Ramadan Nights: The cafe, the pool hall, the shebaab

Our second week brought with it the beginnings of many new friendships.
Raechel and I, deciding to be proactive, invited ourselves to coffee with our host brother and his friends. Mehdi was heading to the supermarket for some last-minute shopping before he returned to Tunisia the next morning for work, but he had his best childhood friend and neighbor, Saad, pick us up and drive us to Hay Riad, a flashy neighborhood of cafes jammed with Moroccan young people. Saad, an aspiring lawyer, has excellent English and we became fast friends. In fact, we had tea again after Mehdi left on Wednesday, and met some more of his own friends, Amin, another Mehdi, and Yaseen. We had a fantastic time learning "notas," or Moroccan jokes, having mint tea, and ending the night with Saad teaching me a Moroccan card game on the dashboard of the car as he was driving us home. Crazy Moroccan drivers.
We discovered the other side of young Moroccan night life when we met up with the hotel concierge (Zouhair) and his friend Hisham on Thursday night. They took us to a pool hall near the medina; an intimidating venue full of nothing but young men (young Moroccan women don't often go out at night) and dense smoke. We indulged in some grape and apple hookah and mint tea, and the guys invited us to Hisham's cousin's wedding in Casablanca! Stay tuned for that one; Moroccan weddings are rumored to be unbelievable.
The weekend found eight of us on a two-day, one-night spree to Asilah, a Spanish-influenced Moroccan beach town near Tangier. We found a ten dollar train and a hostel for under 20, and we were on our way. We arrived at the train station around 4 p.m., at the nearly deserted outskirts of the city with nary a taxi in sight. When efforts to find one proved futile, we flagged down a van that agreed to take us in to the city for ten dirham each. Despite the questionable ride, we arrived safe and sound at Christina's House, a lovely guest house that didn't feel like a hostel at all. We met Nabil, an employee of Christina's who took us all around the medina of Asilah and accompanied us to a delicious paella dinner in town. He then took Anna and I around the souk to gather some fruit and orange juice, and we went back to the hostel and enjoyed some homemade sangria on the beautiful rooftop. It felt so wonderful out in the air with the music from the Ramadan nightlife out in the street that we decided to forego our hot rooms and spend the night on the sofas set up on there on the roof. Yum!
The next day, we decided on a horse cart ride to the beach. When the carts arrived, they proved to be more of large wooden planks on wheels and covered with a blanket. We hopped on and away we went, on an epic hour-long journey to a beach that had earned the nickname "Paradise." Our driver (a.k.a. Radio Asilah) sang to us all the way there, including his personal favorite "I Am a Disco Dancer," which was in English but which none of us had ever heard of. We learned some Arabic tunes as well, and another local, Mustafa, joined in the singalong. The trip was slightly precarious, with our topsy-turvy cart reaching some uncomfortable speeds as we rambled along cliffs over the ocean. When we reached the beach, however, it was all well worth it; and the place lived up to its local title.
Despite it being Ramadan, the beach house was kind enough to whip us up a lunch of delicious (and extremely cheap) sole, calamari and sweet local melons. We spent hours in the sun and the water until it was time to head back in to town and catch our train home.
The horse cart ride home was even more perilous than the first, and our driver lost much of his control over the horse as we careened at death-defying speeds along car-filled roads. We bounced on and off the curve and had to detour off the road and in to the sand in order to finally slow down again, with all of us nearly falling off the cart at several points. We caused quite a scene, even the poor driver was unnerved, and each of us came close to a heart attack. However, we had only a half hour until our train was supposed to arrive, so we agreed to continue on in our little carts to the station.
Our caravan of horse carts arrived at the station with 5 minutes to spare, and a bewildered attendant ushered us quickly in to the station to buy our tickets. The train arrived and we ran around the front of it to board, which was nearly impossible as the train was already overfilled. We squeezed in anyway, much to the chagrin of the rest of passengers already packed like sardines and irritable from a day of fasting. We found a bit of standing room at long last, and held it despite being nearly in the laps of a group of men sitting to our right.
Ftour time was wonderful to witness on the train, as all the passengers broke the fast and shared with their fellow Muslims and even forced some dates and bread on us. However, the men with whom we shared breathing room began to invite us to get off the train with them at the next stop and things became slightly uncomfortable, so when seats opened up after an hour and a half of standing we gladly took them. We arrived finally, exhausted and sunburned, in Rabat, where we had some delicious ice cream cones and headed home to collapse in bed.
Sunday and a return to the real world of school and homework followed all too quickly!

