Fes Four

Put the ebowen (dried and skinless) in almost boiling water

Throw a handful of salt into the water (maybe two if you're Kempie) and stir

Boil for five minutes

Spoon out froth continuously, and save it for a tasty snack later

After ten minutes of boiling pressure cook for ten to fifteen minutes on high heat

Stir

Let cool with open top

Put through the smasher

It wont taste good at this point, don't worry, it may get better

Pour mush back into pot

Throw one tablespoon of salt into the pot

Add a half a tablespoon of cumin (making it Moroccan food)

Place back on medium high heat and boil

Smush ten cloves of garlic with the bottom of a glass

It still wont be green

Bring to a boil, and let it boil for a bit

Take off heat and cover

Fifteen minutes later, cook on low heat uncovered

After three minutes, put on higher heat

Keep heating and add a wee bit of water

FIN!

Bread (xobz)

Make a dough of salt, flour, hot water, and yeast

Let it rise

Form it into balls of desired size (we used the size of a softball, that seemed to work really well)

Make sure there is flour (or its equivalent) to keep everything from sticking

Let it rest for 5 mins

After, smash it into bigger, flat circles with the palm of your hand (again make sure there is enough flour to avoid sticking!)

Put cloth over bread

After a half hour, poke hole in bread with your thumb and put bread (without cloth to avoid fires) in oven

After 5 mins bring down the temperature

Now flip the bread upside down and let it sit for another 5 mins in the cooler section of the oven

The xobz should be golden brown and delicious

Complied by the Fes Four

We had a full day today visiting the St. Andrew's Church, an Anglican Church built by the British with Moorish architectural influence - including the Lord's Prayer written in Arabic and the mosque-like layout with a miherab, a nook typically reserved for the Qur'an facing the East towards Mecca. After our visit to the church, we visited the facade of the Grand Teatro Cervantes exploring the rich multicultural heritage of Tangier. We ate lunch at Darna, an organization supporting women and youth in difficult situations through a variety of projects. After a delicious 3 course meal, we headed to the Darna Farm, one of its six centers, to learn more about their horticultural projects with youth. It was amazing! 

To further contextualize our understanding of the rich cultural influences of this city, we visited the impressive Dar El Makhzen, a museum chronicling Tangier's history since pre-Roman times. Strategically located, Tangier has been a major hub and center of commerce throughout history. It also boasts one of the world's greatest explorers, Ibn Battouta.

We finished our afternoon with some tea at the famous Cafe Hafa, where beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in addition to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams spent days seeking inspiration. We also were fortunate to get a clear view of Spain - a mere 17km from us.

Tomorrow will be our last day in Morocco! We can't believe it has come so soon! Everyone is looking forward to Spain, but we will miss Morocco dearly! On our last day, we plan to visit the American Legation and take a trip to the Cave of Hercules and Cap Spartel, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean.

Yesterday was our last day in Morocco, which was weird because it hasn't hit me yet that we're gone. I spent my last dirhams, ate my last tagine, and packed my bag.

     To help set the scene, let me first opine on travel writing. I really don't like it, at least the few forays I've had into those books. The little of it I've read seems to be the poorly sketched musings of self-hating authors who inflate their own bitter deficiency of self-importance and insist on their own permanent alienation in cultures they want nothing more from than acceptance, and in that quest fret of losing their own individuality. I'm sure there is some very good travel writing out there. Someone please direct me to it. Fiction is more palatable, largely in that it can avoid that insidious pretense to authenticity. In fiction, I don't have to endure the scrutiny of those questioning my verisimilitude or personal conscience: it's fiction, after all.

     In Marrakesh, my "mini-ISP" was storytelling, which I at first assumed would be simple; Marrakesh is, after all, famed for its storytellers. I never met one. In the end, I had to resort to my own experiences and research. This is a modified transcription of the halqa I held in a tent in the desert near Merzouga.

'Here we are in Marrakesh, legendary city of storytellers, yet, how often can you find someone spinning yarns the way they once did? Can you walk Jama'a el Fna hear the words twisting into the air? Rarely, and only by chance. According to varying sources, only seven or eight bards remain. Now, I have been to Marrakesh five times, and other cities in Morocco more than that, but my first visit here my foremost aim was to find one of these traditional halaqat and adapt something I learned into something I could write. I was not so lucky in that search, but nonetheless came away with something loosely resembling a story to tell.'

