Italy pictures, my trip before the farm

From the airplane to Milan

On the shore of Lake Como

Lake Como

Can't remember the town name =/

In Como town

Bellagio

Hiking up Mt. Grona, L. Como

Trails up the mountain

On Mt. Grona peak

Menaggio, where I stayed on the lake

Modena, life under the portico

Rome

Rome from the Janiculum, Trastevere

Sperlonga, on the sea near Rome

Life on the farm, part 1

My long break in writing has mostly been the result of my staying in one place in Italy for the past month – on a farm, outside the small city of Sora, which lies partway between Rome and Naples, in the Apennine Mountains.  I should be in Syria right now, which is a strange thing to think as I work in fields and see green mountains all around me.  I’m sure my mother will be shocked to hear this, but I’ve taken to working with the soil, in a way that I had not anticipated.  The ghosts of my childhood still lurk, mainly the utter contempt I had for anything that involved yard work, something I was forced to do every Saturday morning as a child.  This about-face reminds me of the phenomenon wherein a person who is forced to read something does so begrudgingly, whereas they might elect to read something similar, on their own, and really enjoy it.

Part of my decision-making has certainly been financial.  By working on the farm, I have a place to stay for free, and I share my meals with the other volunteers here.  Meaning, I am getting by on the cheap, which is of importance considering that I am unsure whether I am returning home to a job.  Better to return with some scrilla in the bank.  But the main reasons why I’ve stayed are my fellow volunteers, and the beauty around me.  I’m working alongside people from all over, Latvia, Austria, Germany, UK, the Netherlands, Italy, and the US.  And the nature here is beautiful:  impressive mountains, green carpets and trees.  Olive groves are everywhere.  The farm is also gorgeous, tucked into a river valley, small fields winding through hills, orchards under a hot, hot sun.  Everything is grown here:  figs, dates, grapes, olives, pears, plums, apples,  walnuts, melons, zucchini, broccoli, all sorts of salad greens, beans, chili peppers, tomatoes, onions.  Work mostly involves weeding, watering, and picking.  My back might disagree with me, but I found picking beans to be particularly enjoyable.

I should describe my living conditions.  For the first couple of weeks, I stayed as a guest at the main house, which is where the chickens, goats, rabbits, and donkeys are kept, along with some small gardens.  The Siragusa family runs the property as an agriturismo, which in essence is a place for tourists to come and stay on a working farm.  I hung around as a guest until financial calculations and an impending plane flight to Istanbul forced my hand.  At this point I decided that I was too happy and too broke to travel further east, so I moved to the other property the family owns, which they’ve named Le Mogli.  This is its setting:  an old farmhouse from the 1800s, crumbling and only partially intact, inhabited by myself and (at the moment) the nine other volunteers.  We have two usable rooms, one in which we store our food, and the other in which we store our random stuff, and occasionally sleep.  Most sleeping is done on the intact portion of the roof, or in the fields, under the olive trees.  No electricity, water pumped out of a well, and cooking done by fire.  The word rustic was likely developed for exactly such a place as this.

The vibe here is something like a mix between a hippie commune and a traditional Italian farm.  The only things breaking the off-the-grid atmosphere are the laptops, Ipods, and the one car, which Marcus from Austria drove down with him.  Thank goodness too, because the nearest city, Sora, is an hour walk.  We are properly in nature, when I look from our patio all I see are hillsides and trees (oak, olive, pine, maple, bamboo).  Some chickens milling about too.

When I say hippie, I don’t mean that I am surrounded by flower children.  Most people here are, dare I say it, normal, and wouldn’t be out of place in an average social situation.  The farm seems to attract interesting people, who enjoy conversation, poker, wine, walks, and cooking.  My kind of people.  [Some of us would rather drink beer to wine, but with no refrigerator, you make compromises].  Right now we are:  Gunther, the “capo” who is a permanent volunteer and organizes most things; Marcus, who is an old friend of Gunther; Martina, who is Marcus girlfriend; Jan, the giant, giant German (about 6’4” and 265 lbs); Hannah, the new girl from London; Nicola from Puglia, who enjoys teaching chickens to explore the forest; Anna, who hitchhiked here from Germany; myself, and a particularly special girl for me, Lasma from Latvia.

