The Saga: Part Three; In Which We Follow Strange Arab Men Through Dark Alleys

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, it should have been easy to get to the riad. The problem was, whether due to religious beliefs, pure sexism, or something else altogether, the taxi driver seemed to refuse to interact with me. No matter whether I spoke English, French, or Arabic, he would never respond to a word that I said, although he would speak to A fairly freely (for the record, that's never happened before.) That wouldn't have been a major problem except that the directions were in French and the driver didn't seem to speak much English. A tried the best he could to repeat what I said, but enough was lost in translation that the driver seemed to simply grasp onto the one phrase he understood "Qasbah des Oudayas." That was the general area we were supposed to go, but there were more directions from there that he seemed either to not understand or to ignore. He did, however, stop the car several times to ask strangers for directions - unfortunately, everyone told him something different.

Just as I was getting ready to have him let us out so we could find a new taxi driver who knew the area and would actually acknowledge my existence, our driver stopped his car, helped us pull out our luggage, asked A for the address to our riad, and started leading us (carrying one of my bags) into the medina. That late at night (it was, by now, perhaps 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning), especially with the air so heavy with fog, the medina was an incredibly eerie place. It was almost deserted except for stray cats and the occasional group of 20-somethings, mostly men, loitering in doorways. Whispering for A to make sure to stay close, I started following the taxi driver (or, really, my suitcase.) Every so often, he would stop and ask someone for directions. Everyone seemed very friendly and eager to help (we found out later that there are a number of riads in the area and visitors are always getting lost, so there's a sort of understanding between riad ownders that they help each other help their guests out) but everyone seemed to have a different idea of where we should go. Eventually, the taxi driver seemed to have had enough, and passed us over to two young men who, fortunately, were willing to converse with both A and me. 

Talking about it later, A and I agree that we were both incredibly grateful that this wasn't our first time in Morocco. It's never a fun thing to be passed back and forth between strange men who are leading you and all your present possessions down strange dark alleys in a foreign country the middle of the night...but we at least knew that, in Morocco, it's extremely common for people to step up and guide people like that. Scams and theft certainly happen, but they're often much rarer than in the U.S. and we've developed a pretty good radar for them. Plus, I was following enough of their Arabic conversations (and they didn't know I spoke Arabic) to be confident that they weren't planning anything sinister unless they were speaking in an extremely clever code.

Anyway, they took us almost all the way to our riad, until we were met by the man who runs it, who they had called to come and help us. He led us the rest of the way there and checked us into our room without any more incident. So that was nice. He then asked us what time we wanted him to make us breakfast. "9:00? 8:30? 8:00?" Hearing the times getting earlier and earlier, I quickly assured him that 9:00 would be wonderful.

The room itself is very small but full of ornate Moroccan flairs that A and I had both missed far more than we'd realized. The mattress is excellent, and despite getting up early for breakfast, I still slept longer (not to mention more deeply) than I have in nearly a week.

The next morning, we woke up and went upstairs for breakfast, only to realize that somehow we had adjusted our clocks incorrectly, and woken up at 7:30 instead of 8:30. Oops. Fortunately, the man was very sweet about it and quickly whipped us up one of the Moroccan breakfasts that we had both missed so much:  mint tea, fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh bread, and jam.

Feeling energized by the copious amounts of sugar we'd just had, and eager to see Rabat in the daylight, A and I then set out to do some exploring. I don't think either us had realized until that point just how much we had missed Morocco. Everything from our favorite soft drink, to the terrifying way you have to cross the street, to the beautiful djellabas that men and women wear, to the bookstores on nearly every block and the patisseries on every corner, just made us feel like we'd finally come home. It was an amazing feeling. 

