Cambodia! (with pictures)

I’ve just about reached the halfway point of my time in Cambodia. Ergo, it’s time for an update. First, water buffalo: 

This is where I live.

            I’m writing this from a little guesthouse in Sihanoukville in Southwest Cambodia. It’s two hours by boat away from the tropical island of Koh Rong Samleom, my current home. There’s no internet on the island, so I make the trip to the mainland every so often.

My volunteer work here is in honor of Brendan Kutler and the Two Hats Award. I work for Marine Conservation Cambodia and conduct extensive surveys of the marine life around the island with almost 30 other volunteers from all over the world. 

The island itself is fantastic. I wake up to convivial cloudscapes, cerulean surf, and the sanguine smiles of the villagers with whom we share the little slice of heaven. And share it we do – I lived right in the midst of the village. During Khmer New Year, I fell asleep to second-hand serenades belted out into karaoke microphones from midnight to dawn by jovial Khmer men. I even shared a bucket-shower room with an elderly family (there’s no running water on the island). The living is very bare-bones; the only furniture in the shack I share with three other volunteers is a row of nails on which to hang stuff.

The village has quite the history. Two years ago, it didn’t officially exist. It was a caravan of corrugated metal full of famished squatters. Alcoholism ran rampant, and the villagers were barely surviving. Then, some developers bought the island and zoned it for development. They tried to convince regulatory agencies that the bay was fished to hell, so what harm would building it up do?

Actually, a lot. It would spell doom for the island, its denizens, and its bewildering biodiversity.

This is where Marine Conservation Cambodia comes in. We do surveys of the island’s marine life to earn it the island marine protection it deserves.

I underwent two kinds of training: scuba training and survey training. I am now a certified Advanced Open Water Diver and have been down to seventy feet. The water here is so warm that we can dive down in nothing but swim trunks and a t-shirt!

It’s a different world underwater. Diving feels kind of like flying around as a fighter jet in space. My survey partners and I glide horizontally along the seafloor and communicate through hand signals. You control your underwater altitude with your lungs, though, so it has a tangibly Zen component.

Marine life comes in so many different colors – lime greens, pastel yellows, Prussian blues, neon greens. Reefs make a distinctive cackling noise, so it kind of sounds like the entire ocean is eating Rice Crispies and giggling to itself every time I get close to one.

The training for these surveys involves learning to identify forty-plus fish - in addition to all the different invertebrate, coral, and substrate varieties that populate the waters around the island. This was a lot of fun. The fish are beautifully manifold, but I began to appreciate marine life on a totally different level when I learned to marvel at the way a chocolate grouper’s pectoral fins flit in the water as it scavenges about a diadema urchin-riddled tower of healthy brain coral.

I spend about four hours a day (any more and nitrogen in the blood becomes an issue) diving in a flat expanse of over-fished almost-wasteland called the Corral. Visibility is notoriously low (I often can barely see my survey partners), and the current is nothing short of legendary. All that’s down there are some patches of sea grass, a handful of oscillating, neon-blue Anemones (complete with Nemo-like damselfish!), the occasional magic-carpet-like black-and-orange polka-dot sea slug, and a smattering of pencil urchins.

Oh, and a lot of jellyfish. Way too many. A few days ago, I counted 28 during one dive. These jellyfish move with an entrancing undulating squeeze and vary in color from pink to deep fuchsia. Fun fact: water eats up red light. That makes these breathtaking creatures really difficult to see, and the Corral’s buffeting current flings them through the water super quickly. I’ve been stung twice. They hurt.

So why go to the Corral? Because in one out of every, say, ten-odd pencil urchins, there will be a seahorse. Up close, they look almost like alien royalty. Their faces are somewhere between horse and human, and the skeletal ridges that line their entire bodies could pass for imperial war regalia as easily as an exoskeleton. They are an eerie abandoned-building verdigris-tinged brown, and they’re rarely bigger than the distance from my wrist to the middle of my pinky.  

Finding a seahorse makes a chest-pounding hour of barely dodging jellyfish tentacles in three meters of visibility worth it ten times over. Even better, every seahorse we see on a survey is published in the massive logs of data that we send to a number of worldwide conservation organizations, including the UN. Every survey we do makes a measurable difference towards protecting these animals. Find a seahorse, save a seahorse.