There are many stories to tell, so let this serve as a beginning.

Italia, insomma…

My present location is on a farm in eastern Lazio, roughly 2 hours away from Rome, in a collection of houses just east of the town of Sora.  I am sitting outside on a terrace, which overlooks hills and ridges and mountains, the earth full of trees.  In my view are plum, fig and olive trees, along with fat, black bumblebees.  My ears hear the sound of goats bleating, and thunder.  A storm is coming in.

I long ago had a thought, and my experience here in Italy continues to confirm it:  the most obvious travel destinations have the least interesting tourists.  My hostel in Rome was full of people who felt the need to loudly proclaim opinions idiotic and facts which were demonstrably false.  For instance, one particularly annoying American girl asserted, “Oh yeah, you can teach English anywhere, and all the countries will give you citizenship to keep you.”  Another American counseled a Swedish woman that her country’s people need guns in order to deter Russia from invading.   I would guess that 90% of the people coming to Italy go to three places (Venice, Florence, Rome), and of that 90 percent I’d want to spend time with roughly two or three of them.  I have precious few minutes left in my life and do not want to waste them on people who declare that Bolivia is an island in the Caribbean (true story).  To be fair, I have made my living the last three years needling people for making statements without understanding their ramifications, or for simple bullshitting.

Too many of these fellow travelers remind me of my least liked students.

On the other hand, here in Pescosolido, in the middle of nowhere, nearly everyone I have met (both travelers and workers at the agriturismo) have been interesting.  One long string of Good People.  The less obvious the place, the more interesting the people.

Enough with the social observations-cum-complaining.  Let’s talk about food?  I have had a steady diet of porcini mushrooms since arriving in this country, which I think are the GodShroom, delicious with everything.  On pizza, in tortellini, on fettucini, wherever, as long as they make it to my tongue.  Everything is one big porcini delivery device.  And, of course, there has been a steady consumption of the salumi, e.g. prosciutto, speck, bresaola; sausages; and cheeses (motta, taleggio, various pecorini, mozzarella di bufala, etc).  Somehow, despite eating weeks of delicious food (and as you might remember, delicious to me usually means laden with fat of some form), I have dropped about 15 pounds over these 5 weeks.  Nice to know the metabolism still works.  I made this discovery (the numerical one, I had long before noticed that my pants were falling down my ass) today the shop of a fascist cheesemonger, where I got on the scale and it registered 83 kg, or roughly 184 pounds.  I no longer quite resemble Vida Guerra.

How do you react to a guy who has shown you and your friends his property, given you countless hunks of cheese to sample for free, and has a large portrait of Mussolini on his wall?  Against our dismay and protest was a rather simple defense, and as you might imagine, it revolved around trains running on time.  Politics here are heated.  Last night, I asked an Italian guy what he thought about Marcello Lippi, the coach of the Italian national soccer team.  Instead of talking about soccer, the guy launched immediately into a 30 minute diatribe about how they are all thieves, the people are left poor and starving for lack of work.  A quick 5 minutes would have done the trick, but Italians are justly famous for being longwinded.  Another special trait is the older Italian man’s proclivity to be capo of conversation, meaning your questions to them are often deflected, ignored, or turned into something different.  Not necessarily a malicious trait, but one which is alternatively charming and maddening.  Old Italian men can be primadonnas.

Morocco pictures

I took many pictures in the desert and kasbash, here is a selection:

Our bus traverses a rushing, muddy river:

In Zagora with Halal and Mohammed:

The object of our affection:

The three adventurers:

The desert:

Sunset:

Tinzouline kasbahs:

Final thoughts, Morocco (maybe)

My last night was spent in Fez, a beautiful and dizzying labyrinthine city in the north of Morocco. I’m now writing from the shore of Lake Como, waiting for my boat from Como to Menaggio, where I am staying on the lake. Talk about a contrast, yesterday, waking up at 7 am on the roof of a hotel in Fez, where I slept for 30 dirham (about $3.50), and then seven hours later, arriving in Italy, walking out of the airplane, with a view of spectacular Bergamo and the promise of prosciutto.

