Thanksgiving and Aunt Diane's visit

This past weekend my Aunt Diane came to visit me. She did a tour around Morocco and went to all the famous cities like Marrakesh, Fes, and she visited the High Atlas Mountains before ending her trip in Rabat with me. This past Thursday was also Thanksgiving, which turned out really good despite our worries that we wouldn’t get a real Thanksgiving dinner.

My friends and I ended up going to the American Embassy in Rabat for Thanksgiving dinner, which turned out to be wonderful and delicious. Everything was imported from the United States, so it turned out really authentic and American and perfect. Down to the pecan and pumpkin pie. So that was amazing, and it made us all a little homesick sharing Thanksgiving stories.

The next day my Aunt Diane got to Rabat, so some of my friends and I went and found her at her hotel and took her out to a café. During the weekend we ended up doing a lot – we saw the mausoleum, some Roman ruins in Rabat, went to my favorite Syrian food restaurant, ate with my host family, saw the beach, went to some cafés, and just generally did a lot of walking around and catching up. It was so good seeing her and hearing about everyone at home. She was also the first person of any of my family or friends from home that I’ve seen the whole time I’ve been here. The combination of Thanksgiving, her visit, and us having only one month left here made me super homesick. But, nevertheless, it was awesome getting to be kind of a guide and getting to show her around Rabat.

So anyways, shoutout to Diane. It was so good to see you, and I’m glad you enjoyed your trip! Also, thank you SO MUCH for the peanut butter. I was eating it straight out of the jar this morning and nothing has ever tasted better.

Aid Kabir

The Aid Kabir, which literally means “big holiday” in Arabic, celebrates the story in the Koran where Allah tells Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ishmael as a test of his faith and his devotion. Ibrahim is willing to do this, but then at the last minute before the sacrifice Allah tells Ibrahim that he had passed the test and told Ibrahim to sacrifice a ram instead. So every year every Muslim family buys a ram and sacrifices it to celebrate this.

We had a lecture about Aid Kabir, where the lecturer told us that although a lot of people these days think that it’s barbaric to do the sacrifice but that it’s also a huge part of Muslim tradition and it’s a big deal for every family to get their own ram and do their own sacrifice. He also said that the Aid was thought of as a celebration of human life because it was symbolic of Ibrahim keeping his son and sacrificing the ram to Allah instead.

I just got back from Spain the night before the sacrifice, so it was especially shocking coming back from Western culture to see all this. The night before the sacrifice we all did henna. My host Mom covered her palms and soles of her feet in henna as well as designs on the sides of hands and feet like married woman are supposed to. My sister and I got small designs on the tops of our hands as unmarried women.

The morning of the sacrifice I didn’t really know what to expect so I was sort of hanging around with a book watching all the preparations. It felt like a holiday – everyone was bustling around and excited, but it felt really wrong, because I knew they were all bustling about in preparations to kill the ram that was on our terrace. I watched TV with my host Dad all morning that showed various celebrations going on at the palace. Then they showed the king’s sacrifice, which my host Mom got excited about and told me watch, but it seemed almost too businesslike and quick the way that they did it and not much like a sacrifice at all. All that happened was that they sprinkled some water on it quickly, said a prayer, then held it down and the king ceremonially slit its throat. Pretty soon after that my host Dad got out a huge knife and started sharpening it, and then my sister told me to get my camera and I was ushered up to the terrace. There were some neighbor boys helping out along with my host Mom and Dad and sister. I stood a ways away over in the corner. It all happened very quickly, and I didn’t watch the whole thing. It was sort of surreal to see an animal that big being killed though – I think I’ve only seen fish die, not a huge animal like a ram. Anyways, they did it exactly like the king had – they held it down, slit its throat, and let it bleed out. There was an incredible amount of blood. I was proud of myself for not fainting or doing anything embarrassing like running away or getting upset. I didn’t help butcher it or anything, though, like some of my friends did with their families. I kept sort of watching through my fingers like it was a scary movie. It was really disturbing to see it trying to run away even with its throat cut, and it was really disturbing when they started chopping the head completely off when its body was still alive. I took exactly one picture of all of this because I felt like I should at least sort of document it, so this is all I got:

After that I went downstairs while they did the neighbor’s ram and while they butchered the rams and got all the meat out and everything. I decided before all this that it would be extremely hypocritical to not want to see an animal die because I eat meat, so I’ve probably eaten a ton of animals in my lifetime. It was still strange seeing a ram die and knowing that I was going to be eating it for the next couple weeks. In America we’re so separated from the idea that meat comes from an actual animal. It’s really different meeting the animal you’re going to eat and seeing it go from alive to dead to you eating it.