The whole thing makes me feel a bit like a secret agent – especially the dodging jellyfish part.

Now, a bit about the country.

Cambodia is the most under-developed place I’ve ever been by a massive margin. Clear, immediate example: I’m writing this in between power outages. Cambodia suffers from severe “energy poverty” – people don’t have access to reliable electricity. They supplement the meager output of the grid with household generators. It’s no surprise this country has been locked in the third world; its people need to devote so much time to jerry-rigging an infrastructure for carting around all of that diesel. The poverty is rampant, and a tinge of desperation often fills the air. I learned this early on when I left my shoes on the beach while going for a swim; they were gone when I returned. Many people are desperately poor.

            Even with crippling issues like these with which to deal, the Cambodian people – especially the villagers – are usually warm, welcoming, and friendly. This – literally – rang true this past week. There was a wedding on the island, and all the volunteers were drawn into the proceedings like old friends. I shuffled in a conga circle of sorts right next to affable Cambodian teenagers, and they demonstrated for me the Bollywood-like, languorous, lolling hand rolls of Khmer dance. Despite the lack of electricity on the island, a platoon of speakers blared poppy ballads across the bay (hence the ringing: sound carries over open water really, really well).

            Long story short, waking up every morning with long chains of mosquito bites coating my legs and gecko poop on my floor is an adventure, but I’m loving my time here! I know Brendan would approve.

            Anyway, I’ve gotta get this posted before the power cuts out again.

           Here are some pictures: 

 On a boat ride to the mainland. We're in open water.

 Hello, there, water buffalo number two.

 Gecko in the bathroom.

 Cambodian wedding. Note the bandage. Wounds here are a big problem. Because of the humidity, they get infected viciously easily.

 Cambodian wedding again. That guy in the yellow had some fancy footwork.

As always, I’ll keep you in the loop. I’m headed out to the temples of Angkor Wat soon….

- Gavin

Shanghai: A Retrospective

First, some statistics:

            Total Continents Visited: 4

            Total Number of Flights: 16 (and one camel ride)

            Total Countries Visited: 6 (soon to be 7! More on that later.)

Anyway, with my time in Shanghai drawing to a close, it’s time for another retrospective! Let’s do this shindig.

            The two months I spent working at the BoAi center were eye-opening. My center had two floors: one for mainly physical disorders and another for mental illnesses. I spent my time between the two, helping with physical therapy classes for kids with cerebral palsy on the first and working through brain-function-boosting classes and exercises to students with Down’s Syndrome and Autism on the second.

            The work was intense but very enjoyable. My time with the kids was interspersed with the jarring realization that for all of the training and time and love they got, there is only so much progress they can make. Cerebral Palsy is not a one-off sort of thing. It is a lifelong battle, and it’s tragic to watch. When I was teaching in Morocco, there was always the possibility I may have sparked a passion for scholarship in the next big Moroccan tech mogul. I was giving my students something that would afford them a tangible advantage. That felt great – as did this job. However, the happiness I’d get whenever one of the students at BoAi would suddenly understand the difference between red and blue or stop obsessively biting his or her hands was soon tempered as I remembered the permanence of their maladies.

            One day, I asked the head of our center what happens to these children after they get older. She replied, “Exactly. That’s the question.”

            She’s a remarkable woman. Moved by her son’s battle with Cerebral Palsy, she quit her lucrative career in finance to found the BoAi Center. This was back in the 90s. It was the first NGO and NPO in Shanghai. That wasn’t easy. Since then, she’s done a lot of good, and it was a pleasure to help her. Apart from my activities with the children, I also did a lot of translation for her and the center. I even served as her translator at a big event hosted by the Irish Consulate!

Gaelic and Chinese is an interesting combination. 

 Here are some pictures of the kids with whom I worked:

 This young fella's name is Zhu Weili. He's a Houston Rockets fan.

 This here is Dashu. He was one of my favorite students. One day, he asked my why I was wearing my Just B Bracelet. I began to tell him about Brendan and our friendship. He would ask me about Brendan almost every day.

 This girl was sad to see me leave.

