Maroc

Hello from Casablanca!

I'm currently sitting in the top level of Joy and Jer's house and can see the ocean and the waves. I arrived here Monday night, after something like 14 or 15 hours of time in the air, never mind airports and terminals and waiting and everything. The trip over was long, but extremely uneventful - a good thing! Jer was waiting right at the exit from baggage pick-up / customs. Nice to see a familiar face after all that time.

Since then, I've been seeing bits and pieces of the Moroccan way of things. The Perrotts live in a little neighbourhood by the beach, a ways outside of Casa itself. I don't really have a frame of reference to compare to. Greece comes closest - older buildings, on the water, etc. Casa also reminds me most of Athens, although to say that they are alike doesn't sound right either. Signs are in French and Arabic, but you'll see English occasionally (if it's something fancy!).

Yesterday I mainly slept off jet lag and general school exhaustion, and went to the beach for a bit. In the evening, we went to a restaurant at a gas station - Moroccan fast food. You go to the butcher counter and buy your meat, then take it to another counter and give it to them to cook. Very tasty. The cumin is so much more... spicy? vibrant? fragrant? than the Safeway Select container at home. Not surprised. The kids like this gas station restaurant because there is a big play area. You pay a certain amount for 15 minutes of play time, though Joy said if you came with a group you could negotiate a flat rate.

This morning, I went in to school briefly with Jer so he could pick up some things from his office, and then we went downtown to the American Consulate. The city is something else! Strangely placed Americana like Starbucks, KFC (apparently all over the place here), and I saw an ad for the Gap. Mix that with Arabic signs, crazy traffic patterns... very different from anything I've seen before. I'm very glad I speak French, because at least I can pick up on some of what's going on. A lot of the buildings were built by the French so it's not entirely a foreign feel. The driving is nuts - you have to pay very close attention. The lane lines are really just suggestions.

We drove and parked, and couldn't figuring out the parking meter, so Jer ended up with the boot on his car. One of those "what do you do" moments because there's a number to call, but chances are, the person on the other end speaks Arabic... thankfully parking dude showed up a few minutes later.

Now, I'm back here while everybody else is at school. Time for more beach, or the little nearby cafe (thankfully I know the French word for coffee) or something. Tomorrow I'm going to be nerdy and hang out at school - go to physics, grade 6 math, and hopefully an AP math class - then Friday Joy and Jer took the day off work so we'll drop the kids at school and go sightseeing. Not sure what the weekend will bring - Sam has lots of ideas.

A la prochaine.

packed

Pulled everything together in to my backpack tonight. That included bubble-wrapping a jar of dill pickles...

You never know what you'll miss until you can't get it!


I taped the lid down, bubble wrapped it, then put it in a ziploc bag. Here's hoping it doesn't leak.

off again

You may or may not remember, or you may or may not have known me at the time, but I originally created this blog in 2007 to keep friends and family up to date on the adventures of 3 months of backpacking around Europe.

I have not been very good about updating since then!

Jumping forward in time, I spent 2 years at the University of Winnipeg doing a B.Ed. We had to do a lot of writing and reflecting, so a blog seemed redundant. Then last year brought Vancouver and adventures of a more outdoor variety. Camping doesn't lend itself well to maintaining a blog, though I have two "rite in the rain" journals full of notes.

One week from today brings the beginning of another large-scale adventure. I'm heading back across the pond, this time to North Africa, to see dear friends from camp who are working at an American school in Morocco. 9 posts ago, which was 2 years ago in time, I wrote about camp and our lives in community there coming out of something I'd heard in one of my B.Ed. courses. The people who I am going to visit are very much in that category of people in my life, and I haven't seen them since about 6 months after I wrote that post. Crazy!

I fly from Vancouver, leaving in the morning on March 25. Four planes and some amount of time later, I'm not sure how much, I get to Morocco in the evening on March 26, and spend a week there, followed by a few days in London and a night in Toronto. I can't even imagine the culture shock that will hit me all of a sudden, at whatever point it begins. The plane safety instructions? The customs and immigration card? The airport signs? I've never experienced anything but western culture.

What is it like to be the minority in such a clear way? Being a white female makes me a total anomaly in my own classes, but that's so different than being in an environment where the underlying foundation isn't the same.