That afternoon we ate the liver and the stomach, or so I was told. Here's my host fam grilling:

That was pretty much it. I went out with my friend that night and the substances on the street were pretty questionable. There were a lot of blood stains and in one corner there was a huge 10x10x10 foot pile of ram innards and carcasses. I remember that I had just finished talking about how disturbing it was to see all the innards and stuff on the streets, and I was wondering where they put all the extra stuff that they didn’t save to eat, and then I turned around and saw that huge pile, which was funny and perfect timing in a really sick way. Also, my friend, who is Moroccan, kept talking about how sore his arm was from cutting off ram heads all day, which I couldn’t take seriously. (A lot of the younger Moroccan men get paid to help families sacrifice their rams.) I didn’t even know how to have sympathy for someone being sore from that.

The next morning I woke up to my house looking like a butcher shop – my host Mom and sister were cutting up all the meat on the kitchen table and putting it in bags to freeze. The next couple weeks were funny in the sense that I always had to ask what part of the ram I was eating. They really use every part of the ram. One choice moment was when we had the usual couscous on Fridays, and there was a ram skull right in the middle of the couscous. That was the only time I ever lost my appetite from all the ram meat was watching my host Mom and sister go at the head in the couscous. They literally eat everything – the face, the eyes, and they suck the marrow out of the bones. They don’t eat the brain though.

So, that’s it. After the next couple weeks of nothing but ram meat (which just tastes like lamb) I have never appreciated normal things like chicken or noodles so much in my life. However, despite all the absurdities and semi-traumatizing incidents, I’m glad I got to see the Aid Kabir because it’s such a big part of culture here.

Espana

This is my first entry in about a month, apologies for that. After we got back from our trip around Morocco, life in Rabat was relatively uneventful. We got back into the swing of schoolwork and spending time with host families. We also spent a lot of time at the beach when we probably should have been studying – a group of us in the program are taking surf lessons, and we live right next to the beach, so it’s entirely too easy to skip studying to go swim. We’ve also made friends with all of our surf instructors and so we’ve been hanging out and going out with some of them. It’s been fun hanging out with native Moroccans because they know all the best places to go and it’s funny talking to them about Moroccan things that we don’t understand.

This past week was our semester break, so a group of six of us went up to Spain for eight days. We visited Seville, Cordoba, and Madrid. It was wonderful to get out of Morocco for a little while and get a taste of Western culture again. I can’t even express how happy I was to wear a dress above my knees and show my arms without getting strange looks from people on the street. It was fun blending in too – in Morocco I get a lot of stares and comments because I stand out as obviously European or American, but in Spain I could pass as Spanish as long as I didn’t talk. One morning I went for a walk by myself and it felt so nice to just walk without conspicuously standing out.

Unfortunately I don’t speak any Spanish, so on that front the trip was a little tough. It felt sort of disrespectful to them to not speak their language at all. Sometimes some Moroccan Arabic slipped out when I was saying basic things like hello and thank you, so that definitely got me some weird looks. A couple people in our group spoke some Spanish, so they could pretty much communicate anything we needed to figure out. I was surprised at how little English or French most Spaniards spoke. I guess I expected most Europeans to know a lot of languages because they’re so close to so many countries, but that wasn’t really the case.