           

           

            So work was great. Another thing really stands out in hindsight, though: this was the first time I’ve lived in a foreign country without a host family, and I got the chance to sample an entirely different lifestyle. While I spent my days working entirely in Chinese, I came home to my English-speaking flatmates. That was totally new to me. I ended up with two separate social lives – one with my Chinese buddies and another with my friends from Projects Abroad. It was somewhere between the experiences of an expat and a native, and that combination was pretty fantastic.

            I spent my days at work chatting with Wang Hong and Xu Da Ge (literally “older brother Xu”) about Eastern medicinal approaches to treating birth defects, the news (there was a lot to talk about these past few months), Lady Gaga, and everything in between. At night, I hung out with other volunteers. Some of my good friends included Pedro, the loveable Spaniard; Arryl, the Norwegian who won a pancake-flipping contest sponsored by the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai; Katya, the Dutch-speaking Russian; Sean, a witty Brit who studies in Florida; Courtney, an Australian who personally knows a member of a band I love; David, a med-school student from Texas; and Izzy, my Brown-bound buddy from Manhattan. It was a diverse group, and we learned loads from each other.

Through my interactions with these two disparate social circles, I gained much of my second-hand knowledge of the city through contrasting cultural lenses. I ended up with a pretty unique map of this metropolis in my head by the end. For example, I can tell you where all of the nifty expat hangouts are - and I’ll automatically think of the best parks for early morning Taichi around them. I also know that the best Thai restaurant in the French Concession is near a local antique-store haven.

My existing Chinese habits became more deeply engrained. I drank hot water (in lieu of cold) almost exclusively during my time here. My Chinese friends loved it. It makes so much sense – if it’s cold outside outside, why not drink hot water? I also retained my love of local restaurants. I ate at least one meal a day at a charming hole-in-the-wall restaurant next to my flat. In fact, I had breakfast there not three hours ago. They have the best fried rice in Shanghai – hands-down. I went there so often that my roommates began to call it “Gavin’s”! I became really close with the family that runs the restaurant, and I’m sad to leave them.

As you can see, we’re pretty tight.

More importantly, though, is that I got know the differences between the two cultures more intimately than ever before. Fun little fact: they’re a lot smaller than you might think. I was a little bit shocked at how similar the daily shooting-the-breeze was with my coworkers and flatmates. When all was said and done, though, I developed two discrete modes speech – one with people my age, irreverent of language spoken, and another for older Chinese people. That was surprising. Comparing the generation gap in the States to the one here is like sticking your hand in a kiddie pool and then the Mariana Trench. That became apparent only this time around.

You probably read about it every day, but I can’t emphasize strongly enough how quickly China is changing. It’s downright freaky. In just two years, man-powered bikes went from patently ubiquitous to just above rare. The clink of chains and ringing of bells that I associated so strongly with my time in Beijing is all but gone. The new hotness? E-bikes - electric bikes.

I guess the question Shanghai poses is: what happens when development outstrips a culture’s ability to adapt? It’s a little bit frightening. I remember when I was a sophomore and phones with internet were a novelty. After coming home from my junior year in Beijing, the 3G networks were commonplace, and everybody quickly became accustomed to checking their Facebooks at lunch. That’s pretty revolutionary when you think about it. Now, imagine if the principal mode of transportation were utterly transformed in the same span of time.

Remember the 7^th country I mentioned at the beginning of this post? Well, it’s Cambodia!

The next portion of my year is dedicated to Brendan Kutler. As the inaugural Two Hats Fellow, I will spend two months on a Cambodian island in the Gulf of Thailand (Koh Rong Samleom) working at a center for marine research and conservation. In addition to salvage diving to remove debris from the seafloor, I will be collecting data on seahorse migration patterns and taking extensive reef surveys. I chose to pursue this project because it’s the sort unique interdisciplinary synthesis that Brendan and I love. I will combine our shared loves of foreign cultures, Asia, science, the sea, and volunteer work (along with good food and weird tropical fruit!) in the two months I spend on the island.

I’m excited! As always, I’ll keep you posted.

 I saw Shinchi Osawa on the weekend of Brendan's birthday. I gave him a Just B bracelet... AND HE WORE IT FOR THE REST OF HIS SET! LOOK LOOK LOOK IT : O

 Just a cool shot. Taken on Chinese New Year.