St. Pierre Cathedral

We were able to find two churches within very easy walking distance of our riad (maybe 10 minutes each, all on flat ground. Yay!!) Both of them have daily mass in the evenings. One of them is a medium-sized church on a busy street that is just across from the "Lalla Meriem Creche pour les Enfants Prives des Familles," or the "Mary Home for Children without Families" which we assume that the church operates. I am VERY excited about this, because I am itching for a place to volunteer and I'm hoping that that might be the perfect place to do it. I'd absolutely love to do something with kids, whether it's playing, changing diapers, or teaching French or English. The chance to do it in conjunction with a local church would be even better. The second church was an absolutely breathtaking cathedral with stained-glass windows, an enormous (still used) pipe organ in the back, and mosaic images depicting each of the stations of the cross along the side walls. This church seems to be heavily involved in community charity work, including a prison ministry and an outreach program for immigrants, so I should absolutely be able to find somewhere where I can get involved and be useful. I can't wait! 

The bookstore: if you recognize why its name is awesome, you get a cookie!

After visiting the church, A and I went to a bookstore that we absolutely fell in love with. It's packed with fantastic literature, including an enormous wall of Francophone Moroccan authors that I've been dying to check out since last summer. It also has a history section with several books that are exactly in A's main field of research. 

Next, we headed to a nearby restaurant where we settled in to have our second real, live, Moroccan meal. For about $6, we each ate our fill of fresh bread, delicious meat and French fries all soaking in the meat's juice, water, and Hawa'i (our favorite Moroccan soda - and yes, I spelled it right.)

So, all in all, despite how difficult, stressful, exhausting, and expensive it was to get here, I think our overwhelming feeling is that it's good to be back.

Good night.

The Saga: Part Two; In Which We're Exhausted... No, Really

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, to pick up roughly where A left off...

We were scheduled to fly out of Istanbul the next morning at about 7:00. After checking the ticket approximately 1,000,000 times to be SURE that we had the date and time right, A and I set one alarm for 3:30 and another for 3:35, (we really didn't want to miss another flight) and went to sleep. Although I was completely exhausted (I know we keep going back to that, but seriously, it was really, really bad) my traitor brain managed to wake me up at about 1:30 that morning whispering "What if neither of the alarms goes off?" "What if we're so tired that we sleep through them?" "What if on the 1,000,001st time I look at the ticket, I realize that really we're supposed to leave at 3:00, not 7:00?" and so on and so forth. Eventually, I gave up trying to get back to sleep.

So. 3:30 rolls around, A gets up, we gather our things and head for the airport. It all seems to be going smoothly until, as we're waiting in line to check our bags, a passport control worker comes up to check our ticket and our passport. After asking some standard questions about where we're going and what we plan to do there, he informs us that, as we don't have visas into Morocco, we have to be out within 90 days. We were aware of that and planned to work around it by either getting an extension from within the country (which we've been told we can do) or by making a day trip to Spain (or wherever) and coming back with a fresh 90-day allowance. Both seem to be pretty common solutions, we certainly aren't planning on over-staying our visa, so no big deal, right?

Well, according to this man, we cannot be issued our boarding passes until we show him our tickets out of Morocco, bought for within 90 days of the current date.

Now, keep in mind that at this point, besides being (surprise!) completely exhausted, we had also just spent massive amounts of money on four plane tickets to Morocco (two for each of us), plus two train tickets, two bus tickets, a hotel stay, and numerous taxi trips - none of which we had budgeted for at all*. Hearing that we were going to have to buy two MORE plane tickets was really more than either of us could handle at that point. But, if it was that or not being able to get to Morocco...And it wasn't like we could just hop on a later flight, because we had grabbed the last two seats available until Sunday.

Fortunately, as far as either of us could tell (no one we talked to spoke particularly good English, so we're still only about 90% sure) all we wound up having to do was make a "reservation" for a ticket, which didn't actually cost any money. They seemed to be much more concerned with the piece of paper formality than anything else, but it was still a pretty enormous scare.

We were, however, able to land in Madrid without incident. From there, we had a 9-hour layover that morphed into a 10 1/2-hour layover because of delays, but we safely landed in Casablanca at about 7:40 (Casa time) that evening.

The flight itself was absolutely beautiful; we took off just as the sun was beginning to set, which let us watch it slowly go down as we flew over Spain. Unfortunately, we were somewhat nervous throughout the trip, because we had to get through passport control, grab our luggage, pass through customs, and get to the airport train all by 10:00 or miss our transfer to the night's last train heading to Rabat (where we're living and where we had a hotel for the night.)

