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!
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