No, really, this is the last post ever! As most of you know, my book All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World is coming June 14, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Throw me your email address, and I’ll deliver you a handful of essential, entertaining bulletins about the book and events surrounding it. (You can bet there’ll be some really good food.)
I never properly blogged about my Morocco trip. That’s because I came back and plunged right into writing about it for my book.
Actually, I spent a lot of timing tuning up my chapters on Egypt, and Lebanon, and the Emirates. By the time I really focused on Morocco again, I was in less of a Morocco frame of mind.
Of course, I had my notes and photos and everything, and I remembered what happened. I just had lost a little of what it felt like to be there. I didn’t realize I was forgetting until I was in a movie theater, watching Lincoln, and in one scene, someone’s wearing some elaborate silk dressing gown, and in a close-up, you can see the little silk-thread buttons on it.
And I felt this sudden pang. Morocco, it’s slipping away!
Why did the buttons spark this sensation? Djellabas and caftans, the standard Moroccan clothing, are often done up in heavy brocade, and these very lovely buttons. They’re emblematic of a certain level of luxury and comfort and care that’s everywhere, every day, even in rough settings. Flashes of beauty, rich colors, ornate detail–and not covered in grime or left to ruin, but well kept, and in many cases, freshly built or even being made before my eyes.
I walk around New York and look at old buildings and sigh: “Why can’t people build things like that anymore?” I harrumph. Rockefeller Center. The General Electric building–that kind of thing.
In Morocco, it’s still happening! I’m not saying every new construction is lovely, and the country is aesthetically seamless. Not at all. But a certain, very specific style is completely intact and vibrant.
So here are some photos, to try to recapture a little of that feeling, the silk-button feeling. I recommend looking at these while wearing comfy slippers and drinking mint tea… (I also recommend opening each one in a new tab–the details are key!)
Ah, the year-end recap. Some silly things, some momentous things–and not just a rehash of old blog posts. Genuine new material here.
1. We got a pet.
Well, not really. But we did get Sugar Duck, a very easily anthropomorphized sugar canister from Turkey. He speaks with a lisp, and sounds sweet, but sometimes he can be a bit snippy. Peter and I are rapidly progressing toward being one of those awful couples who only talk to each other via hand puppets.
2. I made Saveur!
Well, really, the excellent restaurant The Curious Kumquat made Saveur, as #39 in the Saveur 100. It just happened to be my name at the end.
3. I got a cover story in a magazine, and I won an award.
Please indulge my career brags briefly. I was moving too fast this year to fully appreciate these things at the time. Typing it now, I feel kinda bad-ass.
Both were via New Mexico magazine, where I’m always honored to be published. The cover story was this roundup of cool hotels in my home state, in the October ’12 issue.
And the award was from the International Regional Magazine Association, for the feature I wrote in 2011 about taking the train to Las Vegas, NM [PDF].
The best awards are the ones you didn’t even know you were up for. A Macarthur is next, right?
4. I traveled alone throughout the Middle East, and I did not die.
Back in February, I was quoted in a story about how Americans were still traveling to the Middle East.
A reader felt compelled to warn me of my foolhardiness:
Hi,
I know you feel travel to the Arab nations is safe, but you need to appreciate is how fast the situation over there can change and as an American you are a symbol of hate at the moment.We had the student hiker’s capture, when the USA has plenty of Mountains to climb.
We have the Aid workers freed by the Navy Seals in Somalia; BTW I think 10 Somalia’s were killed. So sad considering the Aid workers could be doing aid work in plenty of places right here in the USA.
Please don’t promote the middle east until women in Saudi Arabia can drive and vote. Or until women can choose their own husband.
[redacted]
Er.
Anyway, “the Arab nations” (I can’t vouch for Iran or Somalia) I visited this year are safe. I even picked up hitchhikers in Abu Dhabi.
The UAE is unintentionally hilarious; Doha is delicious; Lebanon has great hiking; Morocco is full of sweet people.
Actually, everywhere is. I don’t think [redacted] appreciates this, and I feel sad for him.
5. I took up a sport.
If you consider hula hooping a sport. It’s certainly more of a workout than I usually get, a bit of a break from my couch-and-bonbons schedule. And, remarkably, it is the only physical activity I have ever been reasonably good at on first attempt.
