grande finale of a weekend

For those of you who are unclear as to the exact details of my summer stay here: recap.  I leave Morocco on very late Friday night for Denver, before I continue on to Jordan on August 21st.  It's sort of shocking to me that my time here is already almost up.  I'm excited to see all of you guys, but there's plenty more for me to see and do here I feel.  For instance, in the Tangier medina, through some of the narrow, twisting alleys that often become narrow, public staircases winding around buildings, there is the Prince's Center for the Blind.  If there is any one building in Morocco that I would love to become my thesis, it is this center.  What do they do?  How do the blind even find it?  Mental note to return.

Moving past this nostalgia for a country I have yet to leave, let me reorient this back to physical things that I have done, not those I don't have time to discover.  For this weekend, Joe and Daniel convinced me (thankfully) that I should leave Tangier for Chefchaouen.  Good idea Joe.  While it took us about 3 hours worth of sitting in the backs of stuffy, hot, crowded shared taxis to get there (always more taxis), once in Chaouen, I realized what a special place this one little mountain town has become for me.  In our two days there, it seems less like we did anything that we wanted to do, as opposed to just bouncing in between conversations with locals and being drawn into discussions and activities before finding another.  Seeing the sacred spring where locals still come to wash out their laundry and rugs, then hiking up to the now semi-ruined Andalusian mosque's minaret in the mountains above Chaouen, looking down on a city that seems bright blue close up, and deep orange from a distance, or even just having someone explain how Berbers write through carpets to us, I realized how much I really have been able to see while here.  As cheesy as it may sound, thanks Condi Rice.  Seriously, this trip, by being oddly well-funded, has really just let me use my own money to wander around, and try to exploit my free plane ticket to the extreme.

As a final thought, whenever I travel, I always have semi-obsessive thoughts about how I'm portraying my country abroad.  Can I break the stereotypes of the loud, obnoxious, blundering American and their dominating viewpoints and politics, or on some level, are all of my actions either just a drop in the bucket, or, even worse, actually conforming to this view?  In some small way, this exquisitely blue city gave me a little view into what I'm actually doing here.  Before leaving Tangier, Emily asked me to visit the Hat Man one more time for her to pick something up, so we found ourselves on Friday night back in that narrow cave of a store, lit entirely by candles and the glow of the hash-pipe of its proprietor.  When I walked in, and greeted him in Arabic, the first thing he asked was, "Are you American?" clearly not remembering me from before.  I answered, and inquired as to how he knew.  "Americans, when they come here, they always speak Arabic.  Just, oh, maybe three, four weeks ago, there was an American man like you and a woman who studied Arabic in Tangier, and they spoke amazing Arabic too."  This story oddly resonated of a description of Emily and I (although I believe he gave our linguistic ability more credit than mine at least deserves), however, my point being, that even if in the mind of this delightful, if drugged, man, Americans are now the tourists who speak Arabic, that's doing pretty good for changing stereotypes.  At least, with that anecdote, I feel a little better about what I've been up to here before returning to Colorado.

Also, pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2094563&l=98d33&id=1013451