MTV Cribs - Broke Teacher Edition

Hello and welcome to the broke teacher edition of MTV Cribs. As the weather is preventing me from going out and doing anything productive today, I figured I'd give you a brief overview of my life and living situation in Rabat. I know you've been waiting with baited breath for pictures of my living room. 

For starters, this is the couch I crashed on for almost a whole month, before I could find an apartment. A special shout out to Anna and Lynne, my wonderful coworkers, for allowing me to invade their living room for so long. I would've been homeless without them. Also, look how awesome my blanket is! It's like someone skinned cookie monster. Goes perfectly with my beloved and incredibly unflattering cookie monster pajamas.

Thankfully, with an amazing amount of help from another, equally lovely coworker, I found (or rather, he found, I just stood there and looked pretty) the apartment I'm writing in right now. It's kinda weirdly laid out and the floor is impossible to keep clean (I'm relatively sure that there's some kind of dust fairy that's hard at work every time I'm not looking), there's almost no hot water and my shower has exploded (literally exploded!) a couple of times, but with Riley it's pretty close to home.

This was taken the first day I moved in. Obviously it hasn't been this tidy since. I truly hate the colour of the sofas, and as it's a furnished apartment, take no responsibility for the design choices. However, this is fortunately the least ostentatiously furnished Moroccan apartment I've seen. I should be thankful that the couch isn't metallic pink with rhinestones on it. Seriously, that's a thing here. For example, this is the actual design on my bathroom floor:

It looks like it was designed by a 7 year old girl whose parents work for Hallmark. Do I look like someone who would appreciate a Valentine's Day explosion in my bathroom?

Anyway, let us adjourn to the bedroom...

(Note the prominently displayed hide of cookie monster...)

(...and the pictures of the many people I know, love, and miss terribly. It continues on the other side.)

So between teaching...

...lesson planning (or trying to)...

...and having inane conversations with my cat (which takes up most of my time)...

...that's about all there is. 

I suppose I do go on the occasional field trip...

(Yes. This is a MacDonald's. No. I was surprisingly not brought in by force.)

(Boat ride in Salé, in case anyone was wondering)

...but I generally forget to bring a camera, so I rarely have anything to show you. I have a vacation coming up soon, and despite a decided lack of funds, perhaps I'll go somewhere fun and photogenic. And who knows,  maybe I'll even sort through my Christmas pictures and share some of them with you sometime before Easter.

Quoth the Turkey

The story of how I made my first ever Thanksgiving dinner at/for Café du Livre (the best little restaurant in Marrakech) on about 10 hours notice. Certainly stressful and a little accident prone but the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.

Many thanks to Kenny and Sheryl for running around all day looking for supplies, to Youness and the Café du Livre staff for hosting and putting up with my presence in their kitchen and to Eliot for still loving me after seeing what a control freak I become the moment I enter a kitchen.

 As a result of several days of proctoring tests (i.e. sitting around looking serious and doing nothing), this post is written in verse, because what the hell else was I going to do silently for 3 hours?

Quoth the Turkey

T’was the night ‘fore Thanksgiving and all through the town,

Not an expat was sober, yet the mood was quite down.

The vodka was placed in the freezers with care,

In the fear that no turkey soon would be there.

At Café du Livre, they were drenched in dismay,

Mourning the loss of excessive food day.

They grieved and they grumbled, they hemmed and they hawed,

In the hope to appeal to the Thanksgiving God.

Then from quite out of nowhere, our Youness did speak

Of a wondrous idea that made my whole week.

“We’ll have Thanksgiving here! Tomorrow!” he cried.

“I’ll make stuffing and turkey. It’s easy!” I lied.

In the morning I woke with the memory of fun

And I thought to myself “Dear God, what have I done?”

I can’t cook, I can’t roast, I can’t fry, I can’t scramble

Boy, making me chef was one hell of a gamble.

But I went nonetheless and was met with surprise

When I found there a restaurant’s worth of supplies.

And the littlest turkey was trussed up quite pretty,

Still warm from its slaughter that morn in the city.

So we snipped and we seasoned and salted the breast

And felt pleased when we saw how nicely ‘twas dressed

In the oven we crammed it, which made me quite queasy,

And I thought to myself: “This will not be easy.”

Next came the biscuits, best part of the meal.

