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?