The other men were often interrupted as they would speak, but here this figure received without ever demanding perfect, attentive silence, and his audience was held in a solemn transfixion as they listened to him recount his time in Marrakesh.

'Of course, my influences are almost entirely western. When I experienced this, I had yet to encounter a real Moroccan storyteller. My presentation is hardly authentic. My stories are not sweeping epics or tragic romances, but are tinged with modernism from our own tradition, and even if the stories themselves take place in Marrakesh, I bring their nuclei from abroad. Even if I adopt this medium, this is only my dishonest attempt at aping this ancient and dying tradition. I recognize the basic fact that my tales are firmly rooted in the western corpus, and at the fore, I am not Moroccan. So in this spirit I begin.

'I am Walstrom, your host. Kan ya ma kan*¹, a young man from a faraway land, searching these oft-storied deserts and mountains and medieval cities (oh how Orientalist does that sound?) for something, though he could not articulate what. He was an idealist, and you can attach to that whatever meaning you so choose. Only a few days into his foray into the country, he arrived at Jama'a el Fna, the crown jewel of Marrakesh, if you do look at it that way. From winding medina streets, step into the chaos and fire. Red lights from overhead and flaming sunrises give the impression on an endless but mild inferno in the early evening, and the shouts and aggressions give the distinct conjecture of a primeval workhouse without the labor. For some reason, a poem I heard afar came to mind. Why precisely I recalled it I have no idea. I do not have time to recite it all, but the first stanza should suffice to give an idea:

Beside the pounding cataracts

of midnight streams unknown to us

tis builded in the dismal tracts

and valleys huge of Tartarus

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems

it hath no rounded name that rings

but I have heard it called in dreams

The City of the End of Things.*²

The poem progresses to tell of a city of great furnaces watched over by a withering elite who once built its ramparts, and live only to die in its highest towers. Again, the mind is mysterious, and I cannot tell why I remembered this verse.

'You've all felt the rush of the unadulterated excitement of the square, the primal chaos and energy there, snake charmers, musicians, vendors of all sorts, and, in the evening, the food. Beware: dinner at the square is not at all for the faint of heart.

'Entering the stalls, all the, for lack of a weaker word, restaurateurs, if you will, stand and clap; they cheer, shout all manner of profanity and insult, hassle you and grab your arms. Steeled, it is tolerable. Of course, we don't know that going in.' He chuckled, and then screamed,

IT'S F*****G GOOD, MATE!

You eat with us here, no?

Come here - dine it's delicious!

Chawarma? Pastilla? All good food here!

Chez Sidi Moumi! The best in Marrakesh!

Come on - see? Sexy women like our food!

Why no? F**k American! F**k British!

Eat, eat our food!

He continued in this startling manner for about a minute until the waiter gave him an angry glance.

'Ah, it's all the same food anyway. I sat down with my fellow travelers at the behest of someone a bit calmer, and we began to talk of our reasons for traveling. They weren't familiar with "Northwest Passage," so I played it on my phone for them, but I'll sing it to you to bypass the distraction of modern technology:

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Westward from the Davis Strait, 'tis there 'twas said to lie,

the sea route to the Orient for which so many died,

seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones

and a long-forgotten, lonely cairn of stones.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Three centuries thereafter, I take passage over land

in the footsteps of brave Kelsey, where his sea of flowers began.

Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again,

this tardiest explorer driving hard across the plain.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

And through the night behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west,

I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson, and the rest,

who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me

to race the roaring Fraser to the sea.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

How then am I so different from the first ones through this way?

Like them, I led a settled life; I threw it all away

to seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men,

and to find there but the road back home again.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

And if should be I come again to loved ones left at home,

put the journals on the mantle, shake the frost out of my bones,

making memories of the passage, only memories after all,

of hardships there the hardest to recall.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,

and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.*³

'Fairly to the point, and entirely true. What is Jama'a el Fna? Only a facade - what is authentic, not this exterior propped up by the government for tourists? Here they are, preserving their past, but saving only the surface. That is what I came to find. Why is it that here in glorified Marrakesh all I can think of to write about are profane food vendors and thoughts of afar? Decay, my friends, decay. Marrakesh now is the ashes of a fire we stoked, thus I set out to find the coals that had not yet burned, so after a night nestled quietly in the warmth of my hostel, a night sleeping soundly without thinking of my quest, I made up my mind to discover the antithesis of this awful, tainted edifice. I resolved to travel into the truest depths of the medina, and therein find the authenticity I knew must survive somewhere in the quiet, dark alleyways tourists never visited. After breakfast and coffee, I left the hostel and circled around the south end of the square to the road leading into the souqs, and ventured down the narrow, tourist-packed street as far through winding markets as I could, and finally came to a covered vegetable market frequented mainly by Moroccans. I was making progress. I turned away from the square at this crossroads, into a derelict residential neighborhood.

