Sunday 4 September 2011

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.


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