11/9/14
Even our train ride up to Tangier has already been an adventure. We share two seats between the three of us so that the older woman across from us can put her feet up (as my friend says, “She’s worked hard her whole life, you know?”) The other two men in our cabin, traveling with her, are either husbands, brothers, or sons, it seems impossible to tell, but they are friendly and kind to us. One asks how we find morocco, if we like it, and particularly if we find the people kind. He seems relieved when we answer all these positively.
An hour or so in, the older woman’s cell phone goes off in a call to prayer, at the appointed hour. Such a meeting of modernity and technology with tradition and religion! A cell phone pre-programmed to give you your call to prayer on the hour, for busy Muslims on the go!
By the time we arrive in Tangier, the “pirate city” at the very northern tip of Morocco (we’re told we can see spain, but I cant claim to recognize which lump it might be on the horizon), it is already dusk, and we are starving. And, incredibly, only a few people speak French here– mostly, the second language is Spanish because of it’s proximity. We ask at a hanut in the Medina where we might find Tajine, and although everything nearby is already closed, a little boy leads us all around the medina to the spots he knows, looking for somewhere that might serve us. He chats to us in French, English and Arabic as he runs, and we have to hustle to keep up. “Do you go to school?” we ask him. “Yes,” he responds, nodding seriously. “I am a good man.”
After we find dinner, we are on our way home when the sky suddenly opens in a Moroccan rainy-season downpour. We rush off the street and, soaking wet, take shelter in a bakery on the street. The old men who work there laugh at us, and help us choose what we might buy to nibble on while we wait for the rain to stop. We chat in Arabic-French-English (the new language of the country) and, as the rain finally starts to let up, he hands us each an extra cookie “for the road.”
When we finally make it back to our hostel we go up to the rooftop terrace and join a young Australian man who is sitting reading, his knees covered in a blanket. He has spent the past 4 years teaching English in Japan, and now is traveling the world, deciding where he wants to work next. He does not plan to move back to Australia, although he speaks of it fondly. In this way he reminds me of my english-teacher friends here in Morocco, and reminds me that I—despite my insatiable travel bug— am not quite one of them. I love my roots to be sunk deep in a soil where I have friends and family, and take as much joy from the home-coming of travel as I do from the adventure of setting out.
Regardless, we travelers swap stories on the roof late into the night, comparing and sharing and marveling like old sailors reliving wild storms.
Nora's MBA: Most Beautiful Adventure 