Here’s the tricky thing about learning the Arabic language – there isn’t one. There are four, or seven, or twelve, depending on how you look at it. There’s Classical Arabic, which is what the Qur’an is written in. Then there’s Modern Standard, also known as Fus’ha, which is what the news is in. Then there’s the various dialects, called Derija, which vary wildly from one country to the next. A Saudi and a Moroccan could understand each other about as well as a Frenchman and a Spaniard.
I, like almost every other student of Arabic, am starting with Modern Standard, Everyone can understand Fus’ha, because it’s in all their media, but no one speaks it on a daily basis. Talking to a Moroccan in Fus’ha is like going up to someone on a street in Detroit and spouting Shakespearean English. It gets you some weird looks.
On top of that is the fun fact that Morocco used to be a French colony, so anyone with any education speaks French. Most of their tourists are French or Spanish, so you’re greeted with a chorus of Bonjours and Holas every time you walk through a tourist-frequented district.
The upshot of all this is that instead of learning one language, like some of my lucky fellow Moore students, I’m learning bits and pieces of three. My Spanish is getting more practice than it has in years, too, and every time I get flustered I start belting out Mandinka, which doesn’t do a whole lot of good.
There are too many words in my head.
As long as I’m whining like a little girl, I may as well mention the weather. Almost every day in Fes has been blue skies, clear sunlight, fantastic views, and air cold enough to freeze you in place. Whatever I was expecting when I went to the land of camels and sand dunes, it wasn’t being unable to do my homework because my hand is cramped and frozen. Every morning I huddle with my fellow classmates in the meat locker they call a classroom, bundled up in coats and shivering as we mumble along with our professor’s alien phrases and scribble strange runes into notebooks. Ana bareed da’iman.
But there’s nowhere I’d rather be. This city is, I'll say it again, absolutely amazing. Every time I explore the old medina I find some new hidden secret. Turn a corner off a tiny alleyway, and you’re in a massive courtyard, the walls covered in faded calligraphy and a dried-up fountain in the middle that could double as a swimming pool. Everyone here’s got a story, which they’re eager to tell even if you can’t understand more than a few words. I’ve spent hours in tiny, smoky tea shops, playing cards with day laborers and taxi drivers and listening to them argue about politics, religion and football. A majority of the population here is Berber, not Arab, but the government and economy are dominated by Arabs, a fact which causes no small amount of rancor. Recent reforms have elevated the status of the oppressed majority and increased their political influence, but that doesn’t seem to have appeased many dissenters.
I’ve found following the “yes” rule nets you a lot of XP in this town. (XP is the game my friends and I came up with in the Gambia. The object is to have as many strange or affecting experiences as possible, earning XP every time you really live your life.) When you’re travelling and someone asks you to do something, your first instinct is to say no, on the assumption that they’re trying to screw you. It’s true, most of them are, but you’d be amazed the people you meet and the things you see when you try saying yes. Last night I was in the market with a friend of mine, an Army guy named Joe who’s learning Arabic to be a cultural liaison for the infantry, and we passed a fairy-tale carriage. It was all in white, with a wrought-iron cage on top which was twisted into strange and elfin shapes, like a garden trellis. With a white horse drawing it and velvet cushions inside, it was a vision straight out of Cinderella, and when the driver asked me if I wanted a ride there was no way I could turn him down. We climbed into the seats, bundled our jackets against the cold, and with a cluck the driver got the horse moving. He was a young guy, maybe fifteen, and he had a sober, serious face that instilled confidence.
Of course, within minutes it was clear that he was insane. He began at a sedate pace, then let the horse pick up to a trot, then a gambol, then a run. Then he stood up in the driver’s seat, slung one leg over the front of the carriage, and whipped the horse into a full-on gallop. It was unbelievable how fast that animal could go, pulling a carriage and four people – probably fifteen or twenty miles an hour, but it felt like sixty. The city lights whipped past us and we rocketed down narrow roads and around breakneck turns. It was not a carriage ride, it was a chariot ride – Grand Theft Auto, Ben Hur Edition. The driver’s father was in the front seat, and he never once glanced at the road, just chatted with us as his son pulled the carriage out onto the highway.
Traffic in Morocco is insane at the best of times, with nothing resembling laws or rules of common decency dictating the paths of drivers. It’s a total free-for-all, every car for itself, even when one of the cars happens to be a goddamn horse-drawn carriage. At one point the driver did a full speed U-turn on the highway, which meant that cars were coming at us from both directions, swerving and honking and screaming curses. Joe and I stood up in our seats, gripping the bars of the cage and letting the Arabian night whip past us.
I’ve been lucky to find a couple other “yes” people out here. There’s Joe, who climbed the city wall the first day we met – the wall that armies have thrown themselves against, where men fought and died for centuries. Took him about ten minutes, mostly because he had to jump for a few of the holds. Then there’s Maia, a freelance journalist from Denmark who enjoys finding a unique perspective for her stories, such as the time she lived with a prostitute for a week to write a piece about the legal sex trade in Copenhagen. They’re good people to have around in a pinch.
One of our favorite places to visit is the hill north of town, which overlooks the old medina and gives a spectacular view of the world’s last medieval city. It holds the Merinid tombs, an entire hillside covered in ornate graves, as well a the fort that an old king built to keep an eye on Fes, which apparently used to have an annoying habit of exploding into violent rebellion.
