ghost city

maura ewing fails at blogger skills. more frequent posts coming sooooon. promise.

kids are cute, but also vampires of time and energy. that's my excuse.

anyways, the little devils are really starting to grow on me. there has been more laughing and less scolding recently, which i think is a relief for everyone involved. also recently the kid-Os have been trying to get at who this ms. ewing character really is... they've been asking questions like, "ms, have you wanted to be a fifth grade teacher since you were a kid?" " or "are you going to be a fifth grade teacher here for the rest of your life?" both of which make me feel like i'm keeping a dirty secret. and of course i only answer them honestly, "yes, i have wanted to be a fifth grade teacher my whole entire life, and i've been doing it for just about a hundred years already, so i don't see any reason not to do a few more."

what else? ramadan is about half way over now... i think i'm actually going to miss it. granted i'm not fasting, just observing. but i love the way it has synced the whole city: days are slooooow- no one really expects much of anyone else, it's like a communal understanding that nothing much is going to happen while the sun is shining. and then at night the city comes back to life full force- eating eating eating, laughing, yelling, singing...whatever.

but my favorite time is fitour time- the breaking of the fast. it's around 6:30 pm, just as the sun sinks away. this is my #1 favorite time to cruise the streets... EVERYONE is at home eating so the streets are mine! it's almost creepy. of course there are a few other white faces here and there, but in general marrakech is a ghost town. i like to do things like explore neighbrohoods in the medina on my bike and ride down the center of normally crazy streets. it's liberating if you can imagine. this precious moment doesn't last long- maybe 20 or 30 minutes... soon soon soon the sleeping baby of marrakech wakes up and is in full tantrum. the calm before the storm, whatever.

ok, back to real life. it is sunday afternoon which means time to get ready for SCHOOL next week.

kids

sorrysorrysorrysorry.

i'm back. i'll try to keep this thing up, but no promises... anyways, marrakech is lovely if HOT, and i'm doing well if BUSY. oh man.

teaching is going as well as to be expected i think... i've still got a lot to figure out. like for example how to make kids stay in their seats, also how to make them like, learn stuff. these are #1 and #2 on my weekend "stuff to figure out" list.

though they drain my energy, the kids also keep me pretty entertained. ha, so i think my home-town readers will appreciate this- i'm setting up a penpal system with our class and leverett elementary's... so i thought it'd be good to introduce leverett a bit, just like size (2,000), and geography (lots of trees, big hills) etc. so, one of the kids raises his hand and says, "and ms, do they have electricity in this village you come from?" hahaha.

ok, i'll do a better job of updating this soon. hope everyone is doing well!

p.s. happy ramadan.

frisbee battle

so, i though it would be a great idea to give my neighborhood boys a frisbee that ben had left behind. i mean, they're always running around looking for things to do (their activities sometimes include kicking cans at eachother, teasing girls, playing self-created board games, and ringing my doorbell then running away). sooo, seems like a frisbee would be a welcome edition to their collection of games. dumb american. they've managed to take my innocent toy and turn it into a weapon. one time i walked out my door and saw a heard of kids chasing a boy who was clutching the frisbee and running for life, another time i saw one of the large boys hitting his little brother over the head with it. ooooopsydoo! i thought i could bring peace and fun, instead i've created a small scale frisbee war. ha, i'm sort of waiting to come out my door and have it come whizzing at my head.

anyways, i've had my ma and aunt bobby here for the past week or so. we've had some fun. now they are both tried and true marrakechias, by that i mean expert price hagglers, moto dodgers, crowd navigators and they have perfected the 'you jerk' look for annoying men on the street. we also ventured to beach for a bit for a gnaoua music festival- good music, delicious sea food, and a chance to put everyone's newly acquired marrakech crowd and haggling skills to the test...

ok, i think if i sit in this cyber cafe any longer i just might melt into a puddle.

hi

ok, i fail at this game.

i've had some wonderful partners in adventure lately and thus have been distracted from my blog-o. mary mary mary kuhn was here for a week or so and i've had my little brother benja' bean with me for a bit now... can't really re-cap all that we've done, but will say that it has all been lovely.

um, public oven excursions have been more frequent. just this evening we made challah bread. gasp! jewish bread in a muslim oven, breaking barriers all over the place.