Fun with infinity pools in Hong Kong. Taken when I visited a friend who goes to college in the mountains of Hong Kong Island. 

Shanghai

Hello from Shanghai, China!

              Sorry for the lack of pictures - I can't actually access my blog. My brother (love you, Conor) was kind enough to put this up for me. The censorship wasn’t even an issue the last time I was in China. It’s gotten worse since then. Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have all been totally “harmonized” (tongue-in-cheek Chinese slang for “censored.” People also use “river-crabbed” online, which is a near-homonym – 和諧 he2 xie2 vs. 河蟹 he2xie4 ).
             My first couple of weeks in Shanghai have been excellent. I live in a flat in a very Chinese section of town with three roommates: a British girl from Nottingham, a Norwegian girl from a rural village, and a boy from New York City headed to Brown next year.
             I started work at the Shanghai BoAi center the day after I arrived. Its name (博愛 bo2 ai4) translates to “fraternal love” or “universal love” in Chinese. It’s a fitting name for a non-profit organization that provides full-time care for children and young adults with mental handicaps, physical disabilities, or, in a few cruel cases, both.
             The work is intense, but it’s very rewarding. The kids at the center all call me “foreigner older brother” (外國哥哥wai4 guo2 ge1 ge1) – even those older than I!
             Now, about Chinese New Year. It was wild. Most of the city shuts down when the immigrant population leaves for their hometowns across China. The only restaurant open for the past two weeks was a noodle restaurant owned by members of the Islamic Hui people. As a result, I ended up eating in a Muslim restaurant before heading out to watch fireworks on one of the two big nights of Chinese New Year. After eating dinner with my Chinese friends in Morocco on Eied (a major Muslim holiday), it was definitely a full-circle moment.

            Guidebooks tell you not to visit China during the two weeks of festivities. If possible, I’d recommend you do. I was fortunate enough to experience a Chinese New Year during my junior year in Beijing, and I was crazy-go-nuts overjoyed to have the opportunity to take in a second one. There are two nights where everybody in the entire city sets off fireworks. At once. This comes after a week-long buildup where people set off all kinds of pyrotechnics on the street. I’m not talking about firecrackers (though you do get plenty of those). I mean gnarly ones that shoot up and explode and spray flaming colors everywhere - front yard, broad daylight.
            The city feels uncannily like what a warzone should for the duration of the holiday. Firecrackers, off in the distance, ring like gunshots (or really heavy rain, if you’re inside). The smell and smog of gunpowder flood the streets. Large booms shake the air and set off car alarms. To top it all off, most stores are empty. Then, you see people walking around with large stalks of cabbage in bags flash you a grin and teenagers giggling into cell phones.
             I was fortunate to be on a rooftop 30 stories above the madness on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. It looked like the entire city was getting bombed, but not from the skies above, but from the street level. Every building was bathed in conflicting tones of purple and green, in red and yellow, as the thick clouds of gunpowder smoke grew more luminous, they thickened with every new firework. There isn’t anything else like it on the planet – believe me, I’ve looked.  I’d go on, but I took 10 minutes of video : D I’ll upload that as soon as I get my systems for working around the Great Firewall of China.

            This city is incredible. Beijing feels like a clash between the new and the old China. Shanghai (so far) appears to be a more peaceful overlay of the East and the West. There are entire blocks in the French Concession that looked plucked right out of Paris. That said, the European illusion falls apart pretty quickly once you see (ironically enough) one of the million Chinese-ified pseudo-French bakeries.
            So there you go. I’ll keep you updated. : P
            Happy Chinese New Year!

Teaching: A Retrospective

    Now, in previous blog entries, I’ve mentioned loving my job. I really did. This sounds corny, I know, but there’s something about a child’s smile that makes me get all bright and giddy inside. I learned so much about Moroccan culture from my students, and they were overjoyed to learn about life across the pond. I walked to the bus after work with a goofy grin every day.

            That said, I’ve waited to fully expound upon the less-glamorous aspects of the Moroccan schooling system.

            Anyway, I taught at a school in Sala Jadida.

            A little bit of geographical background: outside of Rabat is Sale. Outside of Sale is the underdeveloped and agrarian New Sale, otherwise known as Sala Jadida. My commute clocked in at an hour and a half each way.

