Things I will probably do when I return

(This is Mark)
Now that I come back super soon I figured I would tell everyone those odd habits that I will probably end up picking up from my time here.

- I will probably spend lots of time in my apartment strollin' around in my djellaba, which on the one hand is awesome but on the other hand looks sort of like a KKK robe.

- I will probably obsess over American breakfasts for a while. This definitely includes things like pancakes and omelets (I will actually probably spend the time to make them) but also plain ol' oatmeal and definitely peanut butter bagels.

- I will probably obsess over American (lunch/dinner) food for a while. This includes Chinese food. Or at least American Chinese food. Also includes pizza and pasta.

- After "a while" I will probably re-enter a Moroccan food phase, where I start eating Moroccan breakfasts (milwee!) and dinners (couscous, tajines)

- I will possibly be very bad at crossing the street

- I will probably rejoice over small things, like not getting run over by motorcycles all the time

- I will certainly complain about how hard real school is

- I will run a lot, but slowly.

- I like to think I'll be more social

- I will talk a lot about improving my English. And my chess skills.

- I think that I will be more into cooking new things

- I will either be really into being clean or be really into being "clean" where "clean" is a lot cleaner than I have been and a lot less clean than is socially acceptable in America

- I will definitely complain about lack of street food

- I will definitely complain about high prices of everything in general

- I will almost certainly have nothing interesting or insightful to say about Morocco or my time there except "It was fun" and possibly telling various amusing anecdotes.


You have been warned!

Souqing

This is Natalie. I joined Mark in Morocco on Sunday, and we first spent about 3.5 days in Fez. We're now in Rabat, where I will be until Sunday, when I come home. Mark is leaving tomorrow.

In Fez, Mark and I walked around a pretty public garden, saw the king's palace and "hiked" up a hill to see the Tombs of Merinides, from which we got a great view of the city. We also spent a lot of time walking around the souk, or market, and shopping. In fact, it felt like that was most of what we did there. We bought several items, but we can't tell you about all of them because some are gifts.

For each of the things we bought, we bargained. We became reasonably good bargainers after a few times, but I still think we can get better. It's pretty fun, actually - sort of like acting out some kind of game. After doing all this shopping, I'm now reading online other tourists' tips for bargaining, and finding that we sort of instinctively followed some of these tips/rules. One tip I heard that's good is that you can find reasons for your prices, each time you offer one. Eg, you can say "oh, well, it's really beautiful but it's not EXACTLY what I was looking for so I really can't go higher than 400 dirham..." or something like that. I think Mark and I mostly just said "umm...that's too much, we're students, sorry..."

We also weren't sure where you are supposed to make your first offer, relative to the first price the seller offers. I'm now thinking that you generally should start with less than half of what the seller offers, PERHAPS even a third. I think starting too low is a bit insulting though, but in general I started too high. This site says there's no fixed price relative to the seller's offer where you should start, and gives some interesting insight about why the price might change throughout the day: http://www.moroccotouristguide.org/marrakech.htm

This site talks about one tourist's experience with some really elaborate negotiating processes, but Mark and I didn't do anything like these:

http://www.davestravelcorner.com/articles/morocco/moroccan-rugs-fez.htm

In general, we walked in and looked but didn't ask about price unless we were pretty sure we wanted something. I once made the mistake of asking about a blanket's price before feeling pretty sure I wanted it, then walked out without negotiating...I think the guy would have followed us and been really pushy, but he had other customers, fortunately.

I was looking for a leather jacket, and the first day negotiated in several places, but didn't end up getting anything. I finally bought a jacket in the tanneries, and I think I overpaid by about 200 dirham.

In general though, the things I learned about bargaining are:

Don't ask about price unless you want the item(s).

Before even asking about price, think about how much you're willing to pay for the item. I feel like things are cheap in Morocco, so the price I'm willing to pay here is generally lower than what I'd be willing to pay in the U.S.

Start low but not insultingly low. Probably you can always start at less than half what the seller initially offers. 