Was I ready to leave Morocco? Yes, and I have to admit that the thought of Italy was never far from mind while I was there. I felt a bit guilty each time, as my mind wandered off to il bel paese. I tried my best to chastise myself and redirect my attention back to the present. Ultimately, I enjoyed my experience in Morocco, though it was a mixed bag. The people and the food and the infrastructure were successively lovely and maddening.

I fear that most tourists leave Morocco with a less than sterling impression of the people, mostly because the average Moroccan one interacts with as a foreigner is quite aggressive and demanding of your time. Rather than be one of those things that one simply gets used to, I found myself slowly getting more and more aggravated by the street encounters, and the constant second guessing of whether or not I was being cheated. There are no prices, only arguments. Constantly being one one’s guard gets old. With that said, I did meet many fantastic people, and balancing out all the times that I got nickeled and dimed for this or that were several instances where people gladly gave me things for free, most often food or tea. The Moroccans people meet on the streets and in the souks are, of course, not representative of the entire people, and yet because these are the people one interacts with on a regular basis (usually not by choice), it is easy to lose sight of this.

My last day in Morocco, which was yesterday, is a good example of this. Two acts of kindness were done to me, one great and one small. Great was me leaving my wallet on the back seat in a taxi, and the taxi driver returning 5 minutes later to hand it back to me, intact. I, of course, was sweating bullets, both literally (as I realized my mistake just as he was curving back down the road, and chased after him in a futile effort to catch his attention) and figuratively (my ATM cards…). He didn’t have to take the time to perform such an act of kindness, but did anyway. The second instance was later that evening, when I asked a small group of Moroccans next to me which bread was the best at this particular stall. That led to a conversation as to the merits of each, and then an invitation to grab some tea with them at a café nearby. I readily agreed, and was treated by them to tea and an hour of interesting conversation, about Morocco and the US. I an relate that they all approved of Obama, but not of gay people. This lead to me thinking later that were I talking to 5 Americans my age who expressed revulsion at gay people I would likely get upset and end the conversation by leaving, yet with these 5 Moroccans of my age, I did nothing but weakly protest their points. It was an experience that placed me precisely at the point of decision between the universal principle and the culturally relative. I weakly straddled the middle, mostly due to my desire not to offend them and prematurely end our exchange.

Of the food, I have to say that it is both delicious and monotonous. Morocco has some great food (tagine, cous cous, merguez, etc), but the same thing is on offer, everywhere, everyday, and by your 20th tagine in 3 weeks one begins seeking out anything other than Moroccan food to satisfy one’s appetite. This didn’t quite lead me into the arms of McDonalds or KFC (both present in Morocco), but did have me eating a lot of pizza, crepes, and beignets. About tagine: imagine the best pot roast you’ve ever had, and then add cumin, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, and paprika. Deliciously spiced, really satisfying. What I don’t quite understand is how Moroccans can eat this dish for lunch, every day, regardless of whether it’s 100 degrees out or not. To me, summer and roasts don’t go with one another, but this is not something which appears to be considered by the Moroccans I interacted with.

Making the tagine is dead simple: first, have a tagine, second add onions and water, cook; add meat, brown; add the vegetables and spices, simmer. My particular interest in the dish is the richly flavored broth and wonderful bits of blackened onions at the bottom. F yea. One sad thing to note, is that any time one travels and has a taste of the “real thing” (whether it be pizza, pasta, or whatever), it quickly and effectively ruins one’s ability to go to a restaurant at home, order that dish, and enjoy it. In other words, I think I’ve had my last tagine at Amanouz.

“He’s calling the hump, Walt; he shouldn’t want the hump.”

Alternative titles:  Mo’ca de mierda; The Turbanators; Tocqueillin the Sahara; Rock the Kasbahs.

In other words, I am just back from the desert outside Zagora, at the fringe of the Sahara.  It sounds exotic and spectacular, it wasn’t these things, and I can’t properly say that I’ve been to “the Sahara.”  It’d be like saying I’ve “been to Africa” after having visited only Morocco.  Technically true, but missing so much.  But anyway, I should begin with the beginning…

Which was myself, and two great people, Bastien and Andrea, on a bus to Zagora.  I met them at the hostel in Marrakech, turned out we had similar plans, and decided some solidarity would enable us to haggle a better deal out of the agency in Zagora.  Turned out to be a great decision, as we made good friends.  Bastien is from France and Andrea from Argentina; the two live together in Paris.  A happy couple and easy travel companions.  Bastien told me his philosophy of photography, and Andrea about Carlos Menem and the history of the tango.  A lot of Spanish was spoken over the course of four days.  We had little else to do, aside from ride buses through flash floods, ride camels, and swat flies.

