Marrakech and the snow-covered High Atlas 

I knew from the age of fifteen that I wanted to go to Morocco. The moment of realization came at Disney World, of all places, where I was on vacation with my family the summer following the tenth grade. At that age, of course, I would have much preferred to be just about anywhere but ogling Cinderella’s castle with my family, but the discovery that I could bypass cartoon characters entirely by hanging out at Epcot Center’s World Showcase made the whole thing infinitely more bearable. The World Showcase, in case you’ve never been, is a clever way of taking you on a trip around the world in an hour or two; it’s made up of a series of pavilions built around a large lake, each one offering a meticulously-detailed glimpse of a particular country. For each country represented (and there are eleven) there are a few buildings constructed in some kind of traditional style, a restaurant or two serving traditional food, a cultural exhibit or short film playing to educate and inform, and a plethora of souvenir shops selling whatever it is tourists might want to prove they had been to Disney’s versions of Norway or China. To complete the experience they’ve even imported the staff as well, who are of course friendly and helpful and tell you anything you want to know about life in said places. For someone who at that point hadn’t even so much as been to Canada yet, being given a glimpse of all these exotic places was wonderfully thrilling, but none of them had more of an effect on me than Morocco.

I still remember everything about that Moroccan pavilion. I remember that it was almost closing by the time I reached it, that the light had faded and the sky was turning purple; that ornate keyhole arches lured me into a twisting web of mud-walled passages lit by filigreed lanterns; that a beautiful tiled courtyard with a bubbling fountain lay hidden somewhere in its midst and the scent of incense hung heavy in the air. I also remember that the place was silent, like a sanctuary, save for the gentle tinkle of water; the other tourists had all left and even the tiny shops stocked with fez hats, lamps and slippers seemed unstaffed. I can’t tell you what exactly it was that enchanted me so completely, but I decided then and there that Morocco must be the most exotic, fascinating and beautiful country in the whole world, and I held that magical image of that evening in my mind for nearly fifteen years – until two weeks ago, when I finally stepped on a plane to go there.

 
Courtyards 

Of course when you’ve had so much time to daydream, the actual place can easily fall short of expectations. I was prepared for this, or at least I tried to be, but in the case of Morocco there was really no need. There were, nevertheless, many surprises; the images I had of Morocco were all there, but they were only a tiny piece in an infinitely more complex puzzle. I was most surprised by the contrasts everywhere. There were the obvious ones: barren desertscapes and lush gardens, the chaos of the streets and the serenity inside dwellings, uber-luxury and abject poverty, strict religiosity and unrestrained hedonism. What also surprised me was how much is hidden: behind walls, beneath veils. A visitor sees only a tiny fraction of Moroccan life, a ripple on the surface that left me more baffled than knowledgeable, and I really came to regret the fact that we had no local contact to shed light on some of the many mysteries. I think part of the problem as well may have been our choice of destinations; the places we visited were really dominated by the well-oiled machine of tourism, and this made it much more difficult to see beyond the glitz, glamour and touts to what Moroccan life is really all about. But that said, even being an observer here is an endlessly fascinating experience, a simultaneous feast and assault on all five senses that leaves you exhausted and exhilarated and always craving more.

 
Faces 

We began in Marrakech, the ancient imperial city situated just to the north of the snow-capped High Atlas and the interminable browns of the Sahara. Marrakech has probably been the most romanticized of all Moroccan cities since it rose to fame in the 1960s as a hippie paradise for pleasure-seeking Europeans, and it’s never dropped off the map since. These days, however, the typical tourists are a little better-heeled, and the huge influx of cash they have brought is on display everywhere, from luxury hotels to fine restaurants to exclusive boutiques with eye-popping price tags. There are in fact two parts to the city – the new town, full of wide boulevards, apartment blocks and French-style cafes, and the medina, a city-within-a-city, enclosed by high walls and containing a web of serpentine streets so confusing it has never been completely mapped. It’s in the medina where the real action happens, and the tiny streets are a constant throng of people, donkeys and motorcycles all trying to get somewhere fast. Though the streets are chaotic, sometimes a door opens as you pass and you catch a glimpse of another world, a serene interior courtyard with orange trees and jasmine, the clean austerity of a mosque, or the murky depths of a communal bread bakery. And of course here are the souks, or covered markets – an endless labyrinth of tiny shops staffed by men expert in luring you in to inspect their goods: silver, ceramics, woodwork, clothing, shoes, tapestries, food. It pays to be cautious, however, as they pounce on the slightest sign of interest and before you can say "it’s not quite my style", you’re mired in an energetic bargaining session. Better is just to keep moving, nodding and smiling, promising peut-être la prochaine fois – maybe next time – when they won’t take no for an answer.