Though searching for cornmeal had been an ordeal.

In the bowl went the flour, the cornmeal and powder,

“Please stop taking photos!” I began to cry louder.

With a spoon I did mix them and then with my hands

Forgetting, of course to first find some clean pans.

My hands they were freezing, my fingers were white

And I wished oh I wished I were done for the night.

I kneaded and flattened and shaped them in spite

Of forgetting what oven temperature’s right.

In the oven they’d rise not more than an inch

But the people were hungry, they’d do in a pinch.

After that came the stuffing, not placed in the bird,

As I read through the steps they hung on every word:

“On eggs and on onion, on sausage, on pepper,

On apple…no, bacon. That sounds so much better.

The food stuffs we’ll sprinkle on mountains of bread,

And we’ll mix and mash to make stuffing,” I said.

In the oven we thrust it, t’was getting quite crowded

With the stuffing and turkey in tin foil shrouded.

Potatoes we peeled them and tried not to linger

As I sharply removed the tip of my ring finger.

We tossed them in water all bubbling and hot

And when tender we mashed them right there in the pot.

I wanted so badly to have just one taste

Of that deliciously starchy white peppery paste.

And yet each time I tried someone slapped me away,

Even though I was the chef and I’d waited all day.

The beans they were sizzling in garlic and butter

When the staff looked at me as if I were a nutter.

Their patience with amateurs starting to fade,

I tried harder and harder to stay out of their way.

With the butter and flour and juice from the turkey,

Came a breathtaking sauce, so dark tan and murky.

We stirred and we stirred and we seasoned it bravely,

And fashioned a stunningly tasty brown gravy.

Finally the food it was ready for eating

But instead of enjoying, they stood ‘round it bleating

About plating and patterns and napkins and spoons

As I glowered there hungrily plotting their doom.

The plating was pretty, too complex for me

All neatly aligned and all drenched in gravy.

The sumptuous feast I’d constructed myself,

It flew and it flew and it flew off the shelf.

The food was all gone in 15 minutes flat

And we grinned at each other all feeling quite fat.

But something felt missing, we all wondered why…

Low and behold we’d forgotten the pie!

“No matter,” we thought, for the food was divine.

For dessert we’ll just have a glass of good wine.

‘Round the table we’ll chat and we’ll giggle and munch

 And savour our time with this marvelous bunch.

 “Shit, it’s almost 6.30!” I said, being rude,

As I yelled at myself with a mouthful of food.

I’ll be late for a class I don’t wish to attend.

So I left as my stomach began to distend.

My class was, of course, not the best I had mustered,

As the wine and the beer had left me quite flustered.

I preached ‘bout Thanksgiving, our culture and food

And I asked of my students what thanks they’d accrued.

Some spoke of their families, their friends or their lover

Some were thankful for grades in one class or another.

“I’m thankful for gorgeous English teachers” one said, as I blushed.

“Let’s move on now” I said in a manner quite rushed.

So we grammered and Englished right into the night,

And their vocab did soar to a marvelous height.

But just as my voice was starting to get croaky

The bell rang and I left to go sing karaoke.

And thus ends the tale of the foremost Thanksgiving

Where through recipe and ritual I began sieving,

For a Thanksgiving feast of my own rendition.

Happy Turkey Day to all. Make your own new tradition!

Marrakech International Film Festival

The Marrakech International Film Festival is an annual festival showcasing films from around the globe. It takes place in a number of cinemas and converted government buildings around the city, including but not limited to:

Palais des Congrès...

and Cinéma le Colisée...

the two places closest to my house. Movies are free to the public, attracting an interesting array of people.The festival floods the city with Hollywood and Bollywood actors alike, making it almost impossible to leave the house without having a camera shoved in your face. Below are the synopses and reviews of some of my favourite and least favourite movies from the festivals. 

Waltz for Monica – Swedish

In the early 60’s Monica, a young, rebellious girl from small town Sweden is determined to make it as a singer in the vibrant jazz clubs of Stockholm and New York. She embarks on a singing career of her dreams, rubbing shoulders with Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Bill Evans. But behind all the glamour, Monica struggles to face the dark side of success.