Our trip started in Seville, which is a beautiful little city in southern Spain. It had such a quaint and fun atmosphere with lots of beautiful architecture and tons of tiny tapas bars and restaurants. It’s a big tourist destination, so we heard a ton of different languages on the streets. We stayed in hostels in all three cities, so we met some interesting people in each city. In Seville there were a lot of Americans, British, and French people staying there, so it was fun hearing everyone’s story. That particular hostel in Seville has a program where you can stay for free and work as part of the staff for a month. I talked to some of the Americans doing that and it seems like an awesome option for anyone looking to travel for prolonged periods of time cheaply. We spent Halloween there and the hostel hosted a little party for all the visitors in the hostel. Most Spaniards don’t dress up, but everyone at the hostel got really into it, so we had a lot of fun. (I dressed up as Courtney Love and my friend dressed up as Kurt Cobain.. it was the best we could do working from random things from our suitcases. I basically just teased my hair and put on sloppy lipstick and my friend wore a lot of flannel. Most people didn’t get it, but at least we tried.) We did a ton of walking around the city.. we saw the Cathedral and the Plaza de Espana, which were both beautiful. Our favorite things, however, were inexpensive grocery stores where we could trust the food to not give us food poisoning, and coffee to go in big American sized cups! (Coffee to go does not exist in Morocco – they will give you funny looks if you try to explain this concept to them. They also drink it in tiny glasses exclusively.) You don’t know how beautiful normal coffee is until you don’t have it for months.

Our second city was Cordoba, which was a little quieter than Seville and wasn’t as much of a tourist destination. It had really cute tiny streets with tons of shops and tapas restaurants. We did a lot of walking and exploring around the city, which has really interesting architecture. We saw a medieval castle that was built by one the Spanish kings to house other visiting kings. We saw a Catholic church that looked very Arabic, where the doors and art looked a lot like most mosques, but with a Greek style courtyard. There were also a lot of renaissance looking sculptures all over the old part of the city. The city was founded in the 7^th century, so was cool to see all the hundreds of years of different influences in one city sort of layered on each other.

Finally was Madrid! It was pretty cold and rainy there, which reminded me so much of fall in Boston and it made me a little homesick. The actual city itself reminded me a lot of New York, with crowded sidewalks and that sort of city feel. It felt so strange being back in a city after life in Morocco. Everyone looked really well dressed and stressed out basically. We all got back into the swing of city life very easily though – I didn’t know how much I missed walking on city streets until we were actually there. It was so fun getting dressed up and walking around the city with coffee (I will never take this for granted again.) While we were there we visited the gardens and the Prado, which were both wonderful. The gardens were huge and really peaceful and beautiful. We walked around there for a good amount of time. One of my friends described it as what Central Park wishes it could be. It reminded me a lot of Robert Frost poems, which is nerdy but that’s really all I could think about – it reminded me of all his descriptions of forests. The Prado was sooo cool. The art nerd in me loved that too. They have tons of Goya and a lot of other Spanish impressionists that I wasn’t that familiar with. They also have a ton of really famous Italian baroque.. I’m forgetting all the names of the artists now as I’m writing this, though. I spent three hours walking around and looking at all of it until my feet hurt and I was overwhelmed by all of it. They have so much Spanish, French, Italian, and Roman medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, impressionist, sculptures.. they have it all. (Not a lot of anything past the mid 1800s, though, so if you’re a fan of post impressionism or any modern it’s not the best place for that.) If you love art you have to go. I left there so happy and dazed from standing and looking at art for three hours I could barely even think. I think that may have been my favorite part of Spain overall. We met some funny characters in Madrid too. We were sharing a big hostel room with a bunch of Brazilian guys and a Lithuanian, so we went out with them one of the nights. We ended up in a huge two-story club dancing until six in the morning. That was probably our most authentic eurotrash moment.. we didn’t sleep that night at all, we just went straight back to the hostel, packed up, and then had to go straight to the airport to catch our flight back to Marrakesh, and then from there the train to Rabat. We got home exhausted and dirty and happy to be home. We got back the night before Aid Kabir, a very big Muslim holiday, which I think will be a theme of a new post.

All in all it was a really awesome trip. It was really nice to have a break from Arabic and Moroccan culture, and of course Spain itself was beautiful. It was really funny and weird coming back to find that it sort of felt like coming home to be coming back to Morocco and my host family. Some things about Morocco is so quirky and weird and annoying in so many ways, but it’s so fun and welcoming at the same time that you kind of have to love it.