Although the medina itself is impossible to navigate, if you wander long enough you’ll eventually be carried downstream to where all the medina rivers eventually meet: the Djemaa el Fna, dead man’s square. The Djemaa is the nerve center of Marrakech and the largest square in Africa, the place where orange juice sellers rub shoulders with snake charmers; where beggars and shoeshiners and henna artists vie for your dirhams and the only escape is on the rooftop terraces of the restaurants surrounding the square, where you can observe the madness without being sucked in. The Djemaa, while teeming all day long, is also the scene for Marrakech’s famous night market, when the storytellers come out and a hundred food stalls
set up. This is when we liked it best, and we spent many evenings crammed in on benches at crowded one food stall or another, feeling like we had front-row seats to one of the greatest shows in the world.

The medina is an intoxicating place and one of the best ways to experience it is to stay in a riad, a house built in the traditional style around a central courtyard. Thanks to its up and coming status in the where’s where of hip destinations, Marrakech has more than its fair share of riad accommodation, ranging from no-frills backpacker lodging to thousand-dollar-a-night luxury palaces complete with swimming pools and in-house hamams. What they all have in common is a sense of tranquility, a beautiful open-air courtyard (or two) often decorated with exquisite craftsmanship, and a comfortable roof terrace upon which to gaze out at the skyline and listen to the many calls to prayer echo across the rooftops (which is something to be aware of if you’re a light sleeper – every quarter of the medina has its own mosque and you will be woken up every morning at five by the first call of the day, which seems to be longer and louder than any other!). But early-morning wake-up calls aside, we loved riad life. The other nice thing about staying in riads is that is gives you the chance to discover some of the quieter back streets of the medina, away from the souks and constant hassle, where you can see people going about their everyday lives: fathers pedaling their daughters to school on rickety bicycles, veiled women carting giant trays of bread to be baked in the neighborhood ovens, grandmothers leaning out of second-story windows to observe life on the streets below.

Essaouira, city by the sea 

Marrakech was our main destination for this trip, but we also managed to escape in order to spend a few days in the Atlantic coastal port of Essaouira. Where Marrakech is full of dusky desert reds and browns, Essaouira feels almost Mediterranean with its whitewashed buildings and blue-shuttered windows. It has a medina like Marrakech, but things feel a bit more low-key here – the shop owners are a little less persistent, and the vibe on the streets is a little less harried. Essaouira can get crowded when the wind is blowing – it’s a surfer’s paradise in the winter, apparently, but we felt like we had it mostly to ourselves. We loved it and spent our days poking around the medina’s backstreets for photos and souvenir bargains (prices tend to be a bit lower than in Marrakech, and I bought some beautiful Fassi ceramics), sipping mint tea on oceanview terraces and strolling along Essaouira’s endless windswept beaches. We also stayed at the nicest place of our trip, a gem of a riad called Casa Lila which I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone headed there (we stayed in chambre l’Ivoire which was not only gorgeous but had its own private terrace).

 
Morocco’s beauty lies in the details 

I’ll admit, I’ve had a hard time sorting out my impressions of Morocco. Partly, I think, that’s because I was hoping to be able to come home and write about it with some kind of authority. This is what Morocco is all about, I was hoping to say, which in retrospect is a bit silly to expect from ten days spent in any country, but least of all Morocco. I can say that the image Disney planted in me at fifteen was not exactly erroneous: it is an exotic, beautiful, and fascinating country, Moroccans are lovely and hospitable people, and dusk in a Moroccan courtyard is one of the most magical places you can ever hope to be. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and I think it will take several more trips before I can even begin to understand the complexities of this country. Not that you’ll have to twist my arm to make that happen – I’m already dreaming of my next trip.

But wait, I hear you protesting, how on earth was the food? I guess you’ll just have to wait for the next post to find out. 🙂

 
p.s. All photos © Manuel Meyer. He’s got a full gallery up on his (new+improved!) website if you’d like to see some more.

 

 

…where we’re going?

 
©iStockphoto.com/Landschapsrakker

©iStockphoto.com/jimkirkby

©iStockphoto.com/lucgillet

 

See you in a couple of weeks with all the juicy details. 

