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).