Rocked The Kasbah

Hi! Sorry I’ve been so bad at writing. Here’s an entry for the complainers…

So yes, why haven’t I written. I’ll offer up two reasons. First reason is that it seems I have not outgrown my diary writing mentality from the tween years where I’d only write when I was depressed and lonely, thus creating the effect in my journals that I was constantly depressed and obsessed with people.

Second reason is that I feel like I need to write a lot to catch up and at least describe my time in Morocco, which would just be overwhelming.

Also, Spaniards: not known for their rocket internet connections. Also, other people who have travelled lately will understand how irritating the invention of whatever that internet microphone telephone substitute is. It makes me very annoyed in internet cafes and then I don’t want to write.

So here’s my Morocco entry.

Jaime Graves (friend from Saskatoon) and I spent 10 days together and we decided to head down to Morocco for some of it a) because we were right at the tip of Spain and it seemed stupid not to just cross 16 km of ocean and go to Africa and b) stupidly, I was waiting for my student loan instalment to come in and I was like, wow, here’s an idea, let’s hide out in a third world country until my money comes in because it’s cheap. Yes, Alana. That could have gone really badly but luckily it didn’t except that the fact that I had fifteen, then ten, then five dollars to my name made me even more tense than usual.

We spent 2 days in a surfing town in Spain just 15 km by ocean from Africa recovering from our Morocco experience. We couldn’t have picked a better place because the surfing town, Tarifa, was a neutral zone void of any culture or any specific nationality and we needed that because Morocco was another world; it really was a completely different culture.

Anyhow, I´m still recovering from Morocco. Let´s just say I understand the convenience of wrapping one´s entire being in thick wrapping if one happens to be a woman. So crazy though and so fun. We were staying in a hotel that had a terrace overlooking the medina and we´d spend our evenings up there drinking mint tea and people watching from on high, where we were safe. This is the way I met a Moroccan friend who is a dj who has no hope of marketting himself outside of his country so he plays beautiful jazz-traditional-rock-trance beats out from his shop into the market.. I bought a burnt cd of his stuff. I´m in love with the Moroccan sound and the Spanish flamenco culture now.

Ok, so we took a ferry into Tangier, Morocco, which is famous as the seedy city inhabited by authors and writers in the 70’s when it was officially neutral territory. We spent a night there and then 4 days in Fez, which is considered the cultural and spiritual capital of Morocco.

I’ll just describe my 2 most outstanding experiences in Morocco in order to keep this short:

1)Waking up at 3:30 am in my dark, stone room (it had a really high ceiling and seemed like a prison cell) to the sound of the reading of the Koran coming through the speaker of the tower next door. It was so eerie and beautiful and really loud, echoing off the stone walls around me. Again, nothing remotely Western sounding in the tune of the chant. And the coolest thing is that there are I think 7 towers from around Fez that chant out the prayer and for whatever reason the acoustics in my cell were such that I could hear them all playing off one another and the symmetry was perfect. I don’t think I’ll ever hear that again.

2) Jaime and I tried to get the authentic Morocco experience, not just the touristy version, though believe me, that’s less than pretty too. On the second day we were there we sought out a hammom (bath house) that the people who live in the medina go to. Our hammam experience basically was a metaphor for how we felt in Morocco.

We walked into this shady, urine-smelling, hot series of stone rooms. We had expected something more luxurious. It was just us and the people who had grown up in the medina, it seemed. Then this massive naked mean lady saw us awkwardly standing holding our bags in the corner and ordered us to strip down. Everyone was staring. I won’t get graphic but let’s just say that 5 minutes later I found myself lying on a hot slab of marble in the next room with my legs twisted backwards towards my back by one of the mean lady’s helpers. Then she told me to flop over.

Anyways it was actually good! It really broke down the barriers. It was basically our first and only interaction with the women of that city. After the masseuses broke us in (and had finished chasing us around the hammom dumping ice water over us – I really did run away from my lady and I really did see her laugh and then drench me) they were friendly with us and I could even speak with some of them in French.

Ok, so long entry, which was why I was putting off writing the blog.

And yes, I look like such a loser here but I've got to do it: I also rocked the Kasbah.