That is where I first heard the whispers. They came quietly at first, young men who looked like any of their peers in physicality, but with a much more sinister bearing.

"Monsieur, hashish?" I brushed them aside, and continued briskly down my path. After around five minutes or so, I realized it had been a while since I had last seen another man an American would call white. I kept walking and walking as the buildings grew more and more tired and the street narrowed. More demands of "Monsieur, hashish." The whispers grew and grew until eventually they could heardly be callsed that at all. A one-armed man gesticulated as subtly as was for him possible at a red door and in his spitting manner beckoned me over.

"Good women here, good price. Anything you want." I passed him as quickly as possible. The whispers of the drug dealers grew louder and louder.

"Monsieur, hashish? Monsieur, hashish?" Despite my growing unease, I continued, for in this quarter I was assured to find what I was looking for, although by then I could no longer articulate what it was. I turned a corner and was then on a street that would have had me more than on edge in Chicago or St. Louis, but in the warm atmosphere of Morocco, did not set off those same warning bells. Two men tousled in the street, which was now populated only with these low-life figures I had grown to dread. The old flesh-peddler had apparently followed me, and now issued a new cry. "A male, perhaps?" There were screams and the two brawling men drew knives and the whispers of "Monsieur, hashish?" grew to a deafening roar and then the buildings around me seemed to erupt into flame, red coals falling from the sky, and blazing tongues belched from the windows, and you can envision my entirely horrified reaction when I felt a burly arm curl over my shoulder, and I turned to face a tall, strongly built man in a professional brown suit who pivoted and said to me in an accent both unmistakably and incomprehensibly British: 'This is not a place for tourists. The square is that way. Stick to your own kind.' I rapidly left that infernal place.

'Nonetheless, I did not heed his advice, no, I am too incorrigible for that wisdom, and while I departed the burning street, I did not have any intention of returning to that artificial square, at least so immediately. As I walked west, or so I believe, the whispers of "Monsieur, hashish" faded into the background of raucous Moroccan voices, and the more standard souk fare returned to the fore. Alas, though, I did not want to step back into the fire of Jama'a el Fna, so I turned again when I came to the food market, and went down a street running perpendicular to the one I was currently walking. I passed several herbalists lining the road. Old men weighed mystical powders in decaying bronze scales to sell to superstitious old crones, and I was returned to a dream I had my first night in Marrakesh. I found my self replaced to a room utterly gray, reposing on an unmemorable bed. In this small room there was no adornment, only a table across from me upon which sat a large bronze scale. On the right side of the scale I could see a small pile of white beads, black on the left. Besides these beads, there was no discernible color, only an impenetrable gray which gave the room the feeling of a dreary mid-winter sky. From the shadows a phantom hand would add more beads to the existing piles, one at a time, and to whichever pile the hand would ignore, an equal spherule would materialize to keep the scale in a perfect and interminable balance until the mounds threatened to overflow. Thus the scale was ever-even. Daybreak arrived to color my room and the walls expanded and the furnishings reappeared to garnish the cell at my pension. It is truly remarkable how the slightest thought can provoke such a tangent.

This street of apothecaries thinned, and I found myself once again in a narrow dark alley. At the end of this foreboding street, a narrow tunnel bore into the shadows, and, against my better judgment, I stooped beneath the tired archway and entered the small grotto of an ancient herbalist. I was again shocked by language when a decrepit old man hunched in a dark corner invite me into his shop in the King's English.

"How did you come to learn English?" I asked this sack of bones.

"I have traveled many lands and learned many tongues, and for it am none the livelier." An arresting cough echoed in his den. "You would never believe my stories, boy, never believe them. My skills were once very much in demand. I have cured of syphilis a madman with more wives and concubines than a caliph, treated the worm of a conqueror who traded height for ambition. A bearded heathen took my poisons and give his soul for a taste of endless life. I returned here, and heard of his many deaths decades later. You, young man, have many years to see the world. How I hate this prison my body has become. My skills will be forever available to all, if only they knew I rotted in this hole. Yet one thing I learned from my labors can only be expressed in verse:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Now go return to your life.

