The REAL reason to travel

Yesterday was my birthday. Not just any birthday-- my GOLDEN birthday, which I've been anticipating since I was present for a childhood friend's 9th birf on July 9 and she received a golden plastic 9, a golden dress, and cupcakes sprinkled with gold flakes.

I didn't end up doing any of the golden goose-eating, goldschlag-ing, golden body paint-ing things I had originally envisioned for this verra special day; I've got a rather large party coming up in a month, so I was quite content to spend a quiet day with the fam.

One thing that did elevate this birthday from all others, though, was watching my Facebook wall fill with birthday greetings that poured in from all over the world. Friends I met in Morocco, Switzerland, Italy, Holland and Germany all sent well wishes, and I received a deluge of greetings from my beloved former students in France ("I hope you are very fine," "Hope you'll pass a nice day," "Happy birthday and good wedding miss," "You become old LOL,"). Ils me manquent trop!

The sights were breathtaking and the food delish, but my very favorite part of all my travels this past year was meeting so many wonderfully unique and generous people. I made literally hundreds of friends with folks who I know would share a meal with me, house me, and help me out of a jam if I ever ended up in their vicinity again. And hopefully they know I'd do the same for them.

Morocco Part 3: The Medina

The Fès medina, a 1200-year-old market, was my favorite part of the city. Thousands of tiny, winding paths are lined with stands heaped with scarves, pointed-toe slippers, hand-embroidered tablecloths and caftans if you go down one street; olives, nuts, dried fruit and spices if you go down another.

We went to the medina our first day in Fès, and I was extremely grateful to have our pack of strapping Moroccan men to guide us through the maze. We were so exhausted from (not) sleeping chez Charles de Gaulle the previous night that without them we likely would have gotten lost and trampled by the donkeys used for transport in the tight passages.

Fayçal seemed to know everyone in this city, and we stopped several times to greet various family members and friends. One of his cousins hopped the counter of his three-foot-wide caftan shop to lead us into the fez shop of another relative. Along with the city's eponymous tasseled caps, there were felt hats of all sorts of colors and styles. After making our purchases we headed upstairs to the factory, where we got to see the fezes being made in real time.

Emily and I returned to the Medina by ourselves a few days later, and the absence of our escorts was sorely felt. As an obvious Westerner, I felt like I had a bullseye on my face. "Coucou!" "Bonjour!" "Where you from, beautiful?" and, surprisingly: "Hola!" rang out from every corner as we sauntered along. "Not for buy, just for look!" they promised. "Where you from? America? New York City! I go there one day, Inch'Allah! Welcome to my country. Come inside. Very good price."

Once you showed the slightest interest in something you were doomed to at least five minutes of politely extricating yourself from the situation, so I tried to only stop when there was something I actually had intention of buying.

Emily, though, was the bartering queen. A trinket might be advertised as 80 dirham. Emily would offer 40, insisting that they had quoted her the tourist price. The vendor would clutch his heart and wonder aloud how he would feed his family, and then go down to 70. Emily would go up to 50, final offer. The vendor would dither and Emily would start to leave. "OK OK OK!" he would yell, with a hint of panic. Then he would turn to me, shaking his head. "Your friend is Berber."

And then they would offer us some mint tea.

Not everything in the medina was as deliciously fragrant as those heaps of spices and olives. There were also live chickens and cock-a-doodle-doo-ing roosters, along with the heads of various beasts strung up on butchers' hooks. If you're squeamish you're going to want to skip the next picture.

BRAINS! And lettuce over their tongues. I don't know about you, but that surely whet my appetite.

I like to show this picture to my students and tell them it's my new boyfriend. It takes them awhile to figure out it's a camel head, and then they laugh uproariously. OK, they only giggle a little bit. OK, three of them cracked a smile. But those three thought I was HILARIOUS.

