Beyond the Mountains

It has been an exhausting week. We have been working very long hours to try and stay on top of things. As I have mentioned before we have few hardcopy resources. Our Reading and Science programs are online, and our Math resources have not arrived. For the rest of the Language Arts we are expected to use the internet and design materials to best suit the curriculum. While this is good in many ways, such as you are not tied to one book and potential activities you don't like and it ensures you teach directly to the curriculum, it also means that we are constantly scrambling to get to know the curriculum, plan activities and plan assessment. Today is Saturday and we spent five hours working. Last weekend we were out on Friday and then away for the weekend. This meant that we spent the rest of the week trying to catch up. Combine this with a midweek evening trip down to Fes to see a friend who is leading a photography tour, and our school's Open House evening and this week has felt endless.

Taking last weekend away from school work was worth it, even if it made this week a little stressful. For an anniversary treat we went to stay in a riad in the medina in Meknes. Meknes is one of Morocco's four imperial cities and is 60km away from Ifrane and Fes. We took the bus down for a change, thinking we'd get more space and comfort than in a grande taxi. The increase in space was marginal but we did gain quite a lot of height. While this might usually be considered an improvement with the better views, it also means there is a lot more rolling and movement along the windy road. Having consumed a good share of two bottles of wine the night before I spent the entire 60 minute journey clinging the seat in front and trying to control my breathing to prevent being sick. It was with great relief that we arrived in Meknes. This relief was relatively brief as once there we had to stand in the blazing sun in the big square outside the medina while we waited for the manager of the riad to come and fetch us. As most riads are tucked away in windy back streets and hidden behind big walls, it is near on impossible to find them on your own. While we were waiting for our man we got to take in some of the goings on in the square. This large area was once used for announcements and public executions but is now a haven for cafés, lantern shops and a wide variety of street sellers. The most interesting of these were the African witch doctors. The area is renowned for its medicine men who mix up all sorts of weird and wonderful concoctions. One popular ware is dried ostrich legs and feet, complete with shrivelled skin and claws. Later in the evening the square filled with people watching performers. Snake charmers and dancers tempt people to part with money to get the tiniest glimpse of a performance. We watched a snake charmer for five minutes. There was a whole lot of shouting and parading around but very little action from the snake. If it was a snake at all. It was impossible to know for sure as it remained tied in a bag.

The witch doctors are under the umbrellas.

The riad we stayed in was stunning. At 200 years old it has been lovingly restored by a French family who used it as a home while they were teaching out here. Since they returned home 18 months ago it has been used as a hotel. With only four rooms it is an oasis of calm in the bustle and noise of the walled medina. We stayed in one of the two suites that opened onto the enclosed courtyard. Open to the sky with shade from the orange laden trees, the comfy courtyard loungers provided the perfect place for nursing a hangover. I have wanted to stay in a riad for a long time. It is impossible to know anything about what is behind the imposing doors and high walls from outside. Stepping through the door into a hall and then out into the enclosed haven of the internal garden is kind of magical. The experience was everything and more than expected. 

Our welcome mint tes at the riad.

Some of the beautiful details

The double doors to our room.

 

Compared to the medina in Fes, this medina was small. When we were in the Fes medina we found it surprisingly easy to navigate. This might be due to the fact that we stayed on the main routes. In Meknes we were not so mindful and wandered without too much thought for direction. I can honestly say that within five minutes of leaving the riad for the first time we wouldn't have been able to find our way back. While the shopping area is very condensed and we quickly walked through it, we soon found ourselves disoriented amongst narrow streets and the doors of peoples' homes. We stumbled out the other end of the medina and had to follow the wall back around to find another way in.

The windy alleyways in the medina

Spice stacks

  

We have been advised by a few people that for shopping it is best to look in Fes but to shop in Meknes. With less of a crowd, fewer tourists and a more compact area to cover, prices are also cheaper. Moroccan haggling is legendary. And we were expecting to find ourselves in quite a few long winded bargaining discussions. Surprisingly most people we have tried to bargain with have shown very little interest and are happy to let us leave without decreasing the price at all. Locals and expats alike always say the real price is 50% of the starting price and not to buy at full price. This is somewhat hard when faced with shopkeepers who are happy to let you walk away with no apparent interest in trying to make a sale. We did have one scary experience where a guy was asking about $120 for a mirror and then ended up chasing us down the street offering it us for $30. He had been so hard sell that he scared us away. We ended up leaving the medina with a 3ft black lantern, numerous pairs of shoes and four wall lamp shade to replace our dodgy pink ones. The apartment is still a work in progress but we are getting there. It might just be heading towards the nicest place we have lived in. Now we just need some visitors to show it off to... bring on November.

