back on blogging (about ambergris!)

Hey everyone,

So, funny story.  I actually thought that I had lost my ability to get into this blog earlier today as someone had logged me out of google and I had no idea what I email/password I had used to log-in.  Luckily, that has been sorted out.  Whew.  Amazing what a lot of trial and error can accomplish.

Secondly, I thought I'd update everyone on what I've been doing.  Yesterday and today were kind of awesome.  

1) Yesterday, after doing even more homework (so much all the time!), I headed out to the city with Emily, and we walked out to the Qasba (Kasbah, or old fortress/palace of the city) at the edge of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, overlooking Spain, and went to the Qasba museum.  The museum had a terrible collection (some excavated Roman pots from a different city sitting in little exhibits of gravel with labels like "Pot, Roman") but the actual building was beautiful and contained a Roman mosaic of Venus that's about 20 by 10 feet and mostly perfectly intact in its center.

2) Then we bought a ton of food.  Like, spiced olives, and a cheese from the Rif (country interior of Morocco) that can wrapped in braided palm leaves) and ate a picnic with others out in the compound.

3) Then more homework...  sigh.

4) Today, I bought a pair of بلغة (bulgha or babouches in French), when I went out with Matt and Emily, which are a type of shoe only in Morocco and they're really thin, yellow leather and have a pointy toe.  They are my new slippers, and I am currently very proud of my ability to both learn what they are called, as well as successfully obtain a well-made pair for a reasonable price.

5) I also went to the Ensemble Artisanal today, which is the city-operated craft emporium, which generally doesn't have as good of prices or quality as you can get in the aswaq, but you can walk around and see things getting made.  We talked to the basket-weaving man (who also makes chests and purses and furniture...) for quite some time, as he was friendly, then watched someone weave for a while (though he was not particularly into our presence), and finally worked our way deep into the Medina to find Madini Perfumerie, which is the one store my somewhat preachy guidebook views as being worth visiting in this whole city.  It was pretty incredible.  Which brings us to...

6) Madini: The man who owns it has been working their his whole life, same story with his father, etc...  He was very friendly as we slowly massacred his language and poorly named the smells we wanted to sample from bottles (e.g. "LavEHndir."  "Lavender?"  Yes, lavendir."  Except in Arabic with the Arabic equivalents.)  He also brought out some bottle of something called "soundous," which smells amazing and I bought some oil of (mostly because I felt bad that we took up 40 minutes of his time, so I bought two bottles.  More on the second later.) but cannot figure out what this time actually is.  All of my google/wikipedia searches have only given me "islamicmarket.com" where a bunch of people rage about its scent without explaining what it is or what it's from.  If anyone can find out more about this, I'd love to know.  The other thing that I kind of felt a compulsion to buy was a tiny vial containing essence of ambergris.  Now, before coming here, I didn't know the full story of ambergris, but as more and more people mentioned it (it's still very popular in the Arab world), I decided I at least needed a sample as a souvenir.  So, ambergris is, in its pure form, one of the most expensive and rare materials in the world.  It is also supposedly part of Charles II's favorite dish (eggs and ambergris), and the seasoning that Satan uses to tempt people with according to Milton.  It's scent is the most coveted property, and was historically both the fixative as well as a desirable addition to most perfumes.  Wikipedia described this scent as "sweet, earthy, marine, and animalic."  It is also only obtained from one source (I feel like the novel Dune had to be referencing ambergris with its spice): sperm whale vomit.  Scientists think (how often do you get to actually begin a sentence that way?) that sperm whales produce ambergris within their stomachs to help them digest the sharp giant squid beaks that they ingest (seriously?  I couldn't make this stuff up.), then, for whatever reason, they periodically vomit up ambergris, which drifts along the ocean, until it eventually lands on some shore, where, the oily residue over time hardens into a grayish-amber gel (hence the name "amber-gris"), with this smell of heaven.  Now, ambergris' expense comes from the fact that you only can get it when you find whale vomit, which is (I want to say, "harder than it sounds," but I guess finding whale vomit already sounds hard, right?) a difficult task.  Ambergris finds only happen every few years, and the substance itself has a difficult legal status in most countries (US included) as a result of marine mammal protection legislation (although, the current legal opinion in the US is that it's probably legal since it's not really harvesting the whale to get ambergris as they just vomit it up sometimes and you don't need to even interact with the whale to get it, unless someone found a way to make whales bulimic to get more, in which case I guess it reverts to being abusive.  I digress.), and is currently not sold in the US due to this difficult legal status.  That said, in the Arab world, it was traditionally used as a brain and heart medicine, as well as a fragrance, and at good ol' Madini one can still buy a small vial of its essence.  It smells kind of like sweet leather, musk, citrus, and cinnamon.

7) After the three of us got covered in different scents, we went out to lunch at راي شارلي / Ray Charly (like, Ray Charles... yeah, I thought it was amazing too) in the center of town before tramping back here with our goodies.  To shower off (hot today, about 88).  And do more homework.