Summertime

1) It's 116° (47°) in my town today.  Just in case anyone was wondering.  I haven't bought a fan yet (and now it's too hot to walk to a store and buy one), and it's surprisingly not as terrible as you might think.  I even managed to stand over a stove and cook tortillas this afternoon and not die although, not gonna lie, I was really grateful it was a small batch.  (PC emailed a warning about the heatwave on Friday, which is nice of them, I guess, but I managed to freak myself out about the heat Friday evening, and worrying about the heat was a lot worse than the actual heat.)  That being said, I'm definitely not leaving my house before dusk and I slept on my roof in just my underwear and a tanktop last night.  (I've resigned myself to being caught in a state of undress on my roof by my neighbors.  It will be embarrassing, but more embarrassing for them than me, so there you go.)  Anyway, it's very hot, and the heat wave is suppose to last through next week.

2) I went over to my host family's house for Couscous Friday, and my host brother taught me card games.  My favorite was Xamstash (Fifteen), where we tried to make our cards add up to 15, although I'm a little worried by how much trouble he had with the very basic addition and subtraction.  I also taught my host niece to shoot a Nerf gun and how to make sound effects when you shoot a toy gun.  Zineb is two and she killed me and her aunt Layla very very dead.  It was super cute.

3) Zineb is left handed, and her mom is trying to train her to eat with her right hand (it's super rude to use your left hand to eat in Morocco), so I spent the entire meal holding Zineb's left hand so she couldn't use it.  Zineb seemed fine with it, but she kept patting my arm and my hand and my shoulder all meal, so now I need to wash mashed couscous out the sweater I was wearing.

4) My work has more or less dried up.  My students took their Bac exam (giant high school exit exam that determines if you graduate high school and what universities you can go to) two weeks ago and the rest of my students took their regular exams last week, and now that's it's summer and really hot, no one is coming to the Dar Shabab anymore.  My mudir asked me to finish my classes by July, so I'm pretty much done with work until sometime in mid-September.  Right now, I'm really enjoying the time off and the total lack of anything to do, but this is going to get very old by, say, August.

5) Regional meetings are on the coast next week.  I don't have to be there until Wednesday, but I thinking about leaving tomorrow because it's only 100° there, not 120° and it's not like I have anything going on in site.

Mabrouk! - My First Moroccan Wedding

Last week, a friend and fellow PCV who lives in the neighboring town married her Moroccan boyfriend. I told my host family that I was going to a wedding, and then suddenly everyone knew about it, because I’m a foreigner and therefore interesting to talk about, and yesterday at the Dar Shabab, while I waited for students, my mudir and some of his friends asked me about the wedding.

When they found out the bride was an American who married a Moroccan, they were excited.

"Would you marry a Moroccan?" they asked me.

"Eh, maybe? If I meet the right man."

"There's three men right here! You should marry Mustafa. He has a car!"

I laughed and said maybe and the conversation moved on. This is by far one of the least awkward marriage conversations I've had, since at least I knew all the guys in question and no one was particularly serious, although my mudir did tell a story about another PCV who married a Moroccan and then at the end of her service, they went back to America, which lead to a conversation about whether I could get someone a green card, which led to a lot of me waving my hands around and telling them that I really don't know the particulars about green cards and visas into the US, seeing as I don't need them, and no, I won't look up that information for you.

Still, much less awkward that the time my taxi driver spend the entire ride asking me to marry him.

Kelly's wedding was my first Moroccan wedding.  It only lasted a few hours, so it was more of a Moroccan wedding-lite, a fact for which I'm grateful since Moroccan weddings are intense and I'm glad I got a trial run before my first real one.  (Traditional Moroccan weddings start sometime in the afternoon with parade, and then the party last all night.  No seriously, all night, the bride's family is responsible for serving breakfast to all the guests the next morning while the couple has some, ahem, alone time.)

