Had a bit of an awkward start to my day this morning. Slept in a bit and then went and had a shower, but because Redouane (my roommate) hasn’t been a round, I just took my clothes off in the room and then went into the shower, because there’s nowhere to really leave them in the bathroom except on the floor, so only had my towel with me in the bathroom. So far so good, but then when I was drying off afterwards I hear the door to my room being unlocked. At first I thought it might be Redouane, so I just locked the bathroom door, not too worried. He walks around in his underwear all the time so I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal if I just had my towel. But then I hear someone say, “Cleaning” and realized that it was the cleaning ladies coming in to clean my room and not Redouane, and I had no clothes with me. Shoot, starting to look around for something that I could put on, but couldn’t find anything, so I just shouted, “Cinq minute.” Then I heard the door shut, but they didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t sure if they had left or not, so I wrapped my towel around myself and poked my head out, hoping that they wouldn’t be there, which thankfully they weren’t. I think it would definitely have been more awkward for them. I managed to get some clothes on before they came in again, so I just grabbed the rest of my books and stuff and headed down to the café for some breakfast and to get some homework done before my class started at 12:30. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty awesome to have your room cleaned for you, but it would be nice sometimes to know when they’re going to show up at your door. I don’t know what they would do if you were still in bed, but hopefully I wont have to find out.
My week has been going pretty good. Nothing too exciting or out of the ordinary has happened. Just had my classes that went well for the most part. I did have a sort of pop quiz in my history of the Arab world class, just to see kind of how much we know and so that we have an idea of what to expect when the midterm comes rolling around in a couple of weeks, but I don’t think that it was too bad.
Had a pretty good time last weekend too when we went to see the Roman ruins on Saturday at Volubilis and then skiing on Sunday. It was me and four others who got a grand taxi together and then just went for the day out past Meknes to where the ruins are about an hour and a half from Ifrane here. We stopped at a small own a couple kilometers from the ruins where we spent an hour or two looking around, having a bit of a tour of the town and stopping along the way to have awesome keefta (ground beef kebabs) sandwiches with onions, tomatoes and olives for lunch. The ruins themselves were smaller than I thought they were going to be, but were still pretty cool to see, especially some of the arches and mosaics that are still around and intact. It’s crazy to think that they’re around a thousand years old and still around for us to see. So we spent a couple of hours wandering around the ruins, taking pictures, venturing some planking shots on some of the thousand year old Roman architecture when the caretaker guy was busy blowing his whistle at someone else who was doing something they shouldn’t. It was a pretty awesome day all around and a good trip.
On Sunday I went with four others and we grabbed a grand taxi up to Mischlifin, about half an hour from Ifrane, where one of the few ski hills in Morocco is. I can’t say that I had that high of expectations to begin with and I think I was right in keeping my hopes low, because it was quite different from any other ski hill that I’d seen or been to. Generally it’s understood, (at least I thought it was) that you don’t stand around at the bottom of the hill where people are going to be coming down, but not in Morocco. The longer I’m here, the more and more I’ve come to realize that things are generally not the same here in Morocco as what I am used to, so I shouldn’t really be surprised anymore. Anyways, there were hundreds of people all over the hill, at least all over the really gentle slopes and then the bottoms of the more steep slopes, though there weren’t even a lot of those.
Around the bottom of the hill area, and on the sides of the road as you come up to the lodge area there are numerous guys who just have piles of ski boots and skis and poles lined up, so we just found one guy, who after asking our shoe sizes rummaged around in his piles of ski boots until he came up with sizes that semi fit us. Then got skis adjusted to fit the boots. I think I was pretty lucky and actually got a pair of skis that weren’t too bad, but the boots were a bit too big, and like most of the rest of the boots there looked like they had been top of the line about 5-10 years ago, but were kind of on the way out now. Some were missing buckles, or had the buckles, but just wouldn’t work properly, like one of mine, but it was tight enough so I just went with it. It’s Morocco after all. They also gave you small plastic bags to stick over your feet before sticking them into your boots, because I guess they never dry them out properly. Ha, I thought it was pretty funny. Once all five of us had found boots and skis, or snowboard for Jesse, that fit we hit the slopes, or kind of hobbled in our ski boots down to where the mud and ice stopped and the icy snow started.
Most Moroccans can’t ski, or just didn’t want to, so most of the people that were milling around were just playing in the snow, having snow ball fights and stuff, or were sledding down the hill in make shift sleds that were made out of what looked like a wooden crate with two sawed off skis nailed to the bottom. Zero control on those things, and I saw numerous people go flying down the hill, yelling at people to get out of their way, or just taking them out at the bottom as if they were playing human sized bowling and they were the bowling ball. It was also quite entertaining to watch those Moroccans who were brave enough to try skiing, out of control, not knowing how to stop really, crashing at the bottom in a heap of skis, poles and sometimes other people that they took out in the process.
The whole “ski hill” came together into a big bowl with one short platter tow on the left side and a longer on going right to the top on the right hand side. Doesn’t really matter that they were even there, because they weren’t functioning when we were ready to hit the slopes. Later we figured out you have to go find the lift operator and sometimes pay him for every run that you want to do. So being ignorant of that fact, we grabbed our skis and hiked up every time we wanted to get ten to fifteen seconds of down hill skiing in.
I don’t think I need to say that we didn’t last all that long, but after a couple of hours we called it a day and decided not to punish our ankles anymore by hiking up the hill and retired our skis, boots and plastic bags for our shoes again. It had still been pretty fun, the couple runs that we got in, and now we can tell people that we’ve gone skiing in Morocco, even if it wasn’t that impressive. It’s just fun to hang out with friends too, so we grabbed a late lunch in the marche back in Ifrane before heading back to AUI.
No comments:
Post a Comment