First Peek at Essaouira

I just had the best evening! I arrived in Essaouira around 6 pm and, as usual, had all kinds of trouble finding my riad. It's not surprising, since I didn't have a good map to work with and it's located on a small side street. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I get lost all the time. The riad is in the medina, where no cars are allowed, so I was on foot walking around in circles for about 45 minutes. Thank heaven the temperature had dropped, and there's also a stiff wind here that cools things down significantly.

When I finally found the place, I met Fatima, the proprietor. She is a character and I adore her. She speaks French and Arabic but not English. I speak English, a little Arabic, and a little Spanish. Checking in, getting acquainted, figuring out which room was mine, getting the location of the bathroom and shower, and the time for breakfast involved Arabic, English, French, Spanish, charades, a lot of laughter and eventually a hug. I think that happy mishmash of communication (and the fact that it proceeded fairly smoothly and successfully) is emblematic of Morocco itself. :)

After dumping off my stuff, I set out to investigate the town. The first thing anyone notices about Essaouira is the gale force wind howling in from the Atlantic. It could knock you over, especially near the sea. They even have a special local word for it: alizee. Essaouira sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, and the surf here is really rough. Just south of the medina, there are a group of boulders that look like they're about the size of semi trailers, and the waves that hit them are almost as tall as the boulders. I'm told that the ocean here is too rough for surfing, which I have no trouble believing. The sight of those waves is really dramatic, and so is their roar.

Essaouira is a resort town, and each June they host a famous world music festival (going on right now! Yay!). I was stopping in to look at some of the stalls selling CDs and traditional musical instruments, and people were saying hi (actually Bonjour) as they walked past. I ended up chatting with Khaled, a guy a little younger than me who has friends in Chicago and San Jose and who is originally from Merzouga, where I was the other day. We talked and walked through the medina and climbed up on top of the ramparts along the shore. Khaled's worked in Essaouira for awhile now, since a combination of catastrophic floods and then drought wiped out a lot of the jobs in Merzouga. He was telling me about the towns that our group had driven through and we were chattering away. We ended up getting a bite to eat at a restaurant we passed.

He's got an interesting life story. He's 31 and the oldest of six kids, four girls and two boys. Everybody else in his family is still back in Merzouga, where they mostly farm and raise goats and camels, but the livestock didn't fare very well in the droughts that they've had over the past couple of years. He came to Essaouira to work a few years back during another bad spell, but returned to Merzouga when things looked like they had turned around. But then another drought struck and so six months ago, he decided to return to Essaouira. Unfortunately, it's also a bad year for tourism, and when I expressed sympathy about that, his response was "Well, that's life." Khaled speaks French, Arabic, English, Berber, and Spanish but he only got four years of schooling. When I was marveling at how great his English was, he shrugged it off and credited it to the fact that nomads have to be good at absorbing languages. Interesting insight about nomads, although it diminishes too much his accomplishment in learning to speak five languages.

After dinner I was feeling a food coma coming on, so I headed back to the riad. Fatima and I spent an hour good naturedly struggling to converse, and it's the hardest I've worked on my Arabic while I've been here. She managed to communicate that she's 61 and a widow; she vastly prefers Essaouira to Marrakesh because the traffic in Marrakesh is so dangerous and the city is so noisy; and that she only got to go to school for three years because she was the oldest daughter in her family and her mother needed her help at home. I had my iPad with me because I had been planning to send a few emails, and I showed her a couple of pictures of my family and my house and my dog and she helped me with my pronunciation of all of those words in Arabic. She asked what I did for a living, and when I told her I was a lawyer, she successfully managed to communicate the question "Is the IMF president still in jail in the United States?" That was a triumph of a combination of her skill at charades and my recall of a couple of obscure vocabulary words. Good times. :)

One of my favorite things about Morocco is that so many people here seem to genuinely enjoy an unhurried conversation where people are exchanging each others' full attention. When you are talking with them, they aren't pulling out their blackberries while they're saying something, or twisting to see the TV in the corner during each pause. I hadn't really noticed how rarely that is the case in the USA (especially in Washington, DC) until I came here. For most of the Moroccans I've met, conversation is the form of entertainment that seems to trump everything else. If somebody's in conversation and another distraction/temptation to multi-task presents itself, people seem not to notice it and they remain focused on the conversation. It's a really kind and civilized habit that I am going to try very hard to adopt as my own, especially when I get back to the States.

To close, when I finally made it to my room, the window was open and I could hear traditional Moroccan music being played by the band in the restaurant next door. It was an awesome way to finish the day. Good night!