So far a lot of CBT has been boredom interspersed with intense activity: sitting with my host family and watching Turkish soap operas or Japanese cartoons dubbed into Darija that I don't understand at all; endless hours of drilling numbers or verb conjugations; waiting several hours for someone to show up to meet with us (we have to adjust to "Moroccan time"); followed by 10 hour days at hub packed with information, our weekly trips to the insanely overwhelming souk (market) in Skoura to buy vegetables and fruit, meeting tons of people who all want to greet us and try and speak to us.
Nothing has epitomized the mixture of excitement, confusion, and boredom more than the wedding. The first week we were here, Kristin and I were inexplicably taken along to with Zahara (technically my host mom, but she's only 28, which is my sister's age) and Habiba (Kristin's host sister, 27), to this big house on the other side of the village to make cookies with about five or six other women. No exaggeration, we went three nights in a row, and each night they made a few hundred cookies, mostly varieties of sugar cookie, some with coconut, almonds, chocolate, all different shapes. We were utterly confused, thinking maybe the women were selling them, but we weren't sure where, and there were solidly a thousand cookies.
Finally I heard a word I vaguely remembered from my college class four years ago, and we realized there was a wedding coming up. One Thursday, Zahara somehow communicated to me that Zakaria, her 10-year-old son, would pick me up from school at 5:30 and take me to the big house, because the wedding was starting. I went straight to the big house, which turned out to be her parents' house, where her older sister also lives with her husband and three kids. From 5:30 until about 11:30, I just sat surrounded by dozens of women, either in the big main room (which has trees and no roof in the middle, or in a side room with the bride and whomever was keeping her company at the moment. No one speaks any English, and my Darija wasn't good enough to ask useful question yet, so I was just perpetually confused.
The festivities seemed to consist mostly of food (couscous, hunks of beef with dates and sesame seeds, tea, and the endless cookies), talking, and singing and dancing. The music consists of one massive cow's hide bass drum that gets whacked with a hollow pipe, and a bunch of tambourine-esque hand-held drums, with chanting and singing over it. I went home straight after dinner (which was served at about 10:45 to the approximately 40 or 50 women there) and went back the next morning at 8:30, since we only had school in the afternoon. Zahara and her sisters, cousins, and assorted female neighbors seemed to have all been there since dawn, making batch after batch of bread from scratch, constantly preparing platters of tea and cookies, and washing used tea glasses coming back into the kitchen.
Besides being at school from 2 until 5:30, I stayed at the big house until about 12:30 am. This time, dinner was served at maybe 11:30 or midnight, and there were about 70 or 80 women and children. This doesn't even count the men, who I think were in the sort of courtyard section of the house away from us. The amount of food required is unbelievable; the one saving grace is that there aren't too many dishes, since groups of 8 or 10 people all eat out of a communal plate using bread instead of utensils.
This night was particularly overwhelming and confusing; I was introduced to the inexplicable tradition of spraying every person in a room with bad perfume. Zahara's sister-in-law is really into this tradition, and used several different bottles, which filled the entire room with a mixture of awful perfume. I happened to be coming down with a cold at the same time, and the perfume induced this coughing fit that wouldn't go away, to the point that there were tears running down my cheeks. Everyone was VERY concerned, and were trying to get me to drink sugar water to make my cough go away. (This is typical that they would think sugar was a solution, and is also important for a later story that I'll post.)
I felt bad at this point, since I had been told that weddings last three days, and the next day was a hub day (meaning we were leaving for Ouarzazate), so I would be missing the last day of the wedding. I tried to apologize to my host mom, who just looked confused.
.... to be continued later when I have more time to write!
Nothing has epitomized the mixture of excitement, confusion, and boredom more than the wedding. The first week we were here, Kristin and I were inexplicably taken along to with Zahara (technically my host mom, but she's only 28, which is my sister's age) and Habiba (Kristin's host sister, 27), to this big house on the other side of the village to make cookies with about five or six other women. No exaggeration, we went three nights in a row, and each night they made a few hundred cookies, mostly varieties of sugar cookie, some with coconut, almonds, chocolate, all different shapes. We were utterly confused, thinking maybe the women were selling them, but we weren't sure where, and there were solidly a thousand cookies.
Finally I heard a word I vaguely remembered from my college class four years ago, and we realized there was a wedding coming up. One Thursday, Zahara somehow communicated to me that Zakaria, her 10-year-old son, would pick me up from school at 5:30 and take me to the big house, because the wedding was starting. I went straight to the big house, which turned out to be her parents' house, where her older sister also lives with her husband and three kids. From 5:30 until about 11:30, I just sat surrounded by dozens of women, either in the big main room (which has trees and no roof in the middle, or in a side room with the bride and whomever was keeping her company at the moment. No one speaks any English, and my Darija wasn't good enough to ask useful question yet, so I was just perpetually confused.
The festivities seemed to consist mostly of food (couscous, hunks of beef with dates and sesame seeds, tea, and the endless cookies), talking, and singing and dancing. The music consists of one massive cow's hide bass drum that gets whacked with a hollow pipe, and a bunch of tambourine-esque hand-held drums, with chanting and singing over it. I went home straight after dinner (which was served at about 10:45 to the approximately 40 or 50 women there) and went back the next morning at 8:30, since we only had school in the afternoon. Zahara and her sisters, cousins, and assorted female neighbors seemed to have all been there since dawn, making batch after batch of bread from scratch, constantly preparing platters of tea and cookies, and washing used tea glasses coming back into the kitchen.
Besides being at school from 2 until 5:30, I stayed at the big house until about 12:30 am. This time, dinner was served at maybe 11:30 or midnight, and there were about 70 or 80 women and children. This doesn't even count the men, who I think were in the sort of courtyard section of the house away from us. The amount of food required is unbelievable; the one saving grace is that there aren't too many dishes, since groups of 8 or 10 people all eat out of a communal plate using bread instead of utensils.
This night was particularly overwhelming and confusing; I was introduced to the inexplicable tradition of spraying every person in a room with bad perfume. Zahara's sister-in-law is really into this tradition, and used several different bottles, which filled the entire room with a mixture of awful perfume. I happened to be coming down with a cold at the same time, and the perfume induced this coughing fit that wouldn't go away, to the point that there were tears running down my cheeks. Everyone was VERY concerned, and were trying to get me to drink sugar water to make my cough go away. (This is typical that they would think sugar was a solution, and is also important for a later story that I'll post.)
I felt bad at this point, since I had been told that weddings last three days, and the next day was a hub day (meaning we were leaving for Ouarzazate), so I would be missing the last day of the wedding. I tried to apologize to my host mom, who just looked confused.
.... to be continued later when I have more time to write!