Bit of a funny one... on the way back we stopped to do some food shopping. In the store there was a food court with a selection of restaurants. Entertainingly one of them was named 'Bangkok Cafe... Japanese Restaurant', specialising in sushi and Chinese food. Looks like I'll be sticking to our Thai food at home still.

Steve Davey photography tours http://www.stevedavey.com/galleries/index.html

Riad La Maison Du Cote Riad La Maison D'a Cote | Booking.com

Getting into the swing of things...

It is early on Saturday morning, way to early to be respectable... before 7 am early. Little sleep was had last night, as seems to be always the case when too much red wine is drunk. We had our first proper night out in town with three of our colleagues. A straight out from work for Friday drinks kind of night... definitely not the done thing in Morocco, but we made it work non the less. We went to the 'pub' with beer garden overlooking the lake. Somewhat disappointingly we were not allowed to sit outside in the empty garden to have a beer and had to sit in the gloomy and empty restaurant style interior where they were blasting out Celine Dion and other dodgy artists. I see a return to my late teens on the horizon, with purchases of coke from the bar to be topped up with vodka from the bag. The early morning and late afternoon weather is too good here at the moment to be cooped up inside on a Friday afternoon. 

This weekend is the weekend we needed last weekend. Last week after surviving the first week of school by holding out for the weekend in desperation, we had to go on a school picnic. This was designed to welcome all the parents to the new American/International school system and for them to meet with the teachers on an informal basis. Our community is strange, you bump into your students and parents at every turn, so it is a good idea to break the ice with something fun. Apart from taking up a Saturday we would have liked free for planning and recovery, it was nice to meet new people and play games with the kids. On that note I have found that quite a few of the monsters who were screaming constantly and causing havoc on the playground all those days before school started are now in my class. The one who screamed the loudest is anyway.

Last weekend we went to one of the apartments across the way for a 'carpet educational'. Arranged by some of the foreign teachers it was designed with new teachers in mind as a way of stopping us getting ripped off when we went and bought the inevitable Moroccan carpets. Apparently most people who live here end up developing quite an obsession with carpets and buy far more than they have the space for. The people who went had around twenty huge carpets to sell or swap. It got quite intense at times with many people getting very into their descriptions of 'earth movement', 'joyous rebellion' and even 'women’s womb' representations, but it was lovely to walk through an apartment door and be handed big wine glasses and a bottle of tasty red and welcomed into the fold of a very established social community. There is so much more going in here than you'd expect. Most of it is far more Americanised than I am used to, but this is said in the nicest possible way as people here are remarkably generous. As well as being offered lifts, church money until the bank sorted our ATMs, and the loan of a car, we also had one lady send her husband back from his Friday evening out just to change our gas bottle. She had mentioned in school that her husband usually kept spares and as ours had run out he would swap it and then go and replace it. She forgot to mention this to him until he was halfway to Azrou to watch a local Berber concert. He dropped her off, came back to ours, collected the empty bottle and then went to the marche to get a new one as he didn't have a spare. He then came back, carried it up three flights of stairs, replaced it before accepting only a beer in reward and then drove 20 minutes back to Azrou. It often amazes me just how far out of their way complete strangers can go for you.

We are learning more and more about our international community, as well as the Moroccan community in the area. We have a mixture of very wealthy, highly educated Moroccans and less educated farming Berber communities. Through the university and the local markets and travelling souqs we have chance to interact with all sorts of people and most are lovely. Sadly I have heard some unpleasant things about some of the more privileged. It is not uncommon out here to hire Filipino teachers or nannies for wealthier children. It is also not uncommon for these international hires who are so far from home and family to be incredibly badly treated. A few years ago there was a case of one woman being locked up and starved and having to be rescued by concerned university staff. Thankfully all the Filipinos I have met so far seem to be happy and treated well, if somewhat overworked. It is something of a dark side to an otherwise friendly and welcoming community. 

