I don't need you or your brand-new Benz. |
1. Taxis
If you take enough Taxis in just about any country, you're bound to have some adventures. Back in Boston there are no shortage of interesting cab drivers (one guy offered me a Fireball to cure my sinus infection, another gave me a mid-ride cigarette). I have a complicated relationship with taxis because my mother is deathly afraid of them, and conditioned me to be afraid of them as a child, until I grew up and went to college in Boston and realized that taking the Orange line (or, god forbid, waiting for the Green line) is scarier than any cab ride. But I digress.
Here in Marrakech, Jess v. 2 and I take cabs a couple times per day. There is no other public transportation as far as I can tell (although some donkey-hauled fruit carts seem to be willing to pick up passengers). The cabs are dirt cheap here (starting fare is 1.50 durhams, which is, like 20 cents). Some of the cab drivers are really nice; they let me practice my perversely bad Arabic on them. Some of the cab drivers are friendly with subtle undertones of creep ("Are you sisters?" one guy asked us. No. "Are you married?" Why, yes we are!). Some of the cab drivers are jerks. They see that you're foreign and refuse to turn on the meter, and ask for some ridiculously high price. Fortunately, if the latter happens to you, you can practice your toss-bust-split: Toss some (reasonable) amount of money into the front seat, bust open the door, and split. Your chances of getting hit by another vehicle as you sprint away from the cab are only about 15%. Aforementioned asshole cab driver is probably not willing to take that risk himself by chasing you; so he will drive off, looking for his next group of hapless tourists to try to screw.
The toss-bust-split is the most important trifold maneuver I have ever learned; far more important than stop-drop-and-roll (which, incidentally, will be useless when I am burning in hell for writing all these terrible things).
The other day, a kindly old woman in the front seat of a cab (they will often take 2 groups of passengers if they are going in the same general direction) offered me a piece of fresh-baked bread out of her handbag. I should have taken it.
2. Greatest Kid Ever.
Fierce. |
First of all, let it be known that as I was writing the first paragraph of this entry, Ouidjienne ("WEEd-jen") crept up behind me and literally startled the shit out of me. It's like she knew I was going to write about her. Maybe ESP is one of her many talents, which include (but are not limited to): belly dancing, singing, meat-chomping, bullying her younger cousins, drawing epic masterpieces, playing dress up, ignoring the existence of language barriers, running around in circles, and (when necessary) pouting. Remember Angelica from the Rugrats? Ouidjienne is her x1,000,000. She's that outrageous. Unlike Angelica, though, Ouidjienne has a soul. So much soul.
I have 2 new great passions in life: watching her dance, and watching her eat. First of all, she is seriously one of the best belly dancers I have ever seen. The kid has mad rhythm; I'm serious. She does things I've only seen before in Shakira videos. Her hips wriggle, she shimmies her shoulders, flicks her wrists, weaves her head to the beat. Pure gold.
Me, Layane, Ouidjienne, Jess v. 2, Inez |
Secondly, she feasts like a starved Caveman returning from a month-long Caribou chase. Here's a metaphor for you: When normal people eat, it's like they are dipping their toes into the pool. Ouidjienne does so with a running-start bellyflop. Food coats her arms up to her triceps, her fingers ooze, couscous settles in gracefully above her eyelids, leftovers live in her hair, and the knees of her pants are stained with tomato sauce. Tonight we had meatballs, and each one of her fingers were like little mini skewers. Awesome.
When her plate is removed from the table, a perfect halo of food debris remains. Gnawed bread, chicken bones, vegetable outcasts and sauce droplings are testament to some great battle that has occurred. It is the Chernobyl of cuisine, and
I love it.
3. God
On a more sobering note:
It's impossible not to think about God here, if only because of the language. Every saying-- hello, thank you, you're welcome, bon appetite, hopefully, thankfully, etc.-- invokes the name of Allah: God. Some of the things about religion here are really beautiful. I like hearing the call to prayer (deep, rhythmic, sustained) 5x per day. I like the mosaics on the church walls (in Islam, any depiction of a living thing or object in a mosque is considered idolatry: the decorations are all geometric patterns and calligraphy). And even though I feel like a fraud saying them, I like all these expressions with "God" or "Prayer" in them. Kul shee bekher, al hamdulAllah Everything is good, thanks to God. So peaceful, so passive.
Also, the other day this really lovely Muslim woman talked to us at school. She told us that everything in life has 5 layers of meaning, the first being the most obvious, and the last being known only to God. I really like that.
BUT
We also had a "dialogue" with a group of Moroccan students about our age (3 of them, 3 of us, 1 moderator). The topic this time was religion. We were supposed to come up with questions to ask the other group. And you know what? Team America came to the table 10x more informed, and with more thoughtful questions, than did the Muslims. Those kids were brainwashed. Not one of them had anything insightful or meaningful to say about their beloved religion. You know, their wonderful guide to life, that makes their women wrap their heads in 100 degree heat, that grants twice as much inheritance money to sons as to daughters, that tells men that they can have 4 wives and can marry a foreigner (but a woman legally cannot marry a non-Muslim man). If you are a Muslim and all this is okay to you, you'd better have some pretty damn compelling reasons to compensate for it. None of them did.
"I know Islam is the perfect religion," one girl said.
Guess what? That's not good enough.
Of course, this was just a tiny (and skewed) sample of a much, much larger Moroccan Muslim population. I'm positive that other people have more informed, thoughtful, meticulous reasons for being Muslim-- I've met people like that. But it's sad and kind of scary that these kids (and I'm sure there are many more like them), who sit through 2 hours of Islamic studies per day in public school, who pray five times per day, who renounce partying and tattoos and sausage, are so unspiritual and so mechanical about their religion. When they spoke about it, I heard recited lines. Not faith.
I'm not actually "deathly afraid" of taxis...only mildly terrified.
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing this blog. It's great in all 5 layers!