The Way We Live Now

Paramus, though a wonderful town to grow up in, has nothing to actually do. There was always Friday night football games, when the team was home, and the more likely than not defeat celebration at Applebees afterwards with the rest of the high school and a few college students looking to relive their glory days (cue Bruce music).  There was the mall, of course, but my friends were hardly the ‘mall-rat’ type, and the movie theatre on RT. 17 if there was something good playing and we could scratch up the few extra bucks to get in. Bowling in the neighboring towns was, in earnest, the only activity we could do. And we did it often. At least of a third of my memories from weekend hangouts took place on the road to bowling allies, while cosmic bowling, or after bowling at the diner. Thus, the question “Have you ever been bowling outside of America?” I have been bowling more times than I can remember, but never abroad, and as I sat late Saturday night watching Jon Stewart talk about New York pizza on a couch in Ifrane, I could not get the question out of my mind.

Boarding a train in Tangier four days earlier, I watched the reel of nature play on repeat out the window for four hours. Flocks of sheep passed by every few kilometers easily outnumbering the humans on the landscape, occasionally dotted with cows grazing on tall grass. Where the red, cracked earth or the grey rocks covered in dying moss did not make an appearance, agricultural fields stretched for miles. Men mounted on lazy mules made their way from the vast expanse of the bled towards solitary buildings on the horizon in straw hats, their animals weighed town with hidden treasures. Women, still covered from head to leg, bent low between the greening rows, scooping up indistinguishable bundles of Moroccan daily life. As we screeched closer to barren train stations en route, children would materialize, playing on vacant train tracks or looking with wide, simple eyes through my window. From afar, the towns we passed through looked like mirages stacked with ancient buildings, an eminent minaret keeping watch over those below, and impoverished tents along the dirt road dabbled with bright colors of fruits and spices from the souk with venders standing close by, their faces etched with some certain understanding of the past and of ourselves as human that modernity has left behind.

After a missed train stop, we finally arrived in Rabat, the political capital of Morocco. Rabat, compared to the port town of Tangier, is incredibly calm. The wide boulevards are lined with trimmed trees and most of the streets are absent of traffic, grime, and chaos. The same cafes and overly anxious beggers found in every town I‘ve visited thus far inevitably emerge out of darkened doorways and rubbish filled corners. The medina, though larger than my encounters to the north, still holds the feeling of an elaborate maze constructed to make travelers mad (or perhaps entrap them within its walls). Outside the medina hosts a mixture of colonial architecture, modern apartment blocs, administrative buildings, and a infinite array of monuments from past civilizations who have laid claim to this grand city. The Kasbah wall fashioned in bright red clay unfolds far into the distance, topped with a geometric pattern and buttressed with disguised art galleries and shops below. The ancient gates into the city are veiled in richly carved arches, above which one can climb to magnificent views of the beckoning estuary and Atlantic Ocean beyond. After sitting down for a lunch of Moroccan fare (tajine chicken with couscous and mint tea), we made our way to the Mausoleum of Mohammed V. Before the mausoleum lays a forest of severed columns that testifies to a once magnificent plan for a mosque before an earthquake in 1755. The minaret, however, still stands tall at 44 meters and casts an ominously tranquil shadow over its marble inferiors. Towards the east end is the resting place of Morocco’s past three kings. The interior, guarded on all four sides, is a large room of patterned zellij (tiles) and carved plaster where visitors can look down onto the tomb from a balcony. Despite their mistakes or misgivings in life, their eternal home is one of an adored and much loved ruler. 

Unfortunately, most of my time in Rabat was filled with meetings rather than sightseeing, but I hope to travel back to the capital to visit the sparse museums and ancient grounds I did not have time for. While there, we met with several grassroot organizations to discuss the situation of women and children Sub-Saharan migrants in Rabat, and efforts to ameliorate their condition. Though I try to isolate emotion from work, it continually becomes a more difficult task to perform as I hear the plight of pregnant women and children being sexually abused while wondering the desert in hopes of finding the Moroccan border. Their stories, though cast a pessimistic mist over the current status quo, make my fervor for human rights of all people all the more ardent.

 Leaving my Rabat nights of roundabout walks through the rues and late night talks over tea on traditional couches with Moroccans, a Russian, a German, and a Dutch I boarded yet another train to Ifrane via bus from Fes (where I was stormed with hundreds of Moroccan soccer fans for the Algeria Morocco game- which we won 4-0). The arid lands outside my window gave way to more mountainous terrain as the train lurched onward into the Atlas Mountains. Soon tall forests of greens and earthy tones covered deep into the expanse, but still held those few peddlers of fruits and meats on the sides of the roads. Finally, after a days worth of traveling, I made it to the small town of Ifrane, unlike any other city in Morocco. The white and brown wooden houses with red tiled roofs slanting steeply downward are more like an Alps village in Switzerland rather than a town in North Africa. The orderliness of this town, though nothing compared to the impeccable precision of Zurich, seems unbelievably out of place here. The sidewalks are all kept neatly and couples and families stroll down them towards the stork filled lake with meandering paths into the wilderness. There are cafes in town that serve non-Moroccan food (something I have not seen save for the Thai restaurant I went to for my birthday) and people on the streets say hello simply to be nice rather to sell you something. There are many mansions tucked away behind high walls of affluent Moroccans and French that escape the heats of the summer in this cool haven and ski in the winter. The souk, though not as extensive or exotic as Tangiers, still boasts of sheep intestines (though I will stay away from meat after watching a sheep be slaughtered for a ritual on Friday), a dozen types of olives, and everything else in between. The center of town has manicured gardens where young children summersalt onto soft grass and unexpected rendez-vous occur regularly just beyond an ancient stone lion that keeps guard over the inhabitants.

My next few days here will hopefully be filled with hikes into monkey filled forests and under waterfalls (not alone but with my gracious host and his friends). Currently, however, the town finds itself in the midst of a treacherous lightening storm with torrential downpours of hail that push all indoors, including my group of Americans, Moroccans, Canadians, and Brazilians. Taking refuge inside the town’s bowling ally (quite different from the pool hall we played in in Tangier where a girl wielding a stick and taking aim was a spectacle to be watched by all), we tied our laces and entered our names in the screen. As I was tightening my shoes, my companion asked the question that startled me.

Whether I found myself in a taxi in Yerevan or searching for food in Tel Aviv, some aspect of home seems forever present: Beyonce blasting from a Georgian marshuka driver’s radio, a café boasting of ‘New York Pizza’ in Rabat, even the simple English phrases that young children repeat back from Hollywood films all hold testament to the breadth of Americanization. As an International Relations major back at Lehigh, I am well aware of the global stretch America has obtained over the past half century. Nontheless, as I travel across borders, I tend to blind myself from those instances of cultural imperialism in an attempt to indulge myself in the essence of Georgian or Moroccan life. Exploring exotic cultures, one does not like to encounter American influences, dismissing them as “un-Moroccan.” Yet, in reality, living in Tangier or Rabat today as a Moroccan means that certain aspects of American culture are inherently part of your identity, from the movies on TV to the food on your plate. As I near the end of my travels abroad, I have realized that those American manifestations I have avoided are not only impossible to ignore, but truly part of other people’s lives in our time. Moroccan belgha (pointed shoes) and djellaba (robes) are of course still an integral part of this generation, but so are Superman shirts and Gossip Girl key chains. To truly learn about what daily life is like in another country in 2011, it is imprudent to ignore American influences: amusingly, it took a Moroccan bowling ball to teach me.