Fact!

Al Jazeera International’s anchors are extremely attractive.

BBC and CNN: Pick it up.

Tim Curry appears in this post.

I’ve developed an apple habit. They’re cheap, tasty, and always available on market day (key), but selection is limited to a single variety. If I call it a basic apple you get the drift. But not last week. No, last week as I rounded the corner to the main square I saw a bushel of beautiful green granny smiths calling out from across the walk.

I approached with caution. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks. Maybe they weren’t apples at all. They could be unripe pomegranates. Or that odd citrus I’d seen a few weeks ago – what the hell was that thing anyway? But there they were. Green apples. Huge, shiny, beautiful green granny smith apples. I must have stood there gaping for an unseemly amount of time, because after a few moments the vender tapped my shoulder and handed me a bin to weigh out the fruit I was obviously about to take off his hands.

I’d already gotten a kilo of my regular apples, but what the hell - these were special! I filled my bin with a kilo of the shiniest, happiest, most candy like apples I could find, paid the rather bemused fruit guy, and started for the taxi stand to head home and enjoy my bounty.

After rinsing and bleaching all my fruits and veggies (Dysentery: NEVER AGAIN), I picked the largest green apple from the bunch, sliced it, threw on some granola and took a big bite….of deception. It wasn’t sour. It wasn’t tart. It wasn’t a green apple at all! It was a regular apple masquerading as a granny smith. J’accuse!

I cannot tell you how crushing this was. Disproportionately so. I actually scowled through the remainder of my snack. Then I wondered what sort of consumer advocacy group I could contact. Or create. What right does a perfectly ripe apple have being green if it isn’t going to provide a different experience from the red ones? I demanded justice!

I looked in my fridge. I had two kilos of apples. Two kilos of regular, run of the mill, Moroccan apples. Half red, half poseurs. I toyed with the idea of baking a pie, but the lack of both oven and vanilla ice cream put the kibosh on that dream quickly. Besides, if I were going to somehow bake a pie, you’d better believe it would be pumpkin, the finest food known to science. Which of course made me think of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. Which made me think of my birthday. Which made me think of holidays in general. Which made me think of our recent tradition of cooking Tibetan burritos for special dinners. Which made me think of curry, then Tim Curry. Which made me think of….you get the idea.

This might be where the cute moral of the story generally appears, but unfortunately there were no lessons learned from my venture to the fruit stand (aside from the fact that apples are dirty liars). Instead I submit to you just one of the many unexpected moments throughout the day that lead to…I won’t say homesickness. I didn’t stand in my kitchen and suddenly wish I were anywhere but here, cursing the lack of well-marked produce. It was just a simple moment where I paused and thought happily of the random and mundane elements of life in the States I’ve grown to appreciate and, perhaps more significantly, recognize.

I still have seven apples in my fridge. And I really want a pumpkin pie.

So, if you are Elmer Fudd...

Most people think of the internet as an echo chamber; users establish habits and tend to visit sites that reinforce what they already believe. While you may be absorbing more information than you could with newspapers and cable news alone, in neglecting opposing viewpoints the level of discourse is brought down. Pretty soon all you can argue is ‘rabbit season’, while the other guy can only shout back ‘duck season’.

I’m Daffy in this metaphor.

While I have any number things to do throughout the day – washing and hanging laundry, grocery shopping, visiting neighbors, teaching classes, exploring the valley, attempting new and exciting variations on the pancake – I would be lying if I said Peace Corps volunteers don’t have a good amount of free time. We all have books, some have movies, and the fortunate even have tv. But few of us share the same media (at least concurrently – wow have I gotten some fun books from other PCV’s), which means that I have no one to debate with over the latest John LeCarre novel or the six month old episode of LOST I finally got off itunes and my friends on the other side of the country can’t call up and ask my opinion on Christopher Hitchen’s latest opus. So all our accumulated information just sits in our brains, congealing without any real challenge to our understanding or assumptions. See where I’m going with this?

I’ve felt academic withdrawal before (let my nerdiness be noted for the record!), but now its like my mind is being dulled, especially as I lose my English vocabulary to my growing command of Tashlheet. Couple this with the fact that most of my daily interactions lean towards the simplistic, and the net effect is that I feel rather dumb.

And so I would like to try something. Since I’ve entered stasis mode here (the lack of posts isn’t blog neglect, but the fact that the most exciting news I generally have is village gossip, which I won’t air here…but man you would not believe what went down last week!), I thought I might open things up a bit more to non-PC Morocco topics. Like what I read. Or maybe more Morocco in general. Perhaps we can discuss!