Returning to dinner, I thought back on my day. In the late afternoon, I attended a carpet market, where men from the surrounding villages would bring their wares to sell. Were these new inventions crafted by some cloistered Berber wife, perhaps some ancient family artifact of which economic necessity now dictated its sale? I had no way of asking them, and they would never respond.

A mustachioed man weaved throughout the food stalls selling his wares as I ate alone that night. He wore a fake nose and glasses and held a squeaker which whistled a horrible plaintive rhythm. I looked at him discreetly, and I don't think he noticed me. His eyes were sunken beyond the geometry of his face, and even as he joyously approached children to try to sell them the little plastic party favors, his visage was heavy, undeniably somber. I think now that grim whistle is one of the truly saddest songs I have ever heard. Squeak squeak! Buy it! What in his past led him to this business? Squeak squeak. Ask not for whom the man squeaks; he squeaks for thee. The squeak man cometh. You have to have heard the sound, but for me it is miserably tragic, and I have no idea the reaction it would stir in me to listen to it again.' With no introduction this time he began to sing again.

'It was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through,

that I looked from the Citadel down to the Narrows and asked what it's coming to.

I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass right down to the waterline

and I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:

can I sing it just one time?

'With half-closed against the sun, for the warm wind giving thanks,

I dreamed of the days of the deep-laden schooners slashing home from the Grand Banks.

The last lies done in the harbor sun with her picture on a dime,

but I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:

can I sing it just one time?

Can I sing it just one time?

'And haul away and heave her home, this song is heard no more:

no boats to sing it for, no sails to sing it for.

There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.

We traded old ways for the new, old ways for the new,

old ways for the new, for the new.

'Now you ask what's this romantic boy who laments what's done and gone.

There was no romance on a cold winter ocean and the gale sang an awful song.

But my fathers knew of wind and tide and my blood is maritime,

and I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:

can I sing it just one time?

Can I sing it just one time?

'And haul away and sheet her home, this song is heard no more:

no boats to sing it for, no sails to sing it for.

There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.

We traded old ways for the new, old ways for the new,

old ways for the new, for the new.

'So it was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through

that I looked from the Citadel down to the Narrows and asked what it's coming to.

I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass right down to the waterline.

I have heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:

can I sing it just one time?

Can I sing it just one time?

Can I sing it just one time?'*⁵

Belting out his baritone notes something seemed to have changed in Walstrom. The song quieted near the end, but his fervor remained, and he did not pause before suddenly attacking us.

'Can't you see? It's gone. Can you understand what I'm saying? You're all here hunting the same thing, don't deny it. Even if you're a student here, or someone who says you're genuinely interested, well, businessmen get a pass on this, but you're the same in a different way, we're all just Orientalist bastards looking for our fix of the exotic. We traipse around in outfitters' shirts with our cameras and drinking water, and look for something that's real, something that clashes with our processed West. Ha! you won't find that now - we and our ancestors have burned it all. From the rape of colonialism, to our so-called enlightened modernity of cultural tourism, we really haven't come all too far, no, throw it in to the fires, this age of mysticism and separation is dead. I could say that all you get now is cries of 'Monsieur, hashish!' but that would be far too dark, really, and not what you want to hear, so in my permeating dishonesty I will tell you that you will find here something individual, that it is yours to find, and all our experiences will be different, but, no, I don't believe that anymore.'

Then his tale was finished, and he removed himself to another chair to sit aside in silence, and took the pose of a businessless vender. We sat at the table, our tea glasses empty. 'It's getting late,' said the waiter, who brought a scrap of paper with the drinks tabulated, and I looked up to see the heavens veiled by a gray bank of gathering clouds, and a clearing road leading to the edges of the medina sat in a disquieting calm under a heavy sky--seemed to lead into the maw of an immense furnace."

-WWW

*1. An Arabic phrase roughly translating as "there was and there was not," used commonly by storytellers to introduce their stories.