Move up slowly, and don't be afraid to be hesitant and act like you're walking out (or really walk out!). You can also offer fun reasons for your reluctance to go much higher (ie you can be more creative than me, all I said was "um, that's too much.  Next time, I'll try stuff like "I spent practically all my money getting here..." or "I have three years left of school to pay for.") 

A footnote about your starting price, the seller's, and how quickly you move up: I think these are closely related, which I guess is sort of obvious. But I just mean, while the seller's first offer price gives you an indication of how much he'll eventually sell it for, there's no general rule like "if he starts at 1000, it means he's willing to sell for 500 at the lowest." I noticed some salesman came down really quickly when I started negotiating - they knew we were tourists and perhaps named outrageous prices just to see if they could get them, and then the second we started bargaining came down to something reasonable. Anyway, if a seller starts way higher than what you're willing to pay, you might start really low (like a third or fourth of where he's starting) and see how quickly he comes down. He may come down quite quickly or you may have to move up quickly and perhaps walk out if it looks like you can't get it for more than your limit.

Do be ready to leave if they won't come down fast enough and it seems they are really going to insist on more than you're willing to pay.

When the salesman says "Name the last price. the final offer. What is the democratic price?" he doesn't mean it. ie, he'll say that every time. 

Some things I've read have said the Moroccan salesmen take their time with the negotiations, but all ours went pretty quickly. 

On our last evening in Fez, Mark and I debated which of the three kids in our family is best-looking. We decided it's definitely not Charles. 

Some funny stories recounted to us by our professor, Ahmed el Shamsy

el Shamsy is awesome. Here are some random historical stories he's mentioned to us:

In the 1800s, there was a wealthy American slave owner who was also a missionary. He wished to spread Christianity to Africa, and had a slave who knew Arabic (many did). Therefore, he told his slave that if the slave would translate the Lord's Prayer to Arabic, he would be let free.
We still have the original document. On one side is the Lord's Prayer. On the other side is a chapter of the Qur'an.
The slave owner, of course, had no idea, and thought that the translation was accurate. He then sent his slave to West Africa to convert people to Christianity, at which point the slave simply left.

A similar story, in more modern times:
The Saudi government doesn't like people visiting Sufi shrines, because they think it's worship of humans rather than God. Near a certain mountain housing the shrine of a well-known Sufi, there is an official Saudi sign saying, in Arabic, "Don't go up there, this is un-Islamic" etc etc. The other half of the sign is a Turkish translation that says, roughly, "Go up there! You will receive great blessings from this Sufi shaykh!" (or something along those lines)
Presumably the same thing as in the previous story happened here.


Another story is the origin of coffee, for those of you who may be interested. Coffee was first grown in Yemen, but didn't make its way to the rest of the world until a Yemeni student went to al-Azhar university in Cairo. He spread coffee to the rest of the students there, who used it to stay up late studying (sound familiar?). Eventually authorities caught wind of this drug that made people act hyper, and called it "qahwa," which is one Arabic word for "alcohol" (the other being "alcool"; so we get both our word for "alcohol" and "coffee" from the Arabic word for alcohol).
Then they realized that it wasn't actually alcohol; but it was clearly some sort of mind-enhancing drug, so they had to decide if it was legal by Islamic law. Their solution was to feed a bunch of it to one person and see exactly what the effects were. Although he acted "a little cooky," he clearly wasn't drunk so they figured it was allowed, and it spread throughout the entire Ottoman empire (this decision would later become controversial, mostly because cafes sprouted up and became centers of revolutionary thought).

Then, a few months (or years?) later, the Ottomans were siegeing Vienna. When the siege failed, they left behind a bunch of coffee. The Viennese had no idea what to do with it; first they tried smoking it, which didn't work, then they tried a few other things, and eventually they tried cooking it, which worked and I suppose tasted good. Then it spread to the rest of Europe.


Last story!

When the British occupied areas of the Islamic world, they found certain practices incredibly barbaric, such as amputees. So they revoked all of these policies and replaced them with the death penalty, which is substantially more humane.  

What do I do with host brothers?

Play slime soccer, mostly. Takes me back to fourth grade...