So the ride to Zagora was, uh, interesting, namely given the swollen streams and rivers that ran alongside the road, engorged from multiple days of rain.  As you might imagine, rain in the desert makes for water in places it doesn’t belong, such as on our road.  We first stopped at a large rush of water, maybe 100 feet wide, overflowing its banks and coursing over the road.  The lot of us gulped, the driver laughed, and we all mentally calculated the chances of success (getting to Zagora) versus failure (getting washed off the road and into the newly formed river).  I was more affected by the experience than I would have imagined, and had my heart in my throat as we forded the water.  Success.  But success went to the head of the bus driver, and as we approached another body of water, he plunged directly into it without much in the way of slowing down.  We hit the water with a thump, it leapt into the air, covering our windshield, and flying over the top of the bus.  Holy fucking shit, that was what I was thinking, once my brain started working again.  We made it through that river as well, by how much I don’t know.  I do know that this flooded the baggage compartment with muddy water, leaving my bag brown and its contents wet.  Luckily things dry quickly in 100 degree weather.

After a few more water incidents, we made it to the destination, Zagora, and attempted to haggle a decent price for a desert trip.  The guy we interacted with that night was a real d-bag, we left frustrated and muttered about him the rest of the trip.  The next morning we contacted a much nicer, more mellow guy, Halal Azzizi, and booked a trip with him.  Before leaving that evening, he took us to his house (better put, compound) and we talked with him and his friend Mohammed, from Mali, about Morocco and its culture.  It’s one thing to read about parochial gender relations in a book, and another to hear it from the lips of a patriarch.

That evening we set off into the desert on our camels, turbans wrapped around our heads.  Apparently the uni-hump variety is typical to Morocco, and as I perched myself 10 feet off the ground on this swaying, uncomfortable animal I could do nothing but smile a shit-eating grin and repeat to myself “dude, I’m on a camel.”  I spent the next couple hours this way.  The entire situation felt more than a bit silly and kitschy.  The guides basically walked the lead camel, we were towed behind, and followed a 4×4 track most of the way.  I tried to look past all this, and remind myself that riding a camel is fucking sweet regardless of this being a highly gringo-ized activity.  We arrived at the camp, a small, “traditional” Berber spot in the desert.  We smoked some hash, ate tagine, watched lightning in the distance, and ducked inside once the wind began blowing sand.  The second day was mostly spent sweating, complaining about the heat, and smoking more hash (when in Rome…).

The trip was satisfying if unspectacular.   We didn’t get to see any high dunes, or that which one might imagine of the Sahara.  But the desert was pretty enough, had good company, and did I mention riding a camel? 

After our two nights were over, I spent a morning in Tinzouline, where there are two old and crumbly kasbahs.  To describe a kasbah is somewhat difficult.  They are made of wood, mud, and straw, similar to the adobe houses in the Southwest.  Imagine that, and then imagine a crumbly town in the middle of Italy with few inhabitants, perched on a hill, with some minor fortifications.  That’s roughly the aspect of a kasbah.  The first one I visited was in good shape, with many inhabitants walking between it and the oasis below.  The second was mostly ruined, with only a couple houses that appeared to be occupied.  Atmosphere.  Speaking of the oasis, over the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech is the Draa Valley, a long river valley tucked between two desert ridges.  The contrast between the two is stunning, and the flora one finds is very interesting.  Manzanita, aspen, bougainvilla, corn, cacti, lavender, and a million date palms occupy the soil.  It is really a strange thing to see an aspen tree in the vicinity of cactus, I remember aspens only from my childhood in the backwoods of the Sierra Nevada.  It is also strange to see lavender, something I normally associate with France, and not the desert oasis.  The heat in which the farmers work is incredible.  A 100 degree day is the norm.  I was sweating buckets, with my yellow turban wrapped around my head.