Monica Zetterlund – the Swedish Marilyn Monroe – was a profoundly unlikeable character (not the fault of the actress considering she’s based on a real person), selfish, self indulgent, hypocritical and generally horrible to everyone around her. Her tragic story feels so much less tragic because you just can’t bring yourself to feel sorry for her. However, Monica’s distasteful personality made the supporting characters all so much more sympathetic. Her rigidly disapproving father would be one-sided if it weren’t clear how deeply he loves his tragically understanding, neglected granddaughter. Her many love interests are all relatively interesting, profoundly odd characters that play a specific role in her life but still feel like real people rather than caricatures.

Her triumphs are made beautiful and even tear inducing not because of her reactions, but rather how they affect the lives of her friends and family (the people we actually like).

However much I may have disliked Monica (quite a lot), I have only praises for her voice and the soundtrack of the film. The music was utterly wonderful and left me with a strong desire to learn Swedish, just so I could sing along.

Fever – Moroccan / French

Let me start off my opinion of this movie with a disclaimer: It is entirely possible that I’m not worldly or intellectual enough to understand this movie. Given that it was still in the running for best picture when I saw it, it is possible, even likely, that there are people who recognize Fever for the masterpiece that it very well may be. However, I am not one of those people, and I would suspect, that neither were any of the people in the audience with me.

Fever is the story of Benjamin, a chain smoking, graffiting French delinquent who, when his mother is sent to prison, is given the choice of foster care or living with a father he’s never met. He chooses his Moroccan father and chaos ensues.

The cinematography was…different. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. There were some interesting shots, from angles that I’m not accustomed to seeing, a lot of shakiness. While some would have made stunning stills, the overall effect was dizzying and amateurish. Or perhaps I’m being insensitive and the shakiness of the camera was a direct effect of a much lower budget than I’m used to.

The story line was equally confusing. The themes that were touched on, in rough order, include:

1. Foster care
2. Sex outside of marriage
3. Ethnic conflict
4. Generation gap
5. Mental health
6. Physical health
7. Gender and sexuality
8. Suicide
9. Murder

Several of the themes, which were primarily illustrated by the supporting characters’ relationships with Benjamin could have made for interesting studies of human dysfunction had they been fully realised. We are left feeling confused and wondering if the point of the movie was simply to document a few days in the lives of some very strange people and if there was any deeper meaning at all.

That’s not to say that there weren’t good moments. I thoroughly enjoyed the beautifully delusional poetry of the lake hobo and there was a very entertaining moment between the family members where Benjamin cleverly riffs on cultural differences vis a vis pizza toppings. But those moments were few and far between, and ultimately the movie was disjointed and bizarre.

However, I will give you that the end was chilling, unexpected and ultimately the only logical way it could have ended.

2 women on the road – Moroccan

Two women on the road is the somewhat entertaining story of Amina, a young trophy wife on her way up to Tetouan to bribe a judge to liberate her hash smuggling husband from jail. On the drive north, her car breaks down and she meets Lalla Rahma, a very practical and somewhat senile old woman who seems to spontaneously decide to follow Amina north to find out whether her son has survived his attempt to cross the Straits.

The movie was apparently intended as a Moroccan take on the classic American road movie. It has all the right aspects: 2 conflicting personalities thrust together out of circumstance become unlikely friends as they overcome amusing obstacles.

The characters were pretty standard, Amina is young, pretty and vain. She wears inappropriately tight revealing clothes at every point in the film. I’ll admit I probably spent more time than I should have staring at her butt. Lalla Rahma is, of course, the polar opposite: old, [polite synonym for fat], and covered from head to toe in seemingly endless layers of fabric. Conservative and disapproving to Amina’s frivolity and flashiness, Lalla Rahma was all big, disbelieving eyes and huffily gathering up her never-ending skirts, the Moroccan child of Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball.

There were funny moments (at least the Arabic speaking audience seemed to think so, they spoke so quickly that I rarely had the chance to read all of the French subtitles, which left me with a gist of the meaning, but still feeling a little out of the loop), but it wasn’t a particularly funny movie. It tried so hard to be funny that it ended up being a little sad and at times a touch morbid. Perhaps the Moroccan sense of humour just isn’t compatible with such an American story line.

How I Live Now – British / American

Daisy, a Hot Topic patronizing American teenager has been inexplicably sent to stay with oddball relatives in the English countryside on the eve of World War 3. Initially withdrawn and alienated, she begins to warm up to her charming surroundings, even falling in love. As the UK falls into a violent, chaotic military state, Daisy finds herself hiding and fighting to survive.

