Update

Hello

This is Jenny. Again, I apologize for no pictures. We don't have our camera with us this afternoon. The wedding festivities are over. They began Friday night, with the dinner for the men. When cooks, waitors, and relatives began to fill the house Friday morning, Rob and I escaped to our favorite Marrakech hotel, Hotel Akabar. Akabar means "the best." It is a 3 star hotel in the French district of Marrakech. It has three very important things: 1. Air conditioning 2. pool 3. Quiet

While Rob attendend the men's dinner Friday night, I relaxed in the hotel. I spent most of the time sleeping, but I also did some reading and relaxing at the pool.

Sat night was the big event at Rita's house. I will let Rob fill in the details when he gets a chance to add pictures. We were very confused about what time we were supposed to meet at her house. At first we were told 2pm, later Rachid said 10:30 pm, Rita's sisters told me 5pm, at 2:30 Rachid called us at the hotel and asked us to hurry over. When we arrived, Rita's sisters said, "I thought you were going to be here at noon!" This time misunderstanding is definately one of the big differences between Moroccan and American culture.

We arrived just after the henna party. During the henna party, Rita, her sisters, and her mother have their hands and feet decorated with henna. I had mine done the night before, so I was ready for the wedding. For the henna party, Rita wears a nice jellaba (Moroccan traditional clothing, like a long overcoat that both men and women wear, but the women's are more decorative). Rita also had her hair and make up done for the henna party.

I have finally figured out why Moroccan women have such nice hair. They go to the salon to have their hair styled regularly, about a few times a week. So there is no need for hair dryers and curling irons at home. Last week, I went to the salon near Rita's house to have my hair blown straight by Nadia. In 20 minutes, I had great looking straight hair, and it only costs about $5. For the henna party and the wedding night, Rita and many of the guests go to the salons for updos with glitter and accessories, and bright shimmery make up.

After the henna party, there was a break for Rita to just relax before she had to get ready for the wedding. At 7pm, Rita and I went to the salon for the updos. Her father asked that we be back by 9pm because there were still many things to do for the wedding and guests would begin arriving around 10pm. By the way, most of the wedding festivities happen in the middle of the night! So we went to Fadli Abrahim, the best stylist in the Mohammid district where Rita lives. When we stepped into his salon she pointed to all his awards from the annual national comptetions in Fez and Casablanca. Fadli's salon was very busy. We waited an hour before he began to work on my hair. Rachid stopped by the salon and told Fadli that both Rita and I needed to be done by 9pm. Fadli said he would be done with me by 9pm, and Rita at 11pm. So I guess everyone would have to wait for the bride.

Fadli did a nice job with my hair and make up, but here they use very dramatic colors, and with my fair skin I looked somewhat like a clown. Rachid had tea and cakes delivered to Fadli's salon for Fadli and all his customers while Rita and I were there. Fadli is the first Moroccan I have seen who did not take a break from his work for tea. He truly was very busy.

Taha, Rita's brother took me back to the house on the family's scooter. I left Rita with Fadli. Rob was waiting outside the house by himself. Rob said Rachid was off running errands to prepare for his part in the wedding. Rob waited outside for Rachid and I went up to the roof of the apartment with all the women as the wedding began. The roof was covered in carpets, there were about 100 chairs, there was a band, and there was a throne for Rita. At first the band played just for the women guests. By the third song, the women began dancing in the center of the roof. When Rita walked in around 10:30pm, everyone sat down and clapped and cheered for her. She was really beautiful. Her hair was piled high on her head, her make up was dramatic but beautiful, and she wore a white shimmering traditional taksheetah. It truly was an amazing site.

Now I must go. I will let Rob explain the part of the wedding when Rachid enters. There was a bit of a delay, about a 2 hour delay, which is common in Morocco.

The wedding went until 6am when the sun rose. Rob and I returned to our hotel and slept most of the day. Last night was the second wedding, this time at Rachid's parents' house. The second wedding had no band and was quieter and more traditional. Fortunately everyone went to sleep by 2 am or so.

Now we are back in Marrakech. We had planned to take the bus to Agadir today to get out of the heat and to swim in the ocean. Unfortunately, Rachid is having a difficult time getting his paychecks from his various employers. He is a high school English teacher, but he has been teaching summer lessons at a private schoo. Since we are so tired and because Rachid is not ready to go anywhere, we are going to check back into Hotel Akabar. There we will have some pizza, popcorn, and coka light for $6 and spend as much time in the pool and air conditioning as possible.

I have no idea what the temperature is, but I am certain it is over 100 degrees, and it is very sunny.

I don't know what our plan is for after tomorrow. Hopefully Rob will add a blog entry describing the wedding. It was amazing, and he can desribe it better then I can!

