Officially, the Spring 2015 Lewis & Clark Study Abroad Program to Morocco is over. We’ve turned in all of our papers and have gone our separate ways. As I write this, I am sitting in an apartment in Troyes, France, where I’ll be for the next nine days.
In the past five days, I’ve spent the night in five different places. Thursday night was the last night in Fez, and INLAC hosted a party for all of us and our host-families. Halima spent the evening trying to get me to dance with some of the women from the program, but she usually paired me with women who already had boyfriends or just are not interested in men. The music was nice, however, and I did get up and dance a little. That night, back at the apartment, I wrote Halima’s name in Arabic calligraphy, which I had been practicing for the past two months.
The next morning, I woke up a minute before my alarm went off. I could hear Halima making breakfast in the kitchen, so I decided to rise and take my shower quickly. For breakfast, Halima made harsha, a cornmeal-type bread that is dry and sticks to the roof of the mouth and teeth and in the throat. No matter how much tea you drink with it, it still dries your mouth to the point that you can hardly swallow.
Halima walked me to the street and waited until I got a taxi. I didn’t have far to go– all of the Lewis & Clark students were meeting at Bab Ziat, about a five minute drive from the apartment– so I got a taxi that already had someone sitting in the front seat. I threw my stuff in the back, and then Halima and I shook hands. “Shukran,” I said. “Shukran bzaaf.” “La shukran ala wajib,” she replied, and then the taxi driver told me to hurry up. I jumped in and waved at Halima from the back seat. In two months of living with her, that handshake was the only physical contact we had.
Our first stop as a group was Rabat, the Morocco’s capital. As we entered the city, our driver pointed out all of the sites to me. “This is the Royal Palace, that’s the National Bank.” As we got closer to our hotel, our van got cut off from the other bus by a stream of protestors in white smocks, chanting as they crossed the street. We waited in silence as we watched them pass. “They’re probably going to protest outside of parliament,” our driver said. “And of course, your hotel is across the street from parliament.”
He wasn’t kidding. As we pulled into our hotel, we could still here the chanting from the protestors. When Ryan and I reached our room, we opened the window and watched the protestors across the street. Sam and Daniela came to join us, and we all stood at the window, amazed. Later, we found out that it was a mixture of students and medical workers, protesting for more rights for nurses.
For a while, Ryan had been telling his new favorite story about his homestay. He was a little sick, and coughing in the night. His host-mother finally came and knocked on his door, and when he opened it, she had a plate of tea for him. “Drink this,” she told him. “It’ll warm you up. Why are you only sleeping in your underwear? No wonder your sick. Put some clothes on.” It was the same kind of gruff tenderness I had grown to know with Halima, and so it was a story that touched us both.
That night in Rabat, however, I learned what Ryan meant by “a little sick.” He coughed all night, and when he finally did fall asleep, he unconsciously groaned with the weight of the phlegm in his throat. The groaning would grow more insistent until he finally sat up and coughed out whatever was inside, then lay back down and coughed more.
The next day, we drove to Casablanca. We stayed at a hotel called Morocco House, and I would recommend it to any going to Casablanca. It is owned by the same people that owned the hotel we stayed at in Chefchauen, Hotel Madrid. If you’re sitting in the lobby for any period of time, the concierge will just bring you a cup of tea, just to make sure you feel welcome.
That night, we said our goodbyes. The whole group gathered together in the dining area and had our last discussion, led by Pauls. Sometimes, there are things said that are just too personal to put into a public blog like this, so all I will say is that I will distinctly remember each and every one of them.
The next day, Ryan, Lauren, and I traveled together to Paris. To get to the airport, we did the finest piece of negotiating I had ever done in Morocco. We told the taxi driver that we wanted to go to the train station, which he thought meant we were heading to Marrakech. When we told him we were going to the airport, he offered us 250 dirhams to take us there. We knew that train tickets there would be 40 dirhams each. “No,” we told him. “Train station. 10 dirhams.” “25.” “You’re a thief. 10.” “20.” “15.” That settled it, but as we started driving, he kept telling us that it would be so much easier to take us to the airport. Finally, we talked him into taking us there for 15o dirhams, a full hundred below what he originally asked. Plus, it would only be 5 dirhams each above what we would have paid anyways, a small price for ease, we figured.
In Paris, Ryan and I took the metro to the Juares station, and our hostel was right across the street. We shared a room on the seventh floor (with no elevator) with two other men, Benjamin, from Canada, and Abdel_____ from Algeria, who we were able to talk with in Arabic, which obviously made him happy. It made us feel a little better, too, though Benjamin seemed like he felt left out.
Above, I referred to our Algerian roommate at “Abdel______.” That’s because when he introduced himself, he said his name was Abdel. However, my first thought was that Abdel is not his full name, as it literally means “the Servant.” Abdel, however, is not an Arabic name; it is only the beginning, such as the names Abdelkebir, Abdelaziz, or Abdellah, which, respectively, mean “Servant of the Great,” “Servant of the Dear,” or, simply, “Servant of the God.” In Islam, there are a multitude of names for God, and so there are a multitude of names that begin with “Abdel” and then have one of God’s names, but there are none that are just “Abdel.” I wanted to ask, our Algerian roommate, then, what his full name was, but I never got around to it. To me, it seemed most likely that he thought his name was to hard for a westerner to pronounce, so he just went with Abdel for ease. I do wonder what his full name is, however, and I regret going downstairs to drink rather than asking him.
In Paris, the next day, Ryan and I wandered. We went from Juares to Notre Dame, which took us about an hour and a half, with a stop for breakfast along the way. Then, we walked along the Sienne until we were across from the Eiffel tower, and then had lunch. After, we made our way back to the hostel, which was holding our bags for us, and then we went to the train station. From there, we caught the train to Troyes, an hour and a half long train ride.
Now, here we are. Troyes is a town of about 120,000 people, with a small old town area. When we first decided to come here, Ryan and I wanted to come because of Chretien de Troyes, a Medieval author. When we were Freshman, we both took a class on Arthurian literature with Dr. Karen Gross; the connection is that Chretien de Troyes is the author who created Lancelot, a French character in a popular British myth. So, Troyes seemed to be a great way to make a full circle of our time in college.
We are staying in an apartment with a woman named Christine, about a twenty minute walk from the Old Town. Christine is a teacher at a school near Troyes, and spends her days there, so Ryan and I have a level of privacy in the room we are staying in. On the 28th, we’ll return to Paris, and then fly home to Portland. Until then, we plan to learn as much about Troyes as we can.
That’s all I have to report for now. The trip is done, but there is this one last leg of the journey before I return to the Rose City. Hopefully, nothing extremely crazy will happen in between then and now.
To Morocco, all I can say is; so long. Nshufek men b’ad, inshallah.