let's see, adventure highlights... benny and i went to a music festival in fez. pretty fun. on our first night of exploring we heard some music coming from down an alley near our hotel. special music side show? we peeked our heads down the alley and were found a group of men who had clearly been uh, partying and very adamantly wanted us to do the same. we were quickly whisked into a raging moroccan wedding! not a side show at all: small room with lots and lots of dancing people from alllll the generations. ben got to dance on the men's side with some silly boys and i got to dance on the women's side with a pre-teen who wanted to show me some new moves.

what else? lots of long bus/grand taxi/train rides have been had; complete with live birds, buckets of cow hooves, barfing neighbors, and shoe thieves (r.i.p. my black sauconys, they lived a good life).

ok, i can't write any more now. clearly i'm being a bad hostess. tomorrow or the next day we're off on a sahara bound road trip. sweet. i'll tell you how it goes.

oh, i'm coming home for like a month this summer. i'm pretty much on summer vacation now... can't complain. anyways, state side mid-july to mid-august. around? lets hang out.

wedding fun

oopsy do, worst blogger ever. hope all my loyal readers haven't given up on me (i've got at least two or three, right??)

um, things have been going really well. marrakech was god awfuly-hot last week, like i was afraid to leave the house after 11 am... but now we're being rewarded with some spring showers. i love stuff like that.

rachel and i went to a wedding in the country the weekend before last. pretty sweet... we were invited through some girls she knows through her research- fatima zorrah and amal. these girls live in the country by our standards, and the wedding was at their country cousin's farm. preeeety out there. i wouldn't say it was even in a village, we were like 6k from any sort of center.

the farm was beautiful and the family was warm and welcoming. we pretty much spent the whole weekend with the women, which was fine by me because from what i could tell they were way more fun. i was actually quite taken aback by them, these were some baaaad ass ladies; i think even the elderly gradmother could have thrown me across the room. and they did all the work for the ceremony- which included baking cake upon cake, degutting sheep, preparing tubs full of chickens, and making mystery concoctions which somehow turned into a feast. oh, and making sure that the men always had enough tea to drink as they layed around looking bored and boring. rachel and i were sometimes given small tasks, like peeling garlic or moving chairs, which were overly-praised, sort of like we were handicapped or five years old. it was pretty cute.

on the second night we went to the bride's village for the party there. so rachel and i along with about 15 other women and a live sheep piled into the back of a pick-up truck for the journey. and it was rachel's job to sit like on the sheep, haha. the ride was great- it was a total party mobile! everyone was singing and drumming the whole way- sometimes we would pass people who would always stop and cheer.

the party itself was pretty fun. lots of food and dancing. luckily the kaftans we were wearing were roomy enough that they hid our far inferior hip-shaking skills. the whole affair lasted until about 4 am, but rachel and i fell asleep in the kiddie room at like 1, which seemed very appropriate... the truck ride home is such a sleepy blur that i'm still not totally convinced it happened.

you get the idea, it was three days of this. we returned to marrakech happily exhausted and ready for urban luxories like a warm shower and vegeterian food.

mmmm brownies

fyi brownies in the public oven are totally do-able (the cookies were out cause theres no brown sugar here...).

the men at the oven were very amused by the gooey mess that i was so excited about... i got a bit defensive, like i didn't think they believed me when i said chocolaty brownies were one of life's finer pleasures. soooo, i felt i needed to go back and prove it to them. i brought them a brownie and in my mood of sharing brought one to my favorite kiosk man and my favorite woodworking man. well appreciated all around. i sat with hakin, the woodworking man, and drank tea while he ate his brownie. hakin always gives me health advice, and he said that he thought the brownie was full of vitamins and thus fully approved. i think he may have confused vitamins with calories. ah well.

what tasty treat should i introduce to the derb el hammam neighborhood next??

keeps things interesting

so. i think i've discovered why i love the marrakesh medina so much. it is a city that will always and forever keep you on your toes. not just in the typical bustling streets sneaky theives sort of a way (though it has both of those as well). but no, the medina keeps you alert in that it is an ever-changing maze. once you think you know even like a small fraction of it, something will change or you will discover some new layer that you never knew existed. like closed doors in the neighborhood will open one day and suddenly there is a new cobbler or blacksmith. was he always hiding there behind the closed doors? or what was in that room like, a week ago? shops open and close depending on the time of day, day of the week, shop owner's mood. who knows.

