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From Abroad

Ah, I am in Morocco!

The trip started off at Pittsburgh Intl., where I incurred a two hour delay due to a storm in NYC. The delay, however, allowed me to converse with a fellow named Adalberto from Brazil. He spoke very little English and I cannot speak Portuguese, so we spoke in Spanish, of which we both were a bit rusty. In the middle of our four hour long conversation, there was a call from the check-in kiosk: ?Does anyone here speak French?? I, speaking French at the lowest level, jumped out of my seat and was embroiled in an attempt to help a French lady get home. This backfired, as I was taught the lesson of languages: if you don?t know one very well, making up words that sound like that language does not work. It also didn?t help that I had been speaking Spanish with Adalberto for two hours prior to speaking French.

Our conversation:

ME: ?Est-ce que vous avez un billet pour Paris?? Do you have a ticket for Paris ?
HER : ?Bla bla bla bla, oui monsieur, j?ai un billet, mais ou est le soixante dix sept ? (I don?t know?she kept saying numbers)
ME : Tu necessitas ir a la..errr, donde, errr, ou est, umm, je ne sais pas, je suis désole. (Mixture of French, Spanish, and gibberish)

And so it continued. No one else in the airport spoke French, which truly surprised me. I let the confused Parisian use my cell phone five times and she kept coming back to me throughout the duration of my delay. Just as I was boarding, she figured out where to go and presumably made it back to France.

After arriving at JFK, I ran into a fellow Al Akhawayner named Katie and from that point we collected other students heading to Ifrane. It was kind of like playing the game, Lemmings, but more interesting. After boarding the jet for the long haul flight, we sat on the runway for almost two hours waiting for traffic to die down. To ameliorate the situation, Royal Air Maroc handed out small bags with blue socks. I felt instantly better. We eventually arrived at Casablanca Airport, which greeted us with an extremely ornate lobby and security guards peppered throughout the terminal. We were literally banished to the smoking room of the airport, where we watched a report on dogfighting and attempted to overcome the awkwardness in adjusting to Moroccan culture.

Subsequent to waiting another two hours for our flight to Fes (attendant: “there is no one in the control tower”), we hopped onto a 12 passenger plane that seemed to have been past its prime. Mom, don’t read this part. It was wild. The tail end was shifting from side to side and the wings were likewise shifting up and down, setting us up for a rocky landing. My seating arrangement allowed me to see the runway quickly approaching us as an older Moroccan woman sat beside me with tightly shut eyes and a prayer book in hand. We hit the ground and slammed on the breaks, spinning us ever-so-slightly to the left. And then to the right. Finally, we stopped and the lady repeated, “Shukran! Shukran!” which means ‘thank you!’ in Arabic. We went through Moroccan customs’ meticulous inspection process, where I had to explain the purposes of bug spray, epinephrine pens, my tent, and other presumably questionable items. I, however, was the lucky one as six of my colleagues did not receive their baggage and have yet to change clothes.

The austere AUI official met us at the airport and then quietly escorted us to the vans. Our luggage was strapped to the top and then we were sardined?pardon the neologism?in the back. Driving through the Moroccan countryside turned me into a pure tourist; I was snapping innumerable pictures. Like the flight into Fes, the trip was an adrenaline rush.

By the time we arrived at Al Akhawayn, I was overcome with delirium from lack of sleep. At that point, I had been traveling for 30 hours and felt the effects of dehydration. We checked in and dropped our luggage and then I stumbled into the town of Ifrane. A local told us to walk up a dirt path to find the center square. In our naïvety, we followed this advice and found it to be ridden with trash and broken glass?not Morgantown broken glass, but pounds and pounds of it entangled in trash bags and old food. At the top of this trail was a large bush, which I parted to find a clean, Swiss-like center square. We casually strolled into a restaurant, where I ordered the mouton tajine, which, according to my German friend, is ‘sheep brains’. Initially, I thought he was being facetious, but given the meat’s characteristic shape and the fact that it was attached to a skull affirmed my fear. It turned out to be fairly tasty. Then again, I was fairly hungry.

I will learn a lot this semester.