Atlas Mountains hiking

Just back from a few days hiking up in the Atlas, walking between Berber villages and enjoying the beautiful scenery.  It really is a unique and spectacular range, for several reasons, including its position in a desert latitude versus its height.  Meaning, the ridges are brown and rocky and mostly dead, like the eastern Sierra Nevada, but because of the altitude, the mountains collect a good deal of snow in the winter, which turns into rivers and streams in the dry spring and summer, providing the valleys with constant irrigation and generating wide green swaths of trees and grasses.  The villagers have terraced much of the lower hillsides, while walking I came across walnut and cherry groves, barley, corn, and poppy fields.  The contrast between the green valleys and the brown, rocky ridges is stunning. 

The villages are also atmospheric.  I stayed in one, Tacheddirt, and was an instant celebrity.  Not many non-Moroccans come through the village, as it lies in a river valley across a ridge from the main tourist town of Imlil.  The hike there was absolutely beautiful, but it is off the beaten path, so there I was, alone.  I stayed at a refuge that kept a registration book, the last traveler had come through 9 days prior.  I think I enjoyed observing them as much as they did me.  This was especially true in the next village over, Ouaneskra, where I spent a good chunk of an afternoon slowly moving through the hillsides, interacting with sheperds and people just sitting by the river, relaxing.  As you might imagine, the people were much more relaxed and friendly than here in Marrakech.  Ouaneskra is especially beautiful because of all the herds of lambs and cows, who by munching the grass effectively “mow the lawn” and make for comfy relaxation spots.

Fun random story:  the massive, massive spider that was in my room at the refuge.  I normally deal well with spiders (spider, meet shoe), but as I got up to whack this monstrosity, it took quick notice of me and scurried (quickly) in the opposite direction.  Understanding that this wasn’t a spider to fuck with (size, speed, intelligence), I in a rush grabbed one of the foam mattresses and a pillow and slept outside.  Better to shiver through a night outdoors at 7000 feet than sleep in a bed with a giant fuckoff spider that could eat my face. 

That’s it for now.  Tomorrow I head off to the Sahara.  Pictures eventually.

Essaouira

I’m back in Marrakech after five days in Essaouira, a city on the sea about 3 hours west of here.  Tomorrow I go up into the Atlas mountains for a few days of hiking.  Now, though, to recount my time in Essaouira (Ess-ao-er-a), which largely revolved around hypochondria, bed-bugs, fish, seagulls, and annoying hostel people.  Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it wasn’t all shits and giggles, although I did manage to sneak in a good time here and there.

Starting with hypochondria.  My sore throat and fatigue really hit me hard on my first day in town, leaving me wondering whether I had mono or strep throat.  I managed to keep calm by telling myself repeatedly “I don’t have a fever, so it can’t be these things.”  I couldn’t, however, contain stray thoughts of what 2.5 months of traveling would be like with mono (“Ok, I’ll just find a relaxing town with a cheap and good hostel and settle down there…that sounds so depressing…”).  Things really got bad on day three, where even after napping all afternoon I was dizzy upon waking up and had difficulty with the stairs.  But that same day my throat started to feel better, so I was beginning to see the end of the tunnel.  Yesterday the fatigue left me, and today I feel back to normal.  No mono, just a bad throat infection that made my whole body unhappy.

You might imagine that spending much of three days in bed does not mix well with that bed having bed-bugs.  I somehow built up a massive karma-bomb which exploded on me a shower of bad luck.  My first two nights I managed to accrue some bites, which I assumed were mosquito related, and shrugged them off (cursing the mozzies, that is).  The third night left me with a whole bunch more, including one trail up my back.  I google’d “what leaves bites in a row” and the answer returned:  BED-BUGS DO.  Ick, ick.  So I complained, changed rooms, and washed all my clothes in incredibly hot water.  Problem solved, although I still have a body with small concentrations of really itchy bites all over it.  Looking at the big picture, after years of traveling and many hostels later, I’ve only encountered the problem once, meaning it was only a matter of time.  And for those whose immediate thought upon hearing this news is, “eww, hostels are gross,” my response would be:  bed-bugs are not attracted to dirty surroundings, but to places where human beings lie motionless for many hours in the dark.  Meaning, one place is as likely as any other to get bed-bugs, including fancy hotels, or your bedroom (pray not).