If you're a long time Francey Pantser you know how much I love a good creepy mannequin, and Fès did not disappoint. It was like Christmas for creepy mannequin lovers (in fact, it was Christmas... for everyone). The problem with drawing attention to yourself by, say, taking a photo, however, is that you'll have shopkeepers descending on you like bees to honey. So I only got this excellent shot of the Child Barbie Shawl Revolution before running away.

Next time, next time. Inch'Allah.

Morocco Part 2: The Hammam

The thing I was most excited to do in Morocco was to visit the hammams, or bath houses. I was pumped for the cultural stuff too, of course, but the prospect of spending time in a spa-like setting, getting all renaxed and shiz, really appealed to me.

There are different kinds of hammams you can go to, depending on how pampered you want to get and how much you want to spend. We went to one where we just paid 30 dirham (the equivalent of 3E) so we could take a hot shower. There were no frills, no extras, just a room with a showerhead and a bucket. As I understand it, there are also ones where you strip down and sit in a shvitz for awhile, soaping and exfoliating yourself while trying really hard to forget how uncomfortably Minnesotan you feel about being in a room full of nakey people.

But we decided to go for the full-bore, 100% luxury experience at a fancy modern hammam for a whopping 100 dh, plus 30 dh for the exfoliating glove (about 13E total).

Having never done this before, I was full of trepidation. Were we supposed to be naked? Were we supposed to wear swimsuits? Would they be offended by my circa-2007 teal-and-red flowered bikini? After a brief conference in the dressing room, Emily and I decided to go with both halves of our swimsuits, with our towels clutched tightly around us. The Moroccan woman in charge of us indicated we should bring our soap and shampoo, as well as the tokens indicating we had paid for fanciness.

We descended to a marble room that I like to imagine resembled the old Roman bath houses. There were showers in one corner, a steam room on the opposite side of the room with a jacuzzi adjacent to it, and four raised marble tables in between, where women in black tank tops and skorts were exfoliating their bodacious clients--all of whom were topless. Got it. I hung my towel on a hook and nervously plucked off my bikini top, mentally assuring myself that no one was staring at me and everyone has a body and it's OK to be half-naked--really!--it is.

Our Moroccan lady beckoned us into the steam room and handed each of us a gob of gooey, caramel-y savon noir (black soap) that kind of reminded me of Gak, miming  that we should rub it onto our skin. She then left us to our own devices. This was our first time around hot water in two days, after a night spent in Charles de Gaulle and a day of dusty touristing, so I was eager as could be to de-stinkify. My handful of savon noir took a surprisingly long time to run through, so I got really, extra, super clean.

After we'd soaped and rinsed to our heart's content we didn't quite know what we were supposed to do, so we did some awkward stretching and lounging on the tiled seats. "See?" I told myself. "You're a champ at being half-naked! Ain't no thang! Nobody's staring at you! Oh wait. Everyone's totally staring at you. Better cross your arms over your chest and act real casual. Good."

The lady finally came to fetch us, and pointed that we should get our tokens and exfoliating gloves and go to one of the raised marble tables in the middle of the room, where more black-clad women were waiting for us. I smiled meekly at the one assigned to me and handed her my token, which she promptly stuffed inside her skort.

After hosing me off with a shower head, she took to me with that black, sandpaper-y glove, and exfoliated the crap out of me as if my skin were a scourge on humanity that the King of Morocco himself had ordered her to remove with whatever force necessary. Great gobs of grayish dead skin cells came wilting off me as she violently rubbed me EV-ER-Y-WHERE. Parts you wouldn't think someone other than your partner would see, much less touch: oh, she went there. Sensitive parts you'd think she'd go a little easy on: ha! nope. At one point she flipped me onto my stomach and yanked my swimsuit bottom up so she could get at my cheeks, giving me the worst wedgie of my life as I stiffled a yelp.

My skin tingled all over when she finished, and I gave thanks to God that I didn't suffer from eczema or any other ouchy skin condition. She hosed me off again, and then squirted half my precious bottle of Aveda rosemary mint body wash onto me as she massaged me. "Ahhhhhhh," I thought. "This is nice. I could just lay here for--" She abruptly yanked on one of my legs, trying to flip me over. I was slip-sliding all over the soapy stone table, trying desperately not to fall and crack my head open, as she pushed and prodded me into different positions.