            The school was underfunded, disorganized, and all kinds of chaotic. Classes invariably ran ten minutes behind schedule, and teachers spent half their time disciplining kids.

            At the front of every classroom, there was a wooden block – square on one end, trapezoidal on the other. It was used for two things: banging the blackboard to quiet kids down and corporal punishment. It was used very, very, often. From 8 to 5, the halls of the school rang with the oppressive knocking noise of the infernal blocks clanging against blackboards.

            A fellow English teacher would often complain to me about how the children don’t listen, pay attention in class, or do their homework. She would then roll her eyes at me and sigh exasperatedly, as if to elicit agreement. I never gave her one.

            These were intelligent kids. They picked up the vocabulary I gave them very quickly and were always eager to learn more about all things America. The problem was that this teacher would write a sentence or two on the board every day and force every student in every one of her classes to sit still, be silent, and copy it verbatim. These children were as young as six.

When kids screwed up, she would approach them and yell or just scoff dismissively. If a student talked too loudly, she would pick up his or her book and wail on his or her head with it. (Just to be clear: the books were soft cover – but still!) If a student forgot his or her book or didn’t do his or her homework, she would make them stand up at the front of the classroom and hit them harshly on the palms with the unassuming wooden block.

            Never once did I hear her verbally laud a student. If they did well on a homework assignment, she would write “Good”. No exclamation mark, no smiley face, no fun swirly thing – just “Good”. I made a habit of grading my papers with large, grinning, cartoons. Kids went nuts as soon as I returned the first batch of papers. They actually rushed my desk with completed homework assignments, desperate for some sort of affirmation.

            The most jarring part of this whole mess was that this teacher was a genuinely gregarious person – outside of class. She was always amicable to me and laughed and smiled with her students as long as she didn’t have chalk in her hand. The contrast made her in-class causticity all the more disconcerting. It wasn’t just her, though. Every single educator I met at the school was liker her: kind, warm, and gentle - except for when teaching.

            It was an intense job. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen kids beaten. I try not to think about how many times I’ve seen kids cry. I realized that I couldn’t single-handedly stop that from happening. I resolved to do my best as a teacher and lead by example – it was really all I could do. In my classroom, I traded copybooks for skits, blows to the head for pats on the shoulder, censure for praise, tears for smiles, and fear for happiness.

            On the last day, I saw the aforementioned teacher hit a kid. I had suggested alternate methods of discipline since I began working at the school, but my input went unheeded. I approached the teacher and asked calmly why she hits her students, noting that we never do that in America. She was uncomfortably cavalier in her response: “They don’t do their homework, so I have to…”

            She raised the wooden block to hit the next student. He broke down in tears, begging for forgiveness. She put her head in her hand, dropped the block extravagantly, and sent the kid back to his seat.

            So that felt pretty awesome. I really did feel like I had made a difference.

 Here are some pictures. Enjoy!

Me teaching. Notice the two kids performing a skit.

 I put this picture in there just for that kid in the blue shirt. He was a fun kid.

Eied

            The ever-bustling passageways of the labyrinthine Medina were eerily deserted. Every single shop lining the walkways was closed, corrugated metal barriers ominously assuming the place of overflowing, Arabic-pop-blasting storefronts. The streets (if you can call them streets) were silent except for frequent hacking noises, the occasional whoop and holler, and the subtle crackling of flame. Oh, yeah, about that - there was a sizeable bonfire every 50 feet or so. Large Moroccan men - some smiling blithely, some briskly irritated – ambled hurriedly past me with massive, menacing knives lying tensely at their sides and large, obvious blood stains flayed across their dirtied clothes. The sometimes-tiled floor of the ancient walled city was all kinds of rank, smeared with ashen charcoal and the occasional red dot or smear. If you looked at the red closely enough, you would soon realize that the spacing of the dots was very regular, and then you’d see that it was blood you were staring at. The regularity of the dots made it seem as if a wounded soldier had limped his or her way down the very street you were walking on, and his or her shattered leg had smeared some of the blood.

            “This is so utterly surreal,” I remarked in Mandarin to my Chinese friend.

            Let me back up a bit.