The desert was awesome

But there's not much to say about it. It was mostly just really beautiful. We walked around and rode camels and visited a city in this big oasis (the largest oasis in Morocco). I found out that sprinting up sand dunes is incredibly difficult and that playing connect four in Saharan sand is more fun than on the computer. I also figured out how to properly tie a turban (I had a turban tied for me 4 different ways... I only remember one. And I can't tie it nearly as well as the person who tied it for me, it falls off more often). Also we saw some barbary macaques on the way there, which was awesome.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of any of these things because I was worried that the sand of the desert would break my camera.

Also, I have (finally!) decided what to do during my week off -- I'm going to Portugal!

And now to the desert

Again I won't be blogging for the next 4 days because I will be in the desert.
As a parting note, this is a picture of shebekiya, which is fried dough soaked in honey with sesame seeds sprinkled on top. It's absurdly good and costs a dollar a pound.

This is what a Moroccan couscous meal looks like

Everyone eats out of the same dish. You either eat with a spoon or with bread (using the bread to grab the food) or both. Some people eat couscous by rolling it up into a little ball but I've never seen that happen and I think it's considered uncouth or rural or those are kind of the same thing. You eat meat with your hands, or if you're using a spoon, you sort of hold down with the spoon and tear off a chunk with your hands.

The best couscous meal I've had is still the only one our host mom in Fes made. I wish I knew exactly how she did it. I will never be able to replicate that deliciousness. I am pretty sure that one of the keys was adding raisins (which I think had been cooked with cinnamon) but I am also sure she had other keys.

Maybe I'll just keep on talking about infinity forever

As a follow-up to this post, where I talked about the Islamic idea of infinity as embodied in architecture, here are a few pictures of the inside of a (no-longer used) mosque in Meknes. 

The second image is just zoomed in on the Arabic writing, which is the same throughout the entire mosque (100% of Arabic writing in this mosque is the expression "God is good," or something similar, I'm not entirely sure how it's translated. Laura, do you know? It seems like it says "Dear God" or "God is dear" or "God is good," I'm not sure which...)

But the whole infinity thing is pretty apparent.

Views from high places

I mentioned that this last weekend I went to Chefchaouen to go on a hike. It was really beautiful and pictures don't capture the beauty, but here are a few anyway.

This last one is of the city itself; all the houses are blue and white. It's really cool. Apparently it's entirely coincidence; people started building their houses in blue, and then people liked the way it looked so everyone built their house blue. So now the whole city is blue; people paint their doors blue, the walls, etc.

Churro

Spanish churro, dipped in chocolate, is an amazing food.

Thirty years after it became legal to be a non-Catholic in Spain...

Spain is full of reminders of both the Spanish Inquisition and the presence of Muslism everywhere.

If there's one thing I know...

It's that this bab (gate, door, etc) is in some way distinctly Andalusian/Maghrebi (Moroccan/West African). Those aren't quite the same thing but are really similar because of all the interaction the two regions had. I think it has something to do with the curved top and possibly the Arabic writing above it.

(This post is funny only to me because we've looked at lots of babs and been told how they're similar architecturally, but I've really never understood it. Instead I just sort of nod and smile and people think I know what I'm talking about). 

Alhambra in Granda

One of the things we did in Spain was to visit Alhambra which is an old Islamic palace in Granda, and an awesome example of Islamic architecture. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It was cool to see right after Catholic cathedrals; Islam is much more strict on iconography, so Islam doesn't decorate things with scenes from the Bible like Catholic cathedrals, but instead with Arabic writing and geometric symbols. Islam is also really into the idea of infinity (God is everywhere, etc). You got a good idea of this at Alhambra.

Those are three different areas of the palace, and any writing you see is saying "God is most high" over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It says this phrase everywhere at Alhambra! (There are other things said as well, including parts that aren't the same thing repeated over and over, but this phrase is really really prominent). 

It's interesting to compare it to Catholic art although I'm not sure if I have anything intelligent to say about it. All I'll say is that seeing the same praise of God written a million times wherever you go gives you a sense of awe different from the sense of awe you get from high ceilings and elaborate depictions of Biblical characters, but I'm not sure how exactly it's different. 