Last time we flew into Casablanca, passport control alone took well over 2 hours, so we rushed there as quickly as we could. Luckily, it went much more smoothly this time, and even though the airport was packed, we were able to get all our things and make it to the train by 8:40 - plenty of time to catch our breath before the 9:00 train out.

Thrilled that we had made it through so quickly and grateful that we should be able to so easily make it to Rabat, we settled back to relax and wait for the train to come. We waited. And waited.

At first we joked about how silly it was that we had expected the train to be precisely on time - had we forgotten how Morocco worked?

At 9:15 I heard a couple angrily complaining in French about how ridiculous it was that the train still hadn't come. Moments later, they stormed out while saying they would just take a taxi. I chuckled to A about how they probably wouldn't do very well in Morocco if a 15-minute delay bothered them so much.

At 9:30, I started needing to go to the bathroom, but didn't want to leave in case we missed the train.

At 9:40, I finally decided to take the chance.

At 9:45, A and I tried to reassure each other that the train to Rabat would almost certainly be running late, as well, and we should be just fine.

At 10:00, I saw a group of men come back from talking to someone at the ticket office. They looked very upset, but I could only pick up bits and pieces of what they were saying.

At 10:10, another group of men came and began spreading the word that the train wasn't coming. Everyone who had been waiting got up to leave.

Most of the people were flooding the ticket office trying to get refunds, but A and I were just focused on trying to make it to the transfer station in time to get that last train to Rabat (which was supposed to leave at 10:45.) We didn't even know whether it was still running, but we were pretty desperate not to be stuck in another foreign city for another night.

The station was so crowded that it took us another 10 or 15 minutes to make our way out to the taxi station. At first we tried to get a taxi to the train station, but we pretty quickly realized that we almost certainly wouldn't make it there in time. At that point we were so exhausted that we decided to just take a taxi all the way to Rabat.

Fortunately, Moroccan taxis are affordable enough that the 1 1/2-hour or so trip was "only" about $85. Unfortunately, we're broke and that's still a lot of money. Anyway, the complications continued as we began driving through heavy fog that made it extremely difficult to see more than a few feet ahead of us. Moroccan drivers being Moroccan drivers, that made him slow down to maybe 70 MPH. Anyway, the complications (sorry, "adventures") continued when we arrived in Rabat. Our hotel, Dar Alia Riad, was actually a riad (basically, a mansion that's been converted into a smallish hotel) set in the center of the medina. Unfortunately, the medina can be difficult to navigate even in the daytime, and it is almost impossible to drive through. Fortunately, I had very specific directions regarding where to have the taxi driver let us off, and exactly how to walk to the riad from there. 

 Seriously, don't try to drive a car through here.

This post is so excessively long, even for me, that I'm splitting it into two parts. 

Next Up: Silly J! Why would you expect things to start being simple?

* Can I just take a moment to once again thank everyone for their extraordinary generosity at our wedding? Seriously, as bad as things were, they would have been much, much worse without all of your help. Thank you so much.

The Saga: Part One; A('s) Perspective on Our Travails... Err... Travels (Part One)

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, J's given you a bit more background on why we're on a completely different continent than we're supposed to be. That leaves it up to me to tell you how we got there (unless J decides to chime in on this too).

There's no reason for this to be here except that we took it in
Turkey, and we thought it was fun. Not sure what Nas
means in Turkish, but I'd like to think it means "Rocket."

We left our apartment at about 8:30 PM on Monday night. We were, upon leaving, completely exhausted. J was exhausted because a bad bed combined with a ten mile trek the previous day had left her in some of the worst pain she's had in quite some time. I was exhausted because while J was busy packing and cleaning, I had spent much of the day out and about running various errands. Well, I didn't actually run, but I walked a great deal.