            Roughly seventy days after Ramadan, the Islamic world celebrates Eied, a holiday that commemorates Abraham’s dedication to God. This is customarily done by buying a lamb, sacrificing it, butchering it, and distributing the meat: one third to the poor, one third to friends, and the final third to one’s own family.

            During the entire week leading up to Eied, I saw people carting lambs throughout Rabat. I even spied a lamb shoved into a car trunk once!

            Throughout the night before Eied, the city echoed with the warbly cries of the lambs holed-up in apartments. They sounded uncannily like the calls for prayer broadcast across the city five times each day. Having developed the habit of keeping track of time via the prayer calls, all the new false alarms threw me off.

            I woke up early on the day of the festival. As my host family decided to spare the expense of purchasing a lamb, I walked to a fellow volunteer’s host house in the medina to witness and hopefully partake in the celebration. I began to see the bonfires as soon as I turned on to the main street.

Why the fires?  To burn the hair off of the lamb heads and cook them a little bit.

I entered the medina. It was desolate but not quite devoid of djelabba-donning denizens. I arrived at my friend’s house and saw a hapless lamb tied-up in a corner of a courtyard. I greeted the father, smiling as I again spoke the well-rehearsed sequence of Moroccan greetings. After discussing his model-boat building hobby, I asked if I could help prepare for the sacrifice in any way.

I cleaned-up the plot of brick intended for the sacrifice and joined the mom in smearing henna on the bridge of the lamb’s nose.

            I again again if there were anything I could do to help.

            My friend’s host brother, now brandishing a long, freshly-sharpened knife, replied, “Nope.”

            One thing I’ve learned in Morocco: it’s customary to turn down offers at least once.

I asked again.

            He hesitated for a bit, then remarked, “Actually, yes, there is.” He gestured for me to come over and help hold the lamb down. The dad had wrestled it to the ground and was holding the head. The brother firmly clamped down half of the body and indicated for me to grasp the animal’s hind legs.

             I‘d heard they hang the lamb upside down after slaughtering it to let the blood drain and the meat for at least one day. I assumed that they would hang the lamb first before slaughtering it. That is not what happened.

            There I was, thinking that I was going to help them hoist the lamb up onto the loop of rope above us, when the host dad whipped-out a large knife from nowhere and quickly brought it down onto the lamb’s neck. Blood burst out of the wound in a huge gush -   it had an odd crimson tinge. It looked like a certain color of paint Moroccans use to mark high-quality melons more than anything else.

            I was not ready for this. The blow came swiftly and suddenly. I just went with it.

            My Arabic teacher had told me that they sacrifice the lamb with a deft slice across the jugular so that it dies instantly and feels no pain – ergo, I thought the lamb would just simmer down and kick the bucket peacefully.

             That is not what happened. Instead, the lamb kicked and gurgled and shook for a solid minute or two. I kept clamping down on its leg. After the lamb had finally died (or stopped moving, rather), I helped the family raise it up to the rope and clean up the blood. I thanked them and headed home.

            And there you have it. 

My first Eied.

            Walking home, both stunned and fascinated by the ritual, my Chinese friend called me up asking me to join him and a co-worker for the afternoon. His company gave him Eied off and he asked if I knew the best place to check out the Eied festivities.

Oh, did I ever. I suggested we head down to the medina.

It was quite a treat. Talking about it in Chinese was made it even sweeter (and a little bit more surreal).  

Two things in the first paragraph still deserve explanation:

The guys carrying knives? Hired butchers who travel between the houses of people who cannot or will not carve-up the lamb themselves. The blood? From the lamb carried through the streets.

            We then headed back to the coworker’s house for a delicious home-cooked Chinese meal. As we cooked, I couldn’t help but feel a little differently about the knives as I chopped up veggies and garlic.

            When I got home, there were drops of blood all up and down the stairwell. Spooky.

            Fun little side note – I ended up speaking English, Chinese, Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic, and a little bit of French that day. It was memorable indeed.
          Now for some pictures.

 The medina...

...and again.

Me and my Chinese friend.

 Some lamb skins. They're made into furniture after the festival.

Me holding a lamb head.