6. I made friends in Arabic.
For all my years studying Arabic, I have never actually gotten to know someone in the Mid East purely by speaking in that language. That has a lot to do with studying at fancier schools in Egypt, where most people speak English as a second language.
This year, I went to more French-as-backup countries, and my French sucks. And those countries also happen to have some charming and outgoing–and patient–women I’m honored to have met.
7. I went back to Morocco with my parents.
They spent a lot of time there in the late ’60s, which is why I have the name I have. I also finally figured out what my name is really supposed to be in Arabic.
All the details will be in the book.
(Oh, sh*t! The book! Why am I writing this blog post when I should be writing the book?!)
8. I turned 40.
And I feel pretty good about it. Even though I almost immediately had to have my wisdom teeth pulled. Life is so much easier at 40 than at 20. And so is traveling.
9. I might have just hit my limit with traveling.
I hope this isn’t related to the previous point. But it was a long year. As I’m writing this, I should have been on a plane to Kuala Lumpur. But general tiredness and a creeping sense of responsibility made me stay home. What’s happening?!
I do have a book to write (ack, sh*t!), and that requires sitting still. I’m a little behind schedule. After this post, you might not hear from me for another month or so.
(The book, in case you’re new here, has a lot to do with “the Arab nations”–and how they’re a great place to travel.)
******
I dedicate 2012 to all the wonderful people I met on my adventures: Maala, Btissam, Said, Alaa, Mido and family (oh, that was late 2011–but still!), Agnes, Holly, Arva, the women behind Qatar Swalif, Habooba, the Asrani family, and many, many more.
May your 2013 be filled with nourishing food and kind strangers.
Travel life is better after 40.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a first-generation anything. But even though it was new and had no reviews, I jumped at the new Polaroid Z2300 digital camera because I was headed for Morocco just two weeks after its release in late August.
It promised to solve a particular travel dilemma.
You know how you take a photo of some nice kids, or a particularly sweet family, and say, “I’ll send you photos!”? You totally mean it at the time, and dutifully copy down their address. And yet, when you get home, somehow the motivation leaves you, and then five years after the fact, you’re still feeling periodic guilt about those nice people in the beehive village in Syria? I mean, for example.
So. I’d considered buying a Polaroid, the old clunky kind—but then you give away your only copy. Really, I wanted a camera where I could give the pic to the person, and keep a copy for myself.
Which is what the Zink Z2300 does! Miraculous! You take a digital photo, then, if you like the pic, you press a couple of buttons, and presto, the camera spits out a teeny-weeny print from a slot in its side.
Well, not spits. More like sloooowly extends its tongue.
Anyway, I’ve road-tested the Z2300 (terrible name, by the way—why the numbers? It’s the very first one!) in Morocco, and I can tell what’s good and bad about it.
The good: it works. People are pretty impressed by it. And something I thought was a drawback—the small size of the photos—was a plus for one photo recipient. “If it were a normal size, I’d be like, enh. But it’s so cute and small!” said my friend Btissam. (Translating freely from Arabic.)
The bad: the quality of the camera is relatively basic. It boasts of 10 megapixels, but the sensor is probably only as big as a bedbug. My digital photos from it aren’t anything I want to print or use for anything substantial.
The display screen is so lo-res that it makes every photo look crappier than it is (though not as bad as I first thought–when I realized it had a protective film on it that could be peeled off).
It’s also pretty boxy, to hold the printing apparatus–though when you consider what it does, it’s impressive it’s as small as it is.
In practice, this meant I was carrying around the chunky Polaroid along with my regular, fancier camera (a Canon G12, also new on this trip). And my iPhone.
On the other (good) hand, the simplicity means it’s easy to hand to someone else and say, “Just press the big red button.” To judge from the packaging, covered in snaps of people doing zany things, it was designed for drunks in mind. This means children can also use it.
In fact, it looks so simplistic that it’s misleading. This is another bad thing. I’m normally an avid manual-reader, but I was lulled into thinking this camera didn’t even call for it. For about two weeks, I thought the only thing I could adjust was flash on or off. Then one day I accidentally pressed a button, and a whole menu of shooting modes (portrait, night shot, etc) came up. Der.