While hiking there one day we saw a guy walking toward us, carrying a long stick out in front of him with something precariously dangling off the end. When we got closer we saw it was a small dead snake, smashed with a rock. He put it on a boulder and let us admire it for a while, then made an expectant gesture. We gave him a quizzical look, and he made it again, holding out his hand and tapping his palm. He wanted us to buy the snake.
Joe and Maia are crazy, but they have limits, and quickly turned him down. I, however, was intrigued. I’d never bought a dead snake before – I wasn’t sure what the base price should be, or the best way to negotiate. It was an interesting challenge. I talked him down from twenty dirham to five, or about eighty cents, which I think is a damn good deal. How much would a dead snake cost in America? You’d have to find someone capable of finding and killing one, then pay them to go and bring it back – you’d be out at least twenty or thirty bucks, at the least. I made out like a bandit.
The snake hunter insisted I cut the head off, a sensible precaution. I left the noodle-like body in a bush and wrapped the head in my trusty bandana. Back at my homestay I attached it with some electric tape to my bookshelf, and there it hangs now, watching over my room, offering protection and wisdom.
I haven’t been able to indulge in quite as many of these little episodes as I’d like, because my mobility has been hampered by an annoying injury. I want to stress, though, that this injury wasn’t my fault – Fate did it.
The cheapest way to get to Fes from the States turned out to be a flight to London on December 31st, followed by a cheap trip with RyanAir to Fes on the 1st. On the plane to England I sat next to an American girl named Nicole who was studying International Relations in London, with a focus on religion. She was interesting, she was worldly, she was cute – it was a good flight. As we got off she told me she was celebrating New Year’s at a place called Maggie’s in Chelsea, and that I should come by if I was in the area. I said sure, in that way you say yes when both people know there isn’t a chance in hell of it actually happening.
As it turned out, though, my travelling companions weren’t in the mood for serious London partying, and they went to bed shortly after midnight. I wasn’t going to pass up a chance like this, though, spending New Year’s in the City, so I took to the subway and went to find a bar called Maggie’s. This was harder than you’d think, since Londoners have less knowledge of their own city than any group of people I’ve ever met. No one had the slightest idea of how to get to Chelsea, or they were both absolutely sure and completely wrong, sending me on a false trail half a dozen times. Finally I found the one tube station employee who was still on duty in the entire city, and he pointed at a train that had just come in on the platform downstairs.
“That’s the last line to Chelsea!” he said. “Go get it! Run!” As I lunged down the stairs I planted a foot wrong on a wet step. It slid over the edge and twisted badly, sending a bolt of pain up my leg and me tumbling down the stairs. I limped onto the car just as the doors whooshed shut.
Once I got to Chelsea, I learned the bar was a good a mile or two away. After the first quarter mile my ankle went numb, so I assumed I was okay, because I’m an idiot. It was raining, of course, and I was soaked by the time I got to Maggie’s, which was not so much a bar as a full-blown nightclub, with a line of people waiting to get in and a forty pound cover. That’s sixty bucks, which is a lot more than I wanted to pay for the off chance that a random girl I met in a plane might still be inside.
I walked up to the bouncer, a gigantic guy with a permanently sour expression, and told him my improbable story, asking if I could just take a look around, then come back and pay if she were in there. He was unimpressed. A few of the girls in line overhead, though, and thought it was the most romantic damn thing they’d ever heard. They implored him to let me in – it was actually kind of touching – and finally he turned the whole question over to a higher power: Maggie.
The woman herself came out into the rain, and she was far more intimidating than the bouncer. A tall, statuesque blond, with a deep fur coat and liberally coated with diamonds, Maggie could snap you in half with an arched eyebrow. She listened to my story with a mix of amusement and annoyance, then waved at the bouncer.
“He’s got ten minutes. Make sure he doesn’t try to stay longer.” So I descended into the club, gorilla in tow. As soon as I got down the stairs I knew it was hopeless. It was a large room, made claustrophobic by the wall of partiers dancing wall-to-wall. There wasn’t an empty square foot to be found in the place. The lights were off, except for flashing strobes. I wouldn’t have been able to find my own mother in there, much less a girl I’d only met once. With a shrug I waded into the crowd, my Cro-Magnon friend following like a bodyguard. I searched aimlessly amid the swirling bodies for minutes, going through the motions of an absurd quest.
Then I found her. I pushed through a pack of German hopping manically in place and came face to face with the Girl from the Plane. For a second I just stared in shock, then I put a hand on her shoulder. “Nicole!” I shouted over the music. “I made it!” She gave me a wide-eyed, startled look, then turned her back on me. I tried again. “Nicole! I actually found you!” She grimaced and maneuvered so that a friend was planted in between us.
This was ridiculous. After all this, after chasing Fate through the rain and half of London, after injury, confrontation and triumph, to be rejected. This was not how the story was supposed to go. Outside, the bouncer, who’d spoken a total of a dozen words the whole time I’d known him, said, "That's bullshit."
"I'll let you in. Half off on the cover."
So I ended up staying, dancing on my numb ankle and getting lost in the noise and crowd. Somehow my story ended up spreading around the club – I have no idea how, but I suspect the bouncer had something to do with it – and I had no shortage of dance partners all night. Most people thought I was an idiot, though, and it was hard to disagree.
I woke up the next morning and my ankle had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit. It still hasn’t fully healed, which is annoying, because it's keeping me from enjoying this country to the fullest.
Still. Hell of a New Year’s Eve.
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