 

Although my track record with memes has been a little wobbly as of late, I do appreciate getting tagged. Someone wants to know more about me? Hard to believe – I thought everyone already knew more than they could stomach. But really, the reason that I’m not always very quick on the draw with memes is that I generally like to hoard tags and pretend they’re something like ‘get out of jail free’ cards in Monopoly, only that these are more like ‘impress readers with new content when I haven’t actually lifted a finger in the kitchen for a week’ cards. Yes, you see, when I haven’t had time to cook they’re a godsend – a way to keep the traffic flowing when the cookie jar is empty, so to speak, and so I was quite relieved to find I had two in the bag this week when various factors prevented me from my usual kitchen acrobatics. First there were those pesky final corrections on my thesis (it never ends, does it? well is has now since I did the corrections, they were approved, and all that’s left is to get the damn thing bound and delivered!), and then there were all the preparations for our imminent trip to distant and exotic shores (which shall remain a mystery for now – ooh, the suspense!). But really, you don’t want to hear all my lame excuses, do you? You just want me to cut to the chase and get to the juicy-revelations part. Okay, I get it.

Both of these memes have been making their way around the ‘sphere for a while, but the thing I didn’t realize until I sat down to do them is that they’re both all about the number five. An omen, perhaps? If so, I’d better figure out for what!

Thanks to Aoife and ASMO for the tags!

Five Things You Didn’t Even Know You Wanted to Know About Me

Since I have already or will probably reveal each and every last detail about myself that has even the slightest connection to food by the time I retire this blog, I’ll stick to non-food revelations here.

1. I am deathly afraid of spiders. It’s a true phobia, and I have tried almost everything to conquer it, including watching them, holding them (never again), reading Charlotte’s Web, and of course, squashing the living daylights out of them. Nothing has worked, and I am no better than I was as a child: I cannot sleep if I know there is a spider in the room, and in the rare case that one lays a hairy leg on me you’ll find me screaming and jumping around and giving new meaning to the word panic. One morning Manuel got up and I noticed the remains of a large, black spider smeared on the outside of his leg – he didn’t bat an eyelash but I very nearly had to go in for therapy. Oh, and I have laid awake at night more than once wondering what would happen if ever a spider were to crawl up my arm while I was driving a car. *Shudder*

2. Between the ages of 10 and 12, I wanted nothing more in life than to be a professional baseball player. Seriously, I was obsessed with baseball – I followed the San Francisco Giants as if my life depended on it, and I would have rather sacrificed a limb than miss a game. I also played for a little league team in Berkeley, and incidentally, was the only girl in the league at the time. I’m not saying I was particularly good, but at least my heart was in it. Speaking of which, I was also madly in love with the Giants’ first baseman at the time, Will Clark, and one night when he was a guest on a radio show I called in and managed to ask him a question. I asked "what do you think of the future of women in professional baseball?" I can’t remember exactly what he answered (I do have it on tape somewhere), but the gist of it was "well, since I love looking at all the women in the stands, I would love to have a woman on the field to look at too." Hmm, somehow I could never look at him in the same way after that. But it was just as well, since the following year I turned 13, discovered boys and lip gloss and forgot about baseball completely. If you handed me a bat now I doubt I would even know which end to hold.

3. I have three brothers. This always surprises bloggers that I meet in the flesh, since I invariably mention a brother or two and they always say "but you never talk about them on your site!" Well, I am now. They’re quite a bit younger than me: Brendan is 20, Rickey is 18, and Connor is 14. I love them dearly, but in all honesty our relationships are about anything but food, which is why they rarely make an appearance here. They’re all great guys, though I keep secretly hoping they will start to follow in their dear old sister’s footsteps and take less of an interest in girls and computer games and more of an interest in what they eat.

4. I was homeschooled for a year, in the eighth grade. Although I was supposed to have a standard curriculum, the school liaison we met with once a month was pretty easygoing and let me fulfill my requirements by doing things like taking pottery classes (yes, Ghost had just come out), and writing a screenplay for Star Trek: The Next Generation. I actually intended to submit the script on spec (the various Star Trek spin-offs were, as far as I know, the only television shows to accept scripts on spec from absolutely anyone), and got the thing to within 95% of completion (I was just missing one scene where there’s a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that I couldn’t figure out how to write). But then Wesley Crusher left to go to Starfleet Academy and the whole basis for my episode crumbled, so I shoved it in a box and never looked at it again. Who knows – if Wil Wheaton hadn’t left the show I might be a famous screenwriter in Hollywood now! Then again, maybe not – that screenplay really wasn’t very good.

