Spain

Last weekend was the weekend of Green March, a Moroccan national holiday. In the 70s, King Hassan II organized hundreds of thousands of Moroccan citizens to march south through Morocco to take back the Desert. To celebrate this reclaiming of our territory, the weekend is a national holiday, and schools are given Friday (and usually Thursday) off!

I've now been in my country for three months, and I have yet to have the government complete the transactions on my paperwork for my carte-du-sejour. Due to immigration laws, I had to leave the country before the three month mark, in order to re-enter and start over on the deadline to get the carte-du-sejour.

During this long-weekend, all the other new teachers at my school and I decided to go with the thriftiest option and hop across the boarder to Spain on a Ryanair jet for the steep price of 2 Moroccan centimes, fractions of dirham which are fractions of dollars.

The best part of the weekend was actually taking a personal day Thursday and leaving on the train to Nadour Thursday around 2am, a four hour ride, with Ethan, 3aisa, and Jona. We took the train to Nadour, and discovered that the train secretly continued to the next town north. Having the day before our plane left, we took the train past Nadour, through beautiful golden towns.

The cold weather has not sapped any of the golden luminescence of the land, but makes it look richer and more inviting, and is more deceiving. The cold is far from the bitter frigidity of New York, but is a continual permeation, like Chinese Water Tourture. Indoors are just as cold as outdoors. The train was just as cold as outside, or colder. When we pushed out way through the rusted doors of the train that barely granted us admittance, we were happy to drink in the sunlight. We ate a lunch of traditional Moroccan food - there is no other kind - of egg in oil with Moroccan spices, eaten by picking up bits with scraps of khubz bread.

The four of us trudged past high fences and walls with shards of glass embedded in the concrete like snaggly, crystal teeth. We stood at the end of a line of Moroccans in heavy winter djellabas, scrunched between a wall and a rough metal barred barrier. Someone saw our passports and waved us forward, and we were admitted into a different line. The Americans got through in minutes.

Over the boarder of the North African coastal Spanish city of Melilla, we had only to walk several blocks from the boarder to leave the Moroccan cultural influence. I uncovered my hair and pushed up my sleeves. The men took off sweaters and stood in the sun in T-shirts. We found a park to sit outside, and I played on some soccer goals and playground equipment and was generally child-like and undignified.

On the way back to Morocco to catch our flight, we passed an outdoor market where women seemed to be buying unusually large quantities of items. We heard the sound of tape, and saw a group of women with their over-djellabas pulled up around their chests to allow rows of sandals to be packaging taped to their bodies to smuggle them back across the boarder. We would witness this much this weekend.

We were among the 23 people on the full-sized Ryanair jet, on the pilot flight from Nadour to Madrid, and 3aisa's friend Theresa picked us up in the airport and dropped off Ethan and I at the house of the couchsurfer we were staying with. We went out walking the city, spent some time in Plaza del Sol, sampled lots of tapas, and went salsa dancing. The following day, we enjoyed sleeping in, picnicking in the landscaped green park, and walked the downtown of Madrid. In the evening, we had Mexican food and went out for more tapas and drinks. All the meetings with the other folks in our groups failed due to lack of ALL means of communication, and our attempt to see a movie in English ended in both of us being swarmed by employees. I think they didn't want us to enter the theatre late. I'm still not sure.

Saturday, we had time to visit some beautiful cathedrals and have one more picnic and a walk through the park before metro-ing to the airport. We met Jona and 3aisa at the airport, and enjoyed a seemless transport back to my city, through airport, petit taxi, by foot, grande-taxi, and finally train. The guys slept most of the transport (it was very late), and I got time to study on my own, read, and observe the people around me. I got some good tips on a variety of smuggling that really shouldn't be effective. The women taped so much under their djellabas that they were round. They could've rolled.

It was fun to come home to Morocco. I enjoyed Arabic being a relief to my ears after Spanish, and it made many aspects of this culture seem much less frustrating. This week at school has been smooth sailing.