4:33am,
New York Time, June 26 (a Thursday, as it happens)
So,
I am writing now because I know that if I don’t, I probably won’t, and for some
reason, being up in the wee hours gives me motivation to write, and also being
drunk. (Two mini life lessons I learned while traveling: these are the times
when I am most motivated to do things.)
I
just said goodbye to my friend Juliet, who I spent 2 weeks in Morocco with, the
one who was studying Moroccan Arabic there for a year. She stopped in New York
for an 11-hour layover on her way home to the West (a.k.a. the Best/Left)
Coast. I had flown home the day before her from Casablanca (and no, there is no
white house there, as I had been hoping; I asked a Moroccan).
I
probably wrote this in some post back, but my life has become a series of
goodbyes. And it won’t stop becoming a series of goodbyes, just because my
current traveling addiction has been halted by the social mores and necessities
of being an American in my late 20s (erg…offspring clock ticking…single…go to
grad school…get real job…most of the time I brush off these social “pressures”
or “milestones,” though I will admit that sometimes I get “itched” by them –
you’ll have to pardon if my English is messed up; I’ve technically been talking
with non-native English speakers for a year and a half now).
I
have 3 new life goals now:
*Go
back to Cappadocia someday and get over my fear of heights so I can take that
balloon ride, which I can’t stop kicking myself for not doing (I know,
#firstworldproblems, it’s okay, you can laugh)
*Learn
French (essential for the Arab world, unless you want to be talking in FusHa
all the time and sound like a Shakespearian robot)
*Just
Do It, like Nike says (thank you capitalism for your inspiration, which I
rarely seek from you)
*Live
in Haifa for a year
*Live
in Berlin for a year
Okay,
so that turned out to be 5. Anyway.
I
kind of hate how I lose touch with people. Even if we are “connected” through
Facebook. I’ll admit I’m pretty lazy about it, but whenever people leave, I get
all nostalgic and think about things I did with people, even if it was years
ago. Dammit.
Sometimes
I wonder if we are no more “connected” than the people of Downton Abbey, that
British drama series about the aristocracy and servants in early 20th
century England. When the characters left, they knew they probably wouldn’t see
the same people again. Even though it’s not quite like that today, what with
all the digital links that keep us in touch with each other, sometimes I still
feel like I’m in Downton Abbey when it comes to goodbyes.
I
get this pang in my heart, and then I think about mistakes too, like, Oh I wish
I hadn’t treated this person like that etc.
Can
you tell I’m someone who can dwell on something forever? Sometimes I have to
give myself a nudge and say, “It’s okay to move on. Go enjoy that ice cream.”
(Pardon
my randomness if you see it; it’s still 4:48am in the wee hours, and I’m not
planning anything as I’m writing. This is “stream-of-consciousness.”)
It
has become less pleasurable recently to crack my knuckles. I wonder if my
knuckle cracking days are over.
How
do Arab cultural styles towards work and American cultural styles towards work
affect the international arena regarding NGOs?
How
does our addiction to our smart phones affect our every day interactions?
These
are 3 random thoughts that have passed through my head in the last 24 hours.
Ok,
so now on to Morocco. Like my mother, I am a Southerner in some regards, and
like Arabs talking in FusHa, I tend to ramble a bit before getting to the
point. I think this is a cultural thing. (Oh there goes the anthropologist in
me blaming everything on culture.)
Morocco
is a whirlwind place of chaos in the streets, constantly bumping into people,
little kids hustling because they have to, everyone hustling something, from
used clothes to old electronics to single cigarettes.
Morocco
is a place of sexual harassment, where men still blame it on the women (e.g.
for not dressing “right,” prostitutes causing it, it’s not important if it’s
only verbal, etc.)
Morocco
is also a place of incredible kindness and warmth. Like I was riding in a taxi
and falling asleep, and my head accidentally hit this woman’s shoulder, and I
thought she was gonna say, “Excuse me,” but she offered to let me keep sleeping
on her shoulder!
Like,
who would do that in the United States?
And
then in Casablanca, on my last day, Juliet and I were wandering around this old
slaughterhouse, which has been turned into an art complex, and the groundskeeper
approached us; we thought we were in trouble (like we needed to buy a ticket or
something), and then he invited us in for tea! We had barely known him 5
minutes.
In
a woody park near Fez, I nearly had my pants pulled down by a monkey. No joke
(he probably thought the bead on the string on my pants was a nut.)