*2. Archibald Lampman, "The City of the End of Things"

*3. Stan Rogers, "Northwest Passage"

*4. Percy Bysse Shelley, "Ozymandias"

*5. Stan Rogers, "Fisherman's Wharf"

Circular Thoughts on Niqab and Advertisement

     We heard from multiple sources that the niqab, also known in some countries as the burqa, that all-concealing style of dress associated with Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, was a relatively recent introduction to Morocco, only within the last fifteen years or so. The reasons for this are debatable. That time period has seen a religious awakening, but such dress had never been popular in Morocco (and still isn't). Certainly, women dressed modestly, wearing Berber headdresses or less stringent veils, and then the rise of the hijab in the late 70s, but something this complete was unheard of. We also heard that it had been popular in Marrakesh among a certain class of woman for much longer. Niqab makes it difficult to make clear a woman's identity, and so the prostitutes of Jama'a el Fna used it to dissociate their humanity from any neighbors who might see them in the square, and thus hide the shame of their "profession." Modesty conceptually necessitates the notion of exposure. The fig leaf requires the thought that there is no fig leaf. In this are aura and epistemology inextricably linked. Part of my thoughts here concern the irony of the prostitutes' cloth of choice, but they must also extend to their venue. Jama'a el Fna is ancient, and has been a place of bizarre uniqueness for its entire existence. Now, though, with tourists coming from abroad, and mechanization of everything related to the square's business, it is economically (at least in the traditional sense of the pre-tourist/pre-service economy) obsolete, and socially losing its importance to "real" Marrakshi culture, which can certainly also be said to rely on it. Of course Morocco has modern dentistry and those gaudy false teeth are no longer needed; of course much of what is sold is foreign-made, but the changes run deeper. To quote one of our lecturers, it "deteriorated from a culture of minds to a culture of stomachs." The square was once rife with bookstores, but now it is all food and touristy junk. Yet still with this entropy that contradictorily accompanies progress, Jama'a el Fna is raised up as the exotic jewel of not just Marrakesh, but now broadcast abroad.

     A huge part of the problem, if we can even say there is a problem, is that thin and elusive line between kitsch and authenticity. At what point is preserving Jama'a el Fna in a way accessible to tourists only destroying whatever cultural value it once had? How can one merge the art of conservation with the science of marketing?

     This unrepresentative promotion extends beyond just Jama'a el Fna. Erg Chebbi is about as representative of Morocco as handing a foreigner a brochure on Hawaii and saying "This is America." Yet why do so many Americans immediately associate Morocco with desert and dunes, if any association comes to mind at all? Certainly, deserts comprise much of the Arab world, but Morocco is closer geographically to London than to Mecca. Fortunately or unfortunately, due to the divide of the Atlantic Ocean, we are not as inundated as Europeans with Moroccan tourism ads showing a land of sand and camels, but that image still manages to reach Americans.

     It is often said about Moroccan houses that they are symbolic of nearly everything in the culture: the jewel hides within. Unmemorable exteriors belie whatever sumptuous environs linger within. While I am not at all suggesting one look for a prostitute's "inner treasure," I must implore people to (and extend this example to everything, not just tourism ads) dig beneath the facade of selected imagery and find out both what is not being shown, and why what is being shown was chosen. Your answers will give you infinitely more than just accepting the pretty picture on the postcard.

     Now more familiar with the city, and with a more relaxed schedule than the first interval in Fes, I found time the two Sunday mornings of Fes Phase II to attend Mass at Église Saint François d'Assise, the Catholic church in the Ville Nouvelle. From a combination of my own presuppositions and offhand remarks from people with whom I had spoken, I had a very set image in my mind of how the church would look. It would be a small building blending in with the surrounding architecture, an almost Calvinist austerity on the interior, and a ramshackle parish of tired relics of bygone colonial days. As assumptions tend to be, this was markedly wrong.

     In a large, modern church easily identifiable in the surrounding neighborhood, I attended Mass with a congregation of West African migrants; perhaps no more than ten of us were not among their ranks. The service was in French as I expected, but the parish office provided prayer sheets in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic as well, and several hymns were sung in some African language I couldn't identify. I was stunned mostly by the sheer number of migrants. In the insular world of the medina, I had grown accustomed to a world that was wholly Moroccan; fresh on the heels of a lecture on Moroccan migrant labor, the at least 200 clearly non-Moroccan, mostly male, churchgoers around me in the pews fascinated me as an irrefutable example of the ever-elusive allure of a new world. As a side note, three women who appeared to be a mother and her daughters, all wearing hijab, joined about halfway through the service. I determined to know more about this group about which I had previously known nothing.

