A Carnival

So the boy that I had the Sedar with goes to the French school which had a carnival to raise money for different charity organizations. I decided that it would be cool to see how a Moroccan carnival is and to see little kids. So a friend and I go. To get in you have to bring in a liter of milk, that they are going to donate to a charity that takes care of kids for moms who can't afford day care. We enter and it's one of the most organized carnivals I've been to. There are tents for everything, a blow up slide, lots of games for kids, a kareoke place. On the other side there are stands with stuff for artisans and with different charity associations. I felt like I was in Vermont, or when I was in Talahassee or any open air farmer's market. It was a strange feeling, because the Medina is also open air but very very Moroccan. Somehow, this with its little tents and organized set up was so very American somehow. In any case, it was fun to see a different side of Morocco. I also got to see the children of Europeans who obviously live here. In the medina, all you see are Moroccans and tourists and us from the center; you don't realize that there are actually people of European descent that actually live in the country. I was amazed at seeing so many blondes and red heads!

Mega Mall

So yesterday I went bowling at Mega Mall, Rabat's big mall. It was strange, almost like walking back into the US. The stores were similar to any upscale mall in the US, along with upscale kaftan stores. There was a ice rink, bowling alley, and children's play center inside. The food court had food like you'd find at a food court in the US, tacos, asian food, sushi, a kebab place named Aladdin. It wasn't like the "fast food" I'd seen in the rest of Morocco. What was strangest was the clothing. There were the jelabas and even more hijabs, but there were a lot of western clothes and more strangely western hairdos and more cutting edge western clothes. Cutting edge is the wrong word; I don't quite know how to describe it. Maybe it was that there were more piercing and hipsters and things like that. The bowling alley was a lot like the ones in the US, minus the alcohol and arcade. It was actually a lot cleaner than any I went to in the US. It was a strange experience, I guess, by living in a lower middle class neighborhood, I've gotten the least globalized part of Morocco, but the richer areas are very Americanish...

A Moroccan Sedar

So I was really excited to get to go to my first Sedar since I came to college. Of course I found it easier to find someone to have it with in Morocco than in Boston. So my really religious friend found this family that we could have Sedar with, so I went with her, her boyfriend, and two other girls to synagogue for prayer before we met up with this family. There we meet the son of the family. His name is Avi and he is a nice looking 18 year old who is just finishing up his French Baccalaureate. He speaks a little English, but his first language is French. I think that his parents first language may have been Dareeja (or in any case they know it a lot better than their son, who had to learn it in school). We walk to his apartment building and enter. In many ways it is like a moroccan house, with the main room with lots of couches. However, there is a high table there with chairs for all of us. We start the Sedar, which is all in Hebrew, with the tradition of putting the plate with all the special passover food over people's heads and saying the prayer for wanting to be in Israel next year. It is a fast Sedar, since it's just rushing through the Hebrew words that all those who know Hebrew say. I'm a little bored, but I look at the pictures and try to keep to the right pages. I think I want to learn how to read Hebrew, it bothers me that it's so close to Arabic but I can't figure it out. I'm sure it won't be that hard to learn. After we do the prayers (the only time that is really exciting is the plagues where they pour water and wine together to make the water turn into blood and the dayenu part where at least I remember that we're talking about how it would have been enough if God had only given the Torah) and eat the specific food (I've never seen the haroshet literally be squished up apples in wine), we commence to eating. The food is quite Moroccan in its way. First we have salads of different sorts, including an amazing one made of carrots, parsley, oil, lemon, salt, and pepper. Then we have a fish dish, and then a fava bean soup. It's all very good. During the meal, we Americans mostly talk between ourselves, but I try to find out a bit more about Avi. He wants to go to college in France and study business and eventually leave Morocco unless there is an especially good opportunity in Morocco. Talking to him is funny, since he doesn't speak that good english but he doesn't really speak Arabic either, but it can be easier to speak arabic to him. Also, his first language is French, which I mostly understand... but we mostly stick to English. The mother is nice, if quiet, and it took a long time for me to figure out that she even knows how to read Hebrew since she leaves it up to the men (I asked... women don't get bat mitzvahs in Morocco). After we eat and get fruit for dessert, we do the after dinner prayer (for I think the first time in my life) by speeding through the Hebrew even faster than before and with less time for singing parts. After that, Avi drives us home and then we go the next day, for almost the same thing except meatballs, peas, and artichoke instead of fish. I enjoyed it, although Passover isn't the same if you don't understand the story that is being told...

