I've returned to the WWW

No internet on the weekends so here are the latest updates:

7 Feb 09
Moroccans don’t take hospitality lightly, and that’s definitely something I’m realizing more everyday. I showed up today at my host family’s house and they were nothing but gracious in true Moroccan fashion. Everything from bringing me tea to warm me up (the house is freezing!), to touring me around the neighborhood made me feel so welcome. Just a little clarification...Zakia was the woman I met on Friday, her sister is Hnia, and Hnia’s daughter is Jahin (she’s 22). Zakia is my “mom” here, but I just call her by her first name. Zakia picked me up from the hotel today in the pouring rain and because she lives in the medina and you can’t take a car to her house, we got to drag all of my stuff through the souk (market). It was definitely quite a sight and the entire time I was wishing I had brought a lot less. Zakia lives in a two-story house and I’ve got a small room to myself, with an armoire and a small bedside table squished in with two small beds that are a little narrower than twin beds. The bathroom’s kind of funny because you can tell there used to be a Turkish toilet in there and now it’s a Western, but the shower and the toilet are still in the same room. Now whenever you take a shower you’re facing the toilet and all the water runs down to a drain right near the base of the toilet. I’ve never seen a set-up like that, but she said it works fine…I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Zakia took me on a tour of the medina this afternoon and it was great to get a tour from someone who lives here and knows all the neighborhood gossip. It seemed like everywhere we turned someone was greeting her with a friendly “slamaa!” I did see one girl from my program that I knew and she seemed to be fitting in perfectly with the culture…she had already let her sister dress her up in the traditional djellaba (long robe) and hijab (headscarf). Zakia offered to lend me a djellaba, but I think I’ll hold off on that for a bit.
Oh, and for those of you who like irony…my first meal at my house was seafood (sardines to be more specific). I knew I should have said I was allergic.

8 Feb 09
So the Big Guy upstairs sure has a sense of humor…I was leaving for the hammam this morning with Jihan, but Zakia caught me before I left the house and insisted I wear one of her extra djellabas. I guess I jinxed myself with yesterday’s entry! For those of you who have no idea what I’m babbling about, a djellaba is a long robe worn by both men and women and it has a pointy hood. Some of them are actually very ornate and fashionable; the one I wore was a baby blue color with some decoration on the front and despite its simplicity, it was gorgeous. The hammam was a time-warp experience and I fully intend on making this a weekly tradition. These public baths can be found in the most unsuspecting corners of the medina alleyways, and the one we went to looked like nothing more than a whole in the wall. As soon as we paid the man outside, the entrance fee (<$1), we were transported to a whole different time period; one that made me draw parallels to the days of Roman baths when Caesar was emperor. After stripping down to just my underwear, I gave my bag and towel to the woman behind the “desk,” grabbed my newly purchased kiis (scrubbing mitt), took the bucket that Jihan handed me, and we made our way through a sequence of three dimly-lit connecting rooms, with large arching ceilings, each one warmer than the previous one. After arriving in the hottest room (think steam sauna), we filled our buckets from a large trough with hot water, adding cold water to make it bearable, and staked out our spot on the ground with our mat. I met two of Jihan’s friends there, Kanta and Hanna, who both spoke French and were patient enough to teach me enough etiquette to keep me from offending all the older women who kept staring at me, waiting for me to make a mistake. I can’t even describe to you how rooms so simple and basic could create such an ambiance of luxury. Only one side of each of the rooms had an old light fixture, and the effect was that the opposite side became a compilation of barely discernable shadows that hovered in the steam circulating throughout the hammam. Sitting there among women who were normally completely covered from head-to-toe, with only their eyes showing, I felt like I had entered a world that very few people know exists. We sat in the hottest room for about an hour and slathered a mixture of henna, argan oil, and something they kept calling “soap” all over our bodies. After rinsing it off with bowlfuls of water we took our kiis and scrubbed all of the dead skin off our bodies. I have never felt so clean in my entire life! We moved to the cooler rooms to wash our hair, and then dried off and changed back into our djellabas so we could make it in time for a traditional couscous lunch. Sunday at my house is a very relaxed day, so I didn’t do much for the rest of the day besides take a siesta, walk through the souk, and read Morocco by Marvine Howe for class tomorrow. It was the perfect way to start off what is bound to be a busy week!