I must say, despite how lazy it makes me feel, it was utterly refreshing to watch a movie in English (my first since I moved to Morocco), which may have contributed to my enjoyment of this movie over others.

The acting was excellent as was the sound track. I had trouble relating to Daisy, in all her insecurity, borderline OCD and sudden burst of romanticism, but that’s probably because I’m no longer a 16 year old girl. Her cousins were lovely and welcoming and wonderfully weird and I wish they were my family.

A couple of distracting plot holes; including the voices in Daisy’s head, why Eddie was telepathic (or was he just really in tune with her?), what the political conflict that led to WW3 was and why the hell Daisy’s father would have sent her, against her will, into such a politically charged potentially fatal situation, but I assume these are explained in the book it was adapted from [yes, Eliot, I ended a sentence with a preposition]. But my main issue was that the love interest previously mentioned, the boy that she flung herself into a whirlwind romance with, the boy that she willingly gave herself to (think biblically, people) WAS HER COUSIN. HER FIRST COUSIN. Granted he was cute, but they’re blood relatives. Close blood relatives. So very very icky. Needless to say, the gross out factor detracted a bit from my sympathy for their tragic love. Yuck.

One last irritation, which applies to all of the movies, but to this one in particular, is how incredibly obnoxious the other movie goers were. They acted like complete children any time there was physical affection of any kind. They clapped, cheered and whistled inappropriately during tense, emotional or romantic moments. I spent more time fighting the urge to stand up and yell “shut the fuck up” than I did actually enjoying the movie.

Thanks for reading, and here's a gratuitous shot of how beautifully warm Marrakech is in December. I guess you never really appreciate something until you're about to leave it.

The CATastrophe

Once upon a Halloween party...

...I made the acquaintance of a lovely little white speckled kitten. Her manner was calm and sweet and curious. I thought to myself, “I’m lonely and bored and could use a friend. Why not find a friend whose poop I need to clean up every other day?” And thus began the tale of Riley Gerken.

As you can probably guess, the cute, SANE kitten I met that Halloween night is not my Riley, but rather Riley’s sister (who probably has a name by now, but didn’t when I met her). She was the inspiration for the biggest impulse purchase of my life.

Dazzled by Unnamed’s cuteness, I made the bizarre decision to trek out the very edge of Rabat (props to Anna for putting up with that decision and all of the subsequent disasters) to the embassy district to pick up the sibling of a cat I had met once while relatively intoxicated.

I was quickly made to pay for this decision. My adorable new grey and white kitten was rather displeased about being taken away from its parents and hordes of siblings (seriously the woman had at least 9 cats roaming her backyard) and to be liberated from the relative feline paradise of some expat’s garden. She chose to voice her displeasure by 48 hours of constant biting, screaming and suicide attempts.

Night 1:

A taxi, tram and short walk later, we got my traumatized new kitten “home.” I tried to make her feel as safe and happy as possible, but never having had a kitten (especially not a feral kitten) I became keenly aware that I had absolutely no idea what that entailed. I put her in the kitchen – a smallish space where she couldn’t cause too much damage (or so we thought) – and checked in on her periodically, not wanting to overwhelm her with my presence. After a few hours of my affections being rebuffed (by which I mean, being bitten, scratched and generally hissed at), I was ready to give up. Clearly this cat would never love me. I went to bed on the couch, leaving the kitchen door cracked a bit, hoping that she would spontaneously realize her love for me and come cuddle. Howling, howling and then silence. Sweet silence and sleep. The next morning I awoke worried about the lack of frantic meowing. Shortly thereafter we invented my least favourite game “Where the fuck is the cat?” We looked everywhere. In every box and cupboard, under every appliance. We even tipped over the oven to see if she was under there. But nothing, not a solitary meow, not a clue. Until we smelt it. A feral smell. That was when the panic hit. Oh my God, am I so useless of a person that I allowed my cat to die on her first night under my protection?!? It was coming from the oven. From INSIDE the oven? That’s right folks. In her terror, the then unnamed Riley had crawled up the back of the oven, inside the wiring, had made a little nest and then violently released her bowels. ALL OVER THE INSIDE OF MY FRIEND’S BRAND NEW NEVER BEFORE USED OVEN. To say that she’s persona non grata in this apartment is an understatement. Have I mentioned that I’m basically moving in with them in a couple of weeks? Oh dear.