When that part was over, I stumbled over to the shower where I was blessedly allowed to wash my hair. The first Moroccan lady cut my shower a bit short, and ushered me over to the bubbling jacuzzi. I didn't mind; I could go for a nice relaxing sit in a hot-- holy mother of nards the water was freezing! I suppose the point was to close our newly cleansed pores, but come on! A little warning!

Our final stop at this Sadist Spa was the Chambre de Relaxation, which was actually quite nice. We lay there for awhile on lovely leather recliners, meditating on what we had just been through and making plans to come back.

Morocco Part 1: The People

Fayçal, Amin, Emily, me and Hattim visiting a fez factory in Fès

It's a bit complicated how I ended up in Morocco this winter. I originally had other plans for my two-week winter break, and when those fell through I tried in vain to latch onto other assistants' holiday voyages. I was relating my woes to Emily, an assistant in Angers who I'd never actually met in real before, and she said her plans had similarly gone bust and she was thinking about heading to Fès to visit her friend Fayçal.

Fayçal ended up being an incredible host. Together with his friend Hattim, who lodged us, and various family members and friends, he made sure we got an authentic view of Moroccan life.

I've never before experienced hospitality like what we encountered in Fès. I had only the most tenuous of connections to Fayçal, yet his family and friends welcomed me as if I were an old friend. His parents hosted us for three delicious, elaborate meals (more on that in a later post), one of which was to celebrate the 16th birthday of Fayçal's sister Boutaina. I came as a stranger and left feeling like one of them.

Fayçal, Boutaina, Mama Bouzoubaa, Amin, Papa Bouzoubaa, Hattim, and little Wael in their home.

It wasn't just the Bouzabaa family that welcomed us. As we walked through Fès' ancient market streets one day, we ran into a man we'd briefly encountered playing a traditional Moroccan instrument in an alley of the Medina a few days earlier. Without hesitation, he invited us to partake in some "Berber whiskey": the delicious mint tea that's ubiquitous in Morocco.

Emily and I had some trouble communicating to a taxi driver the name of a café where we were meeting our friends. We went back to the restaurant where we had lunch, and the host there used a payphone to call Hattim on his own dime, and then accompanied us to a taxi so he could explain to the driver in Arabic where we needed to go. Like, who does that?

Also, I spied several people wearing this fantastical cloak with a pointed hood, like they were straight out of Whoville or something:

Man they're cool. My biggest Moroccan regret is not buying one.

Morocco en bref

I'm sitting in an Internet café in Meknès right now, a city where our host Fayçal studies the science of plant protection. I promise to do an in-depth, day-by-day recap when I return to Francey, but for now a few quick observations:

• I have experienced incredible hospitality here. Fayçal's friend Hattim has opened his home to us and made sure we have everything we need. Fayçal's mother has gone all out preparing us not one but two elaborate, multi-course Moroccan meals, during which she frequently insists, "Mange, Nina," despite my protestations that I might actually die if I force something else into my mouth. The flavors and textures and smells are all divine; it would be a happy death.
• The city of Fès, where we're staying, is full of small, red Petits Taxis, which can hold three people at a time and cost the equivalent of 1-2€ for a cross-town voyage.
• We visited the 1200-year-old Medina on Saturday night, designated by UNESCO as the oldest in the world. There were stands with heaps of dates, figs, dried apricots, and nuts. There were stands selling traditional caftans and the ubiquitous robes for men with pointed hoods. Stands for felt hats (including fezes, bien sur). Stands for live chickens with one glassy-eyed camel head. Goat heads. Pottery decorated in famous Fès blue. Silver. Leather. Etc...

 I'm going to head out in search of lunch, but look for more Morocco Pants on Thursday, Inch'Allah.