for this reason routines and patterns are very difficult to form- for example i had gotten in the habit of eating bissarah (yummy fava bean soup) in the morning from our neighborhood bisarrah man, mahamood. then one morning mahamood's doors were closed. rachel saw him later and he explained that now he only made bisarrah when the mood struck him. so now sometimes he's there. sometimes he can't be bothered with cooking in the morning. fair enough. so yeah, routines are out. but with routines come ruts, am i right?

sometimes small tasks can turn into adventures. like just the other day i was on my way out to buy vegetables for lunch. i was headed to the souq (market) where i always went- a nice souq not far away that always has pretty good stuff. but, on my way out stopped to talk with the woodworker across the street, hakin (my number 1 favorite neighbor). he's always full of advice, and this day steered me in the direction of a different market that he said was much better. soooo, i followed his directions- down some twisty streets and through a couple of small alleys and within like 10 minutes emerged in this totally nutty market scene. probably like 3 times as big as the one i usually go to, and with all the bustling madness you could ever want from a vegetable market. there was a sense of urgency, like if you didn't buy your vegetables they were all going to run out or something, people pushing, lots of haggling and arguing, men yelling out prices auction style, special items such as cow hooves and sheep brains... all in all i loved it. got a little caught up with the scene and bought enough vegetables to feed like a family of 10. ah well.

k, think i'm going to go cook some of those vegetable now. i have like 2 lbs of green beans i don't know what to do with. any advice?

us of a

a lot has happened since my last post. birthday come and gone. got sung to in THREE languages. can't beat that. the association i've been working with threw a pretty heart-warming surprise cake-feast. some of the girls i've been teaching brought me flowers and lovely gifts such as a large plastic key chain with sparkles and a sort of brass-foil ring. precious. i tried to wear the ring the next time i went in, but it only fit on the top of my pinky.

anyways, i was reading over my past posts and realized that i hadn't written about any of my guilty American pleasures. and i've got a few. well i mean, there's the bulk peanut butter that we somehow acquired (gift from a visitor?), and our extensive collection of american movies, tv series and of course music. it still makes me smile when i'm sitting in my living room watching like, Arrested Development for example, and then the call to prayer comes blasting through the window. or a group of women yodeling outside interrupts my Bob Dylan album. collision of worlds, in my house. there are also the trashy magazines that can sometimes be found at the used book market (left behind by a tourist?), which i must say i enjoy way more here than i ever did at home. i'm not sure what it says that i find it comforting to read about next season's fashion or look at pictures of the best and worst dressed celebrities... oh, and probably worst of all is my friend's sort of newly acquired wee-nintendo. i don't know if you're familiar with the machine- sort of like the old nintendo except you have to actually move the 'wand' with the game. so like, virtual boxing requires actual punches in the air. just picture two people vigorously punching nothing with a silly stick in their hand. i haven't decided if i like watching or playing more.

it's like i appreciate american pop-culture and weirdo gadgets that much more purely because they're harder to access here. tastes of home, though not necessarily ones that i particularly enjoyed while i was there. next think you know i'm going to be asking one of you to send me an iphone. anyways, don't worry about needing to catch me up with pop-culture updates or weird technological advances. totally on top of it.

oh, in the same vein, rachel and i have plans to make chocolate chip cookies in our neighborhood's public oven. generally people don't have ovens in their house here (specifically in the old-city), but every neighborhood has a communal stone-hearthish one. so people can be seen walking around with huge trays of bread, pasteries, whatever. so yeah, we're gonna attempt a batch of toll-house favorites soon... possibly the first batch in the derb el hammam oven. if it goes well lasagna may be the next step. i'll let you know what happens.

visitors

sorry it's been so long since i've posted... the past couple of weeks have been pretty full. matt was here for a little over a week and our dear friend alex joined us for a long weekend. pretty awesome time all around. i think it may be a trip that is better to show rather than tell. and thanks to matt's web-savvy ways i can do just that.