And
the mom of a friend of Juliet’s (she is from Fez and so is Juliet’s friend)
showed us around Fez, then by surprise took us to her home, where she fed us
like 5 times and then we napped there all afternoon.
My
favorite comment from one of Juliet’s friends was, “When you first get married,
you have to pretend to be a little dumb; then later on you can show your
husband how smart you really are.”
In
a taxi from Chefchaouen on the way to Akchour (this national park), I asked the
taxi driver if the reason people in the north were more calm was because they
smoked a lot of weed (there is a huge marijuana industry in the north, and I
had heard that rumor). He laughed and said, “Well if people are smoking pot,
they’re not gonna be dangerous or aggressive. However, I will say that the
chickens here eat the pot seeds and produce more eggs.” And he wasn’t joking!
LOL. Most hilarious cab ride ever.
And
I LOVE rakheef (it
might be pronounced ragheef – sorry but it’s hard to explain what “kh” and “gh”
sound like in writing; if you see me in person ask and I can make the sounds).
It’s this layered bread type thing, sort of a cross between a pancake and an arepa,
covered
with cheese and lathered in honey.
Next
mini life goal: find a Moroccan restaurant in the U.S. that has this. We ate it
nearly every day for breakfast.
Okay,
my mental battery is starting to flicker out. I think I should go back to bed.
I
wish I could write about all that I saw in Morocco, but my Internet access
there was limited, so I had to store some anecdotes in my brain, which is kind
of like putting paper in a laundry machine and hoping it comes out dry. The
details might get a little smudged, but the basic meat of the memory is still
there.
I
will say though, I had started to write a post my first day there, about
getting scrubbed at the hammam. I’ll try to recount it here:
So
our first day me and Juliet went to a real ladies’ hammam (I’m saying ladies to
respectfully classify female homo sapiens, I don’t mean that the hammam was
classy; it was an ordinary hammam), with all these naked women splayed out on
these short little stools in these steaming hot rooms, scrubbing away their
dead skin (which really does peel off like small pieces of lint afterwards)
with this velvety brown liquidy soap stuff.
Some
little kids were in there too, and there was an old lady; I dunno how she
didn’t trip on the slippery tiled floor, she was so bent over.
So
it was STEAMING; it’s like going into a big locker room without the lockers,
and there’s a drain in the middle of the floor, and this one area with the taps
(one for hot water, one for cold), and everyone’s got their buckets full to the
brim, and sloshing water over themselves, and getting scrubbed down by these
ladies wearing red, bathing-suit panties (they reminded me of lifeguards, in a
way). The experience was supposed to be relaxing, but I felt like I was being
grated as if I were a piece of cheese. I did come out squeaky clean though. ;-)
I
also found it ironic how on the street, you are supposed to technically be
modest (though I saw a lot of women and girls without headscarves, and wearing
shorts and tank tops), but in this hammam, all these ladies were naked with
each other. I thought, wow, this must be a heaven for lesbians.
Okay,
my mental battery is on its last leaks now. I think it is time to wrap up.
If
you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading. It’s been a long, crazy journey,
what can I say, someday hopefully I can tell my grandkids about this experience
(although I want grandkids, I don’t really want kids, so I don’t quite know how
I’m going to get past that problem – I may have to go ahead and suffer through
the cookie dough in order to get the cookies).
I’m
probably not gonna write on this blog again, so whoever has read it or been
reading it for the past year and a half, thank you for taking a peek at my
life, and I wish you all the adventure, luck, hope, all the sugar, that your
dreams come true blahblahblah, you get my gist.
And
I wish you love. Above all I wish you love. Because even if I did not become
fluent in Arabic, I have had the chance to love, not just in a romantic sense.
If I remember anything from Israel when I am old, it will be standing on a
street corner in Tel Aviv, caught in the indecisive net of deciding whether to
stay in Israel or go back to the States, being embraced by a dear male friend,
who is the first (and perhaps only) male friend I have trusted to be that
physically close with and still have it stay platonic. I told him, if I go back
to the States and it doesn’t work out, will you still be here, waiting for me?
And
he said of course, and I just remember him hugging me so tightly, like I was a
squishy doll plush toy and he didn’t remember I actually had lungs and a rib
cage. I had to unencumber myself after a few moments so I could breathe again.
And
if I forget all my Arabic, that’s what I want to remember.
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