in Life's name and for Life's sake

So like I said in my previous post, I'm going to very interpret the "something" in the title of "National Create Something Month" very loosely...mostly for the sake of days like yesterday, when the only thing I created was dinner.

But trust me -- it was a good dinner.

There's a restaurant about ten minutes' walk from my apartment called Kitchenette that does the best savory breakfasts. Possibly the best sweet breakfasts, too, but I love them for things like biscuits and eggs and home fries. On weekday mornings, you can get the "Kitchenette Special" for $7.50: biscuit, bacon, two eggs, cheese, and coffee. (This is a steal in Manhattan.) My biscuits might not be quite as good as theirs, but we had heavy cream and I decided I would whip up a very easy biscuit recipe (five ingredients, less than 20 minutes!) and have Kitchenette Specials for dinner.

( Kitchenette Special )

I suppose we could also count it as working towards creating something that I spent part of last night watching a punk rock band documentary and thinking about how I want to write a Romantic poets rock band AU...

Sometimes it's a comfort to engage in a work that is challenging, but not beyond the bounds of the possible. I spent a good portion of the past two days doing a research project for an in-class report to be delivered on Wednesday, and I know that I spent more time on it than I needed to (and I haven't actually started writing it yet) but the process of discovering and organizing the information has been pleasantly easy. I've figured out what I needed to get done, and then I've done it, and there's something incredibly satisfying about that sort of work, something that feels worth getting up for. 

That's also sort of what NaNoWriMo feels like to me now, in my seventh straight year as a participant. It's interesting because the majority of the other wrimos I've met so far are doing this for the very first time, and I can hardly remember my first novel. I know that it was more autobiographical than you would expect, considering that it was set on a lunar colony in the future, and that's about it. I don't remember how I felt about the quality of my writing. I barely remember what it was like to see that I had won. My NaNo memories don't get very clear until Year 3, when I wrote the novel that remains the love of my life to this day, and when for the first time I was in close proximity with other people doing the same crazy thing. This year, the writing is going surprisingly well, and although I don't know if anyone other than me would want to read this novel as it is currently being written, I'm finding myself enjoying the writing process far more than I normally do. Hopefully this isn't just the week one high talking.

Speaking of novels, I still have one to write, and I'm gonna get on that so that I can then focus on my schoolwork so I can start writing this report before I go watch Downton Abbey and eat homemade scones with a friend later tonight. (I told you there would be scones.) 

I love the sociability of the British and their tea. It's not about the whole high tea time sort of thing -- oh no -- not about going to some posh tea house in Westminster. It's about taking a break from your essay at the same time as your flatmates and all sitting in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, talking while the tea brews, sharing the milk (because when you say "tea" it means English Breakfast or Earl Gray, but is always just called "tea" with no added signifier) and talking around the kitchen table. It's about sharing your mismatched mugs with a friend who's come over for a cuppa. It's about going over to see someone to ask a small question and getting asked in for a cuppa and then not going back to your flat for a few hours because once you've been asked in for tea it becomes a chat and it's always so hard to go.

It's about the tea but not really about the tea. It's about the people you drink it with, British and otherwise. It's about being distracted from your work for five hours on a day when you didn't wake up until noon and had things you maybe should have done but it doesn't matter because you've had a cup of tea with a friend and chatted for hours and something really meaningful has happened in the process. Yes, there is something to be said for a pint at a pub with all your friends, too, but I think I'll always prefer -- even crave -- the intimacy of a shared cup of tea.

Harry asked me a while ago what it's going to be like when I go home and I said, Well, probably I'll cry a lot on both ends of it because I'll be happy to go home but sad to be leaving home. Home? he said. The people here are home now, I said, and smiled at him. He's part of it. They're all part of it. And I don't know what I'll do without them and their cups of tea, so the obvious answer is that I'll just have to keep coming back.

Again with the ‘impressionistic’ updates (to borrow a term from Mr. Vargish). I have two essays due in the upcoming week and a friend flying in to visit from Dublin on Wednesday, but I don’t want to forget the things I wanted to say about Marrakesh before then!