the selected photos: http://flickr.com/photos/mattewing/sets/72157600060717395/detail/

and if you're so inclined, the whole set: http://flickr.com/photos/mattewing/sets/72157600059890357/

the highlight of the trip was probably the three days matt and i spent hiking in the atlas mountains. we did a sort of village to village trek with a wonderful man, ali, and his donkey. i loved ali. really i did. i mean, i guess i still do. and i think he loved us. well, he loved his job anyways. he sat on his donkey swinging his legs and singing berber songs as we huffed and puffed behind. sometimes he forgot about us and rode away leaving us dumb and lost. but he always came back. and we had mandatory tea stops like 3 times a day. i think they were more for him than us, but were well appreciated just the same. oh! and get this. he thought matt was my LITTLE brother. what. haha, i guess he thought that my ability to butcher his language was a skill that came with age.

anyways, aside from our endearing guide the trek really was wonderful. the mountains were totally breath-taking and it felt really great to get a few days of fresh air. and of course to share some quality huffing time with my favorite big brother.

we had a lot of fun in the city as well. did some good wandering and exploring and saw a pretty sweet soccer game. the game was sort of an intense experience. people are really into soccer here. like, the field was lined with armed cops holding riot shields and people were throwing lit flares onto the field. but marrakesh won, so there was no violence after the game. just celebration. we walked back from the field alongside a parade of loud, crazed marrakeshi boys on motos and/or running alonside their friends on motos.

we met alex in casablanca. our first night was a very typical matt-alex evening: drinking cheap beer in a seedy bar discussing american politics. sort of felt like home for a bit. i mean, aside from the old man singing arabic love ballads and the fact that we had olives as a bar snack. anyways, the next day we got ourselves into morocco mode and had some fun adventuring in casa and marrakesh. did the sights, met some interesting people and made sure that they both left with their bellies full of yummy moroccan food and tea.

i was very sad to say good bye to the both of them, even felt home sick for a bit. but don't worry, i'm back in gear and happy to be settled into my marrakeshi routine.

moral of this post is that morocco is a stellar vacation destination, and i can be an awesome guide. promise. come!

passport blues

as many of you known i've been going through a bit of a rough time lately. through some dumb moves on my part i had my bag stolen. left it on a chair while dancing at a night club with some tourists i had just met. in it was: my passport, my wallet, my camera, my phone, my house keys, and last and barely least my favorite black hoodie. pretty much everything important in my life.

and of course it was like the one weekend that both of my roommates and all of my american friends were out of town- fulbright conference/ american school spring break.

pretty shitty situation all around. i'll spare you the details of the epic 24 hours that followed but will say that they included sleeping at a stranger's house, hours in the stupid police station, some public tears, and a very crazy maura.

in retrospect, now that i have things somewhat under control, i can appreciate that some parts of the experience were actually sort of funny. well, ridiculous anyhow. most notably was the morning when i woke up on a couch in the same room as a 90 year old man.

i had met his son, racheed at the police station in the middle of the night the evening before- where i went when i realized i had no way to get into my apartment and the hotel of my new friends would no let me stay without a passport or any id. anyways, racheed had let me sleep at his father's house and that is where i woke up. very confused.

i was stifled under about 10 blankets because he had kept piling them on top of me in an attempt to be hospitable. i should preface any more talk about racheed by saying that he is pretty crazy in a sort of endearing way, and had also spent the night drinking beers instead of sleeping because he was "so very very worried." so yeah, after being shaken awake after about 3 hours of sleep, i battled through the blankets and found racheed and his 90 year old father hovering over me like i was a baby bird coming out of a shell or some sort of strange specimen they had just discovered. after orienting myself a bit i noticed that they had like 3 clocks in the room all saying different times.

me: "racheed, what time is it?"
racheed: "can't you see? its 11:30."
me: "ok. why does that clock say its 7:15?"
racheed (looking at the clock): "yes ok, its 7:15 then. really, does it matter?"

after a moment of thought i decided that all things considered, no it didn't really matter.

clearly i wasn't in the mood for small talk or hanging around. now that i was awake i was pretty desperate to try and get in my apartment and go to the police to get things figured out. racheed however had a very different plan in mind. first he insisted that i take breakfast with his father. fair enough, they had put me up for the night, it was the least i could do.

his father is a very round man with spikey white hair and at this point is wearing a tad-too-small sweat suit. and he sort of has a old man baby face if you can imagine. as racheed said himself, "yes, baba is 90. i know you probably can't believe it because his face is so pretty. baba! your face is so pretty!"