In addition to the bed-bug karmabomb, my illness left me spending far too much time in the vicinity of the two young women who worked at the hostel, two people who annoyed the shit out of me with their insecurity-related social (dis)graces.  One was a Canadian who constantly talked at a yell and could be heard all over the hostel, and the other a Scot who babbled at length about herself, with her (over)weight as a favorite subject.  They managed to make themselves the center of social activity, meaning they were constantly yammering and annoying the hell out of me (Scot: “oh, gosh, I need to lose 15 pounds but it’s hard with all this bread around,” Canadian: “I KNOW RIGHT?  HA HA HA”).  In the hostel’s defense, the Moroccans who they worked for were excellent people and made the stay enjoyable.  The owner looked like an old Ronaldinho.

So, about the city?  Crumbly beautiful, well-situated on a nice coast.  The photos will testify to its charm.  Famous for its winds, which will keep the beach clear for days at a time.  On the very short “good luck” side of my ledger, the winds weren’t too bad, and I managed to spend a fair amount of time walking and relaxing in the sand.  The city is known here for its fish, which I of course sampled.  The best was a lunch at the hostel, grilled sardines on the roof with watermelon for dessert.  Most Americans have never disassociated sardines in the can with sardines fresh from the water, and a pity for them, as fresh sardines are nearly entirely comprised of delicious, oily meat.  And the skin when barbecued becomes salty and crispy, aka really good.

Walking around the harbor is a good time, although the mess of seagulls there had me constantly cringing at the thought of earning the title “shithead.”  My companion at the time told me that getting shat on is supposed to be good luck, to which I replied that this was probably the concoction of some embarrassed fisherman who wanted to make his friends stop laughing at him. My other seagull moment occurred in bed-bug-bed, when in a state of delirium at perhaps 6am I awoke to the cries of what must have been 1000 seagulls (maybe I exaggerate here).  It was the weirdest, loudest cacophony of bird screams I have ever heard, and being half-asleep, I ventured into the recesses of my imagination to come up with an explanation, and of course returned with thoughts Hitchcockian.

So those were the high/low/lower points.  I finally am leaving for the mountains and couldn’t be happier to be a) healthy and able to be active and b) hear quiet and spend some time away from city streets.  After 10 days of weaving and dodging through crowds and avoiding hawkers, I am mentally fatigued.  In retrospect, I have been sick nearly my entire time in Morocco (if you hadn’t been following along previously, this all started when I first arrived in Marrakech).  So, here is to a new beginning.

Marrakech, part 2

Jemaa el Fna dominates Marrakech’s night life, a giant plaza where the entire city congregates, from sundown until early morning.  A good chunk of the square is taken up by food stalls, mostly catering to tourists, feeding them traditional Moroccan staples, but minus any flavor or quality, and employing a horde of men whose mission it is to be “your friend” and inform you that you are too skinny.  The rest of the square is full of buskers, some singing and playing drums, some men in drag belly-dancing (in very ornate burkas), and a motley assortment of snake-charmers, tooth-pullers, and monkey handlers who try to perch them on your head, and then demand dirham.  In short, it is an fascinating place.

It is particularly interesting to observe what attracted the attention of the Moroccans, after a day full of seeing what interested the tourists.  Marrakech is intensely touristy, who are highly visible, as they (we) stroll through the souks and tiny streets and deflect/entertain the calls of the hawkers (“my friend! My friend!” or “where are you from?” or “bonjour, ca va?”).  In the souks there is a clear demarcation between peoples, the tourists who walk about and buy stuff, and the Marrakechi who occupy their stalls, trying to attract our attention.

One thing that did successfully attract my attention was the one food stall in the Jemaa el Fna which actually had Moroccans eating at it.  It is generally foolproof wisdom that one eats best at the place where one finds the locals, so I took note, and sat down with my friends from the hostel to enjoy a nice meal.  Up for grabs?  How about lamb head, tongue and brain!  See the photo in my last entry.  So we sat down, and each ordered a tagine, which here means a bowl full of head meat in broth, with a side of bread, and a pepper/salt/cumin mix on the side.  I won’t say it was the best tagine I have had so far (kinda uni-dimensional, being just meat and bread), but the meat was tender and really tasty.