Anyway, so we're exhausted. Not realizing that we would be moving to Morocco within a month of arriving in Turkey, we had backed five bags. All of those bags, now repacked (with two of them filled with expendable items, because we weren't sure what our baggage allowance was), had to be loaded into a taxi and taken to Ankara's main train station. The loading isn't so bad, but everything in between is not fun. J had two large rolling bags weighing in at about eighty-eight pounds. I had two rolling bags and a duffle bag which weighed in at well over a hundred pounds. I only managed by putting the duffle onto the larger rolling luggage, which put a hundred pounds on one arm. Oh, and yeah, we both had back packs with our laptops in them too.

Seriously, an amusement park with rides and everything.

Right at the beginning, Turkey started to get its revenge on us for leaving. It was sad to leave our apartment, and as if to add insult to injury, the Ankara train station is located across the street from an amusement park. Seriously, an amusement park.

We waited a few hours at the station, then were able to board our train: the Ankara Express. It's a sleeper train from Ankara to Istanbul, where our flight was (there didn't seem to be a whole lot of traffic between Turkey and Morocco, and we were happy to get what we did). I slept fine, but I woke up around six in the morning, and J barely got any sleep at all. When we got to the station, we broke our fast with a couple bagels. So we were tired and underfed as we dragged our bags off the train and into a taxi.

The ride from the train station to the airport was not a pleasant one. There are a great many cars on Turkey's roads, and their taxi drivers seem to be correspondingly aggressive. I was alright, but J's motion sickness was bad by the time we got to the airport.

Once we were in the airport and looking for the line to check in, we noticed something peculiar about our tickets. In the US, we show everything in AM and PM. However, the Europeans, always out to have more practical measurements, keep counting up to 24:00. So right now, I'm writing this at 21:53. Well, we realized at the airport that our tickets did not say that we would be taking off at 1:35 PM, but at 1:35. It was only then that we realized the check in counter opened at 22:35 the day before.

We don't really have many photos from this portion of the
trip. So here's the train station. Gar means station.

 We were crushed. We were supposed to be at our hotel in Rabat within just twelve hours, and now we realized that we didn't even have a valid plane ticket. We were exhausted, J was nauseous, we had no ticket, and we had no place to stay. Just going on was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done. I would say the same for J too, but she’s faced a lot more problems in her day and she’s a lot braver than I am. Speaking for myself, I had to fight repeatedly the urge to break down into sobs. We had invested a great deal of time, effort, and money to get as far as we had, and now we were faced with the prospect of putting in a whole lot more.

Fortunately, the airport we were at provided free internet, and we were able to strategize our next moves. We booked a hotel, looked up bus schedules, and a two hour bus ride and a one hour taxi drive later we had all of our things settled in a hotel room for the night.


Still not many photos from this part of the trip. But look! The
Turkish flag. This kind of thing was everywhere. One of the
things J and I wanted out of the trip to Turkey was a better
understanding of Turkish nationalism. While we didn't really
get to talk to any Turks about it, we definately got a lot of
graphic examples.

I just want to stop and say at this point that I’m married to one of the most fantastic people in the world. I was on the verge of breaking down like a three year old and sobbing, and I had gotten sleep in the past three nights. I was fully recovered from the taxi ride. I was barely functioning, and I was in much better condition than J was when she looked up public transportation in Istanbul, booked our hotel, and found us a flight for the next day for only a mildly bank busting fare. She did it because she’s done almost all of that kind of work for all of our trips, because she’s one of the most capable and hardworking people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. The fact that she did it in the state she was just goes to prove that she’s also the strongest person I know. I would say I don’t know what I would have done without her there, but the truth is I never would have made it so far. I am the luckiest man in the world, and I don’t mind telling you either.

(Note, when I read the preceding paragraph to J, her response was, “Suck up.” Can I just say that I also married the funniest woman in the world, as well)



Look! Another Turkish flag! And yes, I was
very tired when I wrote these captions. Why
do you ask?

So anyway, J got us a hotel five minutes from Istanbul’s other airport (the two are almost as far apart as you can get in Istanbul, they’re literally on separate continents). It goes without saying we were tired, but I’m going to say it anyway. We were very, very tired. It was in this context that we read the note on our hotel mirror, that while the tap water was fine for brushing teeth, it was not drinking water



That would have been fine, except that the hotel charged five Turkish Lira for a half liter bottle of water. For context, a half liter is about the size of bottles in the states (maybe a bit smaller, I’m not sure), and five Turkish Lira is about $3.30. To give that further context, the same bottle would cost .35 Turkish Lira in the grocery store or .50 Turkish Lira almost anywhere else.