Night 2:

This time, we decide to quarantine her in the bathroom. We hope that the smaller size of the room will be less overwhelming than the kitchen and are pleased that the door is closeable and there is nothing valuable that she can break and nowhere she could crawl into and hurt herself (or so we thought). Eventually we get used to the yowling noises and fall into a sort of half sleep. At 3.30am we are awakened by the sound of Lynne screaming our names. The tiny kitten has somehow managed to jump 7 feet into the air, open and fling herself out a window. She is now dangling out the window by one claw. She was mercifully retrieved and I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom trying to sooth her and trying to stop her from jumping at the closed window. One can’t help but feel a little hurt that she felt that possible death and certain maiming were preferable to my company.

The next morning I left as early as possible to spare Lynne and Anna the continued annoyance of what was quickly becoming the world’s most high maintenance cat, and adjourned to the train station for 5 hours of trying to convince train personnel that I wasn’t transporting an animal despite the fact that my bag kept meowing.

Thankfully , since arriving in Marrakech, Riley has evolved into a somewhat saner cat. I say somewhat because she certainly does still have her odd moments. Our first night together in Marrakech, we bonded over the movie version of Phantom of the Opera and vegetarian pizza and she fell asleep curled up on my lap. I felt such a sense of triumph. She’s slept on or next to me every night since. When she was little she used to curl into a ball and perch on my hip, but recently she’s taken to crawling under the blankets with me and sleeping just under my chin. She purrs when she breathes in and out, and the effect is like sleeping next to a very small fuzzy old man who snores like a tractor engine. It’s actually difficult to sleep when I’m not in Marrakech because I miss her funny snoring.

 Despite the occasional annoyance, like her penchant for attacking my feet while I’m sleeping or her predilection for sitting on my keyboard while I’m typing, I’ve grown immensely fond of Riley and her Wiley Coyote moments. If she’s my first step on the way to crazy cat lady-hood, I’m alright with that.

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Riley says hi.

The Customs Incident

On route to Casablanca, I learned two important things: 1. the train system in Morocco is not idiot proof. 2. I am an idiot.

Having recently watched the masterfully made, number two film of all time (according to the American Film Institute) Casablanca, I had high hopes for my weekend trip to the city of the same name. The remote possibility of meeting Humphrey Bogart and becoming his tragic love interest made it just a little bit easier to tear myself out of bed before sunrise, take a freezing cold, scummy shower and stumble the seemingly endless distance to the train station.

The Moroccan train system is both surprisingly nice and unsurprisingly has no concept of punctuality. Apparently, “your train departs at 6” actually means “Your train departs at 7.30 unless you arrive at 5.50, in which case it departed at 5.45.” Time seems to work differently here and I’m the only person annoyed by it.

Anyway, one needlessly complicated and time consuming train ride later, I learned that there are only three reasons to go to Casablanca. They are as follows:

1. Hassan II Mosque. The largest mosque in Africa and third largest in the world. Beautiful architecture, stunningly intricate detail, pictures to follow.

2. Morocco Mall (or as I prefer to call it “Morocco Mole”). The largest shopping mall in Africa. It has everything you could possibly need: designer clothes, groceries, food (Pinkberry!), an Imax movie theater and, for some reason, an aquarium that you can scuba dive in while your friends shop. Consumer paradise.

(The largest nightclub in Africa is also in Morocco, in Marrakech. The diversity of record setting monuments here pretty accurately reflects the often contradictory ideologies that makes the country so interesting (and confusing) to live in.)

3. Customs is holding hostage the care package your mum sent you to remind you that you are loved and to temporarily stave off homesickness, which is a sentiment the Moroccan government apparently firmly disapproves of.

Let me elaborate…According to the Moroccan government, packages with contents that are worth more than $25, contain beauty products, weigh more than an unspecified amount that varies from person to person or not going directly to a member of the Moroccan government are subject to search and seizure by Moroccan customs and will be held in a really creepy warehouse until you pay fines that don’t actually exist or, in the case of beauty products, produce a signed and dated letter of explanation from the Minister of Health. I’m not even making this up. But of course, when your package is seized by customs you’re not informed. In fact, even after calling and emailing pretty much every FedEx employee on both continents, the only thing you’ll gain is a reminder that your package is being held by customs. No solutions. No offers of help. Nothing but frustration.

