Until spending so much time here, I never noticed the extent to which Americans seal themselves away from the elements. In Morocco, by necessity, people learn to adapt to what nature gives them instead. The summers are brutally hot here, so people build homes of thick mud walls that resist the heat surprisingly well. They don't have the option of switching on the air conditioning. When it's hot out, people are hot. They cope. During the day, instead of fighting the sun, people rest--stores and restaurants close and people find shade and fan themselves with paper or magazines or whatever they can find. They dress as sensibly for the heat as modesty will allow, and they drink lots of water and orange juice. And if you can find some good shade and a breeze, it feels great. You don't take it for granted: you notice the breeze and feel grateful for it.
Same thing holds for lighting. Homes and stores and restaurants are designed to let in natural light, and I can't recall seeing anyone use electric lights in a house or restaurant during the day. (If stores are in a dark corner of the souk, sometimes they do). At night, when it gets dark, homes and stores aren't lit like Christmas trees--people turn on the minimum number of lights they need, and at the moment they no longer need the light, they shut it off. They don't create an artificial daytime when it is night, or an artificial winter when it is summer. Interiors aren't magically 72 degrees and brightly lit at all times of day, every day of the year.
I haven't seen a single window screen in Morocco, and all of the places where I've stayed have big windows. They open right to the outside, and they are almost never closed. I've stopped being concerned about flies and mosquitoes in my room--they are a fact of life. It's good when there are no birds in the room. :) Most of the places I've stayed are square homes that open into a tiled center courtyard room which is open to the sky above, and all of the rooms on the ground floor (usually a dining room, a kitchen, and a sitting room) open off the courtyard, open to the air as well. Sometimes the courtyards have trees or a fountain, and it's not unusual to be sitting with your book in the courtyard (because that's where the light is) while a bunch of birds start a turf battle in an orange tree three feet away. But legions of cats patrol the cities, slinking through the homes and stores and restaurants and medina streets to keep the bird and vermin (and bug?) situation under control. It's all part of life and the food chain, there on display.
The whole experience of being in Morocco feels different from being in America because Morocco actually touches you, whereas often America doesn't. It's like the difference between traveling down a road sealed inside a car versus on a bike. You experience things so differently on a bike--you know how an area smells, you can feel whether the air is wet or dry, you hear the sounds. In the car, you miss all of those things. In the summertime, Morocco makes you hot and sweaty and tired and thirsty and mosquito-bitten. When you walk down the street, everybody else is also hot and sweaty and tired and thirsty and mosquito-bitten, and it actually gives you something in common with every person you see, from tiny kids to elderly people. Morocco's the bike; we're the car.
I'm not going to lie, sometimes it would feel really good to slip into an air conditioned restaurant or store, and boy do I like my window screens back home. But for the most part, this traditional system works pretty well. It's making me really aware of how much heat, air conditioning, and lighting I use at home. One of the things I'll take home from this trip is a heightened sensitivity to how little I actually need. I think the time I've spent here will make me want to live less in the bubble.
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