Seem to have deleted all my pictures from this week... slipping into slight chaos of ridiculous long hours of planning... working much later than required in order to get organised... hopefully be better in the next few weeks.

First Week of School

Well, the first week of school is over and we are officially exhausted. Perhaps not as exhausted so much by the students as we would have been in Thailand, after all there are only twelve of them in my class and not thirty plus like I’m used to. We are more exhausted by slow bureaucracy and failing technology. Having signed our bank papers about three weeks ago, banked our travel allowance cheque and been paid, we have yet to receive ATM cards. The queues at the bank make it impossible to make it to the bank during school time, and it closes before we finish. This has meant that we have run out of money. We refuse to take any more money out on credit cards when we have our pay sitting in the bank down the road. Yesterday this all came to a head and our boss and superiors at the university heard about the situation. Our boss brought us pizza as she was convinced we had an empty fridge and offered us a loan from the petty cash. The female reverend from the university dropped in to school today to see if she could run us around and help us at the bank. Finally, Hannah, the Moroccan lady in charge of admin at the school arranged with the bank manager to go and collect some money for us. This is really a community that pulls together to support each other.

As for technology, this has nearly broken us this week. Nick more so than me as everything he tried to print, copy, or prepare seemed to fail. We have a photocopier that works about 45 minutes every day, a printer that often runs out of paper or ink and computers that lose connection with the printer for no reason and switch between French and English keyboards without rhyme or reason. When you have no books and no resources this drives you to distraction. It can take an hour to prepare something that the students finish in five minutes. We are with our students twenty-four hours a week and have little preparation time. This means that to get stuff ready for the next day we often have to stay an hour or two late. Writing our year plans and getting everything we need together for the semester is a distant dream right now.

Happily, it is not all doom and gloom. The school is beautiful and the time in the classroom is a pleasure. The school has 47 elementary students and has lots of space for them. A sand playground, football field and the tallest sloping-red roofs that contrast against the most incredible blue sky I have ever seen. There are ceder trees, weeping willows and pampas grass all around. it is stunning.  The students are lovely and have a far higher level of English than I am used to. Having twelve students in the class means that I already know how to get each student to work, how to control them, and what makes them tick. I’ve never had that chance before as there have always been so many kids I only get to know them properly when I tutor them. Here I am able to talk to even the most reclusive. After teaching boys for four years it's also really nice to have girls in the class. By the second day they would attach themselves like Velcro to me at the end of break. They are a really friendly class.

The administration building and lucnh hall. There is a staff room with computers, coffee machine and sofas.

The entrance

Outside my classroom window.

 

 At the end of last week we went to our first authentic Moroccan cous cous meal. Provided by the school, it was an opportunity forall the faculty to get together. With around nine people round each round table, they brought out a high sided plate that was about 50 centimetre diameter. This was piled high with cous cous, baked vegetables and tender beef and chicken. The traditional way of eating it is to all eat with your hands out of the one bowl. You have an area in front of you, like a slice of pizza. This is your space. You pick up the cous cous in your fingers and toss it in a backward motion into the palm of your hand repeatedly until it forms a compact ball. This you can then pick up and eat. This process took me so long and with my coordination meant that more went on the table than in my mouth. I quickly resorted to a spoon, as did most of the locals after the initial display of tradition.

As I mentioned before, one of the big highs of moving into our apartment was the huge great open fireplace that we have. After living in Thailand for so many years we are thrilled at the thought of having real fires when there is snow outside. When the temperature dropped last week Nick was checking the fireplace and found that the chimney had been cemented over. I was horrified. Apparently people couldn't live without the fireplace a few years ago, but now there is central heating it is more of a luxury. The chimneys were blocked up as there was a problem with birds flying down them and the university didn't want to pay for them to be cleaned any more. I’d be happy to pay for cleaning and take my chances with the birds if it meant that I could have a real fire. Sadly it doesn't look like it is an option. Instead we went out and bought some giant pine cones from one of the local souvenir shops. At the shop they went from asking for one cone for 100 dirahms to four cones for 120. When we agreed we were ushered quickly into a back room of the shop where we had to inspect pine cones. We left feeling like for the second time in a few days we had been involved in a back street black market deal.