The other not-immediately-logical thing is the macro-lens option: it’s a little slider on the side of the camera. I jostled it once without realizing, and then for two days couldn’t figure out why all my photos were coming out blurry.
But another good: It wasn’t too expensive. If it had cost any more, I’d have serious buyer’s remorse.
But like printers and razors, the pricey part comes from the supplies. I wasn’t using the camera left and right because I didn’t want to run through the paper—I lived in fear of being discovered by a mob of kids, all demanding their own print.
Am I totally sold? Did it revolutionize my travel experience? I was going to say, Not really. But looking over just the handful of photos I took, it was well worth it–normally I don’t have any pictures of people.
I’m not a natural, outgoing, interact-with-people-to-get-the-best-shot photographer. But the Z2300 gave me a little bit of an excuse–even if there was an awkward calculus of when to use the camera, and how clumsy it would be to get it out, explain what was going on, waiting around for the photo to spit out, etc.
Near the end of my trip, I just took a random photo with it, though, rather than a portrait–and I realized I should’ve been doing more of this. It looked nice enough onscreen that I went up to the shop-owner and gave him a photo. He grinned and gave me a huge bag of olives. Aw.
Would I recommend it? Yes. It’s just plain fun, and I like the idea that I’ve left souvenir photos with a whole range of people.
But you shouldn’t buy the white version. Mine is already covered with schmutz. Black is much better for travel.
And, if you don’t have a trip or a wild-n-crazy party coming up, you might want to wait. The next iteration of the Zink Z2300 (will they call it the 2301? Or the 2400? The 4600? Seriously, what? It sounds like a 70s sports car) will almost certainly be smaller and lighter, and have a better screen.
And it will even cost less. Then I’ll have buyer’s remorse.
At least the photo paper will cost the same.
The first five tips (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5) had a lot to do with how to plan your trip (or not plan it). Now we’re getting into the more nitty-gritty on-the-ground stuff.
Drink the water.
I had written a righteous screed about how all guidebooks are just covering their asses when they tell you not to drink the water, and of course you can drink it, if normal middle-class people drink it too.
Then I went to Fes, Morocco, where everyone drinks tap water…and I got sick.
But even so, I believe that tap water is often not so horrible. If people who could afford to buy bottled water drink from the tap, you can certainly brush your teeth with it. You can even swig a bit in the night, when you realize you’ve run out of bottled water. You can have a little ice in your drink.
It’s with cumulative exposure that your system freaks out (or mine does; yours may be different–that’s my CYA). I didn’t get sick in Fes until about a week in. My threshold for Cairo tap water is about four days.
Contrary to logic, the worse the water is, the better off you are. If all the restaurants use bottled water, this means your ice is almost certainly made from purified water. Basically, there are very few situations in which you have to do that prissy “no ice, please” thing.
The reason I’m even being so macho about tap water is that plastic bottles are the world’s third-largest evil, after plastic bags and Halliburton, and I feel like a failure every time I buy bottled water. If you’re not feeling like risking it, I really recommend a Steripen. I just got one this summer–it’s fantastic. It has cut down on my water-risk-taking and makes me feel like a magician every time I use it. (But I recommend rechargeable batteries–it was due to battery fail that I was in the unfortunate Fes situation.)
On to more practical matters. Though this still relates to trip-planning.
Take the train, especially if it’s slow.
I can’t tell you how many guidebooks I’ve read recently where they’ve said, basically, “Enh, there’s a train, but you’re better off on the bus/airplane.”
C’mon—how will you ever be better off squished in a bus barreling down a highway? On a bus or a plane, you’re just waiting till you get there—that’s 100 percent wasted time.
On a train, though, the adventure starts when you get on. Fine, maybe it gets a little boring in the last hour, but it’s still at least 70 percent quality time.
Moreover, the train makes the decision for you. Overwhelmed by all the wonders a country has to offer? It’s easy to narrow down your itinerary if you just go where the train goes. After three trips to Morocco traveling almost entirely by their excellent train system, I think I’m finally ready to rent a car or hop a bus to the farther-flung parts of the country. Peter and I still haven’t run out of entertainment on the Thai train line.
Yes, you’ll be missing some things—but that would happen no matter what. Why not enjoy what you can see by train, rather than showing up cranky and poorly rested to a bunch of other places?
