9 More Things

1 – In college I studied international relations, and even without that, I’ve always pretty much been a raging nerd. With the two combined, however, you have an international relations dork of the highest degree, and, as a result, I can describe for you the flag of pretty much any nation (I will admit that I can get a little tripped up around the Gold Coast of Africa from time to time). Morocco’s is a red field with a green star traced in the center. In the US, we have a pretty well accepted understanding of how the American flag looks, which became all the more apparent to me when I started to notice a trend in Moroccan flags being upside-down. At least, I had always assumed that the star would be such that only one point would be facing up, while the two opposite would be facing downwards. I asked about this, and got a lot of responses along the lines of: “It’s got the star on it, right? So who cares?” I asked a few government officials, and they all confirmed my suspicions that there is, in fact, a correct way to hang the flag, and that the majority of people either just don’t know or don’t care.

2 – I never realized before just how sissy our culture is when it comes to our hands. In Morocco, people do everything with their hands; they eat with them, clean with them, cook with them, and many other things that we just wouldn’t do. Or, if we did, we would rinse them off immediately afterwards. Take cooking, for example. Let’s say that you’re going to chop up some vegetables or slice some meat to add to whatever you’re making. As soon as you put it all in the pot, you rinse. It’s just weird feeling to have slimy-feeling hands. Over here, in contrast, you’ll find old ladies making couscous, which takes hours of being steamed and sifted by hand, consequently coating their hands in couscous. But the amazing thing, at least from my perspective, is that they don’t care. Eventually, they’ll wipe it off or rinse it away, but until that time, they’re more than happy to ignore it.

3 – In Morocco, the functional equivalent of XYZ (eXamine Your Zipper) is “close the garage.” It is not, however, used in the same way. If you saw someone in the states with their fly down, you’d probably be pretty surprised, and might even say something (at the very least, you’d giggle). I can’t tell you how frequently I see unexamined zippers, or how much of a disconnect it is that the majority of people that I see – whether said zipper belongs to them or not – are fairly unaffected by this. I attribute this to two things, neither of which is scientifically founded. First, pants get worn, passed down, sold, bought, worn, passed down again, and so on until they’re nothing more than a pile of threads. It wouldn’t be too hard to believe, then, that the zippers loose their potency along the way. Second, and more likely, is the fact that, unlike in the States, people don’t restrict themselves to just a single pair of pants. To illustrate, I’ll tell a brief story about my little cousin, who happened to be over at the host family’s house when I was as well, and had just taken a shower. His mom began to dress him, and I swear that he equipped with about five shirts, three pairs of pants, and then another shirt or two on top of it all. In that case, what difference does it make if his outermost flag is at half mast?

4 – The Moroccans I’ve met haven’t really been what you might call “animal lovers,” but they do have an incredible relationship with animals not present in America. When we want to tell an animal to go away, we usually say “shoo” or “scat” or some similar sound until the offensive creature leaves. We don’t discriminate according to species when we choose the word to say. Moroccans do. Here’s a sample. Imagine that any one of the following animals is in your garden and eating the geraniums, what do you say? Cats: “supp!” Dogs: “quss!” Chickens: “kush!” Sheep: “shiu!” (And you throw rocks, too.) Donkeys: “rra!” Horses: “rri!” Cows: “hui!” And how did I learn this? I happened to be walking with some guys one night when a feral dog came up and started barking, to which I replied “supp!” The guys I was with were so dumbfounded that I said the cat “scram” rather than the dog one that they immediately forgot about the fact that it very likely may have been rabid and wanted to eat us, and spent the rest of the time on our walk teaching me how to tell any animal to go away so that it understands me.

