Ramadan has begun.
I thought I knew this city. Since Ramadan hit, everything has changed. Not exactly in a bad way, but in a “is
there a restaurant still open where I can eat lunch” kind of way. The city
completely shuts down during the day. There’s very little honking, the streets
are quiet, and it’s incredibly hard to find an open store. The stores that are open have turned all of their lights off. The will leave the door slightly ajar, so as not to draw attention, and then those exempt from Ramadan know that it's open. Then at night, everything wakes up. I didn’t know that there were so many teenagers here. Masses of them emerge at night and fill the restaurants and parks.
The honking that was blissfully absent during the day returns with a vengeance,
and the community comes together to celebrate their successful day of fasting. It’s pretty awesome.
I did
try fasting and made it all of two days. The first day I tried the traditional
Ramadan fast that everyone does. No food, no water. At first, it wasn’t nearly
as hard as I thought it would be. I don’t generally drink that much in the
first place, and I just had to wait a little later for dinner. But around 5, I
was really starting to feel it. Iftar starts at 7:45 or right after the call
to prayer. I was skyping my brother at the time when our host dad called us to
dinner. I stopped Joshua in the middle of a sentence, told him that I was far
too hungry to delay dinner any longer, slammed the computer shut and pretty
much bolted to the table. Our host mom had 2 tables set up with all of this
gorgeous food out. I recognized only the dates, everything else was something
I’d never seen before.
My host
sister, Manal, told me that since I had been fasting, the first food I needed
to eat was a date. In Muslim culture, dates are considered to be the healthiest
food you can eat, which is why you use them to break the fast on a day when you
had no nutrients, I’ve got to say, I’m not a huge fan of dates. I thought they
would be another Moroccan food that vastly improves overseas, but it wasn’t the
case. I just don’t like dates. Everything else was absolutely amazing. Everything was very new to me, but it was still incredibly good. Completely worth the wait.
Anyway,
fasting wore me out so I went to bed at 9:00 and was woken up at 2:30 am for
suhoor. This is the last meal that can be eaten before the sun rises. At 3:36 the canon goes off which signals the end of eating and the beginning of the
fast. The suhoor consisted of beef and cauliflower plus the ever-present Danon. Neither
of my roommates wanted to try fasting, so it was just me and my host family. It was a really lovely meal but it was far too early in the morning. I
went back to bed around 3.
The
next morning I felt very dehydrated and sick. I was contemplating calling the
program coordinator and asking to stay home. However, with the amount of Arabic we go over in a day, I didn’t think I could afford to lose
any class time. I was really determined to make it through fasting for a week though, so I did a water fast that day, where you can drink water but not eat. My roommates and I went to see the Mausoleum where Mohammed V and his two sons are buried. There were men on horses guarding the grounds, a lot pillars in rows, and these white and green buildings that held Mohammed V and his sons. I thought the most interesting part was the Koran reader in the corner. Multiple things in Rabat are named after Mohammed V (a tram stop, a university, the airport), so it was interesting to see another way Moroccans commemorated his life.
That
evening I told my host mom over (a once again delicious) iftar that I have
gotten sick this morning. Apparently, if you get sick you aren’t supposed to
fast. So it was kind of decided for me that I had been kicked out of the fasting
program. I didn’t really know that I had been removed until I woke up at six
the next morning and realized no one had knocked for suhoor. So that was that.
I felt ill again anyway, so maybe it was better to stop fasting altogether.
Consistently being sick in a foreign nation is not my idea of a fun time.
So I
ate breakfast which my daily dose of Laughing Cow Cheese. There is an obsession with Laughing Cow Cheese over here. I
have yet to see another kind of cheese. I’m a little obsessed with
it, mainly because we eat it every day at almost every meal. I think at college
I’m going to stock my dorm room with Laughing Cow Cheese and mint tea. I don’t
think that I could live without them at this point. Anyways, after breakfast my
roommates and I headed off to school.
So I
lasted 2 whole days of Ramadan and I feel like such a weakling. I was going for
a week and just didn’t get close at all. I thought I gave it a nice effort, but it turns out that I'm not all that great at fasting.
In
other news, I finally found Balghas in my size. Yes, in order to do so I did have to get the men’s shoes. They are incredibly comfortable. The best way to describe
them is that they are like slippers that have a harder flat bottom so
they double well for walking. I told Manal that they looked kind of life elf
shoes. She didn’t know what an elf was, but once I looked it up and showed her,
she laughed and agreed.
The
World Cup is still going strong. I watched Algeria’s painful loss to Germany
and the US losing to Belgium. Not a good week in terms of teams I was rooting
for. I love watching the games with my host father. In the US versus Belgium game, it was a lot of "USA" chanting and the return of the good old Washington DC hat. I also took some photographic evidence of how much of a community affair each game is.
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| Paris and I at the ruins |
Our group trip during this week was to the Chellah ruins. I’m not the best at Roman
history, but it was explained to me it’s the ruins of an ancient Roman
settlement. There was some kind of earthquake and the city was abandoned in
favor of its neighbor, Sale. The ruins were pretty amazing. There
were no posted rules anywhere, so people were walking wherever they wanted and climbing
down into the crevices. It was so different that the strict
reinforcement the US has on many historical items. I was just beginning to think that there wasn't any enforcement of policy at all, but then, the security system
emerged. It was a guy with a whistle. What a fun country. The Chellah ruins get a thumbs up from me.
But the
best part of my week was definitely when I went to a Moroccan TGI Friday’s.
Because it's Ramadan, the crowd started to appear around 9:30/10:00. I
went with Lauren, who is another girl in the program who had just been to the restaurant the night before. The Moroccan TGI Friday’s is a party. The music is blaring, every chair
is full, and there is this huge Karaoke screen taking up the front wall.
 |
| Lauren, my karaoke buddy |
I never
really had a dream of one specific thing I needed to do in Morocco. I didn't have one overarching experience I had hoped for going into the program, but I
discovered it on a Wednesday at 9 pm in a packed restaurant.
Singing karaoke in a Moroccan TGI Friday’s was and is my dream. I couldn't keep still once I realized how much I needed to be a part. Lauren, who had sung the night before, went and got the karaoke book. There was a section for Arabic songs and a section for English songs. Flipping through, I noted the vast amount of Billy Joel tunes. I picked “Only the Good Die Young." It's one of my favorites and it was the last song he sang on his recent tour stop in St. Louis (which was the first time I ever saw him sing live). It all came together so nicely. Although the song isn't really in the best place for me range-wise (I have to shift octaves every once in a while) I had to do it.
Anyway, that's what's been happening recently in Rabat, Morocco. Tomorrow is America's birthday and then we depart for Fes. No one here really considers America's birthday to be a big deal (we have our first test on Independence day, for goodness sake). I'm planning on walking around in red, white, and blue and singing every patriotic song I know.
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