It would be a stretch to say that being there was like being in another world (anyplace that has a McDonald’s is obviously Earth — other planets would likely have more sense), but it was definitely like being on another continent. That fact hit home before the airplane even landed; when I looked below me as we began our descent, instead of streets, towns, and city lights, there was red dirt, green fields, sunlight reflecting off thin streams of water used for irrigation, and slate-blue mountains in the hazy distance.

We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel — yes, not a hostel, a legitimate hotel, complete with TVs in the rooms, our own showers that we didn’t have to pay extra for, and continental breakfast each morning. The exchange rate being what it is (roughly 7 Moroccan dirhams to an American dollar), we could afford a little more class than usual. The taxi ride was an entertaining ordeal in itself: there being, apparently, no such thing as traffic police in Marrakesh, the five of us plus our driver managed to fit (along with our hand baggage) inside a car only designed to seat five. I was probably the smallest person there. Four girls shared the back seat — I didn’t even notice if the car was equipped with seatbelts, but I’m inclined to think they didn’t even bother.

Although Marrakesh is pretty touristy in its own right — and the government is doing a lot to promote that aspect of it — it has its rough edges, especially if you’re a white female. We weren’t there during the normal tourist season, so except in the marketplace, we ran into very few tourists on the streets. We weren’t actively hassled (except by vendors trying to sell us things, who referred to one or more of the girls at some time or another as “Hannah Montana” and “the Spice Girls”; we also got asked if we were looking for fish and chips, and whether we were on facebook) but something just seemed different. It wasn’t until one of my friends pointed it out that I saw practically no women (tourists excluded) in the city. There was the odd woman (some in full wrists-to-ankles covering, plus head scarf) doing her shopping at the local market, or speeding along the street on a bicycle/motorcycle hybrid (there are both pedals and a motor; these were surprisingly common), but even they disappeared when the sun went down. Outside the tourist center of the walled city of Morocco, 95% of the people I saw in restaurants were men. I hadn’t realized the kind of inherent menace there is in that until this trip. I was never hassled (and I’m also very good at ignoring what people say and just walking by — the ability to navigate Sproul Plaza at lunchtime without being inundated with flyers and appeals apparently has uses outside of Berkeley), but on the first day especially, something felt a little not right.

This being said, as soon as I had a map in my hand and a general feel for the city’s arrangement (as well as the promise of vigilance from the one male member of our group, God bless him), the feeling went away pretty quickly — and in a way it was something I’d been prepared for, having done enough googling on the subject to get an idea of how conservatively to dress. (Despite approximately 80 degree weather, I spent my time in jeans and t-shirts.)

I am now going to admit to something that, in any other city, would feel like a bit of a cop-out. You know those big red sightseeing buses? Well, there’s one that runs in Marrakesh, and my friends and I took it. It was a great way to figure out where everything was in relation to everything else without having to get lost on the way, and a great way not to walk around in the heat but still get a feel for the place.

My favorite part of being in Marrakesh was visiting the marketplace they’re famous for. I’ve seen its name transliterated in about a billion different ways, but the back of one of the postcards I bought calls it “Jamaa El Fna,” as do the signs in Marrakesh itself, so that’s the one I’m going with. You can get lost in there — in fact, my friends and I almost did. They sell everything imaginable — leather goods, home herbal remedies, ceramics, dried fruit and nuts, scarves, jewelry, live chickens, pig’s heads (freshly removed from the pigs in question) — and you are expected to bargain with them for what you buy. I came home with a hand-made leather purse with an intricate openwork design on the front flap which cost me the equivalent of $25. Other things that came home with my friends included dried apricots, carved and inlaid wooden boxes, and small ornamental daggers.

The market by night is radically different from the market by day. Around the time the sun begins to set, stalls and canopies start appearing in the plaza in front of the market, and soon enough there are a hundred little tent-restaurants ready and willing to serve you everything from traditional Moroccan food to french fries. We ate at one of these restaurants on our last night (ours was #89, I think — the menus are all basically the same, and they use their stall numbers as differentiation). I had kebabs, couscous, really good bread — and, it must be said, really good french fries. Apparently, they’re universal.