     I arrived early my second Sunday in Fes, and took my seat in one of the pews as fellow worshipers trickled in. A number of men signed a sheet ofs paper on a table near the entrance, something I hadn't seen before. After the recessional, I read the sheet the men had been signing earlier, and they were parish sign-ups for new arrivals, a number near-equally balanced with parishioners announcing their departures. In long rolls above the prayer sheets, as is also custom for churches in America, the parish posts contacts for helping its members integrate. Here, they were all listed by country. In columns, the immigrants listed their names, and where available, phone numbers and email addresses. Hosts from Burkina Faso, Togo, Cameroon, the Congos, and the greatest number from Guinea-Bissau, put themselves out to help their countrymen in either a new home, a refuge, or just another stop on the long road north. I left the courtyard of the church only a few paces behind three men from the congregation, one of whom I recognized as the man who sat across the aisle, a man who, too, arrived early, and, after signing what I believe, imagine, was the departures list, sat silently in prayer until the service began.

     "D'où viens-tu?" "Où vas-tu?" I could ask them. "Comment trouves-tu habiter dans un pays musulmane?" "Aimes-tu le Maroc?" "Quel sont des conditions des immigrants ici?" Those, too, I could have asked. For two blocks, we walked, I only a few paces behind them. The tall man from the pew across the aisle from me bent down to fix his shoe, and I finally spoke.

     "Pardon."

     I passed them and walked the rest of the way to the taxi stand.

William Goes Sheep Shopping; Hilarity Ensues

The Sunday before Eid I was invited to join my homestay brothers Mustapha and Ismail and my fellow guest, a Dutch teacher named Kees, at the livestock souq to select a sheep for the festivities. I didn't really know what to expect, but thought it would be something like the produce and poultry sections of the souqs in the medina. No. Oh, lah, lah, lah. I have a meeting with my MSA mentor in the afternoon, but this can't take too long.

12:55 - We hire a grand taxi at Ain Azilten to get there. The four of us occupy the back seat while a very large woman singing to herself sits in the front seat for half the way there.

1:05 - Half the way there? No, those ten minutes were nowhere near that.

1:21 - We passed Oued Fes a while ago. I very much hope we are not going to Meknes. I have an appointment in the afternoon. Mustapha works in Meknes. Please don't let this be in Meknes...

1:28 - We take a turn and head back into a more densely populated part of the city. After exiting the grand taxi, we walk for about ten minutes through what is reminiscent to me of the old industrial area between Bosse Field and Igleheart Mill in Evansville. Yes, you should all be made as familiar with Evansville landmarks as writers from New York expect you to be about the Big Apple.

1:29 - Ismail explains how it is a famous souq and instructs Kees to take some pictures. As far as I can tell, he is being instructed to take pictures of rusted propane tanks.

1:31 - Ismail reminds me to guard my wallet. With my money belt, I feel fairly secure.

1:34 - We enter the chaos of the livestock souq. This is crowded enough to make the Fall Festival look like Washington Square Mall on a Thursday night. I can best describe the souq as a massive walled-in square, which is essentially a plot of dirt to which people bring their livestock to sell.

1:35 - I said dirt. I step in such a way that my shoe cuts down to the concrete floor. This is not dirt. This is dung, caked-on, age-old dung.

1:37 - We begin checking the health of the rams to find one suitable for the sacrifice. This involves checking its horns, teeth, and hooves. Mustapha also warns against getting a sheep with testicles too large. Apparently that is where all diseases begin. Perhaps if I think long enough on it there is some philosophical nugget there.

2:00 - I text Kempie. "@ souq selecting sheep dont know when ill be back"

After checking at least twenty, we settle on a sheep Mustapha deems acceptable. Commence bargaining. No matter how successful I think I've been, nothing can compare to two Moroccans bargaining. I don't know what the initial or final prices were, or how much the price was reduced, but it is truly grand theater to watch people negotiate here. There is plenty of method acting, some remarkable contrast between back-patting and hugging and straight-up shouting, and in some sort of post-modern experimental drama, is entirely interactive with the crowd, as everyone nearby comes to watch and take sides in the negotiation. As the play unfolds, a frantic ewe kicks manure on my pants. This means I have to do laundry. I do not like laundry; it requires organization, planning ahead, and general tidiness, none of which are particularly high on my list of personal priorities.

2:21 - As Ismail does something, I'm still not sure what, Mustapha, Kees, and I roam the souq, checking out bulls (with their horns and eyes covered), and chickens, and a large truck from which Kees takes some cool panoramic photos.

2:41 - We go to the other side of the souq to a butcher/sandwich tent. I find it stunningly logical that these are the exact same location.