In any case, don’t be surprised if I start getting all existential up in this here blog. I may be picking apart a six-month-old Fareed Zakaria thesis, but its news to me. Feel free to email or comment. Or call! I love phone calls. My cell phone ring sounds like the X-Files theme (triple nerd score!).

And I apologize in advance if all I’m shouting at you is ‘rabbit season’. With any luck and a little practice I can get back to talk about hunting licenses.

Did you know it took me five attempts to spell license before I gave up and asked the computer to just tell me how to type? “Me fail English?”

Exciting Things, Let Me Tell You

The past month has been a bit…well I can’t really say busy, but there’s been a lot going on. I discovered the reasons behind my extended illness, moved into my house (!), took my first trip/vacation, and got a chance to attend a couple local festivals. I also hid from the sun a lot, because ohmygodaugustishothere. I’ll try and wrap things into a tidy sort of package, but this will likely be a rather long entry. You’ll want to grab a coffee now.

So first in mid July it got hot. Like 120ºF in the shade hot. That’s not something I know how to handle very well, so there were a few days I just admitted defeat and tried not to overheat. I quite often wound up Florence Nightengaleing myself to sleep in front of the fan, but by the end of it all my body figured out how to function semi-normally. It’s still super hot, but comparatively rather lovely. I’d like to think that by next summer I’ll be a total pro, but I’ll probably just spend all my time concocting the perfect iced tea.

While all this was happening I was also starting to get sick again, which was frustrating for a number of reasons – most of all since I’d been supremely cautious about food and water since my last encounter with dysentery. But the mystery was solved when my host family had relatives visit for a week. When they learned I was sick they asked if I boiled my drinking water.

“Well, no. The village treats the water and no one here boils it. It should be fine.”
“….”
“Its fine, right?”
“If we don’t boil our water when we come here we get sick.”
“….”

Long story short, I now know that while treated, the water supply here is not exactly clean. I boil all my drinking water and I’ve been feeling pretty good, so with any luck I’ve discovered the smoking gun – I’ve actually heard from a lot of people in the village since then that their doctors have advised them not to drink the water without boiling or treatment. This may be something I can try and work on in my time here. (Raise your hand if you enjoy clean water!)

August is of course vacation month in Europe, and Morocco seems to be on the same schedule. Everyone in my village was either coming or going, and the vacation homes in the valley were suddenly full. There were a bunch of festivals that were fun to scope out. They also coincided with the arrival of ice cream bars(!) to local shops.



While all this was happening I also worked to complete my first site report for Peace Corps – basically a quick summery of what we’ve been up to in our sites and our plans for the next three months. This was my first report, so I also completed an environmental assessment. Since we got to our sites we’ve been taking note of local environmental practices/beliefs and the health of local ecosystems, as well as cultural norms and traditions. We synthesize this information into a single report on the environmental situation and begin to brainstorm what sorts of educational activities might be beneficial in our areas. I’ve been assigned two projects already – one a plant survey in my local protected area and the other assisting a local argan coop with marketing materials – that I also gave a quick write up.

Towards the end of the month I took advantage of two national holidays and a weekend to take an extended trip north to Essaouira, a seaside town midway up the Atlantic coast. It was the first time since swear-in that I’d been able to see other environment volunteers, and it was great, to say the very least. I would more likely say it was spectacular.



The city was beautiful and chill – though since its August the entire population of France was also there – and even kind of cold! Its kind of a café scene, and the old medina is full of cool places to check out. You know that Scene in Kingdom of Heaven when Orlando Bloom is looking out on the sea from the ramparts? That’s Essa. Orson Welles also filmed parts of Othello here (there’s an Orson Welles park near the beach).




I ate way too much pizza and ice cream (and crepes and Mexican food…and pastries) and spent an inordinate amount of time simply gazing at the ocean, and by the time I got back it was time to move into my new house! I’ll post pictures of the house separately, but it’s glorious. I like my host family, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally be own my own timetable for sleep, outings and meals. And I can cook! So far I’ve made mac n cheese, pancakes, ramen, spaghetti, iced coffee, vegetarian tuna, and spicy egg sandwiches. Next on the docket are tortillas.

And this is the first time in six months that I was finally able to unpack my duffel and just….spread out. Its amazing how much I’ve accumulated through care packages and general shopping, but I’ve also been here for six months, so I’d have to have picked up at least a bit.

I’ve unpacked and started to decorate (a prominent portrait of Anderson Cooper? I have one!), and now I’m set for Ramadan. My neighbors have been asking for weeks if I plan to fast, and so far I’ve said yes. I’ll give it a go, both out of respect and as a chance to bond a bit more with people. (Though on a super hot day I may have to cheat and take a swig of water….).

So that’s what’s up here.

….and do you also love watching field reporters try not to fall down in hurricane force winds? Rob Mariciano, I heart you.