sheets for us to become more educated, had known NOTHING, and then, as the cherry on top, told us that our bus ride was 45 minutes.
When we arrived 3 and a half hours later, dripping sweat from the swealtering bus, none of us were that happy with her. Before I continue, though, I do have to tell a quick story about our bus ride.
The roads in Morocco are pretty thin, and our bus was pretty unsturdy. What’s more is that our bus driver was a maniac. At one point during the drive, we were flying down a tiny road in the middle of nowhere, and a car was driving towards us in the opposite lane. No big deal, right? Right…had there not been a man biking on his bicycle going the same direction as us and in our lane. Instead of assessing the possible dangers of this situation, Mr. Bus Driver went right on driving at top speed, until we came right upon the tail of the biker at the same time as the car coming towards us was passing. Essentially, we couldn’t swerve into the oncoming lane because of the car, but continuing on our path would have meant a very dead and very flat biker. We swerved as much as we could at the same time as the biker swerved onto the gravel path beside the rode. My heart was beating, and I was sure the biker was going to die or that we were going to get into a head on collision going 100 km/hr. Astoundingly, and luckily for everyone, things went very smoothly and nobody died.
We arrived in a small town a little while later and took a short hike up to a house on the top of a hill.
The owners were a man named Muhammad and his wife, and they live there with their 5 kids. We made ourselves a picnic, and then ate some couscous they made for us.
I avoided an embarrassing scene. Afterwards we sat down with them and talked about their lives, our lives and the world in general. It was interesting to see how in touch they were, despite their rural setting, with the world and current events.
After chatting, playing soccer, and having the worst stomachache of my life, we left the village and set off for a town called Chefchaouen
for our final dinner and some last minute shopping. The next day some of us chose to get up early and go for a short hike to the old Spanish Mosque in Chefchaouen.
All in all it was a very uneventful event, except for when a pack of wild dogs (not actually wild. Actually owned by a group of hippies) came racing towards us and may or may not have knocked Jillian on her butt. Sort of not funny, but actually hilarious. And then, after a quick border hop and a ferry ride to the mainland, we were back home.
The trip, in a lot of ways, really changed my life. It really took me out of my comfort zone, and because of that I think it's a trip everyone should do. It's impossible to imagine what Africa or Asia or even Europe are going to be like without experiencing them first hand, yet everyone has many preconceived notions and judgments founded on almost nothing. Although some parts were challenging, and I dont think I could ever be in Rabat for a whole semester, it's the type of trip I want to do again. And with that, I’m finally finished writing about Morocco, almost 3 weeks after I got back. Phew!
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