Sardines for Lunch

Miracle of miracles, Steph and I met right on time at 12 noon on Sunday in downtown Dakar. I'm still in disbelief that our plan actually worked, and furthermore that we made it all the way through the next 24 hours of travel to arrive in a hostel in Casablanca without the slightest problem sneaking through customs, or sleeping in the airport in Madrid for a long lay over. Just now I'm typing from an internet café in Essouria, a paradise of a fishing town and a wonderful old medina...this afternoon, just after the fish auction and the sunset, a sweet man named Ibrahim squeezed orange and clementine juice for us, and confirmed our sentiments-- this is a country to arrive in and fall in love with on contact. The bus ride out here took all of yesterday, with a stop for lunch on the side of the road where a butcher made hamburger ground with onions and parsley on demand, and you then carried over the meat to the cook who clamped the beef in a square grill and set it out over hot coals to cook. The bus was going to leave before we were able to finigh, so we made sandwiches to go with slightly sweet semolina bread...back on the bus, heading south, we shared a revelation-- this sweet, fresh meat is why people crave hamburgers-- this is how it's supposed to be. Late in the afternoon we were winding around roads by the sea with a purple sky slipping into night and so many stone walls and plots of land surrounded by fences made of cacti. In Casablanca the night before we ran through the medina, buying long underwear to keep us warm, and also anything that looked like it needed to be tasted. Merangues, a macaroon, peanuts from the guy who was roasting them over a hot pan, snails that you ate by fishing them out of the shell with a safety pin, and broth that was spicy and hot, strangely not totally unike tea. We found our way back by remembering food stalls- the chicken row, the vendor whose display of bananas and bunches of grapes hung like crepe paper, the place where we ate chickpea soup for dinner...eventually the cart of unknown fruit which we were now bold enough to ask about, and when we did, the response was a simple offering to taste for ourselves. The fruit was cold and sweet, little round seeds filled my mouth and then magically dissolved. Back at the hostel the spirited old Russian lady who was bunking with us said we must have eaten cactus fruit. Go to the Grand Canyon, she said-- it's the most beautiful place I've been. While Steph punched holes in two snail shells to make souvenir necklaces for us, our Russian granny recounted trips to Costa Rica, India, the islands off the coast of Spain by Barcelona, the years in Russia when she was a teacher and took her students traveling around before they were aloud to leave the country. Her husband has passed away now, but she says she has to keep traveling on her own, it's the only way to survive. In the dark of morning, as I was repacking my bag she slipped me info on camel trekking. Make sure you wear some good padding she said, which sent us into peels of laughter.

In Essouria we befriended two boys who sold us shoes, served us tea, and attempted to clear my stuffy nose by applying a saché of unknown hearbs to my nostril and instructed to breath deep. In the evening we walked along the prommenade by the beach, watched seaguls swoop over the port, and sighed many, many sighs of utter content. I left Sénégal with scraps of batik from the tailor and several new dresses, my homestay mother telling me it had only been 10 days or so, but the experience had been rich...on my last night there she and I had a talk about Islam, her using a poster of Mecca as a teaching aid, and telling me the religion was why my impression of her country was of an indescribable warmth and openess. She hailed us a taxi to the airport where the guards and security checkpoint personelle were joking with us in a markedly Sénégalese spirit right up until we clicked into our seatbelts to take off. But after all of that...Morocco has captivated me, combining my favorite senses of India, Portugal, and Italy all at once...it feels old, and the people in their shops, the men in their habitual cafés, the women walking arm in arm through the market, the women cooking us tangine for dinner last night...before leaving New York a new friend told me I would find the people to be softer than I'd ever anticipated, and this has rung true again and again. Mint tea and so many pastries, warm smiles and fried fish, tiles and tiles and tiles covering stairs, walls, bathrooms, buildings. There are small wood workshops in the winding allies of the medina in Essouria, American pop songs playing from boom boxes, bakeries hidden behind windows that are down low by the sidewalk. I'm fighting off a cold, but luckily there's plenty of fresh orange juice to be drunk. And there's more food than we'll ever be able to eat, though we are trying our hardest to sample it all.