Which is what truly inspired me to hop on a train to Casa. By that point they had pissed me off enough that I was going to retrieve my package or die trying. Little did I know how close I would come.

The customs area for FedEx is close to the Casa airport, which is close to absolutely nothing else. Fun fact, it’s also in the opposite direction of the sign directing you to it, allowing you to wander around creepy warehouses for a full 45 minutes trying to find it. The next 5 hours involved running between parts of various creepy warehouses, getting 500 million seemingly unrelated documents signed, stamped and dated by people who were all spontaneously on break the moment you got to them. To break up the fun, were brief periods of identifying your package and showing official identification to various people who came and went as they pleased, usually moments before you needed to inexplicably hand them your passport again. Then came my favourite part: justifying everything in the package to a sweaty overweight man who wouldn’t stop fondling the panties that your mum sent you. It was at this point, holding up the things that my mum had so lovingly included in her care package (kraft mac’n’cheese, zinc sunblock, candy corn pumpkins, new sheets, my sneakers…etc. Thanks mum!) and showing them to a man who would not stop touching my underwear and grinning, that I lost it. That was the moment when the constant harassment and frustration and loneliness culminated in the one thing that every strong independent woman hates to do in a country that already thinks she’s an overly emotional dependent wimp. I cried. And everyone looked at me. I was truly mortified and completely incapable of stopping. Which, as it turns out, was the best thing I could have done. All the useless bureaucratic men were ashamed enough of making a poor helpless girl cry that they burst into action and delivered my package to me. Of course, it took another two hours (by which point I was on the verge of tears again), but some people had been waiting for three days, so it was comparably swift.

To help you to better feel my pain, this whole experience happened the day after a bit of a bender involving a spontaneous trip to Rabat to pick up one of the participants in our little disaster, during which the driver of the car was not quite as sober as I would have hoped. We were so shaken by our little brush with death that we proceeded to drink for the next 4 hours. By the time the alarm rang the next morning, we were in too much pain to eat breakfast. So reread the paragraph about customs and, to the experience, add a hangover, borderline starvation and only 3 hours of sleep. Fun, right?

Needless to say, I’ll be avoiding Casa like the plague. That is, until I next have a craving for Pinkberry.

A special shout out to H, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to even get to customs, let alone retrieve the package.

A Walking Lunch

Today I learned that “Hey, want to grab lunch” actually means “Let’s go hiking.” Am I crazy or is there no real link between those things? Needless to say, anticipating a quick walk/drive to a restaurant or food stall for lunch, I dressed appropriately in my only pair of jeans, a t-shirt and flats. Casual lunch clothes. Not hiking clothes. So imagine my surprise when the car left downtown, where most of the food is, and passed the city limits, passed the water park (We have a water park! Who knew?) and after miles of desert, snaked up into the Atlas mountains, to a little (unfortunately well known to the tourist industry) town named Ourika.

Ourika is a “relatively unspoiled” Berber village built on the banks of the Ourika river which, as you can see, is low enough to walk across in the summer, but rises quickly during the rainy winter (in fact, several residents were killed and a few houses were destroyed in Ourika in the same unseasonably heavy rain that flooded my apartment a few weeks ago). So every 100 meters there’s a bridge you can cross to get to the other side, which are generally made of scraps of wood held together by twine. This is by far the most stable bridge we found and it still jiggled too much for my taste.

In all fairness, we did eventually have lunch, at an adorably brightly coloured table along the river. But first we enjoyed fresh mint tea (which must have some kind of addictive property because I cannot get enough of it) and fresh walnuts, with our feet dipped in the sub-zero temperature water of the surprisingly fast moving river. I stalled for as long as I could, racing walnut shells down the river and playing with the increasingly wet and frantic dog, until eventually it could wait no longer. We were to hike to a waterfall, and I was to do it in my work shoes.

Personally, I feel that “hike” isn’t really an appropriate verb to describe what we did, “scramble frantically up enormous, incredibly slippery boulders while being constantly harassed by people selling tourist crap” seems more accurate. However, the scenery was beautiful, the air was clean and it was lovely to be out of the city for a while. It got easier when I made the executive decision to take off my shoes and do the scrambling barefoot. Although it did result in a couple of potentially questionable scraps on the bottom of my feet, it was vastly superior to smashing open my skull slipping off a rock, as I was bound to do with my shoes on. 