At this point, I want to say something about greed. Greed is charging ten times the retail value of an item essential for human survival, and then telling your guests that they are not allowed to bring in their own food or drinks. Greed is charging more than 13 dollars, dollars mind you, for a can of Red Bull. Greed is charging a price because you can, and it, like other degrading evils is best met with nonviolent protest. In our case, nonviolent protest consisted of going to the shopping center across the street, buying two 1.5 liter bottles for one Turkish Lira each, and then thoroughly hydrating ourselves with the banned items in our hotel room.

Just writing all this out makes me tired, so, on that note I’ll end for now. I’ll complete the rest of this saga later.

More Details

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here.

A and I were very excited about spending an academic year in Turkey. As we brought up in one of our first posts, we were both eager to learn the language and come to understand the country better, and we both believed strongly that Turkey would quickly become an increasingly influential player in the region. None of that has changed. The school seemed excellent, the people we had the chance to interact with were incredibly kind and helpful, our apartment was lovely...but almost immediately, we began running into significant complications.

The first (and biggest) problem, as A mentioned, was the Arabic classes. Certainly, before we had left, A and I were fully aware that Turks speak Turkish, not Arabic, so we weren't going to get an "immersion" experience. However, Bilkent University was supposed to offer a number of Arabic classes. Unfortunately, after we arrived in Ankara, we found out that (a) many of the more advanced Arabic classes wouldn't actually be offered, meaning that I wouldn't be study at the level I needed, and (b) although normally Bilkent's classes are offered in English, its foreign-language classes are taught in Turkish. So, even if they had offered Arabic at the level I'd needed, I wouldn't be able to take it - and obviously, A couldn't take anything, either.

Fortunately, A and I had come up with a back-up plan before even leaving for Turkey, just in case the Arabic classes at Bilkent weren't what we were looking for. If that happened, we were planning on taking classes at Tomer, a very reputable language school in downtown Ankara. Unfortunately, that didn't work out as planned, either. Although our planning had gone so far as to plot out the public transportation we'd need to take to get to Tomer (to make sure we could get there and back without too much trouble), apparently some of the bus stop listed online didn't really exist...so it would easily be a 2-hour trip each time we wanted to go to a class. Then there was the fact that we'd have to take at least 6 hours of Arabic each week, which would have been fine except that we also had to be full-time students at Bilkent - the Arabic hours wouldn't count. Oh, and also - despite what I had been told before we left - the Arabic classes at Tomer were also offered in Turkish.

So, it quickly became obvious that there was no good way for us to study Arabic while we were at Bilkent. That alone was a huge blow: we're both Arabic majors who want and need to use the language regularly for our careers, and we've still got a long way to go in mastering it. We weren't ready to throw in the towel yet, though: there was still a lot that we could get out of the program, and we were quite happy there. We had a lot of long talks about our options, including just staying for a semester and independently studying Arabic for that time, trying to get involved with the Arab immigrant community and finding help with Arabic that way, etc. At the same time, we agreed that we should start looking into other options, just in case. We knew that whatever we decided, we would need to do it soon: it was already too late to go back to OU for the semester and classes at Bilkent would start in just a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the problems just kept piling on. Although our apartment was lovely, it was basically all a single (large) room and the mattress was very hard. As most of you know, I have some significant health problems that make it very difficult for me to sleep well at night (which, of course, makes the health problems much worse, and the cycle continues from there.) The mattress and the fact that A woke me up practically every time he moved were causing some major problems. And this was before classes had started or A and I had any sort of real schedule at all, so we were getting very concerned about what would happen as we got busier.