Late in Translation

Jenny keyed me in to an interesting point about Morrocans.

If you are late, they dont blame you. They will never hold it aginst you. To them, it is controlled by the spirits and you had no control. Something took longer than you thought or something went wrong. It is not your fault like it is in the United States.

And that is a perfect intro to yeterdays grooms dinner.

For a person like me, being late to something is up there on the embarrasing scale with mixing up whether someone is a male or female or if someone is pregnant or not. However, in Morocco, being late is rather a matter of fact.

After the cyber cafe yesterday, I was 15 min late for meeting Rachid for the shave, haircut, and a hamam (sauna). I didnt think it was a big deal (I tend to adapt to other cultures) but when I showed up he was ready to go.

We walked to the barber and of course he was nowhere to be found. We looked and rung his bell tohis apartment. We asked the carpenters next door and finally he emerged from the store down the block where he had been having a snack and some tea.

He set out giving me a haircut and he was really excited to have some hair that was not in the classic Moroccan style of short or shorter. He went after my hair with such aplomb and tenacity that it was great fun to watch. It completely made up for the fact that the scissors where last sharpend in the 1990s. Every once and a while, instead of cutting, the scissors would rip the hair directly out of the follicle.

Then we switched chairs and it was time for the shave. For this he used a straight razor with a new blade that he doused in rubbing alcohol and then burned. Perfectly safe! he told me. The shave went well and I had had them before but I dont remember how uncomfortable it is with someone rubbing the underside of your chin and hearing the scraping through your skull. He also had some issues with the upper lip. The hairs were more tugged out than cut and when he saw me flintch he assured me I am a specialist! Which is NOT what you want to hear from your barber.

So anyway everyone at the wedding said I looked about 10 years younger. I just thought I looked less like a criminal on a deserted island who had recently fallen on hard times ( the criminal, not the island).

During this haircut Rachid had to run to the school to get paid for some summer school courses and along the way he got asked to help move some carpets up to the third floor of his house. Thus is the average errand trip in Morocco as I was about to learn first hand.

While Rachid got his shave, I sat outside and watched what would be the equivalent of somebody wrecking their dads station wagon. A teen was showing off for some friends and he pulled up onto the curb in a two wheeled cart pulled by a donkey. As he left, the wheel came off the curb and bent off. He tried to repair it and the wheel fell off after a few revolutions. Then he lifted the edge of his cart and wheeled the wheel along as the donkey cointinued to pull it.

We then set off to the Hamam but I should have realized that it involved a stop at home which turned into a hour long wait as things were wheeled in and the hamam materials were gathered and scrutinized.

At this point I was worried that I was going to make us late to his own grooms dinner. He kept telling me it was not a big deal.

We then went to a hamam. I realiwe that Moroccans like hamams for the sale reasont that the finns like jumping in a cold lake in the winter. People in extreme weather love to do activities that exacerbate the temperature.

You go in, sit in a sauna in your shorts, and then a guy comes out and:

Soaps you up

Loofahs you

Soaps you again ( which burns like the dickens)

Washes your hair

Rinses you off with hot water

This is all done in an all tile warm humid room. It is great for getting rid of dead skin, which I seemed to have in tonnes. The tile floor looked speckeled when I was done.

Of course, when I was done, I got out and sweated all over the place anyway.

So we were all done getting ready and the party is about to start right?

Oh no. What a stupid thought on my part. Rachid and Rita suddenly got ready

And we were off in a car with some guy?

Yep, we had to take the clothes in to get decorated. We dropped them off after a terrifying car ride into the heart of Marrakech and took a more terrifying ride out of there (the police only whistled at us once)

So we are back and now the party will get started.

After a hour long time while we lounge around downstairs talking about nothing. At this point, I was convinced that I had ruined the party and Rachid was too polite to tell me. After all, it was supposed to start about 2 hrs prior.

Rachid told me to go up and I came up onto the roof where it had been transformed into a sweet outdoor eatery. There were waiters and carpets, table clothes and crystal, and about 65 men all who I could feel looking at me as I walked in. I sat with the driver at an undecorated table and waited for the man of the hour to jaunt in.

Finally, it was here. He walked in to the thunderous sounds of .............. nothing. They couldnt have cared less. Most of them stared at him the same way they did at me. We were moved to a table with about six other men and I asked Rachid about the lack of excitement concerning him. He looked at me like I was crazy.

I dont know any of the men at this table and they do not know me. They are all the fathers friends and they are invited out of respect to them. I am an afterthought.

And so it went. We ate saffron chicken with our bare hands until I thought I would burst. Then they brought out beef! Then it was fresh fruits for dessert.

If the world was dominated by those who could eat the most, we would all be speaking Arabic.