this sort of precious man's breakfasting position of choice seems to be a queen-like lounge across the couch, head pearched on one hand. he popped olives and figs in his mouth and sort of stared at me while i drank the coffee i was given. meanwhile racheed is pacing around the room and rambling on about god knows what.

after finally convincing him that no, i did not want to meet or marry his nephew, nor did i want to have tea with the neighbors, nor did i want to go to his sister's house, or to see where he worked racheed took me home. the rest of the battle is somewhat boring, but nonetheless frusterating. including some long long hours at the police station, a battle with a drunk racheed, and some wonderful neighborhood cooperation to get me back into my apartment. but do not worry, i am safe and unharmed and little by little things are getting worked out. right now i'm in casablanca waiting for the consulate to open so i can get the passport figured out.

and don't worry, i've also been scolded for my trusting, forgetful ways. the moroccan response in general has been sort of refreshing if blunt. most of the people i have told have said something to the effect of, "yes, there are theifs. but really it's your fault. why would you leave your things like that?" fair enough. lesson learned.

lost in translation

today a student of mine wanted to teach me a moroccan proverb. we were doing a lesson on vegetables. so she told me with wide eyes and a genuine smile, "in morocco we say that life is like an onion. you peel away the layers and at the end it's still bitter and makes you cry." i sort of looked at her blankly, not really sure how to react. you try and decipher that into something that's not totally depressing.

ha, and also today i was greeting a woman who apparently likes to do two kisses on each cheek sometimes instead of one. i had no idea this was like something that happened, so i turned and ended up kissing her on the lips! i of course turned red and she pinched my cheek and patted my head like i was a five-year-old and laughed sort of with me, but more at me.

misunderstandings all around. keeps things interesting.

i've been trying to learn arabic. sort of. i'm not in a class so my learning has been totally haphazard and random. i've got the bare-bone basics down, and the rest is just through interaction. the guy who works at the kiosk across the street has been eagerly trying to get me to increase my vocab. now he only lets me tell him what i want in arabic- so i know the words for toilet paper, milk, and ground coffee. not really a hot conversation topics.

anyways, i'm continuing to enjoy my time here. and as you may have seen from my last post, it looks like i'll be staying next year. maura ewing, fourth grade teacher. i haven't totally committed to the school yet. but in my mind i'm pretty set on staying. huzzah!

-maura-

huzzah!

i'm staying

busy bee

recently i've been working on my old lady skills.

first of course is the rustic sort of culinary projects i've told you about. i can't quite decide if i feel like a gramma, a crunchy hippie or some sort of pioneer woman when i soak my chickpeas over night, strain them for stones and bugs, sort them for bad ones, take off the peels and theeeeen add them into soup (complete with rachel's awesome home-made veggie broth). maybe none of the above. maybe just someone without a whole lot of money but pleanty of time on her hands. and besides, food tastes way better when you've spent that much time with it (:

i've also been mastering the fine old lady art of embroidery. i've been exchanging english lessons with this wonderful woman, hajiba, for moroccan style embroidery ones. i use the term mastering loosly... dabbling might be a better word. every wednesday i go and spend a few hours with her in her workshop and she guides me through the impossibly intricate patterning. she has a few other students also- three moroccan girls. the workshop space also serves as a gossip circle for the four women. the language barrier prevents me from understanding most of the good stuff, but now i have a good goal for learning arabic...

my days have been filling up nicely lately. i've got some new tutoring clients and i've just started volunteering at this pretty awesome woman's empowerment association in town. i'm teaching both the staff and a group of young girls english lessons. i'm especially excited to be working with the girls- they are all girls who have stopped school and are at risk of becoming house servents- this association is working with them to get them back in school and also does vocational training. pretty awesome place. i'm really happy to be able to do something that feels useful there, and to have students who aren't totally spoiled rich kids.

yes, yes, all of this recent activity has severely cut down in my aimless wandering and exploring time. i think i'm pretty ok with that.

ok, thats all. hope you're all staying warm.

maura

address

i finally figured out my mailing address:

56 Derb El Hammam
Riad Laarouss
40000
Marrakesh, Morocco

if you're inspired to send snail mail i promise to be an awesome pen-pal.