As for the alcohol... the drought is over... a slab of beer and a couple of bottles of wine were acquired. Definitely not for the connoisseur, hopefully this weekend we'll make it down to Fes for more drinakble stuff.

Outside the classroom

View from the classroom

 

In the classroom

The Magical Middle Atlas

It has been a hectic week. Every time I sit down to write this I keep a few things on my list to write about next time as I’m convinced that sometime soon I’m going to run out of things to say and new events to share. Beyond settling in, exploring, meeting colleagues and getting into school I figured that there wouldn't be much worth telling about life in sleepy little Ifrane. Well, this week included two spontaneous dashes to Fes, dinner out with friends, an adventure to a sheep farm deep in the mountains, escaping crayfish, a snake in the hall, our first Moroccan cous cous experience and an illicit appointment in a hotel car park. This might be a long one. 

Last weekend started well. Having met some friendly returning teachers in school, we were invited down to Fes with our coordinator and his wife. He is from Austria, she is from Guatemala, and they have lived here for a while and know a lot about the area. They took us shopping to Carrefour. This French chain of supermarkets has yet to let us down. As always it was reliably filled with specialist cheeses, meats, mayonnaises, mustards, cereals and other things that you can't find anywhere else. Sadly, the wine section was still closed. When we tried to go to the second supermarket for the things we'd missed we found it was closed for an hour for the breaking of the fast. This gave us the perfect opportunity for us to find a hotel where we could enjoy our first beer in 30 days. Our first Moroccan beer was Spécial. At $2.50 for a small bottle in a hotel, this is the cheapest beer in Morocco... cheap beer really never tasted so good.

At the new faculty welcome meal a while ago, I mentioned to Kim's husband Mustafa that we really wanted some plants for our apartment. Having lived in Thailand with a mini jungle our apartment here seemed to be really lacking something. Compared to steamy Thailand that is bursting with them, suitable house plants are quite hard to find in dusty Ifrane. The cedar trees are nice, but not sure we'd get one up to the fourth floor. On Sunday morning Mustafa phoned us to say he'd take us out to find some, that there was a place about half an hour's drive outside Azrou. Kim and Mustafa own a big old farm about half an hour beyond Azrou, and after bargaining hard for us and arranging for our four big plants to be potted, he drove us out into the country to visit the farm. This was the first time we have really had chance to appreciate just how beautiful and vast the Middle Atlas are. We drove along a track off the main road for about thirty minutes, though fields dotted sparsely with small farms and holdings. We drove deeper and deeper into the hills until we reached the farm. Once there he introduced us to the family that take care of it for them and showed us around the house. With tall, tall palm trees out the front and jagged brown and dusty peaks as far as the eye can see, all you can hear is the wind blowing through the trees and the occasional bleat of a sheep. You are miles from anywhere. As stunning as it is now, in a couple of months, after the rains, the whole place will be green and fertile. While not quite as dramatic, this place equals that Lake District in grandeur just for the sheer scale of the area. We wouldn't even know where to start with walking the area. There are no maps or guides as such, just local herders who know the best places to grace the sheep at different times of year.

After leaving there it felt like we'd been on holiday for the day. It was only when we went to collect the potted plants that we realised we had left ourselves with quite a lot of hard work to do at the end of the day. Once in the pots, with the heavy clay soil, the plants weighed twenty to forty kilos. Carrying them up the three flights of stairs to our apartment nearly ended us. Two of them were so heavy and awkward that I couldn't even lift them. It was definitely worth the effort though as we now have the greenery we've become accustomed to. 

The Farm, they even own the hill behind.

The terrace at the farm

Our plants

 

This week we have had both the best and the worst weather so far. This morning while I type I have the windows wide open, the crickets are chirping and a cool breeze is blowing in. Gone is the dusty haze that we had for our first three weeks. Now most days the sky is crystal clear and as deep a blue as I’ve ever seen and we can see the hills in the distance. It is a high of around 25 degrees and always refreshing. At night it cools enough to need a jumper and appreciate slippers. I have found my perfect temperature. It quite literally fills me with joy and well being every time I walk outside. In Thailand these days came once a year if you were lucky. I’m hoping this is our fall weather for a while. Yesterday was a bit of a shocker though. We had low clouds and horizontal rain for most of the day. They say in the winter when it does snow here, that it just dumps. One day there is nothing, the next day you can have a metre or two. Fingers crossed this will be a snow year. 