The wedding party was mostly Moroccans, but there were a couple of PCVs in attendance, and it was fun to see friends who live across the country.  There's no real religious component to a Moroccan wedding, and the couple didn't go to a mosque or stand before the Imam or any other Muslim equivalent of a Christian wedding.  Kelly and her new husband, Karim, just signed some paperwork in the his family's living room and then we danced and hung out for a while everyone took super posed pictures with the bride and groom.  We ate cake and roast chicken and chicken and prune tajine (in that order) before Kelly and Karim headed to Marrakesh for their honeymoon and the rest of the guests headed home.  Kelly's mom couldn't make it to Morocco for the wedding, but she watched the entire party via Skype and the PCVs made a point of sitting with the computer so we could translate what was happening.

Mabrouk to Kelly and Karim.


Kelly's wedding henna and her ring.  There was also henna on her feet.


Kelly finishing her makeup at the hair salon before the car ride to her wedding.


PCVs!  From l → r: Ally, me, Bethany and Carrie.  I'm the only one not in traditional Moroccan clothes because I found out about the wedding the day before I left for Spain and didn't have time to get a caftan once I got back.  Also, this is the first time I'd worn a tank top or my hair lose since getting to Morocco.  I had to pile clothes on before I could go back to my site.


Kelly and Karim signing their marriage paperwork (I suppose it's the marriage license).  I can't believe she's married.

Hell of a Welcome Home

 I’m pretty sure someone broke into my apartment today. 

I don’t think anything is missing – my camera, Kindle and both my passports are sitting on my living room table - but there are a pair of flip-flops in the doorway of my bedroom, and they are not my shoes.  I've never seen them before, and all of my shoes are present and accounted for, so there's no chance that I accidentally wore them home by mistake.

(My first thought when I saw the shoes was whoops, it's going to be really embarrassing to call the woman I just had tea with and tell her that I accidentally stole her husband's shoes, and then I saw the shoes I was wearing today, kicked aside by the front door, and it stopped being funny and started being creepy.)

It wouldn't be that hard to break into my apartment.  I keep my roof door open all the time, because it's really windy and I have to use giant jugs of water to prop the door open and it's a pain in the ass to move them, so I just don't shut my roof door if I'm in town.  Technically it's a private roof, but someone could climb over the wall between the public roof to my roof, assuming they could get into the building, although we keep the door to the building locked most of the time.

People don't obsessively lock doors here because in general things are pretty safe.  Also, it's very hot, and the one saving grace is that at least there's always a decent breeze.  It's not even like this is a cautionary tale.  Yes, someone was in my apartment, but they didn't take anything.  I even got a free pair of shoes out of the deal.  I'm just torn about what to do now.  Obviously, I'm going to start locking when I'm out, but I sleep with that door open.  Hell, I sleep ON my roof half the time, and now I feel a little unsafe and creeped out.

Under the Stars

A couple of days ago, I was lying in bed and realized that my walls were actually radiating heat.  It was late and I was so tired because the heat is making it hard for me to fall asleep.  It's only May and I knew it was just going to keep getting hotter and hotter and at 1:00 in the morning, that was a horrible depressing thought.  I got out of bed and wandered onto my balcony, and immediately felt better.  It was at least 15 degrees cooler outside, and the constant breeze made is feel even nicer.

Eff it, I thought.  I'm sleeping out here, potential awkwardness with my neighbors be damned.

I hauled a ponj from my living room to the corner of my balcony that is shaded from the morning sun, then stood in my (hot hot) bedroom and stared at my clothes options.  I had been sleeping in just a tank top and shorts, but I knew that wasn't going to cut it.  (My downstairs neighbors sleep on their roof, which is the same level as my balcony.  Technically, my balcony is private and separated by a wall, but the wall is low enough that I can see over onto my neighbors' roof.  And while yes, it's my balcony, my apartment and I can wear whatever I want, I want to avoid the horrible awkwardness of my super conservative neighbors seeing me sleeping in a tank-top.*  It was bad enough when the father accidentally groped me on the stairwell a few months ago.)  Luckily, I have a pair of light weight pajamas pants and I found a long-sleeve shirt hidden in a suitcase that was super thin and too loose to wear in public, but far and away more appropriate than a tank top.

