Africa Pt. 1

It’s a good thing I decided to come travel after being in Paris for three months considering that there is no way in hell I could get around Marrakech sans-Arabic unless I spoke French. All signs are bilingual in French and Arabic and no one at the airport spoke any English at all and just stared at me when my French failed and I would trail into oblivion.

It took me awhile to figure out that the best way to find my host, Jamal, would be to buy internet access at the airport and then call him from Skype, but once I did, I caught the bus to the central square of the city where the Annual International Film Festival is taking place and walked through a park of homeless people pissing on benches to find the POSTE MAROC (what Jamal told me was like a café, but is actually a post office). Luckily, he didn’t have any trouble recognizing me (I’m the only person for miles with blond hair and a septum ring) and we took a bus to his place, from where I am writing now. It’s pretty unbelievably different from Paris, the States, and any other place I’ve ever been in my life. Every woman wears a headscarf (obviously, since this is a Muslim country) and even the cats look African.

It’s super strange to be in Africa, and even though Jamal’s English is pretty good, I’m completely surrounded by a language that I cannot decipher a single word, or even letter of. It’s pretty beautiful to look and listen to but I’m at a total loss for comprehension. Jamal just went out to buy us something for dinner and some wine or beer to drink and relax with. I’ve had quite a long day of being forced to check my hand luggage and listening to children scream and cry on the plane the entire way here so it’s nice to be able to relax (even though his housemates were listening to Linkin Park upon my arrival. Help.). There’s obviously no WiFi here so I’ll be writing posts in advance and posting them when I get the chance to access the internet (which I’m kind of thinking will be a rarity here). I am very low on cash and therefore I will be living this sort of nomadic lifestyle (like a true CouchSurfer, hahaha!) with limited showering, purchasing, and internet accessing.

Also Marrakech is an hour behind Paris, which I didn’t realize at all, and after being on the plane for almost 4 hours I was really confused why we hadn’t landed. Duh. It’s extremely warm here (just like home) and there are shittons of palm trees and sand. Speaking of sand, from the plane window I could see the sun setting over the fucking Sahara Desert. It was pretty wild and unbelievably beautiful. I am in Africa, after all.

Tomorrow I’m going to learn how to prepare Moroccan tea and we’re going to smoke “water pipe” which is hookah. Gotta love the international words for smoking, haha.

Anyway, Jamal’s in college for “hospitality and tourism,” whatever that means, and he waits tables at a restaurant here in Marrakech, so he appreciates my obsession with food. Hopefully we’ll be able to spend some good times together over food and drink.

So the night continued and I watched music videos with Jamal’s roommates, laughing and belly dancing very badly. Jamal made dinner and then we went on a walk through his neighborhood, which was full of homeless dogs and mules grazing, along with millions of scooters and even more stares. I thought people looked at me a lot in Paris. It was really fun though and we talked the whole time and seemed to share a lot of similar interests, everything from cooking to Marxism (his parents are socialists too, haha!) and his resemblance to Barack Obama. Needless to say, I was really happy to have found such a cool host. Little did I know…

It’s a good thing also that I have such a healthy sense of humor and a high tolerance for pain, because it turned out that Jamal was, as most people in the world are, batshit insane. His extreme activity on CouchSurfing is apparently due to his inability to find a girlfriend and he meets as many people as he can in order to fill up the hole of emptiness inside or something. Last night we were drinking wine and eating the delicious dinner he made (tomatoes, onions, olives, and sardines, to be eaten with bread as utensils as is the Moroccan way) and all of a sudden in the middle of our hookah he starts telling me all about how sad he is all of the time and how lonely and how he’s so happy to have met someone as kind as me. And then he starts to cry and tell me how much he loves me. What. The. Fucking. Shit. So I just decided to go to sleep and worry about it today but as I was laying down he kept poking me and wanting to talk about his feelings. I was pretty much totally sick of the psychosis of humans after a day of flying and being in airports with them so I sat up and told him that he was being a fucking shitty CouchSurfing host and that if he wanted to use CS to find a psychiatrist and a girlfriend that he should go ahead and quit now because that was fucking ridiculous. Then I told him to respect my feelings and my exhaustion and to shut the fuck up. Politely, of course, since he was nice enough to host me.

But this morning he was just as annoying, wanting to talk about how wonderful I am etc etc and I was frankly just done dealing with it so I made him take me to an internet café where I looked up a hostel in centre-ville and told Jamal that I was going to meet my friends in the main square of the city. I walked with him to meet his Turkish CS friends, who I’m sure he’s had no trouble creeping out by now, and then back to his house to grab my heavy ass bags and leave. Then I walked about 5 miles from Jamal’s house to Jama’a el Fna square (which I will describe better once I am done with this insane story), having to stop 4 times to gasp for breath and drink water on this 80-degree day while carrying the bags that I wasn’t planning on picking up again until this weekend. My feet are basically bleeding and I’m hungry and my map of the city does not include where I am currently staying and the woman running the hostel speaks bad French and no English.

So obviously I’m a little upset. This was what I feared so much upon arriving here yesterday, having my CS host be insane and absolutely NOT conducive to a fun and interesting stay in Morocco, being lost, being confused, being hungry and tired and not being able to read any signs. And now, despite what HostelWorld dot com told me as I searched desperately for a place to stay with internet and a kitchen, this hostel whose name I still don’t know does not have internet access at all, wifi or otherwise. So not only am I now lost, hungry, confused, pissed, and broke, but I am lonely and unable to email my mother like I promised that I would. Nor blog about any of this horseshit. I understand that I am in Africa but all I really want is to check my email and go eat a tajine and watch snake charmers. And check my fucking email. I think that if I go out and take some pictures and buy myself some groceries that I will feel much better, not to mention that this hostel is GORGEOUS. I just wish that I could have started my sejour in Marrakech on a much better note than this. It wouldn’t have taken much.