Back Home.

I've been stateside for over a week now and being in beautiful Madison, playing ultimate frisbee, driving around the state of Wisconsin for parades and weddings for band and cooking delicious food on more than just one burner set on the ground has been wonderful, but I still feel like this time is simply a vacation from my real life in Fés. I assume this feeling will go dissipate as I continue to move all my stuff back in and become get back into the reality of life here. 

Here are my last pictures and a couple of videos!!!

These are the baby kittens we found shivering outside our house on a stormy day during the last week. 

 Kadie gave them some crackers and a towel for a blanket.

 Views from the roof...

The first video is piece of the Ithan (Call to prayer) from the roof of my friend's Riad. I definitely miss hearing this everyday.

The second video is of two girls dancing on a rooftop in the middle of the city:)

 Bab Boujloud. A popular postcard picture for Fés. Kadie and I bought nearly all of our produce, spices, pastas, rice, meat and olive oil just around the corner!

 A beautiful door and paintings down Talla Kabira in Fés.

Colorful stores on Talla Kabira.

 Amberine, Kadie and I. We're such models:)

 More Talla Kabira!

 Last night all together:)

I guess that's it for my Morocco Blog. Thanks for reading!

Nearing the end and Madrid!

My time here in Fez is winding down, only ELEVEN days left. These last few weeks have been some of the most busy and wonderful of my three months here. We went out to dinner in the Ville Nouvelle last Wednesday as a celebration for both Carolyn’s 19th birthday (I know...she makes me feel like I should be drinking prune juice and watching the Wheel of Fortune) and Eric’s bon voyage back to the states. It was definitely a shock back to the reality of the limited time we have here, but it was a wonderful night!

Dane and Eric

 Sasha and Bruce with their sushi feast

Me after putting a pea-sized amount of wasabi in my mouth...

All the ladies!

Fast forward through an Arabic test and presentation and I was on a flight to Madrid for the weekend! We stepped off the subway into Sol to be serenaded by gorgeous Spanish music and fell in love instantly. People were dancing, couples were holding hands in the street (and more than that, but I’ll keep it PG) we were surrounded by beautiful Spanish architecture and the smells of ham and cheese and croissants and beer (all things I don’t get enough of in Fez) Let’s just say that at that moment I knew a weekend would not be sufficient time for Madrid and I to become acquainted to my satisfaction.

It turns out that Sol was not the subway stop we were supposed to exit at so we spent about an hour taking both incorrect and correct turns through the streets of Madrid to find our hostel, but who were we to complain?! I even tried to take a picture with Amberine of us making sad faces but we were incapable of wiping the smiles off our faces for long enough to snap one.

Madrid has a thriving nightlife. And when I say thriving I mean people from ages 16-75 fill the streets with singing and dancing and laughing at every hour. It is perfectly legal and quite popular to sell and buy cans of beer out on the street as you’re walking from café to pub to bar to club. The subway shuts down at 1:30 in the morning and doesn’t open again until 6 in the morning so most people decide that the most rational, level-headed, reasonable thing to do is just stay out until 6...every night. So we did. Our first stop was a pub called Le Tigre, it had a very social, active atmosphere; with the purchase of a drink they served you free tapas: sliced baguette with prosciutto ham and sharp white cheddar cheese, spicy potato croquettes also with ham and cheese inside them, and breakfast potatoes with hot sauce...DELICIOUS!!!! From there we went to a place called Tupperware...don’t ask where they got the name because I have no idea. Then to a dance club called Pacha where they served champagne in glowing glasses and if you could actually hear the person next to you talking that meant you had to be in the bathroom.

The next day was filled with shopping and art; Madrid has amazing art museums- the Thyssen, the Prado and the Reina Sofia. That night we stumbled upon a great little restaurant where we got bread and olive oil, a starter, a main course, wine and desert for 9 Euros, a pretty good price and a heartily welcomed discovery for college kids on a budget in Europe. We finally finished eating dinner at about 1:15AM and decided to head back to the hostel for a slightly earlier bedtime than the night before. We almost missed the last subway back to our neighborhood, but managed to catch it just in time. Spain has a glorious subway system, by the way. One Euro and you can go ANYWHERE. Having caught the last train, we found ourselves in a practically empty subway station at the end and decided to have some fun...obviously a success, haha!

The next morning Amberine and I went for a walk through the neighborhood in which our hostel was located. We found chocolate croissants, colorful graffiti and cool sculptures...