The amazing thing at this party was that AS SOON as people were done eating, they left. There was NO idle chit chat. They just said thanks and got out! It totally blew my mind but I got another look when I brought it up to Rachid.

Then the family came up and all the women ate at a seperate table while the cooks set out their beds on the roof. They had been cooking since the morning and they were about to start again for the next day.

I stayed the night and had a bear of a time getting a cab back to the hotel while Jenny relaxed in the air conditioned room.

I also saw a cockroach the size of my finger crawl out within inches of my finger. But that is another post and it is hot in this cyber and tonight is the real wedding where Rachid says

Tonight, I am the big deal.

It it is sup

posed to start at 1030 with a parade of gifts for the bride. We are buying them an oven for 30 bucks.

Who knows what time it will really start.

The Bathroom: Please discuss

The Weather
111 °F / 44 °C
Scattered Clouds


Since the last time I talked to you I have done three very unmorracan things.

1 We checked into a hotel due to the house being filled up with a wedding and due to the fqct that a cat hissing outside tends to sound like a cat hissing in your lap.

2. We went to the marjan or big mall to buy some make up for rita for the wedding. Jenny picked out what she used and we asked the price and rita first almost fainted and then ran out of the store. I did sympathize.




Jenny and spices at Marjan

3. Last night we ate at a McDonalds.

Now, lest you think I am not embracing ther morrocan culture to the extreme, I would like to point out that they put NO ice in the pop there! It is a little unsettling for some strange reason.

I have also been sleeping on a concrete floor and using the bathroom at our hosts house. Please dont misunderstand me, Rachid and Rita have been excellent hosts. The house is nice, they cook every meal and make coffee/ tea every day. Rachid even showed me how the pirated satelitte tv works.

The morning coffee

But here are some pictures of the bathroom.

Not quite tall enough !!

The bathroom

The name is rather misfitting. It would more accurately be called a closet with a hole.

The modern toliet is actually a kind of an insult here. To be a guest, it is viewed as much more kindly to be given the turkish toliet. And it kind of makes sense when you realize what parts are essentially touching each other when you are on the toliet. However, as much as I love to try new things, it takes some getting used to.

Last time we were here, Rachid had a gas heated shower. What I did not realize is that I was living it up every time I disconnected the LP tank from the stove and put it on the shower.

Ritas father explained the absence of showers as telling me, My house was 200000 dh, the gas is 1 dh. Yet it could destroy my house. Of course he makes a good point, but the end result is me sitting on a stool with my feet trying to avoid the toliet washing myself with a bucket that I fill from a spigot.

It definitely makes you really debate whether a shower is absolutely necessary.

Imagine a closet with a toliet and showerhead above. Please understand that I am not complaining, I am simply trying to express my sheer amazement that this was even an option.

Last night we did some more shoe shopping at the Jm elfna square and I drank more orange juice than I though humanly possible. But more tomorrow because in case you havent been looking to closely at the pictures, I look like a homeless person and the male portion of the wedding is tonight. I am off to a hamam ( a professional bath where I pay for someone to scrub me down with a loofah and wash my hair) and then to get a shave and a haircut. A straight razor shave is what I have been looking forward to.

Although if I dont post tomorrow, you can assume the worst.

Shopping in the square

The Clinic by Jenny

Hi. Rob showed me how to post on the blog, and he asked me to write a little about the clinic. Sorry, I have no pictures.

I go there in the mornings from 8-12 which I think is sufficient. Most of the activity seems to occur from 9-11am, which also happens to be visiting hours. So during the mornings, there are lots of patients admitted, many coming out of surgery, and dozens of family members for each patient milling about the hospital floors. There are no family waiting rooms so they try to spend as much time in the patients' rooms, and with two patients to a room there can be up to 40 people just hanging around.

I have spent most of my time with a nurse named Layla. She is my age, very pretty, and seems to be in charge of her floor. The patients on the floor are mostly post-op. I am not sure if I have been assigned to Layla because they think I am studying to become a nurse, or if she has the best English skills in the hospital. Maybe it is both. TomorrowI will ask to see surgery to see a different part of the clinic. The clinic is private, set up and paid for by the physicians, and the patients pay fo the services. There are 7 physicians, all of different specialties, and most were trained in France. The advantage to the patients is very little waiting compare to a public hospital. We may visit a public hospital sometime, but I worry that Rachid overextends himself as our host. It's a big week for him, and he doesn't seem to understand that.