life here continues to treat me well. my roomate, rachel, and i have gotten quite into cooking delicious dinners lately. it's a fun challenge to find stuff in the market and figure out what to do with it. though morocco is not-so-vegeterian-friendly in general, there are tons and tons of wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables all over the place literally for pennies a pound. so, with a little experimentation with mystery vegetables and spices and some help from the internet we've done pretty well for ourselves. we've also had lot's of fun inviting people over for dinner partyish gatherings. i really love the moroccan sense of hospitality- it's totally normal to invite people for dinner even if you've just met. we've had some of the most interesting people both moroccan and foreign and off all ages over to our little abode. the most notable was this british artist who we met in a cafe. he had lots of crazy stories about his youth as a struggling starving artist, but made it clear those days were behind him. so, we of course googled him the next day and he's totally famous! he was in all these british journals as like an in vougue celeberity artist. and to think, he was eating lentils with us in our tiny kitchen. next time he comes back we're all going to have a meal in his fancy pants riad he's recently bought in central marrakesh. crazy world.

so, i am seriously considering staying for another year. all of the teachers at the american high school are deciding whether or not they want to come back in the fall, which means that several positoins are opening. i could probably get one seeing as i'm here already and know some people who are working there. i really am happy here, but am also sort of petrified of missing some sort of boat back in the us if you know what i mean. the decision has been plaguing my thoughts recently... i think i'm waiting for some sort of religiousish sign or something (coming from a borderline atheist). anyhow, any input or words of wisdom would be much appreciated at this point.

i miss you all. do keep me posted on what is happening over there.

maura

spring is in the air

hello,

sorry i've been so bad at keeping this up, as you probably know i'm not really a blogger at heart... anyhow, life in morocco continues to treat me well. it's starting to really feel like summer here, the saharra sun has definitely put some renewed life into the city. the streets are buzzing even more than usual and everyone seems to be in extra good spirits. ha, yesterday the guy who i buy oranges from told me that if i stayed in morocco i would get some color in my skin 'ench'allah' ['if god wills it', or in this case more like 'i hope to god'].

let's see, what is new... well, last weekend i spent a couple of days in the atlas mountains visiting my roomate, jordan, in the village where he is researching. beeeautiful! it felt so good just to get out of the city and breath some fresh air, and the atlas really are breath taking. the village itself was really amazing as well. it was wonderful to have jordan as a sort of tour guide, he's been living there off and on throughout the year and really has done a great job of immersing in the community. we spent the first day pretty much going from house to house drinking tea and eating cookies, soup etc, talking about the weather and catching up on gossip. well, jordan did all of the catching up- i myself had no idea what was going on because everyone was speaking berber. but jordan did some good translating so i caught the juicy parts. the hospitality in the community was really amazing, it seemed like every time we left one door someone would come along and invite us into their house- and it was almost impossible to tell who lived where because everyone was in everyone else's house. oh! and i met jordan's new baby goat. don't worry, he's a vegeterian, the goat is purely for bragging purposes when he's talking with the other men. but he was so cute i almost wanted to bring him back to marrakesh with me... also of note, i went on a hike with a boy, mohammed, who looked like he was about 10, and got absolutely burned. not only was he like half my height, but he was wearing plastic sandals and yet still hiked me into the ground. he was jumping from rock to rock and laughing as i was huffing and puffing behind. i think i was border-line crippled yesterday i was so sore, but the view at the top was totally worth it!

so yeah, i really enjoyed my time there. hopefully i'll get to return for a longer stay... there is some talk of exchanging english lessons for room and board, so that is possibly my plan for the summer... we shall see. speaking of bartering, after i leave this internet cafe i'm going to talk with a woman about exchanging english lessons for morrocan style embroidery ones. sweet deal, huh? i'll let you know how it goes.

ok, i have to get going. hope things are going well on the other side of the ocean.

best,
maura

new place

hello hello

i spent the majority of the day yesterday with my two roomates moving into our new place... i thought moving in the us was a pain. omigod. we were only moving like a 20 minute walk from rachel's old place, but somehow it took all day. luckily we decided to hire a man-drawn cart to take us through the city with all our stuff. i guess its like the moroccan u-haul. so we totally loaded the cart with all of our suitcases, back packs, boxes etc. and we all sort of caravaned through the crowded, windy, pot-holed filled cobble stone streets. and it was raining to top it all off. that poor man. we almost had an accident because we couldn't quite squeeze past a donkey cart at one point. it was a pretty hilarious scene.

