A Routine Day in Fez

I feel as though most of my posts have been about special occasions and weekend trips and I’ve neglected to really describe what it is that I do with most of my time here – a typical day, you could say.

Around 8:30am: I wake up for school. Psyching myself up to get out of bed is getting harder and harder as the days grow colder here. Heating is nearly nonexistent here so the temperature at night outside is the temperature I sleep in.

8:45am: I eat breakfast by myself prepared by the housemaid that lives with my family—bread, margarine, jam, honey, and cheese. She usually heats up some milk for me and adds a few spoonfuls of sugar (this is Morocco we are talking about, they ALWAYS add sugar to the drink). Sometimes I am surprised to find a croissant, sunny-side-up egg, or a pitcher of coffee, and then I really feel like it’s going to be a good day.

9am: I literally walk outside my house and cross the street to get to the taxi stand that will take me from the old city to the new city. It’s a handy system where I just get into the first cab, wait until two more people get in as well, and then the driver takes us to the center of town. We each individually pay the driver 3 Dirhams (about 70 cents), so a pretty good deal.

9:20am: After a five minute walk from the center of town, passing a McDonald’s, an Evangelical church, two hotels, and two cafes, I arrive at the Arabic Language Institute of Fez. The school could seem hard to find as they don’t put up a big sign that says “Arabic Language…blah blah,” instead you enter through a door into the garden area which is surrounded by a big white wall. The garden is kind of the social area of the school where you can sit at tables, order drink or food from the snack bar, and play with the resident cat. The actual school is a renovated house (maybe mansion you could call it) with three levels, a decent sized library, two computer labs, teachers lounge, and probably about 12 classrooms in all. I usually show up early to sit in the garden and use the internet, do some homework, or talk with whoever else happens to be around.

10am-12pm: My class schedule varies from day to day but every day I have 4 hours of class usually split into two two-hour sessions. I have one teacher for half the time and a second teacher for the other half. One teacher is a Moroccan woman in perhaps her late 30’s and the other is a Moroccan man in his mid 50’s. The male teacher has been teaching for pretty much forever, wrote the textbook I used, and has countless crazy/astonishing/fascinating stories to tell us about his life in Morocco – some he has instructed us to not tell the administration that he told us haha. There are four students in my class, including me, so I definitely have to stay on my toes the entire class.

1pm: After some more internet time in the garden, I walk back to the center of town and catch my second taxi of the day (same system as before but in reverse) back to my homestay house. When I get home, I watch TV in the living room and wait for lunch to be ready. Usually I eat lunch with my host mom, dad, brother, and housemaid. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day and is usually when we eat the traditional Moroccan foods like tagine (slow cooked meat and vegetables), coucous, or beans (cooked lentils or some other beans I don’t know the names for in English). We can have side salads (mostly cucumbers and tomatoes in olive oil with pepper) or mashed eggplant. And obligatory at every meal is a small plate of olives, which I rarely eat because they are super salty. We don’t really have drinks at lunch. My family all has a sip of water from a communal cup at the end of the meal. Somewhere I heard that this is because they believe eating and drinking at the same time is bad for digestion (or something else health related). I instead head back to my room and drink water from my own bottle.

2pm: I hang out in the living room some more and watch some soap operas (sometimes Korean, sometimes Mexican, but all dubbed in Arabic) until I have to leave for school again.

3pm: Catch another cab back to school (yeah if you’re counting this is taxi #3) for my second class of the day.

5pm: Class ends. If it is Tuesday or Thurday, I head back home to get ready for aerobic class. Otherwise, I might go to a café to visit friends or do some studying. Wednesdays I have a French class that I go to at night.

Depending on the night I head home anywhere from 7pm to 9pm. My family (and I, I can admit it) are addicted to watching this Turkish soap opera that is on 6 nights a week at 7:45.

9pm: Eat dinner with the family. Dinner is usually pretty light. We will eat soup or lunch leftovers, or sometimes (my favorite) they will buy fried mash potatoes from the street vendors outside and then we eat it in a sandwich with mayonnaise and hot sauce.

10pm: I start preparing for bed. I sleep a lot here. I think it’s a combination of the fact that I can (since school starts so late in the morning) and that my stress level is just higher naturally all the time living in a foreign environment.

So that’s a little about my typical day as an Arabic student in Fez. A typical day won’t stay typical for too long though, as I am soon moving to my own apartment, will eventually stop taking Arabic classes, and will start doing more work related to my research.

Eid Al-Kabir (The Biggest Holiday)

On November 28th, Moroccans celebrated the biggest Muslim holiday of the year appropriately called ‘The Biggest Holiday’ in Moroccan Arabic or also the ‘holiday of sacrifice’ throughout the Muslim world. In preparation of the big day, my family bought a young cow and two rams which they somehow got into the house (wish I could have been there to see how they did it) and kept in the room on the roof for a few days.

On Friday (the 27th) after lunch, the time when I usually head to the TV room and sleep off my food, my family informed me the butcher was here and it was time to slaughter the cow. We led the clueless cow out onto into the middle of the roof area, then the butcher with my two host brothers, brother-in-law, and father tied the legs together, made him fall onto his side, then rotated him so his head faced Mecca (the holy city in Saudi Arabia), gave praise to God, and cut his neck open. I am not sure what I expected but I was kind of traumatized by how long it actually took for the poor guy to stop breathing, groaning, kicking – it was definitely over a minute but felt more like five. Blood was everywhere but everyone got to work quickly mopping it up and directing it towards the floor drain (I stood back and took pictures).

Next the butcher, with much skill, skinned the cow, cut the head off, took out all the organs, and broke the rib cage open. My host mom and sister got to work cleaning out the stomach.

The next day, it was the two rams turns. This time my host family slaughtered, skinned and cleaned the bodies without the assistance of a butcher. They worked all morning to do this, and at lunch time we got our first taste of the meat.

According to tradition, we ate the liver first. They cut it up in pieces, placed them on skewers, and grilled them. We stuffed the cooked liver pieces in bread and ate. It was SO good! It had been grilled wrapped in pieces of fat, so it was incredibly juicy and tasty. Then they brought out a plate of mixed organs (intestines, stomach, probably something else), and while my host mom did a great job seasoning it the texture was too much for me (very chewy). One taste was enough.

At dinner, it was time to eat the head. Luckily I was just given a hunk of meat that seemed pretty similar to what I usually eat. Though, I’ve heard in general meat from the head is supposed to be extra greasy.

They following two or three days I didn’t see much of anything but meat, meat, meat. No fruit for dessert, no side salads, just meat. After those few days, the rest of the meat went into the freezer for a later date. Between the cow and two sheeps, I would say they could very well be set until next year’s Eid.