Hamaming alone... or not so alone

So my friends were going to hamam on Thursday, and I couldn't go then because I was going to Passover Sedar, so I decided to go alone. I was going to go in one of the showers, because I was alone, but the lady at the front of the shop convinced me to go hamaming, so I did. So I sit in a corner and start scrubbing. This time I've forgotten to get the lotion soap, so I'm just scrubbing, the lady beside me sees me and tells me, no, you have to use the lotion soap, and gives me some. Then they send me to the hot room, I think just to open my pores, but they want me to scrub, so I do. Obviously I'm not doing it right, because then another lady comes up and starts scrubbing my back and showing me how it's done. I introduce myself and find out her name is Hagar. I then go back to my place and continue scrubbing. I start talking to the lady beside me (her name is Fatiha) and she tells me about her two kids and asks if I'm married (maybe she wanted me to get with her 17 year old son?). I tell her I have a boyfriend and we talk some more. I start scrubbing myself with soap and she offers me her soap scrubber. I accept and use it, and when I clean it and try to give it back, she won't let me. I get the impression she wants to trade numbers, but we're in the hamam, so it's hard. I decide I'm too dehydrated and have to go before she does. I feel kind of bad, she's done all these nice things for me. So I tell her she's nice and beautiful and try to be as thankful as possible before I leave. I had sort of experienced Moroccan hospitality before, but this was the best I've experienced so far.

Thoughts about coming back from Spain

It's interesting, Spring Break didn't revitalize us as much as make us more homesick. I think it was seeing somewhere that although not like home, was so much more like home than Rabat that it felt like home. It was nice not having to worry about street harassment or picking an expensive enough restaurant that it wouldn't be awkward just being a few girls. It was nice being able to be out late and not have to deal with parental figures. It was nice seeing couples on the street and being able to wear a tank top. So coming back was hard--we had to readjust to the cultural differences all over again, and it was harder, knowing just how different they were not just for not being America, but for not being Western. It makes me so much more amazed how immigrants adjust. It's harder than I thought it would be. I suppose most of the places I had traveled before I had been in a Western setting, or at least in a tourist enclave. I think that's why I missed home more than I expected...

A Rabat Church

One of my friends here is pretty religious, and has been going to church every Sunday. I thought it would be interesting to see how Church was conducted in a mostly Muslim country, so I went along with her. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that everyone was talking in English. This was really strange to me... in Morocco, if people aren't speaking Arabic they're speaking French. That's just how its been. But here we were greeted with a Good Morning and everyone was speaking English. I guess it was the choice of service we were going to. It is called "Rabat International Church" and considered itself "Multi-denominational" and "Multi-ethnic." When I look around, I see the most white people I have seen in Rabat, with almost the same number of Black Africans and then quite a few Asians. I did not see a single Moroccan. I think that's mostly because there are so few Moroccan Christians, but also because the service was in English. I also think that the fact that it was not majority Black African is due to the fact that it was in English, French services seem to be mostly Black African here. It was different than other services I've gone to, since we only sang one hymn and the rest were just Christian songs (very upbeat) and instead of an organ we had a guitar player, that just gives a different feel to a service. It was also interesting what the pastor chose to preach about. He took a part of Matthew and explained how it's more important to make sure you truly believe in your heart than performing the actions of Christianity. It was really interesting to me because Islam (and for that matter Judiasm) is very different in that way: a lot of religion has to do with doing the right actions and doing the actions is then supposed to lead to the right mental state. Christianity seems to encourage religion to go the other way. It made me think of a piece we read about Islamic women where a woman was trying to learn to be modest and how she became modest at heart by first acting modest. It was especially interesting because the part of Matthew that the pastor preached about is when Jesus tells a certain group that they don't need to wash their hands before a meal and how Jesus says its not what you eat that makes you unclean but what you say. This struck me as interesting since ritual washing is so important to Islam, and eating clean food is so important to both Islam and Judaism. Overall it was a very nice service, partly because it was so laid back. Afterwards I went with a group to have brunch at a restaurant and I got to find out their stories. It was interesting to see why people had come to Morocco, from working with organizations that helped handicapped children to learning Arabic to simply wanting to live abroad. I think the most interesting thing was when my friend and I both talked about our love of the hammam. I guess that all of the people I'd gone hammaming with had been so open to it and ok with being naked that I had forgotten how strange it is to Western culture. They were a little shocked that I wanted to take my mom with me. Overall, it was nice to meet other English speakers actually living in Rabat. Sometimes we kind of get in a little bubble around our lives at the center and with our families.

Thoughts about history

It's interesting, I feel like what WWII was for the West, wars for independence are to the rest of the world, or at least to the Middle East. Right now there is a music video that talks about having a loved one far away because of war and the music video shows the singer and her lover who's in the underground and her working for the rich colonialists undercover at a fancy hotel. At first I thought it was about WWII because the clothes are obviously from the 40s/50s, but then I realized that no, those aren't Germans, those are colonialists. It's interesting how the Algerians who were fighting the French had a very similar experience in some ways to the French that had underground resistance against the Germans. Maybe the Germans were really only taking colonialism to it's ultimate level, as well as the ethnocentrism of the West. Maybe the French and British didn't persecute people living in their countries or take over their European neighbors, but they did persecute those people they didn't think of as civilized and France did colonize its next door neighbor. Of course, then Germany systematically killed people...