but the new place is really great. its much smaller, but feels more like home already. it's been fun trying to find household items in the markets- today i'm going to hunt for a spice rack and spice containers (spices in market are all in bulk, so right now all of ours are wrapped in paper or in little bags). the neighborhood is really great too, it's much farther into the heart of the old city, so it's much more 'moroccan' feeling. though its also much harder to find, which mixed with my ewing sense of direction has lead to lots of wandering. to be perfectly honest i'm in the new city right now and i have no idea how to get home...

last night we had our first house dinner. jordan's moroccan fiancee (!), nadira, was visiting from casablanca. she is a pretty amazing cook so we all helped her make a wonderful moroccan feast of carrot tagine, eggplant salad and sauteed zucchini. delicious. we all ate family style around our makeshift dining room table and then spent some time rubbing our bellies. can't complain.

oh, the one thing about living in such a residental area is that there are many many kids running around. generally that would be a nice thing, but it just so happens that we are in the middle of a month long holiday where kids are given drums and allowed to light fires. i'm not sure who thought it would be a good idea to combine children with drums and fire, but i disagree. from what i gather the drums are pretty much to see who can play the loudest for the longest. and the fires are for the older boys to jump over, that part is pretty cool to watch actually- though it yanks any maternal strings i have in my body.

ok, no more rambling. i miss you all.

maura

words of wisdom

today i took a cab ride and the cab driver told me, "i love americans... but your president, he is just so simple in the head." hahaha

i love marrakesh. i feel like it's an adventure every time i leave the door. my roomate, rachel, is like the best person to know in the world- she's been introducing me to people and showing me around quite a bit. and she's already hooked me up with a couple of tutoring clients. tutoring pays quite well- if i get a couple more i should be fine with money and still have pleanty of time for adventuring! shes doing a really interesting fulbright research scholarship dealing with woman's literacy. my other roomate, jordan, is doing his fulbright research in a village in the atlas mountains so he is only in the city for a few days at a time. sometime soon i think i'll join him for one of his village stays- he says its a really beautiful place. oh! we found a new apt. well, rachel did. it's really cute and is in a nice neighborhood in the 'old city.' theoretically its a one bedroom but there is enough common space that the three of us will be quite comfortable. and there is lots of couch space for visitors...

ok, thats all. i think i'm going to go bike shopping now. there are lots of very very vintage bike shops in the market. i think it will be a good way to scoot scoot around the city and do some exploring with a little more ease.

-Maura

let's get to the meat of it

hello hello hello family and friends, friends and family.

as promised i will keep up this handy blog. thank you to matt for setting this up.

sooo... i am now in casablanca getting ready to hop on a train back to my new home city, marrakesh (!). week #1 in morocco has consisted of a whirlwind tour of morocco with my dear friend lindsay (who i sadly said goodbye to last night). the week was all sort of a blur, felt like we were spinning spinning spinning and now i'm plopped down into 'real life.' yes, the reality is setting in.

but oh, our tour was grand. full of lots of laughter, long bus rides and random adventure. i definitely impressed [amused] many moroccans with my stellar [horribly broken] arabic skills. some key phrases include, "hello how are you?" "how much for that?" and "i think you must be crazy in the head." luckily my french is coming back with a little more ease...

speaking of poor communication lindsay and i had one young suitor on the street who tried to woo us by yelling "hello scrawny! yes you scrawny come speak with me!" poor guy, a compliment completely lost in translation. you can imagine the looks he got from us.

oh! in rabat we visited my old home stay family. such loving people, we were both greeted with lots of kisses and warm welcomes. and they prepared a cous cous feast for us- complete with big hunks of red meat. i didn't have the heart to tell them again that i didn't eat meat so i decided to suck it up and down the pieces that were put in front of me. and i must say, it was good. i mean bone-sucking, finger-licking good. this may be a new chapter in the life of maura.

ok, thats all for now. i have to go catch my train.

if you are reading this it probably means i miss you dearly. keep in touch! all of you!

maura