Adventures in the Sahara

Two weekends ago, some close friends/fellow volunteers and I visited the Sahara. After three hours on a train through the pastoral Moroccan countryside and eight more hours on a winding bus ride through the mountains, I was pleasantly roused from a fitful sleep by the bright, burning Saharan sunrise pouring in through the wide windows of the bus. We proudly stepped onto the sand and headed to our accommodations.

After a quick nap, I began my Saharan adventures by ambling over to a nearby Berber village. The Berbers are an ethnic minority in North Africa, and they speak this nifty language that’s related to Ancient Egyptian. They’re known for their skill in handicrafts (specifically silver jewelry and carpets) and the distinctive tattoos Berber women don upon engagement. (Wikipedia link for your convenience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_people)

If I could pick one word to describe the village, it would be organic. All of the walls were made out of a tan adobe-like material built of mud and straw. The burnt beige sand between the buildings matched the color of the earthen concrete, and it eerily seemed as if the village rose out of the ground. Adding to the town’s mystique were the lack of clearly marked storefronts and the general lack of people. 

Oh, yeah, one more thing: as I walked, the buildings and village were at my right and the flowing, staccato dunes of the Sahara rose at my left. I was between some of the most visually enthralling structures the earth has to offer and an ethereal Berber village. It was awe-inspiring. The pointed, rolling dunes clashed yet simultaneously paired up perfectly with the rounded frames of the boxy clay houses. As I walked between them, I couldn’t help but revel in how utterly foreign the landscape around me felt and how glad I was to be there.

            After the walk, my friends and  I rode camels into a camp in the heart of the desert. If you get a chance to ride a camel, do it. The ride is unique, as camels have a really soothing swaying, bobbing gait that almost mimics the ebbing of the dunes.

Speaking of dunes: they’re mesmerizing. They also happen to be really difficult to describe. The best way I can put this into words is that the dunes look kind of fake. You’ve undoubtedly seen pictures of them as a Windows default desktop background or something, and you’ve probably thought to yourself: “Wow, that looks awesome but fake.” On a computer screen, they’re pretty cool. In real life, that whole synthetic shading thing they have going on looks positively otherworldly. They look straight out a Pixar movie. They possess a unique shade of orange that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Now that I think about it, in the right light, it’s almost a Princeton orange. The most spellbinding thing about them, though, is the way they play with the sun. It’s cool stuff. All of the phases of the day have natural and distinct manifestations in the dunes. At dawn, they’re a youthful salmon-pink that perfectly compliments the juvenile morning sun. At midday, they exhibit the brilliant almost-Princeton-orange that elegantly counter balances the pristine light blue of the sky. At sundown, they turn a lavender-purple, and are just as relaxing as the scent of the lavender plant itself.

I will never look at sun nor sand the same way again.

We arrived at camp around sunset. I set out to replicate the photo of Brendan Kutler’s that most resonates with me – White Sands Part 5. (http://l11ll3.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d280tgt)

After we set up in the camp, we all ran to jump off dunes. Outrageously fun?  Take a look:

Before to sleep, I meditated under the stars of the Sahara. Oh, the stars. Now, keep in mind that we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There was zero light pollution. Even the moon was MIA, so the stars were as bright as cosmically possible. You know you’re getting a rare look at the night sky when you can make out the nebulous (no pun intended) band of stellar dust that runs through the heavens. It was the most beautiful night of my life, hands down. I must have been out there for 40 minutes, staring at the sky, spellbound.

We slept beneath the stars. I couldn’t have been happier.

We woke up early to watch the sunrise. Clouds blotted out the orange light only the faintest bit, so the rising sun looked straight out of a Japanese watercolor.

 Here are some more pictures from the desert. Enjoy.

            We rode the camels back and  toured a different area of the desert shortly after in a Jeep. It felt like a videogame and a roller coaster in equal parts. We visited some abandoned villages and the place where “The Little Prince” was filmed!

            When we got back, two friends of mine (Jan and Sam) and I noticed that there was a sandboard in the  hotel’s lobby area. We asked around and learned that we were free to use it. I picked up the board and we set out for the biggest dune we could find. It looked about five minutes away.

            One more thing I should note about the desert: everything looks closer than it actually is. Five minutes stretched into twenty five, but the scenery was so enchanting that we didn’t mind in the slightest. The dune looked pretty big, but nowhere near as utterly massive as it felt from the top.