The last day of our stay, we took an excursion through some of the Berber villages situated in the High Atlas Mountains. Along with other tourists, we got in a great big van driven by a local tour guide who navigated the windy mountain roads and explained the scenery that rolled past as we gained altitude. In concept the trip was pretty touristy — the van stopped in several locations so that we could get out and snap the obligatory photos — but behind the tourist motivation were vestiges (small, but there) of a more authentic Moroccan experience. To some of the “natives,” we were obviously a way to make money through the sale of traditional arts and crafts. But to some of them we were just a blip on the radar, a small disturbance in a daily routine that (for them) probably hasn’t changed too much over the last few decades. It’s probable that a lot of them had never even been as far from home as Marrakesh.

That day, we ate lunch in a small former hotel, high up in the mountains, which served a very traditional multi-course Marrakeshi meal: bread, salad, vegetable tagine, roasted chicken, finished off with a small glass of mint tea, something Morocco’s known for (and which lives up to the hype — but granted, I was a mint tea fan to begin with).

There are some places that you go to once, just to say that you’ve been there, and to know for yourself what that means. And there are some places you go to and know you’ll come back to. While preparing for this trip, I sort of suspected that Marrakesh would fall under the first category, but after having been, I’m not so sure. There are, of course, plenty of places I plan to go to for a first time before I make a return trip to Marrakesh (or even to Morocco), but in some future where I am obscenely wealthy and can travel wherever and whenever I like, I can see myself ending up back there — even if only to share the experience of the place with a different set of people.

It was great to be back in Berkeley, and terrible at the same time, because after five days I had to leave. I love the city, and I find out new things about it every time I visit (for example, this time I made my first visit to gourmet ice cream parlor Ici). It'll be good to leave it for a year -- but I have a feeling it'll be just as good to return.

*

The seventeenth gets closer and closer each day. It's almost officially September. That's crazy...but also good. I'm starting to prepare for London in earnest. It's so weird because it's like being a freshman all over again, but with the benefit of hindsight upon the whole college freshman experience. I think I'm going to like 'freshman' year 2.0 even better than I liked the first iteration.

*

Dinner tonight was definitely cinnamon pecan waffles with peanut butter and syrup and milk and bacon. Yum. Life rocks.

*

I'm teaching myself Italian (conversationally, using CDs borrowed from a neighbor) and finding it pretty easy. I've always wanted to learn more languages; the whole grad school language requirement thing is just the incentive I need to start picking them up! Frankly, the real list starts with refreshing my Spanish and then learning French, followed by Italian (and then Latin if I'm not dead yet), but I figure there's no harm in learning some conversational Italian even if I can't actually spell most of the words. Apparently I remember more Spanish than I thought -- sometimes when asked how to say a basic phrase in Italian, I can only remember it in Spanish! In my defense, the languages are remarkably similar. If Italian is spoken slowly enough, I can understand two out of three words.

*

While I'm studying abroad, I will be keeping up with this journal, though it's quite possible I'm (finally) going to make it friends-only. I'm also going to be keeping a public blog that will consist pretty much of condensed and edited LJ posts. I'll still post randomness and rants and hopes and fears on here...but the study abroad blog will be kept free of anything I wouldn't want to share with my distant relatives, parents, and former schoolteachers. Still, if you're itching for someone else to follow on tumblr, my journal is When In London.

*

I got my first check in the mail from DemiDec today! Yes, guys, they're legit, and I'm $700 richer -- and that's only the first of four checks that I'm due. Some of them may be for even larger installments (I confess I don't know exactly). Also, aside from making requested revisions on the three projects that haven't been completed yet (which takes little to no time compared to actually producing the content to begin with), I'm no longer working. This gives me ample and abundant free time. I hadn't realized how much I missed that. I'm looking forward to getting in some beach time, some reading time, some writing time, and some general time to relax.