The first night sleeping outside was a bit unnerved.  I have always rejected camping as a viable life-style choice and firmly believe that sleeping is an inside activity, so voluntarily sleeping outdoors is new for me.  Also, I was a little bit worried that a bird would poop on me, but, let's be honest, that's a viable worry in my apartment as well.  The call to prayer is much louder when I'm sleeping outside, and for the past few nights, I've woken up, disoriented, to the fajr at 4:30 in the morning, but I would rather be woken up by the adhan than the heat.  It was cool to be able to doze off looking at the Big Dipper above me and feeling the breeze waft over me.  And knowing that I would be able to sleep comfortably made getting through the days, when it's been hot enough to work up a sweat sitting still, bearable.

*I basically only wear Aladdin pants and a tank top around my house, and I've started keeping a shirt near the door so I can pull in on when someone knocks.  The other day, I was talking with my sitemate Mike on the phone when someone knocked on my door.

"Gimme a sec," I told Mike.  "Someone's at the door and I need to put on a shirt so I can answer it."

I dropped the phone on the table, thought about what I had just said, then grabbed my phone again.  "Wait.  I am wearing *a* shirt.  I meant put on *another* shirt so I can answer the door."

Hot Hot Hot

It’s gotten hot all of a sudden.  I swear, just a couple of weeks ago it was only in the high 70s/80s and I wanted a scarf at night, and then BAM! all of a sudden the week’s forecast looks like this. 

All week my students have been asking me if I think it’s hot.  I admit that yes, I’m a bit warm, usually while trying to shelter in the shade of the nearest wall, and they tell me no, THIS isn’t hot.  Wait until August.  THAT’S hot.  And then they laugh at me.

Assholes.

It’s amazing though, how fast the town has changed.  People don’t go outside during the day anymore.  Yesterday, I went to buy bread at 5:30 and the streets were almost completely deserted, but I can hear kids shouting and playing outside until midnight.  I’m spending a lot of time in my apartment because at least I can talk around in shorts and a tank top when I’m at home.  (It might be a million degrees outside, but I still have to wear a couple of layers to properly cover up.) Also, I keep having to turn my computer off in the middle of the day because I’m a little worried it might catch fire.

My neighbors have started sleeping on the roof (which led to a super awkward, scantily-clad late night encounter when I went to see why the lights in the hallway were on) and while I’m still sleeping in my apartment, I doubt I’ll last inside much longer.

(People back home keep asking me what I’m going to do about the heat this summer.  I tell them pray for death.  They think I’m joking.  I am not.)

The one plus to the hot weather is that all of a sudden cold bucket baths aren’t something I need to psych myself up for.  Despite never actually getting that cold outside, my apartment was a tiny little ice block all winter and there were days I would just shuffle around the house in my sleeping bag because it was too cold to face getting out.  I don’t have hot water (or a shower), so the odds of me getting naked long enough to actually wash my hair were non-existent, and I survived on by weekly trips to the hamam and just got really use to my hair being a grease slick.  And then my hair adjusted to only being washed once every week or so and turns out, all that crap about how your hair will adjust to less frequent washings is true, it just took a couple of really disgusting months for my hair to get with the program.

(True fact: I was searching through my emails for something and I found an email to a friend with the subject line So, I totally managed to bathe before it was two weeks!.  The entire first paragraph is about how my neighbors found me at the hamam and scrubbed my back for me.)

But now, thanks to the heat, all I have to do it stand outside for a few minutes, and a dumping a bucket of cold water on my head sounds pretty awesome.  Also, my pipes are exposed to the sun, so the water from my tap isn’t actually that cold anymore.  So yay, I might actually start bathing more than once a week.

(They said I’d learn things about myself in the Peace Corps.  I just didn’t realize it would be that I have no standards.)