5. The year after I graduated from college, I had the tremendous good fortune to be one of the 50 or so people in the US to receive one of these amazing fellowships. Thomas J. Watson was the founder of IBM Computers, and when he died his family set up a foundation in his name. The principal activity of this foundation is to fund recent college graduates to take a year off and travel around the world researching a project of their choosing. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? It was indeed, and with the chunk of change the lovely Watson people gave me, I was not only able to research community responses to minority language endangerment in Spain, New Zealand and Peru, but I was able to tick about ten other countries off my to-visit list that year (and eat a lot of great food along the way). All they asked for in return was that I describe my experiences to them. If only life could have continued to be like that – people giving me money to travel, eat and write about it…

My Life in Leaps of 5

This meme asks me to look back at my life in leaps of 5 years. Compiling this list I was struck by the fact that it seems most of the really noteworthy things to happen in my life happened in years that did not end in a 7 or a 2 (apart from the whole being-born thing, but there’s actually not a heck of a lot to say about that, at least from my end!).

1977 – I am born in Berkeley, California, right on schedule and on the same day as a solar eclipse. This celestial coincidence gave rise to a very unusual middle name which I have never completely forgiven my parents for. To be honest, I don’t remember a heck of a lot more.

1982 – I am five years old, eating as much macaroni and cheese as I possibly can and
showing off my Sesame Street sandals at kindergarten. I actually have a memory from that year of looking at the calendar on our wall and seeing the numbers 1982 and wondering just how long it would be before we had to buy a new calendar with the numbers 1983.

1987 – This is the year I turn ten, which means I will soon be entering my tomboy baseball-obsessive phase (see above). I like the kind of food all ten-year-old kids like, namely junk, junk and more junk. For details, look here. I am also welcoming the first of my brothers into the world. He was probably the highlight of that year for me, seeing as I now had a real live doll to dress up with frilly lace and pink ribbons. And for that, he’s never forgiven me.

1992 – I’m fifteen. I have all three of my brothers now, and the year previously we packed up and moved all the way from the SF Area to Seattle. I’m at a new school, having to make shiny new friends. It’s a bit harder than I thought, though, since I don’t seem to quite fit into any category: I’m not quite grunge (not enough Doc Martens and flannel shirts, I guess), not quite hippie (though I did have some killer tie-dye pants), definitely not one of the bible-thumping/church-going crowd, and not athletic enough to hang with the jocks. Isn’t high school great? I was pretty brainy, I guess, and wrote poetry and joined an activist group that did things like protest Columbus Day, encourage people to recycle and hand out free condoms. Oh, and I was about as vegetarian as could be, eating cup-o-couscous and avocados for lunch every day.

1997 – I’m twenty, and a lot has happened in the last couple of years. I have lived in Spain, graduated from high school, started college in New Orleans, and this year in the fall I jet off to Trinity College in Dublin to begin my junior year abroad. On the emerald isle I learn how to drink five pints of beer and still find my way home, among other important life skills. I fall in love with brown bread and digestive biscuits, and even manage to warm up to the whole tea-with-milk-and-sugar thing, though it will never, ever replace my coffee (see above re:Seattle). I travel alot around Ireland, and three separate times in three different parts of the country I run across someone local who mistakes me for a long-lost school friend. On the day I turn twenty, I almost get killed slipping down a hillside in the Wicklow mountains in the middle of a fierce storm. I was hiking alone, and no, I hadn’t even told anyone where I was going.

2002 – I’m in the first full year of my PhD here in Edinburgh, and things are looking great because doing independent research means actually doing a lot of nothing and getting paid for it. In between bouts of doing nothing, I jet off to Germany to spend time with Manuel (with whom I’ve been together for four years already), and spend a fabulous month cruising around Hawaii with my family in a sailboat while eating laulaus and shave ice (lucky them – they spent a whole year on that boat). I’m also salsa dancing at every opportunity and loving the fact that living in student accommodation means having lots of people to cook for.

2007 – What has changed in the last five years? Well, I’m now married, I’m a doctor, and of course I have this blog (which will soon be turning two!). As it’s still early days, I don’t know exactly what else this year will bring, apart from a graduation ceremony in June, and hopefully some sorting out of life, career, relocation plans, etc. Oh, and I certainly don’t need to tell you what birthday is looming…!

 
Gosh, I guess I have to tag some people now, don’t I? I know this is technically two memes and that really I should tag separate people for each one, but I’m feeling lazy and therefore I’ll just tag people randomly and let them choose which if either of the memes they want to do (and if they just want to curse me under their breath I’ll understand too). I’ll tag Lindy, Lara, Lisa, Zarah and Joe. Bon chance, mes amis!