Friday, June 19, 2009

In Souktown, Morocco

For those of you who haven't read any of my sister's blogs (despite my repeated requests :) ), Souktown is what my sister (Liz Fuller) calls her nearest city to her village, which she calls Berberville. She is strongly advised against revealing her whereabouts for security reasons. Unfortunately, sometimes PCVs (PeaceCorps Volunteers) can be sought out as targets. It's exceedingly rare, especially in Morocco, which loves PCVs (and has 210 currently, the second or third highest country for PCVs). Being that Morocco is about the size of CA, that's a bunch of Volunteers.

We spent our first full day in-country in Rabat, the capital and home to 1.7 million people. It's not a tourist destination, so there weren't very many non-business folks there. Rabat seems like an Arabized European city, which sort of explains why they keep applying to be a part of the EU. Here out in the bled, though, (the country-side), I have no doubt by looking out the window or when I walk down the street that I'm in a foreign, non-European country.

The big unique thing this morning were the trees full of cattle egrets in breeding plumage. (Specifics courtesy of my dad, an avid birder.) We have cattle egrets in the US, but they're pretty rare, I've never seen more than one at a time (not in breeding colors) and always w/ cattle, on a fence, a cow, or the ground. Below the trees were lots of Moroccan flags - pure red with a green five-pointed star in the middle. All of the buildings are this bright peach stone (sort of Spanish-style) with bright green tiles (Spanish-style, except for the color). I really like the color combos of the red and green flags and peach/light orange and green buildings. It's very bright and colorful.

It took us all day pretty much to get from Rabat to Souktown last night. We were in a big hurry to make it to the train station, as trains generally run on a tight schedule (as opposed to buses, tranzits - vans holding ~20 people, and petit taxis - little cars that are only allowed to carry 3 passengers. (We're 4, so we need 2 petit taxis to travel.) We were planning on going to stay in the monastery with the monks (about 1 hour outside of Souktown) and we wanted to make it there before evening prayers. After a mad scramble w/ our ~250 pounds of luggage up and down some stairs, we made it onto the platform w/ about 10 minutes to spare. The train was about 25 minutes late. We ran into some of Liz's friends (other PCVs) who were on their way out.

While we were in Rabat, we got to meet a bunch of Liz's friends because her cohort (stage - pronounced in the French way, 'staaage') were all coming in for a week of medical tests - their 1-year (and only) check-up. She was commenting that we got to meet more PCVs this way than any other configuration of timing for us to arrive. This timing also works well, since she now doesn't have to take as many days off for vacation. PC paid for the trip to Rabat (Casablanca, where we flew in is just a short 2 train-rides - a 2-hr trip - from Rabat). Her days in Rabat counted as work and, since she just had a few hours of meetings a day, we got to still spend most of them with her.

We went to the archeology museum Thursday (yesterday) morning. It had a fascinating collection of pre-historic, Islamic, Christian (Roman), and medieval artifacts. The descriptions were in French, so we got to practice French.

More soon! Send me emails if you like and I'll get them (and maybe even have time to respond to a few). :)