Church was another challenge. We had researched church options before leaving and found (we believed) three excellent options. Unfortunately, the information was apparently very outdated (if it had ever been accurate) as only one of those places actually offered services. It was, of course, the furthest church from our apartment, and (because of the previously mentioned non-existent bus stop), it was a massive ordeal to get to. Basically, to make it to service at 10:30, we had to:
1) Be up and out the door by 8:20
2) Walk about 1 mile downhill to the nearest bus stop to catch the first bus of the day at 8:40
3) Ride the bus for about 40 minutes to downtown Ankara
4a) Either power-walk about 4 miles (almost all steeply uphill) and (if everything went well) arrive slightly late; or
4b) Take a taxi and risk having the driver deliberately drive around in circles so he could run up the meter, realize exactly what he's doing but not be able to stop him because of not speaking the language, and wind up late to church anyway but this time with a $45 taxi fare to boot (all of which happened on our first Sunday.)
Then, we had to quietly slip into the back of church, try to focus on mass when really we were just hot and sweaty and tired and dehydrated, only to have to repeat the trip in the opposite direction less than an hour later, not arriving home or eating until after 2:00 in the afternoon and bringing our total walking distance to 10 miles (almost all up and down large hills.)
All of that was bad enough in August and September, when the weather was actually quite beautiful. It would be much, much worse in the winter once the snow and ice came. 

In fact, transportation in general was a fairly significant issue. The nearest grocery store was about a mile away, which wouldn't have been so bad except that it was (surprise!) steeply downhill, meaning that the walk back, carrying all our groceries uphill, was exhausting. The only affordable way to get anywhere off campus was by taking the bus, which was slow and left both of us painfully motion sick every time.

There were a number of other complications, similar to the above in that yes, we could have come up with manageable solutions for some things and sucked it up and dealt with the rest. But now that studying Arabic - our primary motivation for delaying graduation and studying abroad in the first place - was clearly not going to work out, was it really worth dealing with all the other problems on top of it?

Eventually (as you've probably figured out) we agreed that it wasn't, especially because we had several good alternatives in the works. As some of you already know, A and I had previously considered studying in Morocco over the summer before logistical complications made going to Turkey for the school year seem like the better option. Luckily, that meant that we had already done some significant research into Arabic programs in Morocco and had been in fairly extensive contact with several schools. So, we were able to simply reinitiate contact with what had been our favorite options, see what was affordable and could take us, and sign up. We probably wouldn't have been brave (or reckless) enough to make the switch if it weren't for the fact that we'd already spent two months in Morocco last summer. We already knew we loved the country and that many of the complications we'd faced in Turkey just wouldn't be a problem here.

So, here we are in Rabat, Morocco's capital, planning to start classes at Qalam wa Lawh Center on Monday. Trust me, though, there's plenty more to tell about our adventures in getting here - and we will, soon. Sorry again for keeping you out of the loop for so long, but with everything so up in the air, we needed some time to sort things out together before we filled everyone in.

I have a feeling, though, that over the next few days you'll be getting a lot more details than you necessarily care to hear. If you hadn't noticed, A and I tend to be people of extremes with things like this.

This was kind of a depressing post, and this picture makes me happy. That is all.

Our Announcement

Remember that big announcement? Well, it’s ready for publication.

We’re in Morocco, and we’re planning on staying for a while.

We’ll probably get into why more in another post, but for now, our basic reason is that we would not have been able to receive the Arabic instruction that we needed in Turkey, and we will be able to here in Morocco.

So yeah, several weeks of planning and a harrowing fifty-five hour journey later, we’re firmly ensconced in a hotel in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, where we are recovering and preparing to begin Arabic lessons on Monday. 



St. Peter's Cathedral in Rabat, Morocco.



That’s the reason why we haven’t posted much the last few weeks. It’s kind of difficult to write about all of your wild adventures if you aren’t sure what country you’ll be in the next week.

But we are (relatively) sure now, because we’ve been here a day, we’ve met one of the teachers at the program we’ve chosen, and we’ve been to daily Mass at one of the churches here.

We are, as a matter of fact, within a fifteen minute walk away from the grocery store, two churches, the beach, the taxi station, a metro-rail, and a few thousand stands, stalls, and shops.

We’re glad to be here, and hopefully we’ll explain better shortly. For now, we’re too caught up in being here to be able to convey everything.



This is the doorway of the hotel we're currently staying in.