Today Mustafa phoned Kim while we were in a meeting. He'd just bought a ton of crayfish and wanted to know if anyone wanted any. Always game to try something new we said we'd give it a go. He bought a dag with about ten crawling around inside. Each crayfish was about the size of my hand... and to me, terrifyingly, seemed to be mostly claws. They waved at me when Nick picked them out of the bag. We left them in a plastic bag sitting on a table by the door while we continued with the meeting. A little while later as Sarah was leaving she found that one had escaped, fallen off the table, and was making a very slow dash for the door. Sarah, is a vegetarian and seems to have a love of animals of all shapes and sizes, has talked about finding a place to keep one of the many sheep or donkeys that live in the area. If she'd had an irrigated tank, two of those crayfish would have found themselves a new home and have been spared from the pot. As it was, we bought our bag of squirming goodies back home with us, via our colleagues flat where we stopped off to see if he wanted any. We ended up stopping in for a chat for a while, during which time repeated attempts were made to escape the bag. We kept imagining his wife walking in to find them scuttling across the floor. Now many know just how uncomfortable I am with anything possessing over four legs, and dealing with crayfish, which not only seem to be all legs, but also antenna and claws. Nick doesn't seem to have quite the same issues as me and was happily chatting away to them while they swam around in the sink, right up to the point of putting them into the boiling water. I had to be on the other side of the room, quickly googling how to prepare and dismantle them. The result from ten reasonable sized crayfish was a handful of meat for a Malay curry, and a tasty cumin and chilli topping for one crostini each. A very small reward for a lot of mess and work. 

To add to our encounters with things that make me squirm, Nick was walking out of his class and into the hall the other day, when he saw what looked like a large worm. It was only as it struck out to try and bite him that he realised it was a snake. It had to be the smallest snake I have ever seen and looked like a tiny puff adder no longer than your hand. It made a dash for it and ended up crawling into a crack in the wall outside the Kindergarten classroom. Thankfully it was seen a few days later and escorted from the building.

Wednesday this week was the end of Ramadan. To celebrate surviving the fast there is a two day holiday where people buy new clothes for everyone in the house, feast with friends and family and generally congratulate everyone for making it through another fast. We had hoped that this would be the time that not only brought life back to normal, but also brought back the owners of the only alcohol store in town from wherever they have been hiding. Sadly it did not. A colleague advised us that on the third day after Ramadan ended that it would be possible to buy alcohol. Every person had a different theory, and even the staff at the big supermarkets in Fes didn't know the exact date. Theories range from 1 day to three weeks. Not what we wanted to hear after waiting so patiently for the end of Ramadan.

Anyway, our colleague was convinced that Friday was the day. We drove to the local grocers and found it still locked up. There we were advised that for sure the shops were selling in Fes. So we drove in slow traffic on the windy road 60 kilometres to Fes. There we faced the unwelcoming view of the shuttered alcohol section. While muttering profanities under his breath our friend got chatting to some guy who said he knew someone who worked in a hotel and if we called him in an hour he'd be able to get us anything. To cut a long (5 hour) story short, first we were directed to meet a guy in the Royal Mirage Hotel car park who never showed up despite repeated promises, then we met someone else who took us to black market sellers in the medina. Sitting around waiting in a variety of car parks waiting made it feel like we were doing something illicit and not just searching for a cool beer to finish off our working week. It was an adventure but I’m not even that bothered about beer so it was a rather long night. It was more of an issue for our friend, he'd given up beer for Ramadan and given us his left overs earlier in the week thinking we'd be able to replace them easily. It was quite a dejected car that drove back. Thankfully we found somewhere yesterday and we had our first proper social night that broke the 11.00pm mark last night. Typing with a fuzzy head from cheap Moroccan red wine hence there are probably even more grammatical errors than normal. Probably wouldn't have drank it in normal circumstances, but beggars can't be choosers. I did find out that the wine was from the vineyard in Meknes and is owned by the parents of one of my students. They own all the vineyards in the area and are one of the biggest wine producers in Morocco. Pretty sure they have some pretty good wines down there if you can afford it, fingers crossed for generous Christmas presents! Not sure how appropriate it would be for me to show interest in my students vineyard though... not the done thing for a teacher, especially not here.