...we also found ourselves in quite a crunch to catch our flight back to Fez...if you know me fairly well, you’re probably thinking, uh oh. Yes, uh oh indeed. We got back to the hostel to find the rest of our group already gone and a note for us telling us to get our asses (sorry to any children who may have stumbled upon this) to the airport, so we did. We jumped on one subway, transferred to another line which ended up taking us in the opposite direction so we got off, jumped on another, and another, the oncoming panic mode must have sent my brain into overdrive because I began asking for help in some absurd mix of the Spanish I remembered from high school, the Italian I retained from my first two years of college and the Arabic I’ve been studying here. We figured out where to go and how to get there fairly quickly but seeing it on a map and finding it in person are quite different things it turns out! We eventually made it onto the last subway line to the airport. We had already resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to miss the plane and had started considering our next steps. We were still two stops away from the airport itself when we looked at the clock and saw it was 1:05, the time the gate was supposed to close for our flight and we still had to make it through goodness knows how many terminals and gates and security checks to make it there. But it turns out that under pressure, Amberine and I make a pretty solid team and never give up. So we ran. And ran. And ran. We ran through security, ran to the visa stamping station, ran to the passport check and ran to our gate to find it was the ONE flight that had not departed on time. We got in line. Found seats on the plane. Fastened our seat belts and took a breath...And that was our Madrid Miracle. Ma'shah Allah!

Adios, Ciao, Ma Salaama, Buenas Noches, Arrivederci, ليلة سعيدة

Time to play catch up...

So, since I wrote last I've been to Rabat (the capital of Morocco), Casablanca, Marrakesh, Essouira, El Walidaya, El Jadida and all the places in between. For spring break we rented cars in Fez and gave ourselves a grand tour of the mid-coastal portion of Morocco! I know after writing that cary post about the driving habits of Moroccans it might not have been the smartest idea for seven American kids to make their way through Morocco via car, but it was amazing!! I even ended up driving a portion of the way there between Fez and Casablanca and Marrakesh. Never thought my longest experience driving a manual shift car would be in Morocco...hah. We ran into more problems in the beginning than I care to remember one of them being almost losing my bag containing my passport, cash and camera...but everything worked out so perfectly in the end that it doesn't really matter! I hope to add more pictures later, but my camera died on the trip so I have to get them from other people...in the meantime, here are some other random pictures and maybe some more spring break stories, but i have a lot of homework to finish before class, so we'll see...

AMAZING view from the rooftop of the boys's Riad in the Medina. Definitely one of my favorite places in the world.

 Kitties!!! Stray cats rule this city. But these two are cute:)

Big yawn!

 Kadie's birthday party for which we all bought Moroccan dresses!!

 Busy marketplace in the middle of Casablanca.

 FINALLY after 5 failures we got a jumping picture into the pool at our hotel in Marrakesh!

Okay, homework...I'll write more soon!!

So, I was aware that deciding to travel to Morocco would mean coming face-to-face with a set of extreme discrepancies between how men and women were treated...but actually experiencing it on the street is a completely different story. Men inhabit the public sphere and women, the private. The feminism movement in America broke through most of these taboos- leaving incomprehensible remnants like the "glass ceiling," the mindset that women should be treated more harshly for their sexual behavior than men, and the still immensely wide discrepancy between wages for the same work; whereas in Morocco, the feminist movement is just gaining ground.

I'm currently in a gender class at ALIF University in which we discuss these matters every week, with an emphasis on social norms based on Sharia Law which is in turn based on an interpretation of the Q'uran. Did you know that in the Q'uran BOTH Adam and Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden and were BOTH punished equally? It sure blew my mind after experiencing how women are treated as objects and foci of criticism in the Islamic world.

On the streets my friends and I have been called everything from "Spice Girls" to "Beaoootifool" to "Skallywags" to"you stop my heart..." been hissed at and harassed in other verbal ways. After a couple days I got used to it. You learn to look straight forward, appear as though you always know where you're going, even if you're lost, and to remain silent even if you feel like tearing someone's head off. But why?! Why do we have to take extra measures to avoid being seen?! We have often wondered what the teenage boys, who are the most ubiquitous source of catcalls, would think if we turned around and said something back, or called them "Backstreet Boys" or whistled at them when they walked past us!! None of my encounters have been physical, but some of the girls here have not been so lucky...it's never violent, but definitely an unwanted invasion of the personal space bubble.

Overall, if I had one superpower...okay, maybe not that extreme, but if I could change something about my daily experience here, I would want the young men to recognize how degrading and ridiculous they are acting and learn to respect the other half of the population.

I might write more about this again when I have more time, but alas, more class. SO MUCH CLASS!

Anyways...Belly dancing lesson TONIGHT!, second to last test of the term tomorrow morning, music festival in Fés tomorrow afternoon, henna from Kadie's host mom on friday night, hiking a mountain to see the sunrise saturday morning, taking a train to Rabat for the weekend (SO to Hannah Paulson!)

ma salaama
kellen

The Sahara!!!

The trip into the Sahara was amazing! Unfortunately I haven't had much time in between classes and traveling to blog as much as I would like to, but here are some pictures until I have more time!!

There are pictures of me on an actual camel on facebook but I haven't figured out how to upload them here because they were taken on a friend's camera. 

Yes, that is snow. NEVER expected to see snow on the way to the Sahara...

 Translation= God, Country, King

 Shadow of me on my first camel. I named her Fredericka Georgette. We didn't click as well as my second camel Aisha:)

Ciao for now!!