Traveling, Pt. 1

Er Rachidia 1

Throughout most of January and February, I have been traveling to many different cities for medical and training reasons, so I have been a lonely. My travels have taken me from the coastal city of Esaouira, where I ate a lunch of fresh caught fish and squid, to Rabat, the cultural mecca of Morocco, and from Tinghir, where I was trained as a VSN counselor, to Er Rachidia, where I usually go for souk. I decided to celebrate Valentine’s Day in Er Rachidia at a Fulbright student’s house in Er Rachidia. Two other volunteers and I made pizza for the party, and I decided to form the crusts into heart shapes. As I kneaded the dough, one of the volunteers noticed that I was staring off into the distance. She asked what I was thinking, and I said nothing, but I was really back in Esaouira.

Esaouira

I was told that Esaouira had a Portuguese feeling to it. The streets were narrow and curved to the sides, and the buildings were all white with blue paint accents, faded from the sun. Laundry hung on lines on the roofs, and shutters hung on by single screws and flung in the wind. We had just bought 12 dirhams worth of gellato, which is Italian ice cream.

We sat in the courtyard of the cafe, just outside of the city square, where children ran back and forth as they avoided the seagulls. Just past the railing was the Atlantic Ocean; we listened to the sound of the waves as they crashed against the rocks and citadels. White foam shot up into the sky, and sometimes, young women laughed as they neared the railing. I looked up into the sky and watched as the gray clouds moved west, smooth as waves. I stared so that I couldn’t see any buildings and pretended that I was flying over the Atlantic ocean. I imagined that the light rain that began to fall was the foam from the waves.

Everyone at the table laughed as a cat leaped from the ground to someone’s lap. I immediately saw how dirty it was, but he began to pet the cat. I saw how fat it was, and assumed that it had done this many times before, the result being scraps of food. As we stood up to go, he had cat hair on his coat, but he said it was all right. Two young men in the cafe pointed at him and laughed.

The next morning, I woke before the sunrise. I climbed the stairs to the roof and watched as the sun rose over the city. I turned around as looked out over the Atlantic, where I saw ships arrive with fresh fish. I thought to myself that the only thing between me and America was water.

We wandered the shopping area that day. Tourists haggled with vendors but ended up paying double the normal price anyway. silly tourists, I thought, stop thinking in Euros. Seashell beaded necklaces hung at the entrances to the stores. The smell of potato sandwiches and seafood wafted through the air. We decided to sit in a seaside restaurant and eat there. We chose the fish we wanted, and they cooked it right in front of us. I could tell that the building had previously been used as storage, because the chairs and tables were crammed together, leaving little room for any new arrivals to enter. The amount of grease and oil covering the fish and squid ensured that it would go down quickly. We left the cafe and returned to our apartment.

For the entire time, I didn’t feel like I was in Morocco. I heard so many languages being spoken that I wasn’t sure what type of place I was in, but I knew that I never wanted to leave.