My itinerary, and why blogging has been slow

Last weekend I was in Spain from Thursday through Sunday. I had a ton of things to say about it but didn't really have time to blog as much as I wanted. Then this past Thursday (2 days ago) I went with friends to Chefchaouen, a mountain town that was the base for this hike we did. It's also just a beautiful town, all the houses are blue and it's really pretty (we're going to explore it a bit more today, once people wake up...). Later today we're taking a bus over to Meknes, another city, where we will meet up with the rest of the group for a formal excursion of various sites of Meknes; we'll see a mausoleum, an old madrasa (Qur'anic school), a museum and a "Sultana's garden". Then we'll head back, and next Thursday (5 days from now) we head out to the desert for another 4-day trip. I have no idea what that trip really entails. Then it's the last week of the quarter until my week on my own, which I haven't planned yet.

But anyway, I've been busy and will be busy all these weekends so it's hard to blog. During the week I'm playing catch-up on homework and stuff. 

Talking with non-native speakers

Moroccans as a whole are really terrible at speaking to non-native speakers in darija. I think that, as an English speaker, I'm used to talking to people who speak poor English and so I know how to talk such that they can understand me; I talk slowly, clearly, and if they don't understand I try a different sentence construct or use different words.
Moroccans rarely do this. A great example of this is the guy next to me on the bus on the way to Chefchaouen. We talked a good bit, all in Arabic, but it was the most painful conversation I've ever had because this poor guy just could not get his point across, but it was mostly his fault.
Example: After about an hour after we had been stopped, he starts saying something to me. At first it's just a blur of words (only a few) so I ask him to repeat. He repeats again in the exact same manner (unhelpful) so I ask him to repeat slowly. He does so (awesome!) and I isolate the 3 words in the sentence. I still don't understand what he's saying, so he starts repeating this one word, "ouzad" (or something, I forget exactly what). This is clearly the most important word in the sentence. I say that I have no idea what "ouzad" means so he repeats it a few times. I still don't get it, so he helps me out by saying it slightly louder and slightly more insistently. He says "ouzad zwiina?" (is ouzad nice?) to which I say "I don't understand the word ouzad". He explains what the word ouzad means by saying "ouzad! ouzad!"
I say I still don't get it and he laughs exasperatingly.
It's been about 2 minutes so far and we've gotten nowhere. I explain again that I just don't understand what the word ouzad means. Then he gets the idea to try and explain the word ouzad. He says,
"ouzad... medinat tanja. madinat rabat. madinat fes. madinat ouzad!"
"medina" means "city" so I immediately understand that "ouzad" is the city that we're stuck in. Awesome! Why did that take two minutes?

I just climbed another mountain!

This one was even more beautiful than the last! I'll put pictures up at some point but it doesn't really matter because the pictures couldn't come close to capturing the beauty.
Also we had a fun adventure getting to Chefchaouen (where I am right now, and where we climbed the mountain). We left at 5:30 PM yesterday evening and were supposed to get here at 10:30. At 9:00 PM the bus stopped. We didn't think much of it until about half an hour later, when we finally asked what was wrong and they said the brakes were broken. They said it would take about an hour for another bus to get here to finish the ride, so we decided to wait (the bus wasn't crowded so we were basically just hanging out, it was fine) instead of paying $10 each for a taxi to take us there (also, the taxis that go that fart are really, really sketchy. Sometimes the doors don't really close all the way and are generally terrifying). An hour and a half later we asked again what the deal was, and they said again that it would take about an hour. Now we talked seriously about getting a taxi, but again decided against it because we figured it actually would probably be an hour (not entirely sure why we thought this) and we were still having a good time. An hour later we asked again and they said it would be about half an hour. We no longer believed them so we started calling taxis. This was really confusing. There was already one guy with his taxi in the area, but he needed to call his friends to have enough taxis to take all of us.
There was a definite communication problem trying to talk to this guy and negotiate a price / not have him call his taxis before we figured out the price, but he spoke French so we brought our two best french-speakers over, who were both women, to facilitate conversation. Then when they came over he said "no French," we think because they were women and he didn't want to talk to them, but I'm not sure about this. Regardless, he didn't speak French after that at all so we had to communicate in Arabic, which ended up working reasonably well. Eventually we got the idea that more taxis were coming and we agreed on a price.
Unfortunately, at this time we started being told pretty insistently that a bus was actually coming and would arrive in 10, 5 minutes. These time estimates were really low so we thought maybe they were actually true, and we didn't want to take taxis if we didn't have to, but we also didn't want to put all of our eggs in the bus basket. We sort of just sat around waiting for something to be decided for us, and then the bus actually arrived probably about 5 minutes before the taxis got there. We gave the taxi driver a hundred dirhams and went on the bus, and I guess in the end he probably didn't give any of it to his friends so we probably really screwed them over... On the other hand maybe he did and they got a great deal. Who knows. The end of the story is we arrived at about 2:30, 4 hours later than we should have.