Becoming a Siraj

When last we spoke, orientation had just begun along with a whirlwind of "first Moroccan experiences." However, the most important first was yet to come, as Wednesday we met and moved in with our Moroccan host families.
I (and my classmate Raechel Banks) were placed with a retired couple named Khalifa and Aziza Siraj, who live with their 12 year-old granddaughter Yasmine in the same neighborhood as our school. Yasmine is currently on vacation with her aunt in Barcelona, but makes her highly anticipated return this coming Wednesday. However, when we first arrived at our little apartment, there was no Yasmine but rather her uncle, 26 year-old Mehdi, a pilot for Tunisian Air. After a brief tour through the lovely home, we were shoved in to our bedroom and told to rest and unpack. Bewildered, Raechel and I began to explore. We found that the apartment was mostly Western in style, with the exception of the beautiful Moroccan design of the salon and TV room. My favorite part is the pretty little patio that extends out over the courtyard from our bedroom. A supercool Jonas brothers poster adorned the wall of our bedroom, proving that tweens are the same all around the world!
The family is quiet and fairly reserved, but we are slowly working toward longer and longer conversations with them and Mehdi. They speak no English, so my French is proving a vital assistant to our Arabic conversations. A major part of the Moroccan day is centered around the television, and we have watched such gems as a Mexican soap opera set in New York City dubbed in Arabic, a cowboys and indians series complete with silky button-down shirts and pink cowboy pants, and very gorey Moroccan horror film. From a combination of French and Arabic programs I have learned such useful terms/phrases as "dimples," "she is imprisoned because she has cocaine," and "money is the religion of the Zionists."We've also taken a trip to a Moroccan supermarket, spent a full 20 minutes sniffing menthol-scented tissues with our host grandpa, and learned to make delicious mint tea. I anticipate a highly valuable education in this household!
Ftour (the breaking of the Ramadan fast each day at sunset) has been incredible each day, with harira (traditional Ramadan soup), all kinds of bread, eggs, sweets, dates, figs and pastilles. In addition to the time we've spent at home, we've also done a great deal of exploring Rabat. Finding food during Ramadan is a challenge, as only hanouts (corner stores) and some fast food chains remain open. An even greater task, after acquiring said food, is to find a discreet place to eat it. The weather has remained woefully above 100 degrees each day, but taking a gulp of water in front of fasting Moroccans is not only rude, but just plain cruel. On one particular day we sought refuge on the steps of a synagogue to munch on our spoils, and we're quickly accosted by a woman who seems to be its guardian. I was the only member of the group who spoke French, and after telling us about how she is discriminated against as a Jew in Morocco and how her husband is deaf and mute (but still smokes a pack a day), she proceeded to claim two sandwiches, a bag of grapes and an entire pack of cigarettes as her reward for chatting with us. We Amideast students just make friends everywhere we go.
Lovely nights at the beach have continued, along with more meanderings around the Souk and Medina. We ran in to a new friend (the concierge from our hotel) on the pier one night, and he called us his family, invited us to Ftour at his house, and gave us each Arabic names (mine is Noor, meaning "light"). We explored the beautiful exotic gardens just outside of the city, I bought a leather bag for my schoolbooks at the Souk, and classes began bright and early Monday morning. All excitement aside, my favorite part of Moroccan life thus far remains falling asleep to the call to prayer that comes loud and clear through my window each night.