I could expand this tip to cover all kinds of odd transport: bikes, funiculars, pickup trucks with bench seats in the back. The weirder and more novel, the better. That way, the transit time becomes an adventure too.
In fact, maybe this tip should just be: Go the least efficient way. The slower you go, the more you see.
I try to collect a cookbook from wherever I go, sometimes in the local language, sometimes not. I prefer older and traditional, maybe with a picture of a granny on the cover. (My favorite so far: Cocinando con mi abuela, from Campeche, Mexico.)
For anyone who thinks in the same vein, may I recommend two books to seek out on your next Morocco trip.
The first is Fez: Traditional Moroccan Cooking, by M. Guinaudeau, illustrated by J.E. Laurent.
You can tell it’s traditional because it, er, advises you, the reader, to instruct your “negress” to do particular things in the kitchen. Aside from that awkward bit of language, it’s fantastically informative, even telling in impressive detail how to make a family-size bistilla.
The illustrations are quite nice, though more for atmosphere than for instruction.
I picked this version up at a shop in Marrakech that otherwise sold rather stylish little modern tchotchkes. Here’s a newer edition on Amazon, with an introduction by Claudia Roden. No idea if the dated language is changed.
The other book has no grandmas anywhere in it, I don’t think, but is solid nonetheless: The Clock Book, by Tara Stevens. (Here’s a link to it on Amazon.co.uk.)
If you’ve been to Fez before, or heard about it from any traveler, you probably know about Cafe Clock, a great little hangout/cafe/cooking school/cultural zone in the Fez medina, started by British man a few years back. The food is a cool mix of traditional Moroccan stuff and more bistro-snacky things (a camel burger, for one). The cookbook covers all the menu items and a lot more. If you want to get a handle on Moroccan cuisine without going hardcore traditional and having to pretend like you didn’t just read the word “negress,” then I recommend this. I promptly cooked a number of salads and cookies out of here and liked them all.
When I was in Fez, I also took a cooking class there with the truly delightful Souad, and learned to cook up a mean lentil soup. And, utterly unrelated and entirely coincidentally, I met Tara in Casablanca, and it turned out she was the very woman a friend in Barcelona had been trying to introduce me to a couple of years back.
The world is small, as usual. And full of tasty things. Thanks to these books, I now have more tasty things at home with me.
When I was a kid, my father and I would drive from New Mexico to Los Angeles to visit my grandmother. We’d leave before dawn, and drive straight through. When we got out of the car in L.A., the night air was warm and humid and smelled of orange blossoms.
My grandmother’s house always seemed exceedingly elegant–tall windows, plush carpeting, long drapes. In the dining room was a drawing in pastels of a medina gate, busy with be-fezzed pedestrians. I knew it was a place in Morocco, though my grandmother had never been there. My father told me she drew it from a postcard, in a class.
Decades later, my father and mother went to Morocco to live for a stretch. Due to the drawing? I don’t know.
When I was just in Fez in June, I passed by Bab Bou Jeloud, the main gate into the medina, quite a few times–the ATM there was the handiest one that accepted my card.
It was only on the fourth or fifth pass that I realized: That’s the gate! (And if you’re thinking that was a slow reaction, note that I’d even been to Fez before.)
The gate was renovated sometime in the last decade, which I assume is why the decoration around it is a bit different. Or Grandma Carol took some artistic license. Who can say? But the two minarets are still the same, and though the fezzes are gone and synthetic fabrics are in, not too much else has changed.
Except for the fact that the drawing hangs on my wall now. Alas, we have no orange blossoms here in Astoria, but occasionally when I travel, I still step into a hot, humid night and think, “L.A.–we’re here.”
Poor unloved Casablanca–or “Caza,” as locals say it, with a nice buzzy z. Six million people strong, and typically dismissed by guidebooks and travelers as not scenic, too busy, too modern.
But especially in a still-very-traditional place like Morocco, it’s interesting to go to the modern place and see just what details are preserved. As I’ve written about Cancun, in a newish city, you can see what people value because it’s there by choice, not just hundreds of years of accreted habit.