Cairo

For those of you who didn't know there were plans for us to go to Cairo for a week from March 11th to 18th. That has now been cancelled so I have to decide what to do during that time. Any ideas? Major constraints include cost, time, difficulty of getting there (specifically if we're talking West Africa) and if I want to go somewhere crazy, then safety. 

The Great Mosque of Cordoba

Well Spain was awesome so I guess I'll start telling you about cool things. We spent a day in Cordoba and a day in Granada and that was it (lots of travel time).
The most interesting part of Cordoba to me was the Mezquita, which was initially a pagan temple, then converted by the Visigoths to a church, then converted by the Muslims to a mosque, constantly expanded throughout a few hundred years of Muslim rule, and then converted to a cathedral by the Spanish after the Reconquista.
The cathedral is absolutely gigantic. Our tour guide said it could hold about 300,000 people. That seemed high to me, but 100,000 seemed perfectly reasonable. I got lost in there.
One note is that there are sort of two sections, the Muslim/Mosque section, where the underlying architecture is Islamic (but with lots of crosses and stuff everywhere) and the added cathedral section, which the Catholics built from scratch. Anyway, here are a few pictures.

This is from the Catholic part, and I tried (and mostly failed) to capture a sense of how freaking tall the ceilings are. They are much taller than in the Muslim part. This is because of the difference in the purpose of a Church vs a Mosque. A church is moreso a House of God; Jesus is physically present (transubstantiation). Muslims put a lot of emphasis, much more than Catholics, on the idea that God is "One" and everywhere at all times. They anthropomorphize him much less (at another cathedral, we saw a depiction of God standing above Jesus, but we couldn't take pictures there. You would never see this in a mosque). So a mosque is less a house of God and more a community building; it's a place for the community of the believers to meet. People pray there, teach there, organize meetings there, etc -- it has a much more multifaceted role, I think (especially the fact that people would be essentially attending lecture in the same room that they pray -- much more the case in mosques than churches).

Going back to the ceiling, the point is that in the cathedral section, the architecture is designed to impress upon you the weight of God, because he's actually there right now. So you have super-high ceilings and tons of fancy iconography. In the Muslim section, on the other hand, the ceilings are lower because there isn't that motivation.

Mom (or other interested Catholics...?) you can comment on anything about this that you disagree with or whatever.

Just posting that picture to show the level of detail that covered basically every inch of the church. Hard to give an impression of the magnitude of the effort without actually being there.

And that is almost certainly the most interesting picture. It's a crusader killing Muslims! Fun stuff for a church. This was one of the things that made Spain so interesting -- you are surrounded by evidence of the Spanish Inquisition. This was specifically put in here for the Muslims who would come to this church to convert; they needed to be reminded of the power of the Christians over the Muslims. And of course it was just to humiliate them.

Other various items that one sees around the city to remind you of the inquisition are the prevalence of pork in Spanish cuisine (Muslims and Jews can't eat pork, so feeding pork to suspected Jews or Muslims was really common) and tons of clearly Islamic structures that have crosses everywhere around them.

Wait, what?

Does this make sense?

(I'm guessing it does make sense and livre d'or is just what you call a guest book, but I got really confused when I first read this in the lobby of our hotel in Tangier)

This is a bird and that is Spain

I will be going there in two days!
(I'll be in Spain from Thursday through Sunday. Haven't decided if I'm even going to bring my laptop or not)