Some Morocco Pictures

Our hotel in Marrakesh. Most of the hotels, even the budget ones like ours, are based on a "riad" model -- an old house with a central courtyard and several stories of surrounding rooms that have windows opening onto the courtyard. Some of these are quite swank, but as I said, ours was budget, but still quite nice.


The Jama Al-Fna, the main square in the old medieval section of Marrakesh. By day, filled to the brim with tourists, but at night full of locals doing everything from acrobatics to snake charming. tourists can watch, for a price.


The Katoubia Mosque in Marrakesh boasts what is supposedly the finest minaret in all of North Africa. This is it at night (I'm quite proud of this picture, actually).


This is part of the old medieval quarter of Fez (Fez Al-Bali) from the ruins of some old tombs atop a hill overlooking the city. You can see partof the wall that surrounds the old quarters as well as two large, green roofed mosques. Oh, and tons of buildings.

Inside the best preserved Madrasa (in Moroccan Arabic, apparently, "medersa") in Fez.

A street in Fez El-Jadide ("New Fez") the second medieval quarter in Fez.

The view from our hotel room in Fez, at about two in the morning when I as being kept awake by the boisterous food seller right below our window.

Tea and teapot...we drank a lot of tea.


The old city gate closest to our hotel in Fez.

Bill's Morocco Photos

There will be a flurry of pictures posted to the blog in the coming days, from Morocco and from our trip to Siwa Oasis this past weekend (more on that later). Maybe we'll even post some Tanzania or Jordan photos too. Anyway, here are some of my pictures from Morocco.

An arch in Marrakesh, with the typical Moroccan horseshoe shape.

A mosque in the southern part of the old medina in Marrakesh

Stucco carving in a mausoleum in Marrakesh

A snake charmer in the Gamaa al-Fna in Marrakesh

Claire with a view of the hills surrounding Fez

The Fez tanneries

Madersa es-Sahrija in Fez

An avenue in the Ville Nouvelle in Fez


An alley with a view of a minaret in Fez

The enormous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, with Claire

Trip to Morocco

We spent the week before last, our spring break from our program, on a week-long trip to Morocco. Short summary: it was wonderful--relaxing, great weather, easy logistics, lots of good food, and lots of walking around interesting cities. Slightly longer summary: the following.

We flew from Cairo to Casablanca on Thursday night, getting in close to midnight local time. After waiting a ridiculously long time for our bags and in line at customs, we finally got a cab to our hotel in downtown Casablanca, only to discover that they had not honored our reservation and had no rooms available. Fortunately, a nice (but, not so fortunately, somewhat more expensive) hotel down the street had a comfortable room. This scenario of not having our advance hotel reservations kept but then quickly finding an acceptable room elsewhere was actually repeated in each city we visited in Morocco. Whatever, it all worked out. In any event, there really isn't much to see in Casablanca, and when we got up on Friday morning, it was raining, so we just went straight from the hotel to the train station to get to Marrakesh, where we arrived just before noon.

The city of Marrakesh, like Fes, is sharply divided in two parts. The "Old City" was first built sometime in the Middle Ages, and consists of a beehive of small streets and alleyways (narrow enough that cars are not allowed) full of small shops for both tourists and locals, all surrounded by a defensive wall. The "New City" is what the French built in the mid-twentieth century in order to rule Morocco as the colonial power in the country, and it looks like what you would expect--like Europe (wide avenues, fancy hotels, office buildings, cafes, etc...). The great thing about this split is that it kept the old city from being destroyed or badly damaged. As you can imagine, we spent most of our time in the old city, although we did spend some time walking in the new city (it's Morocco too, even if it doesn't look "exotic" or anything.")
Things we saw included: the Koutubbia Mosque, whose stocky tower of a minaret (height to weight ratio of 5:1) is now typical of Moroccan architecture, the well-kept public gardens around that mosque, a mostly ruined royal palace, a beautifully decorated ministerial villa, and some smaller very chic gardens now owned by Yves St. Laurent (a well-known French fashion designer). Mostly, however, we wondered through the alleys of the old city, and hung out in a huge open square (Gamaa el Fna, or Assembly of the Dead), which by day is full of acrobats, snake-charmers, and Berber musicians performing for the benefit of tourists, but by night is full of similar performers, as well as dozens of food carts, catering mainly to local Marrakeshis.

Overall, Marrakesh was quite nice, but lots of the old city feels like the Khan al-Khalili bazaar in Cairo--fun and exciting, but clearly the way it is because it is geared towards tourists. Fes, where we were from midday Monday until Friday morning, felt less touristy and more like a real lived-in city. There are fewer tourist tchochky shops and more Moroccans walking around. We also like that there were more beautifully tiled and carved mosques, madrassas, and gates to see. Also, unlike Marrakesh, Fes is built in a valley, which means it has some hills around it that we climbed and were able to get a great view of the whole old city. As in Marrakesh, we spent most of our time just wondering around the labyrinth of alleyways (getting lost several times), just exploring. The other interesting thing we saw in Fes were the tanneries, a city-block-sized set of huge cauldrons used to treat leather. It's quite a sight (and a smell), and apparently it has been operating in largely the same manner since the 1400s.

The last thing we saw in Morocco before we left on Friday was the enormous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca. Finished only about 15 years ago, the mosque is absolutely massive and quite beautiful. Fun factoids: it's 200m tall minaret has a laser on the top which points towards Mecca, and the floor of the mosque is glass, allowing worshipers to see the Atlantic Ocean underneath them.

All in all, it was a great trip. Also, if you ever have a chance, eat some Moroccan food. Tagine (a kind of meat or vegetable stew cooked in a clay pot), great couscous, excellent bread, and the ubiquitous mint tea were some of the highlights.

Well, we are off to Siwa Oasis this weekend for our last sight-seeing trip in Egypt. Claire promises to post some pictures from Morocco when we get back.

Religion and Weather

In studying Arabic, one of the things you learn pretty early on is that the language contains a lot of very frequently used everyday phrases and expressions that come from religion. For example, one of Egyptians' favorite phrases is, hamdu lileh, or thanks be to God, which is said in huge number of contexts. How are you today? hamdu lileh. The weather is nice today, hamdu lileh. Some problem has been worked out, hamdu lileh. I feel tired/sick today, hamdu lileh. Really, you can insert this phrase after just about anything, good or bad. Another really common phrase is in sha allah, or if God wills. This phrase is included in just about any statement about the future. Hey, cabbie, can you take me downtown for 10 pounds? in sha allah. See you later, in sha allah. The homework for tonight is [whatever], in sha allah. Claire and I have joked that these two phrases combined with a couple of the myriad Arabic expressions for "yeah" and "ok", could form an entire 30 second conversation between two Egyptians.

In addition to these, there are tons of other specific expressions for specific circumstances. There are designated phrases to say (and a designated response) when someone sneezes, when you congratulate someone, when someone leaves, when someone gets back from a trip, even when someone gets a new haircut or gets out of the shower. Of course, Americans have our stock phrases we say in lots of these situations, but in Arabic, almost all of them reference God. The standard form is something like "[some adjective]." Response: "May God make you [that adjective]." The idea seems to be one of God repaying you for the compliments you give to others, or something like that.

This kind of stuff, combined with the presence of a mosque around every corner and the calls to prayer broadcast loudly from every one of them five times a day, make religion a very public presence in Egyptian society. I even forgot to mention all the women who veil and all the men who have prayer bruises--small callouses on their foreheads that come from pressing their heads to the floor when they prostrate while praying. Anyway, all of this makes for interesting thinking about American society, which is very religious for a developed country and has lots of public and everyday manifestations of that religiosity, but not on the scale or of the kind that I see here. I have to say that, as a religious person, I actually kind of like a some of these public expressions of religion, even though it's not my religion. (Some of them, though, like women wearing the niqab, a kind of veil that covers the entire face except for the eyes, do make me quite uncomfortable.) Of course, I think recognition of religious pluralism is an incredibly important thing, and I don't at all want U.S. society to look more like Egypt in this regard. Personally, though, I find the calls to prayer and the conversational invocations of God kind of nice.

In other news, in the last three days, the weather seems to have taken an abrupt turn towards spring. In the span of about 72 hours, it has gone from coat-weather to short-sleeves-weather. Also, the sand-storms are supposed to be coming in the next few weeks. We'll let you know what that's like.

Race

So Claire kind of stole my thunder by mentioning the race I ran last weekend, so...yeah, I ran a race last weekend! A couple of our friends here are running/fitness freaks, and they invited me to come down to Luxor with them to run in the Luxor marathon. (Just to give you a taste, a few of them ran a 100 km relay race back in November--5 people to a team, each running 20 km. But one friend, Curtis, was his own team--he ran all 100 km himself!) Needless to say, since I had never run more than about 4 or 5 miles at a time in my entire life, I wasn't really ready to run a full marathon, so I can the 12.3 km "Ramses Run," which is about a quarter of a marathon. The whole experience was a lot of fun. The course was beautiful, starting and ending at Hatshepsut's Temple on the West Bank of the Nile, winding through a couple small villages and a lot of banana and sugarcane fields. I managed to make my target time of 1 hour, 5 minutes almost exactly--not bad for a whole 3 weeks of training (although I have been running regularly, though not hard, for several months now).

One of the best parts of the experience, though, was being a part of this group of people who are really, really excited about distance running. Our group of people (there were seven of us who went down together) talked about running and training constantly, and we met and talked with lots of people who run marathons on a pretty regular basis. All in all, it was enough to make me feel excited about running too. I really enjoyed running the race itself, and now a friend and I are thinking about doing a half marathon (roughly 21 km) in Jerusalem at the end of March. I'll start training in the next couple of days and see how it goes for a week or two before making a decision, but we'll probably end up doing it. I've got the time and the will to do it now, so why not?

By the way, we promise to post some Tanzania pictures at some point...

Friday Mornings Around Our house

So, I don't know if I have written about this before, but as it is going on right now, I feel like talking about it. Friday mornings/early afternoons (remember that Friday is our Saturday) around our apartment are much like those of any young couple or family. We get up, we make a yummy weekend type breakfast of eggs or pancakes or both, we do our copious amounts of laundry, read the internet news, and listen to the extremely loud and extremely fiery preaching being blasted at full volume from the Mosque next door - oh wait, I guess that's unique.

There is a little hole-in-the-wall mosque two buildings down from our apartment building which ,I think, tries to make up for the fact it is really just a substitute for an actual mosque -- frequented by people who work around our neighborhood or who are not fortunate enough to be able to get to a full fledged free-standing mosque with an actual preacher -- by blasting the Friday sermon so loud as to be heard all around the island (I'm pretty sure this is just a sermon broadcast from somewhere else). As I am not yet advanced enough to understand classical Arabic being shouted and sent through a loudspeaker system, I have no idea what he is says, but it sure as heck sounds like "death to the infidels." I defy any pentecostal preacher to produce a more terrifying rant than this guy. It goes on for about 45 minutes and is simply inescapable. It is a very strange contrast to the beautiful calls to prayer that generally structure the aural landscape around our neighborhood.

The other mystery of Fridays for me is this bizarre fishy smell that permeates the air around our building every Friday morning. By late afternoon it's gone, and I never smell it any other day of the week. I refuse to open any windows while it's out there, because it takes forever to air out the apartment once it's gotten in. Very strange.

In a completely unrelated note, as Bill has not yet gotten around to writing a post about it, I feel compelled to tell everyone that last weekend he ran in is first organized race down in Luxor. He went with a small group of people, mostly from the higher levels of our program , and seems to have a had a great time. The race had three divisions, a 12k, a half marathon, and a marathon. Bill ran in the 12k and did quite well, making his target time. He is now thinking about running a half marathon in Jerusalem at the end of March. All this from the same guy who told me this time last year that he just didn't see the appeal in running :-) Anywho, I'm quite proud of him and rather jealous that I can't run myself.

Until next time...

First Week Back at School

...But before that, an aside: when I think of line-dried clothes my mind tends to conjure up images from Downey commercials of white sheets blowing in the country air and little kids and teddy bears inhaling the scent of freshness and cleanliness. Well, this may in fact be what it is like if you are able to line-dry your clothes in "fresh country air," but when you dry them in Cairo air they smell like Cairo -- that is to say, bad. All of our clothes have this acrid smoky smell to them and always come off the line with a slight brown tinge to them. It may not be environmentally friendly, but I miss my drier.

...Now back to our regularly scheduled program. We finished our first week of classes, and while there was some amount of hectic class changing, we're finally settled in all of our classes. Our Fusat class (Fusat, I recently learned, is the Arabic work for elegant) is full of great people...it seems like they split the returning students into a "studious" and a "non-studious" class, so this means that there are pretty much no duds in our class...all very motivated people (Bill is, of course, still the best). The classes are pretty much the same as last semester, except this time we have a class called "media" which is basically a class for learning how to read the news paper and watch TV. We're learning how to say "Minister of defense and arms production," as well as how to understand the connotative meaning of words in the context of a news article. I really really like this class. In the US there's no way you would take a class like this until you were pretty far advanced in the language, so I feel like it's really something special, and very important, that ALI offers. Our grammar teacher is fine. She's not as amazing as our grammar teacher from last semester, who had an uncanny ability to make Arabic grammar seem easy and straightforward, but she seems to know her stuff. Our Vocab teach is absolutely amazing. She's probably in her early seventies, very short and round with copious amounts of eye makeup. She can't remember anyone's name, talks very loudly, and wants us to all come over to her house of breakfast, and afterwards she has lots of beds so we can sleep :-) She's a character, but she's also clearly very experienced and a good teacher.

Finding the right colloquial class was something of a challenge because our teacher from last semester, the wonderful and fabulous Sherifa, is not teaching this semester. She had wanted us to skip a level and so had put us in an intermediate class that she was supposed to teach, but then she got sick over the break and won't be teaching it after all. We went to the first class and it was just terrible - the teacher basically just read the book out loud - and so we spent a few frantic days trying to figure out the right class for us. In the end I think we found the perfect class. It's us and two other people who were at the top of their aameya class last term and who are really motivated, then two people who have had tons of fusat and so are picking up aameya very quickly. There are also two guys who I think should really be in a lower class, but the teacher does not seem inclined to slow the class down for them, so I'm not worried. The teacher, Abdel Fattah, is really great and we like him a lot. He's very upbeat and energetic, but very demanding and clearly expects a lot from us. He also encourages a lot of talking in the class and create an environment where even I don't feel too scared to try to talk (yes, I know I talk a lot in English, but in Arabic I get really nervous when I'm put on the spot and freeze up).

Anywho, all in all, pretty positive feeling after our first week. Also, it seems like everyone and their brother has moved to Zamalek this semester, making socializing much easier. Ok, now off to my massive amounts of grammar homework and smelly clothes :-)

Yes, We're Still Alive

So, at this point, probably no one is even bothering to check our poor neglected blog, but for those of you who are, our New Year's resolution (a month too late) is too get back on the blogging horse. That said, what have we been doing for the past two months? I'll give a brief summary but you can expect better posts to follow detailing the really exciting stuff...you know, like getting a plumber.

Our classes ended in the second week of December, and our long six week break began. The first couple of days were spent saying goodbye to friends who were headed back home and to pulling together the stuff for our trip to Tanzania. It was very weird being done with our first semester, but we were both feeling pretty burnt out at that point and looking forward to our trip. It felt like everyone pretty much left all at once and we had a few unsettling days of being once again in a city where we didn't know anyone. I felt that it actually was a very quick and sharp transition back to feeling like a purposeless outsider as opposed to a resident.

Finally we left for our trip to Tanzania. The short story is that is was absolutely amazing. If it weren't for the fortune I would spend in sunscreen I would move there tomorrow. We were there for two and half weeks, and though we did the basic tourist circuit, it was a really fulfilling trip. After the initial scare of arriving there to find that our bags were still in Cairo, and of finding out that we needed to buy tons of American dollars in order to be able to pay for anything, things went pretty smoothly (thanks to Bill's excellent planning). We had a three day safari in the northwestern part of the country, starting near Kilimanjaro. Then we got a bus to the Usembara Mountains in the northeast, where we spent Christmas at an absolutely amazing lodge. It was an old converted farm house nestled up in the mountains, from which you could take all sorts of treks or simply just lie around and enjoy the peace and quiet. Next it was back on the bus to Dar Es Salaam. We spent a day and a half in the city, which was more than enough, and then took a ferry to Zanzibar. We had two days in Stone Town, the old port town, and then had four beautiful days on a beach on the eastern side of the island (Bill even managed to get up for one of the beautiful sunrises!)

By the time we left I think we were both ready to be budget hotel/hostel hopping, but we both simply fell in love with the place. I hope that I will find some way to get back there for a long stretch of time. We had a day to recover and do laundry once we got back to Cairo and then the Perdues arrived. We had a great time showing them around Cairo, but the highlight of the visit was our Nile Cruise from Aswan to Luxor. despite getting sick halfway through (yeah, back in the country five days and sick all over again) the cruise was an amazing way to tour Egypt's Pharonic history (there's quite a lot of it). So, after six nights in the south we headed back up to Cairo for a few more days.

Immediately after the Perdues left Carly came! (for those of you connect to Bill rather than myself, Carly is one of my best friends from G'burg). We did some more Cairo sights and then took another trip down to Luxor. It was actually really nice to go down again because I had been feeling pretty shitty the first time and didn't really get to appreciate the city as much as I should. Oddly enough, in the seven days Carly was here, it rained three times!!! Talking to some people later it sounds like this was something of an anomaly in Egyptian weather patterns, which is just our luck! I think we managed to make the most of it though :-)

Now we have a few more days before classes start up again. We're excited about feeling like residents again and having a sense of purpose. The city can be hard to get a handle on when you don't have a specific goal. We're going to try to use the next couple of days to sort our pictures from the trips and to finally write some blog posts. Hope you'll continue to read!