So Casablanca has hammams. And it has a little medina. And it has a modern medina, the Quartier Habous, a winding-streets area built by the French. (This, I suppose, is a better reflection of what the French valued in Moroccan culture than what the Moroccans themselves do.) It has loads of cafes. It even has honest taxi drivers, a rare thing anywhere in this world.
And it has plenty of people dressed in djellabas, the long robes with hoods that both men and women wear (with differing levels of decoration). This shouldn’t be a big surprise, but when you see old men in djellabas shuffling along old medina alleyways, it can all seem a little…put on, you know? You get that creeping sense, maybe born of watching too many movies or something, that somehow a place is just an elaborate bit of stagecraft put on solely for your benefit.
But in Morocco, they’re not messing around. People really do wear traditional clothing because they like it–and have adapted it to modern needs. Women color-coordinate their babouches (leather slippers) with their djellaba trim and their headscarves, and they can ride a moped in a djellaba just fine.
And when it rains, they can put up the hood. That’s what it’s for–it’s not just some vestigial bit of tradition.
Anyway, enough about fashion. Casablanca is fun, and you shouldn’t miss it, especially if you like Art Deco architecture. (And trams! They’re adding a tram line! Very exciting!) The whole French-built center is chock-full of old-fashioned bars and cafes with foggy mirrors and even foggier-looking old men. The tiny medina is still there, selling knock-off sneakers and vegetables. The sea is all around.
Other than that, there’s only one real thing to see. One of the things I like about Morocco, honestly, is that non-Muslims typically aren’t allowed in mosques. From a religious standpoint, that strikes me as slightly precious, but from a lazy tourist standpoint, it’s a huge relief–it knocks so much sightseeing right off my list! But there’s one mosque everyone’s welcome in, and that’s the Hassan II monster, right on the sea in Casablanca.
Photos can’t quite convey how large the thing is. Here’s one. Make sure you appreciate how tiny the people are. The whole mosque is like one of those sight-gag over-large chairs that make anyone who sits in them look like a kid.
Our guide said the mosque was built over six years by about 10,000 artisans working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even if I’m misremembering the numbers a bit (likely), is there any comparable building erected in the modern era? The level of craftwork is boggling, straight out of the middle ages.
Once you’re done being boggled by that, you can walk (slowly, if it’s a hot day) to Sqala for lunch. Or you can go to the mosque in the afternoon (2pm is the last tour of the day), and then wander over to Sqala and get an early start on dinner. Or you could go to Sqala for lunch, wander around the medina behind it, and come back for dinner. I’m putting so much thought into the timing of this because I would gladly eat there two, even three times in one day.
Sqala in itself is reason to go to Casablanca. You know how I was complaining about how all Moroccan restaurants have the same five things on the menu? At Sqala, all the treats are out: special juices (date, almond, orange-blossom water, for instance), all kinds of nifty salads, a million little sweets, and tagine combos I’ve never seen elsewhere.
We had a salad spread that included something conch-ish (abalone?) in a tomato sauce, green olives with chicken livers, an incredibly fluffy eggplant thing and something that was so tasty we ate it all, so it doesn’t show up in the photo and I can’t remember what it is. I’m crushed.
We also had a little stew with lamb, saffron, dill and what I thought were regular-but-exceptionally-good mushrooms but I now realize were so-called “desert truffles” (terfes). I had them in Syria a couple of years ago, and thought they were tasty but not tremendous. Here they were wonderfully firm and earthy, but also a bit light and springy. Maybe the Syrian ones weren’t so hot because they’d actually been imported all the way from Morocco that year, due to a bad crop in Syria.
I could go on. The setting here is beautiful, in a courtyard with fountains, under dappled shade. The place is filled with families, and the children are all well behaved. The prices are reasonable.
Another thing you could do to kill time between meals at Sqala is go see a film at the Rialto cinema, which has been beautifully restored. Just about everything is dubbed into French, but if something with enough explosions is playing, it shouldn’t matter. Or you could have a drink at the Hotel Transatlantique, where Edith Piaf once lived for a stretch. It’s not quite as down-at-the-heels as I’d like, but it’s hard to complain about any renovation in Casablanca, where the fabulous architecture is all in need of love and repair. Or you could just ride the tram to the end of the line and back–that’s what I intend to do next time I visit.
Recommended reading for your Casa visit: The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca
