female viagra and mint tea

We’ve been busted. My roommates and I (but mostly my roommates due to my lack of a pc) had been stealing wireless internet from neighbors ever since September. Mark brought a laptop with him when he came at the end of January and I was really looking forward to having internet and a computer here at the apartment. But on Thursday I came home to the news that Webstar and Thompson, the two networks we’d been using, had both added security that day. Bummer.

Luckily, my brilliant sister Carey had the great idea of typing blog entries in Word and just copy-pasting them when I went to an internet café. Maybe I should have gone to K-State.

Friday February 1 (continued)

I went back to the hostel to get Mark. We headed down the street to the other building with the room full of couches where, presumably, our breakfast would be served. We passed by Fartal in his painting shop on the way there, I introduced him to Mark and he invited us to come for tea after breakfast. The first time he’d mentioned tea it was “maybe later you can come have tea,’’ so I thought maybe that was just something people say to be nice. Now I knew he was serious.

We both had reservations about going, fearing he would probably pressure us to buy a painting, or perhaps just want us to pay him for the tea. But his shop was right in the path between our room and the hostel’s reception area, so avoiding him would have been nearly impossible. On our way back from breakfast he was ready for us, sitting on a stool in the street next to a tray with an ornate teapot and three glasses. Fartal held the teapot two or three feet above the glasses while pouring so the mint tea would bubble at the top and taste better. We drank the hot, heavily sugared tea and talked. He told us about his bad experience in France, where everyone is cold and looked at him funny when he tried to start conversations with them. The anticipated sales pitch never came. I began to feel guilty for questioning his motives for inviting us to tea, thinking maybe Moroccans are just significantly more friendly than Americans and Spaniards.

Then, as we were leaving, he took us to meet his friend across the street and quickly disappeared. This “passing off” made the nervous feeling in my gut reappear. The friend was a salesman in a “Berber pharmacy,” a shop exactly like the one I’d been to earlier, only with even bigger mounds of spices. He served us more tea, explaining that mint tea was a gesture of hospitality. Then he showed us several of the same herbs/spices/remedies I’d seen an hour earlier, but stressed that we should not feel pressured to buy anything. His informative spiel then moved on to Moroccan government, and he told us that Moroccans are allowed to express their opinions about “the government,” but must never be anything other than positive when talking about the king. They also cannot ever speak negatively about Islam or Morocco as a unified country.

After the Berber pharmacy we walked through the plaza of Marrakech, which ended up being one of my favorite parts of Morocco. Several snake charmers were out with their flutes, cobras and boa constrictors. I couldn’t take pictures or even watch for more than a few seconds or they’d come after us for money. Women with books full of henna tattoo pictures called out to me or approached with their books open. One actually grabbed my hand and squirted a puke green colored design on it, ‘’for good luck,’’ before I knew what was happening or had time to object. Then she demanded money. A man with a couple small monkeys approached, put one of them on Mark’s shoulders and encouraged me to take a photo. I didn’t, but as we walked away he still pressured Mark to ‘’give me money for my monkey.’’

Fartal

Friday, February 1

Mark was still sleeping when I woke up so I ventured out alone. I was invited into a lot of shops and talked to the salesmen, who were generally friendly and almost always had a brother or friend currently living in the states, usually in Boston. I bought some bread and continued walking and exchanging greetings with the Moroccan guys in the street. One guy asked me for bread. I told him no, on the basis that he was wearing an ipod and a ralph lauren sweater. He told me that what I thought was an ipod was actually just his mobile phone, but I still didn´t give him any bread. We chatted for a bit, he showed me the tiny shop where he sold amateur paintings of Moroccan cities on canvas and goat leather, and then invited Mark and I to come back for tea. His name was Fartal.

I kept walking, and the shopkeepers kept inviting me into their stores, ''just to have a look, only for look...'' I did have a look at one store that contained four large mounds of spices in the center and hundreds of mystery jars lining the walls. The eager salesman gouged spoonfuls of spices out of the mounds for me to smell; he rubbed blocks of perfume, ''musk,'' and green lipstick that turned pink onto my hand; he revealed to me the contents of the mystery jars -- more spices, herbs, remedies for snoring, asthma, herpes, acne, bad circulation and also some female viagra. I told him that it was the beginning of my trip and I didn't want to buy anything yet so that I wouldn't run out of money, but that I might be back a week later to buy saffron if I had money leftover. He told me ''no problem, have a good day,'' but his face said ''I've heard that before you heartless wretch thanks for nothing.''

tbc...

the change is in the room

There's more to write about Morocco than I want to write in one sitting, and more I'm sure than you want to read, so it's coming in pieces. fyi 100 dirham is a little less than $15.

Thursday, January 31
From the Marrakech airport we took the bus into the city center. I ''saved'' 20 dirham by buying return tickets that the driver said would be good for the next 15 days, but after all the things we'd heard and read before going, Mark and I both had our doubts about whether this ticket would still be good when the time came to go back to the airport. Having no idea which stop was ours, we got off when most of the other people did. I took out the map I'd printed from the hostel website, which didn't include any street names but instead used things like ''OJ stand'' and ''cafe'' as reference points. Thank god a girl from Valencia happened to notice that her crappy map was exactly like ours, and we deduced that we were looking for the same place. Her Italian boyfriend had been in the city since morning, and so we followed them through the mazes of markets and crazy streets around the plaza for almost an hour before finally finding the Heart of the Medina Backpacker's Hostel (the Italian boyfriend got a bit lost, it should've taken about five minutes.)

We thanked the European couple for their help and then followed a guy in a black G-Star Raw coat (his name might have been Abdul) into a large room filled with different colored couches with different colored pillows all with cool Moroccan designs. Abdul filled out the paperwork and total came out to 365 dirhams. I gave him 400 and asked if he had change. ''Change in the room'' he said. He then led us out of the reception area, down the street a couple blocks and into the place we'd actually be staying. I had a feeling we wouldn't be getting any change. The room was nice, only 3 beds, and we had it all to ourselves. Abdul showed us the sink and shower right outside, a 'western' toilet on the next floor up, and a terrace we could access by walking through someone else's bedroom. I asked if there would be breakfast in the morning. His response, which included a lot of gestures, was basically, ''No change -- eat breakfast. Change -- no breakfast.'' We sacrificed the change, partially for breakfast, partially just to appease Abdul.

The door to our room could be locked from the outside, but from the inside there was no was of locking or even completely closing it. Later that night we were startled by the creaking of the door opening and a hungry cat coming in.