Morocco, for now

July and August are not the time to go to Spain and Morocco. I knew this. I knew this the way you think you know how student loan and credit card debt are going to feel until you are actually paying it off. I knew that 130 degrees would feel hot. But I didn’t know how that really felt until I was there, in it, squeezed into the back seat of a 1980s Mercedes with our guide and driver, Ben and Carrie on either side of me, on our tour of Fes. And no air conditioning. Never any air conditioning. Carrying a giant, hard-bargained lamp, a back pack, a carpet (even harder bargaining) and using my mantra “You will probably never see this again, appreciate it, appreciate it, appreciate it” and just dreaming, instead, that you are “home” at Riyad Bahai’a, eating some lentils, drinking some mint tea, and trying to get the shower tap to run as cold as possible. You will be humbled—three times you will cry—once because you have a fever and because you weren’t prepared to have so many people stare at you, and because this is a trip, and trips aren’t supposed to be so hard, and, dammit, you are a seasoned road warrior, why are you crying, and, dammit, people REALLY stare at you when you are crying and turning red the way you do when you cry, or laugh, or are hot, and, dammit, you are disappointing Ben and Carrie, who are tougher because they went to India and because you stayed home and the hardest part of that experience was trying to get your car out of a snowbank by yourself. Oh God, a snowbank. You would lay in it at this moment, you really would.

Even that, though, teaches you something wonderful about the world, because you find a pharmacy in Chaouen, and you try to tell the woman that you have a bladder infection, tossing in the French you remember from high school, because you know virtually no Arabic. Je voudrais fruit “cranberry” and then you finally borrow a piece of paper and draw a stick figure, peeing, saying “ow ow ow” and she gets it and gives you an over-the-counter antibiotic and it works. And you both laugh. Shukran. Shukran bissef.

The second time you cry is because you are so conflicted—so tired of being hustled, and hassled, and wishing for the fictional Morocco of your mind, where the people haven’t had to live their lives in a developing country, but also mad at yourself because you are “principled” about the equivalent of two or three U.S. dollars. They tell you that you “bargain like a Berber” and you don’t know if this is meant to be a compliment, an insult, or entirely racist, so you don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed. You don’t even know if it is honest, because when you use your five Arabic words they tell you that “Your Arabic is very good” and when you choose a carpet they tell you that “You have very good taste, Madam” and you think, if I picked out a carpet made of goat pubes, they would tell me that anyway, and you think, this man works so much harder than me, and is thirty years older than me, why should he call me Madam?

But the next day on the train you meet a lovely Moroccan (her) and French (him) couple who live in Stockholm and become fast friends when you husband jokes that the broken train announcement sounds like Star Wars and you say “these are not the droids you are looking for” and the French man laughs (and, like his wife, speaks fluent English.) And you sit with a beautiful Moroccan family with the lamp in your lap and rub the lamp, saying, la lampe magique and pretending a genie has come out to grant you three wishes, un, deux, trois and the children laugh.

The third time you cry is because Marrakech is shit and you’d finally wrung something wonderful out of this inferno and it is a cooking class and then you find out that it ends about an hour after your train is due to leave for Casablanca and you cry for an hour about how Marrakech is shit and your husband listens, again, patiently, until you decide to do it anyway and just skip the eating part.

And you realize you must really love cooking, because who skips the eating part? You take the class and buy all the food in the souks and see your Moroccan friend from the day before who stops his scooter to say “hello” and he may love you, just a little bit, and the Flemish girls who are your classmates are a little jealous because he is cute and because how does an American girl make friends with only two days in Marrakech? When you cook, there are four turtles walking around the kitchen and you have to watch that you don’t step on them as you walk back and forth from the sink and the stove.