2:43 - Ismail arrives with the sheep. Mustapha laughs. "He is seeing his destiny!"

2:46 - "Please taxi to cafe jawhara near american center by 4:15 pm. Our mentor's time is valuable & we already arranged the session." - Kempie. Oh.

2:47 - This is very delicious meat. I am somehow able to completely dissociate the fact that I am sitting underneath several hanging carcasses as I eat. Mmmm, unrefrigerated meat... Seriously, though, that was good meat.

3:09 - After completing our lunch, we use every method imaginable to pry the sheep away from its cousins and drag it out of the souq. It suddenly dawns on me that we currently have no way of getting our bleating friend back to the medina. I have a feeling we will not be repeating the grand taxi, although tying a live animal to the roof rack would certainly produce an interesting/potentially horrifying result. Mustapha disappears for a moment while Ismail guards the sheep.

3:14 - Mustapha returns with our driver. This man appears to be some inexplicable Moroccan hybrid of Santa Claus and Evil Knievel. I will hit the Return key a few times to allow this image to coagulate in your mind.

Complete with never-removed helmet, nearly waist-length beard which may or may not have at one time been striped with henna, jellaba, and outlandish aviator sunglasses, this man is probably deserving of his own TV show. Maybe a Moroccan version of Cash Cab...

3:17 - After walking/dragging the reluctant sheep a little ways, we arrive at our transportation. In Ourika Valley, we called the souq van a goatmobile, as its other purpose it to carry live goats to and from the weekly souq. That ride was somewhat of an experience in its own right. That was a van. THIS is a sheepmobile. This is a rickshaw, and one that leaves me convinced the "rickshaw" is a portmanteau of "rickety" and something that sounds kind of like "shaw." I think the motorcycle used for power is an older cousin of the one from the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia.

3:19 - This is probably not a good idea, and it is probably fairly slow as well. It doesn't look that safe, but how else am I going to get back to the medina? I decide I have no choice but to board the sheepmobile. This is most likely in violation of not only Global LAB safety policies, but basic common sense and the essential human need for self-preservation. We board the rickshaw, struggling mightily to fit ourselves and our new pet/meal into the back of this machine. Unidentified six-year-old boy decides to join us. I am slightly confused by this turn of events, as it poses multiple questions. 1. Why is a six-year-old boy jumping into transportation with people he doesn't know, I mean, whatever happened to "Don't get in a car with a stranger?" 2. Expand that to specifically this form of transportation, and I use that word somewhat loosely. 3. What is an unaccompanied six-year-old boy doing at a livestock souq anyway? 4. I like his sweater - where did he get that sweater?

I instead ignore the child and focus on finding something to hold on to.

3: 30 - The rickshaw navigates the parked cars and carts and seas of people and finally makes it on to the main road.

3:33 - The ram is rather displeased with his current isolation and new vehicular home. The ram continues bleating and trying to escape. Note to self: caged animal with horns + back of moving vehicle + back of tightly packed moving vehicle = surprisingly more humorous than dangerous. Mustapha corrects this situation by pinning the sheep between his legs. This confuses me. This animal has been excreting fecal matter all day long, yet he has apparently no concerns about holding the ram tightly against his pants to restrict its movement. He is evidently far more of a man than I. Note: somehow the sheep managed to "hold it" until we get off the rickshaw. I commend it for the longest self-discipline of its entire life.

3:34 - Ismail asks me if I have my wallet. I pull up my shirt a little to show him my money belt. He is unresponsive for a minute, and then starts digging into his pants. He pulls out his own money belt and shouts over the traffic. "Good choice!" I feel savvy.

3:35 - Ismail gestures at our mode of transportation, and the handful of other rickshaws on the boulevard. "Hehe - we are in China." Mustapha's hat flies off in the tunnel. This constitutes a crisis. After quite a deal of convincing, our driver pulls to the side and Ismail jumps out the back of the rickshaw. He disappears for a good five minutes.

3:40 - Ismail returns. Ismail bears no hat. This is sad.

3:41 - We return to the road. Our driver feels a pressing need to make up for lost time.

3:42 - Rethinking initial assessment. This is not a sheepmobile. This is a DEATHMOBILE.

3:47 - Deathmobile passes a car. This is most definitely in defiance of the new Moroccan road law. There shouldn't need to BE a road law for this.

3:55 - Deathmobile hits a pothole. Deathmobile jumps. My back is now bruised.

