we'll always have paris...

so while i didn't see rick's cafe (which i hear is an overly-touristed place in any case), i did spend the weekend in casablanca, within the more-than-words-can-communicate gracious hospitality of karim and his parents.

here's a brief layout of our weekend:

friday:
leave ifrane and aui in the late afternoon
arrive in casablanca around 7:30 pm
meet karim's parents
drop off our bags
eat at a charming little italian restaurant named "luigi's" which just so happened to have a hummer with new york state plates on it - we're not in kansas any more :)

saturday:
sleep in a little
breakfast with the fam
tour of hassan II mosque (the only way non-muslims are allowed inside)
some sitting and reading in the sun on the seawall while karim ran errands and picked up eva
lunch with karim's family - really a feast consisting of a variety of salads, pastilla (a spanish-inspired dish of chicken and spices and nuts and honey in between layers of a special kind of pastry dough), and tagine
HENNA! - truly the highlight of the weekend - will definitely post some pictures of the beautiful artwork adorning my hands and forearms as soon as my camera battery recharges...
shopping (a football jersey of my favorite moroccan player and a pair of moroccan slippers)
coffee at a really chic japanese-inspired cafe that karim took us to
driving around the city at night
late night return to the house where we were greeted by a still-warm tureen of harira (a kind of soup), bread, cheese, and dates

today:
late morning departure from the house after some grocery shopping in the nearby marche
lunch out at a gorgeous restaurant called "la sqala" which is a renovated riad in the old medina which put us back late to ifrane, but definitely worth it
unpacking
gearing up for the crazy week ahead

casa is by far the largest city in morocco, and this weekend was different for me in that way to be sure. the past few trips have been to smaller citadels which can be easily navigated with one or two sights, a handful of recommended hostels, and a decent number of cheap eateries. casa, however, is really a teeming center of commerce and culture. many of the places that we drove through combined with the proliferation of french bilboards, shops, and signs made me think more often than not that we had travelled much further than the three and a half hours or so from our mountain perch of al akhawayn.

but this weekend was something else for me as well.

last week, in english conversation group, several of the students asked me how i had found morocco and moroccan people thus far. and it was kind of hard to say. i mean, i haven't had any really negative encounters, to be sure - but at the same time, i have met with more than a little of what could be called...resistence, or maybe distance - than i would have expected, and definitely more than would allow me to say that people have been outright friendly. there's always the feeling, compounded perhaps by french colonialism and religious tension and misunderstanding, that there exists a distinct and impermeable line between you (the foreigner) and the other (moroccan). this weekend, all of that disappeared.

i found myself carefully stitched into the fabric of life of a upper-middle class moroccan family. we sat on the couch together and watched television (albeit in french or arabic). karim's father practiced his english, while we in turn practiced our arabic, laughing the whole way through. we were introduced to extended family, shown pictures of weddings and cousins along with the standard baby pictures, welcomed with open arms, and sent away laden with gifts both material and immaterial. i left with henna on my arms and a jellaba in my bag, but with a heart full of a mother's love and a father's gentle teasing as well as promises for a swift return.

to put it another way: whenever i end up in a new place for any amount of time, i generally find myself mentally wandering down a checklist of sorts. one of the questions i ask myself is whether or not i could see myself living there in the future. before this weekend, i really would have said no. the cultural gap is large, and traversing the fields of language, custom, and religion on a daily basis has been exhausting, particularly when travelling away from the campus. but now, after seeing life from the other side, and experiencing the warmth and hospitality that can be found there, i have changed my mind.

at one point, after jason and i had finished our tour of the hassan II mosque, when we were sitting on the sea wall, i looked up from the book i was reading to find a young mom and her toddler son sitting just a meter or so away. she was pointing out different things, and he was watching the seagulls and the breaking waves with great joy, clapping wildly in response to the white foamy water below. i imagined their lives - pictured them emerging from a small but comfortable apartment similar to the one we had just spent the night in, and i realized that that life wasn't so terribly far away nor so incredibly difficult to imagine. not that i'm about to run off and have children just so that i can visit the ocean with them...but it made the country, the people, and that life somehow much closer and much more...real.