5 – I love to cook, and when I cook, I love to spice it up. Moroccans are also fond of their spices, particularly cumin and salt, but they also enjoy the flavors of paprika, ginger, fake saffron, black pepper, bouillon cubes, and the occasional dashings of hot pepper. I’m into all of these as well (though I can live without fake saffron and bouillon), but, being from Rhode Island – littlest Italy – I have a few other requirements. You can’t cook without basil, oregano, thyme, sage, or rosemary, to name a few. Thankfully, all of these can be found here in abundance. They aren’t, however, used for cooking. And you can be assured of raising your fair share of quizzical eyebrows when you suggest it. But it goes both ways. They like to use sage for brewing tea, and oregano and basil can be found just about anywhere because they’re a common incense. Rosemary, though, is just for bushes.

6 – I’m not a very large person; in fact, you could probably say that I’m kind of scrawny. This is a problem not only for Greco-Roman wrestling, but also for self-description in Morocco. It just so happens that the word for skinny, daif, means both skinny and sickly. To describe someone as thin basically means that they’re anemic. Similarly, seh, it’s opposite, means both fat and healthy. There’s no way to say “svelte,” much less is it possible to convince Moroccans – particularly Moroccan host mothers – that this is something to be desired.

7 – Morocco is truly God’s own country. I recently spent a week in Rabat assisting a training of Language and Culture Facilitators (LCFs, the people who train us during our trainings). It was fantastic. We stayed in a beautiful hotel and ate delicious food every night. On one of these nights, the waiters brought us some kind of fish with a cream sauce and mushrooms. Now, if any of you really know me, you know that mushrooms are my natural enemy. It made me think, though, about how I’d been in Morocco for about five months by that time, and that this was the first time I could remember eating – or seeing – mushrooms. Morocco just doesn’t seem to do mushrooms, either. My suspicions were confirmed when I asked the other people I was sitting with, all of whom were Moroccan, if these were mushrooms. They didn’t know. They honestly couldn’t identify a mushroom without conferring and verifying with each other. At that moment, I knew I would be happy here.

8 – Now that I’m living in my own place and trying to carry on a life of volunteerism and development, I’ve found that I have many books and few places to put them. To combat this problem, I decided that what I needed was a bookcase. Unfortunately, furniture is kind of expensive, and the Peace Corps is kind of cheap, so I didn’t really have the fund available to just go out and get a bookcase. Fortunately, however, I’ve been to college and lived in my fair share of college student apartments, so I know how to get around this. All I need is a pair of boards and about four cinderblocks, and I’m golden. So I asked around for where to get boards and blocks, explaining that I intended to use these to make a bookcase. My family thought this was pretty silly of me, but I drew them a picture to explain everything, and they responded that the words for these things are blanche and tabliat, respectively. We went out to the hardware store and got some boards, and asked if the guy had any tabliat, to which he responded with a confused no. We kept looking for tabliat, going to just about every hardware or construction material stores we could think of. My host brother occasionally asked me again to explain how it was that I was going to make a bookcase out of all this, and I always responded by showing him the picture of the boards on top of the blocks. Days went by. There are cinderblocks all over the town, and I started to consider just stealing some. Finally, I was talking with a friend who speaks English and I told him about my situation, hoping that he might be able to shed some light on this situation. He did. Tabliat are not cinderblocks; they’re a type of white smock that girls are supposed to wear to school. Tobiat are cinderblocks. So incredulous were my family that I could make a bookshelf out of boards and cinderblocks that it made slightly more sense that I would want schoolgirl smocks. No wonder the guys at the hardware stores were so confused.

9 - I don't know how things are in the women's hammams and douches, but in the men's douches I've been to, there are always little stickers all over the walls with advertisements for various brands of European underpants. Most of them are briefs, with the occasional boxer brief, and most are from Italy or France. Anyway, it's something I've always been wondering about, because it basically amounts to a lot of photos of dude's well-shorn crotches there in the shower. Firstly, I don't know what purpose they might serve, as there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about purchasing the underpants if you happen to want them. It's more like a public service announcement about the various advances in underpant technology. Second, where do they come from? I mean, who has that many photos of underpants just hanging around and nothing better to do with them than to decorate the local hammam?