            The trek up was not easy (especially with a sanboard and in a sandstorm), but the view from the peak was compelling enough that it didn’t matter. I felt so fantastically on top of the world from that vantage point. It seemed as if the entire Sahara poured out from that very dune. As I looked down upon the desert, sand battering my cheeks, sun pounding gently at my chest, I couldn’t think of anything but how perfect it was to be where I was right at that moment.

            I would have taken more pictures from the top, but the sandstorm trashed my camera.  : ( This is the last picture I got:

            I strapped my feet into the board’s tenuous binding, hopped to get over the lip of the dune, and carved sharply into the sand as I barreled down the sharply inclined slope. I was actually able to dip my hand into the sands as I banked into the powdery sand. The mixture of sand, sun, and speed (in spades) was exhilarating as anything I’ve ever experienced. I like to think that Michael, an avid surfer, would have approved.

Morocco! (and a little something else)

So I’ve arrived safely in Rabat. My host family is friendly, the city is beautiful, and the food is excellent. But first…

Bet you didn’t see that coming. I visited  Frankfurt! I had some time between flights, so I took a subway and explored the city. It was my first time in Germany, and it didn’t disappoint. The contrast between the modern global city and the quaint German town intrigued me the second I hopped off the subway. I walked around most of the city and was treated to picturesque views of domes, alleyways, and bridges.The first thing that struck me was how the city looked so quintessentially metropolitan at eye level. The storefronts of Frankfurt blend together in a cosmopolitan swath similar to other major cities. Tilt your head back, however, and Frankfurt’s true colors show. Every building, save for a couple malls and skyscrapers, looks like it’s from two centuries ago. I enjoyed the plazas and stopped in two cathedrals, one from the 14th century!

I discovered a Chinese restaurant in downtown Frankfurt. I ordered beef and broccoli and was surprised at how good the meal was. I happily spoke Chinese with the staff and some Chinese tourists. The chance to use my Mandarin was definitely very welcome. 

Fast forward to Morocco. I arrived at my host family’s house late at night and chatted with my host brother until 4:30 am. His name is Saad, and his English is excellent. They are very kind.

I slept through the afternoon. After chatting with Saad and my host parents, I got dressed and hailed a taxi to American Ambassador’s residence near the U.S. Embassy in Rabat for the Rosh Hashanah dinner. Ambassador Sam Kaplan and his wife, Sylvia, are so kind and hospitable. They warmly welcomed me to Morocco and I was honored to be seated next to Mrs. Kaplan. It was actually my first meal in Morocco! A sweet, savory, and all-around perfect chicken-based “tazhin” (the zh is pronounced like “s” in pleasure) was served. As I sunk my teeth into the uniquely Moroccan dish and enjoyed the wonderful company, something clicked. I instinctively knew that Morocco was the right choice. I couldn’t have asked for a better start to this adventure! It was indeed a memorable evening.

My host brother and I went out for a walk around the beach the next day. It was the last day of Ramadan – the Night of Power, or the night Mohammed ascended to heaven. I even donned a white linen tunic, customary attire for Muslim men on the last day the end of Ramadan. The view was quite a treat. The moon formed a perfect scimitar-like crescent in the sky, and it was reflected in a pristine pool just above the waves. I’d describe it some more, but I could just show you:

My first week was fascinating. To celebrate Rosh Hashanah and then the end of Ramadan within the first twenty four hours of arriving in Morocco was quite the treat.  I also explored Rabat thoroughly and discovered lots of nifty nooks and crannies. I was pleased to discover that I feel really comfortable navigating even the labyrinthine sprawl of the old walled city, or Medina. More on that later.

I started my volunteer work last Monday. I expected it to be pretty swell, and it was even better. I'm teaching English to high school students around my age. They're willing to learn and very fun to teach! They're already helping me practice my Arabic, too.

I had my first Arabic lesson last Wednesday. It's a thrill to be delving into an entirely new language again. I'm really liking Arabic so far. The throaty sounds of the language are so different from anything I've ever heard before, and the flowing writing system is delightfully fresh. 

Oh, and, hearing babies speak Arabic is adorable. Just saying.

In short: Morocco's awesome. : D

- Gavin