4:05 - Arrival at Ain Azilten. Ismail helps me hail a taxi to the Ville Nouvelle. God only knows how they got that creature through Talaa Kbira.

4:13 - The cab driver drops me off near Cafe Jawhara. No, I did not rush. Of course not. I never need to; I can just be my usual punctual self.

     For me, this post marks three milestones. Milestone one: I am spending my last night in Morocco. Milestone two: I am posting a conventional blog post, not a poem or a rant or a story - a simple descriptive post. Milestone three: I am actually posting. This is cause for celebration in and of itself. I'm not used to this kind of writing, but I might as well give it a try. The following post is a combination of my first impressions on Tetouan and my thoughts on the impending end of the journey.

     Tetouan is so far entirely unalike any Moroccan city I have visited so far. Large portions of both the medina and new city are filled with colonial Spanish architecture, and there is little which would make it counterintuitive to hear it was where Franco announced his rebellion to begin the Spanish Civil War. The remains of this influence can still be seen in gated and boarded old buildings, although I have been told Tetouan is nowhere near as dilapidated as Tangier. The landscape around Tetouan also separates it from the major other cities we have visited. Marrakesh, Rabat, and Meknes are flat, or at the very most, hilly. Fes is nestled in the foothills, and has considerable inclines throughout the city. Tetouan is built-up, and a modern city in contrast to Chefchaouen, but all around us the imposing and harsh Rif mountains tower over the valley.

     Tangier was the great International City of artists and degenerate laissez-faire, but Tetouan was the Spanish colonial capital, and still feels just as appropriate as a bridge between Morocco and Europe. This time of year, most of the beachcombing tourists who visit in the summer are absent, and almost everyone we see around us is Moroccan. In the conservative north, most of the women wear headscarves, and the traditional jellaba is even more common here than in Fes. Yet surrounding us, nearly every building around our hotel in the new city, or as we walk blocks of the medina near the royal palace and the mellah, we find the tired vestiges of fallen colonial empires, formerly stately rows of conventional European designs, now in varying states of mild disrepair, although much of the city is indeed quite nice.

     Tetouan changed tremendously over the last century. In the last hundred years, it has witnessed the rise and fall of the Protectorate of Morocco, been a colonial capital and reduced to something approaching a regional administrative hub, and seen nearly its entire Jewish population, which once was among the most populous in Morocco, leave not long after the Europeans.

     In Tangier, I sat in a cafe frequented by such luminaries (although some may argue they would be more analogous to a blacklight) as William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Tennessee Williams, and saw at the American Legation a letter written by the hand of Abraham Lincoln, and the so-called pervasive atmosphere of the decay of the City that Once Was is nowhere near what I had been led to believe. Tangier, so maligned by unwitting tourists, truly does not seem so intimidating; Tangier, so mourned by the doddering relics of the Beat and hippie generations, truly does not seem so faded. Maybe I've become desensitized to the nuances of Morocco after having been submerged in them for nearly three months.

     So here we are, six days to the finish. What have I learned from Morocco? How have I changed? We leave for Spain tomorrow, and some patterns haven't changed at all. I probably, almost assuredly, haven't always made the most of my time. I will leave with things I wanted to do in Morocco and didn't, I suppose leaving an excuse to return. Like the ends of so many marking periods at school, procrastinated work comes to a head, and I here I am, completing five blog posts in one night to try to meet my quota. As I have said before and reiterated many times, I try not to judge the present, and wait for a less emotionally charged future where I can more acutely assess the results of my journey, but I can say now that I feel lighter, and not at all in the physical sense, to which can attest three months of delicious Moroccan food, but more energetic, and if not necessarily any more flexible, more aware of my recurring inflexibility, but, most of all, ready to see home. Morocco has been great, and I have no regrets about coming here; far from that, I now have memories I will cherish for the rest of my life, and I am unshakably certain that, whatever my final assessment will be and whatever details it will hold, I will have a greatly positive impression of both the country and my time here, and I absolutely intend to return. Nonetheless, there's something to be said for the familiar, and though I know when I return home I will miss this country, what that means most is that the Atlantic Ocean is one giant, insolvable dilemma - would only that America could be separated from here by some distance so minimal as the Mediterranean. Even so, the full impact of leaving really hasn't hit me yet - I've packed, and have only a little typing to go before I sleep (for however short a time). Maybe in waking again the crisis of moving out will settle in.