Eventually we got to the first waterfall (apparently there are 7, but we’ll visit those another time, when I’m a little more prepared), which was both beautiful and breathtakingly cold (snow melt).While eventually enjoyable, this pretty accurately depicts my feelings about the spontaneous hike, essentially “Why the hell are you doing this to me?”

After a celebratory coke and some unnecessary splashing, I made the executive decision to descend the mountain food-wards, in an attempt that can not exactly be called graceful. Despite a couple of almost fatal slips and some high pitched girly shrieking that seemed to be coming from me, we made it back down to the restaurant in more or less one piece and enjoyed some piping hot tajine and thoroughly addictive tea over a rousing discussion of gender roles (which rendered me nearly catatonic with rage).

The City with Too Many Vowels

We're on the road to Essaouira (pronounced Ess-uh-wee-ruh, you have no idea how long it took me to get that right), a beautiful port city roughly 3 hours drive from Marrakech. Of the multitude of interesting factoids I’ve heard about Essaouira, the most important is that several Game of Thrones episodes were filmed there. GAME OF THRONES!!!

Ok, fan girl moment over. Because of its position along the coast and relative to Marrakech, it’s been an important port to all manner of kings and conquerors since its founding, and thus has been kept in relatively good shape. The route to Essaouira is mostly relatively lifeless desert, but every now and then you see something cool…

GOATS IN TREES!

So, while we’re trapped in the car, let me introduce you to someone new:

This seemingly adorable canine is actually the most annoying creature you’ll ever meet. Imagine an ADHD inflicted rabbit on speed and you have a less irritatingly energetic animal than Y. Yes he’s cute, but trust me the cute wears off when he’s been trying to hump your leg for 3 hours, has bitten you once and has peed on you twice. At this point in the trip, he was still cute. It was when he tried to fight a camel that we realized he was truly insane.

After briefly surveilling the city from above, we retired to the beach, where we enjoyed several hours of relaxation and delightful conversation with a lovely Canadian teacher, with brief bouts of saving Y from drowning.

Roughly 3 hours in to the experience we realized that we had forgotten one crucial element: Sun block. Thus began the worst sun burn of my adult life. Dazed and groggy from the sun and the incredible length of time since our last meal, we set off in search of food, shade and possibly some aspirin. But H had other ideas. Apparently it was imperative that we see Essaouira’s famous fish market.

So we staggered onward bitching and moaning, following H as he sped frantically through the market, heatedly bargaining and buying large quantities of every edible (and a few possibly inedible) fish known to man. Occasionally we held back to step in pools of rancid fish guts, complain and day dream about fish-free food. But those dreams would have to wait, because as we were just about to slip into tantrum mode, we were confronted by a grinning H holding 3 enormous plastic bags, full to the brim with various unappetizing fish, that we were informed would be our lunch. BUT FIRST…we had to find someone to cook them.

 Fast forward to me and A holding the impressively heavy, now leaking bags of fish parts as H runs off to find the car and iceboxes to transport them home. Imagine our horror as H plops each fish between layers of dirty ice, stopping occasionally to pick fallen specimens from the sidewalk (where people walk and spit and frequently defecate) and place them snugly with the others. Now imagine our embarrassment as tourists stop to watch and take pictures.

Hunger overcomes mortification and we’re finally on our way food-wards through the medina, to knock on a little door in an alley that I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. We’re now hungry enough that we feel slightly ill, but all there is left to do is hand over the fish and wait. Which is what we did.

Skepticism aside, the food was quite tasty and it fortified us for our continued exploration of the city.

Essaouira is charming and inviting and utterly different from Marrakech. The ocean breeze is refreshing after the oppressive heat of the city (the rancid fish smell that permeates everything even reminds me a bit of fisherman’s wharf). The streets are just as crowded but less frenzied. People yell, trying to sell their goods but no one touches you or follows you. The ancient walls are crumbling and the streets are maze but somehow the city feels inviting. The nooks and crannies give it charm and make it wonderful to photograph.

The view of the sunset from the ramparts was romantic even to cynic like myself. I sincerely hope to return.