These food stalls (and the butcheries in the souks) have made me think on our affixation for refrigeration.  Nowhere in the medina does one find meat under refrigeration.  In addition, nowhere did I see meat exactly flying off the shelf.  So in putting two-and-two together, my assumption is that a lot of meat is being consumed in Marrakech which has spent a good deal of time at ambient temperature, which was ranging around 80-90 degrees during my stay.  Listening to our FDA, you’d think this would result in a city full of people with food-borne illness, yet this is not the case.  I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this.  Anyway, back to the brains, tongues, and heads, it certainly was a surreal (and desensitizing) experience to eat in the presence of such carnage (artfully, and orderly arranged carnage).

Marrakech, part 1

It’s been several days since my last blog, due to technology issues, so there is a lot to relate and reflect upon here.  Where to begin…

General first impression of Morocco?  Funny stories?  My goddamn sore throat?

Let’s talk first about the city.  Dizzying, fascinating, exhausting, refreshing…Marrakech is just about everything.  I’m guessing it puts off and or pisses off many a tourist, namely that one is constantly the target of those who would hassle you in the name of making a dirham or two.  In the same way that I love Naples for its flaws, Marrakech and I get along.  Even given this appreciation for the city, one must occasionally summon one’s ability to completely tune out the outside world, and sort of glide amongst those around you without doing much in the way of processing their intentions and actions.  In other words, it can get overwhelming, especially initially, and it takes some mental distancing to not be swamped by the hawkers, hustlers, and mopeds.

This is one amazing thing about the souks, that their congested and cluttered and narrow lanes are somehow co-inhabited by pedestrians, scooters, mopeds, bikes, donkey carts, and, rarely, cars.  It all somehow melds together into an odd locomotive harmony.  I didn’t see any accidents, and only occasionally ran against a “traffic jam.”  The souks are Marrakech’s traditional marketplace, now in existence mainly to satisfy the curiosity of tourists and relieve their wallet of its weight.

The medina is large, and a labyrinth (to which the souks do not help).  Finding the hostel on the first day was, uh, challenging, and the 90 degree heat didn’t make carrying around my backpacks any happier.  It also didn’t help that I was absolutely exhausted from a week of insufficient sleep and alcohol-induced dehydration in Paris.  I’m still in the grips of the longest hangover of my life, the last five days I have been incapable of sleeping enough, or drinking enough water, despite downing 2 liter bottles and sleeping 10-12 hours.  Yesterday a righteous sore throat attacked me, leaving me even more run-down.

Luckily I stayed at a very beautiful and homey riad, which made resting and relaxing an easy pursuit.  The folks who ran the place were fantastic, I shared many a lunch with them (tagine or cous cous, and they let me cook for them on one instance), learning an Arabic or Berber word here and there.  Smoking a shisha (hookah) on the rooftop terrace, seeing the minarets and rooftops, was a particularly enjoyable nighttime activity.

I suppose I must now turn to reflecting on cultural differences.  One thing I found amusing was the alcohol delivery system to our hostel.  Because Islam forbids the drinking of alcohol, finding it for sale in the medina is impossible (one must venture out to the new city, and go to the one western supermarket in order to track it down).  So, whereas a hostel outside the Islamic world would tell you to get your lazy butt down to the corner market for your beer, the people at our hostel were happy to call their friends at another riad and have them bring us over a few bottles of suds (decent suds too, was this Moroccan beer “Flag Speciale”…notably, only French on the label, no Arabic).  This extends to cigarettes, although they are not nearly as hidden away as booze.  There are guys in the souks selling boxes of cigarettes, but more interesting are the guys who simply walk through the medina clinking change around in their hand in a slow, rhythmic motion,, their (semi-) clandestine sign to those around them that they have singles for sale.

Speaking of differences, let’s talk about the call to prayer.  My riad was unfortunately stationed about 20 meters away from a main mosque.  I say unfortunate because the muezzin and his bull-horn were practically in my room as he shouted to the believers that it was prayer time.  So you could say it was loud, but what is more difficult to put into words was the call’s jarring, grating drone.  Through its volume and tenor you could not avoid paying attention to it (which, I suppose, is the point).  The 4:30am call was particularly fun.