Since the physicians were all trained in France, all medical talk among physicians and nurses is in French. All communication to patients is in Arabic, and maybe Berber sometimes. I don't speak any of the languages well enough, so Layla's comments in English and her translating is well appreciated. Honestly, most of the exams and procedures are very similar to how we do things. There is much less charting and no dictating; it is all written by hand. Two things I think are different: 1. Lidocaine is used very rarely compared to how often it is used in the Duluth hospitals. 2. The practices of handwashing and glove wearing are also different. They wash their hands, but not nearly as often as we do when working in hospitals. The nurse never wears gloves when working with needles (blood draws, starting IVs, etc) However, the physical therapist always wears gloves, and all he does is touch a patients arm or hand and moves it in different directions.

The story that shocked Rob happened yesterday. While a physician was doing a paracentesis (draining excess liquid from the stomach) a nurse accidently dropped a clean freshly unpacked needle. After running to get a new needle for the doctor, the two nurses repackaged the needle and taped it shut while the doctor wasn't looking. I don't know how often that happens, but it is something I have never seen before.

Now it is time to go with Rachid and Rita to Marjan, the upscale store in town with groceries and everything else. I am going to help Rita pick out make up for her wedding!

Jenny Sauter

Its getting hot in here

Current Conditions updated 12:26 PM ET

106°
106° 70° Mostly Sunny

By the way.

I received an email reminding me of the penalties for excessive drinking and driving in Morrocco. This persons fear was that I would be jailed and forgotten about. please dont worry.

1 I would not drink and drive in Morrocco

2 Drinking in Morroco is tough due to the islamic ban on alcohol.

3 I do not have a car

4 Driving in Marrakesh is terrfying

So please dont worry, but thanks for the email!

Its getting hot in here

Morocco is different than Duluth

Our hosts Rachid and Rita

First let me apologize for the lack of quotes and apostophes. I can find neither on this bizzaro keyboard.

The title of this blog is not as much meant to inform or shock you, but it is more to remind me of what is going on here. I am starting to feel a little culture shock here and for me that always takes the form of sitting in the house and watching TV. It can also result in me smeeping more than average.

This morning I did both.

Rachid woke me from his living room floorat 1130 and told me that 1: Breakfast ( lunch) was ready and that 2: There was some live soccer on. In this case it was bread and tea while watching Iraq and South Korea duke it out in the bizzarely named Asia cup.

Watching Soccer

After that it was Cous cous and Saudi Arabia vs. Japan. What I really found strange about this is that the chmpionship match for the Asia cup will be the Saudis and the Iraquis. Then Rachel Ray came on and TaHa came from upstairs and decided that it was time to hit things with a hammer.

Queen Jenny and the Cous Cous

Whether it was a screwdriver or a pop can, TaHa hit away. Ironically, this is also the time I picked to go to the cybercafe and update everyone. Over the last seven days I have gotten almost 150 hits and I can see from the map at the bottom that it is from all over Minnesota. ( Even one from Montrose MN) which reminds me of the movie drop dead gorgeous.

The wedding is on Friday and Jenny and I are thinking about checking into a hotel for a couple nights over the weekend. However, we want to do this without insulting our hosts (who have really been great by the way). A hotel here is only about 30 dollars a night and I think not sleeping on a floor, throwing in some air conditioning, and a pool would be a fun break for us and our hosts.

The wedding is going to be a big affair and our bedroom (their livingroom) will be full of people Friday and Saturday night. Having to stay up as late as the latest person and having to share the room with a few other people is enough to get Jenny and I talking about moving on for those nights.


A two night wedding sounds a little strange. Well really, one night is women only and one is men only. So really it is just one total. When I asked Rachid what I should do for the all woman part he said Oh, you will stay with me as a guest. I love to get stared at and whispered about as much as the next guy, but I think I am going to pass.

However, Friday and Monday only make up 2/3 of the wedding. On Monday we will be going out to Rachids parents. They live on the edge of Marrakech and we visited them on Sunday. They have a small house with no electricity. We have stayed there before, and they all remembered us and were happy to see us again. They fed us a great dinner of fish and bread and we slept under the stars on their porch. I know the stars were out because I was awake for about an hour in the blackness. It turns out that roosters do not just crow at dawn and dogs and flies both do not appreciate the importance of sleep.

Rachids House in the Country

We had to get up early the next morning to catch the cab that might or might not meet us. Luckily that turned out to be a non issue because we got up too late anyway and to get back to where there were cabs we spent about a half hour hitchhiking, eventuqlly being picked up by a big rig.

Hitchhiking

We made it back into town and dropped Jenny off at the hospital (our thin excuse to come back here ) and Rachid and I went to pay bills, have an avacodo juice, and buy some meat for the next couple of meals.
The Meat Market

All that energy spent was taken back with a 3 hr nap through the heat of the day. It would be better to just call it heat. My clock has a thermometer on it and last night it read 85 degrees. When I woke up early this morning it said 79. The good news is that 79 feels great now!!

I am going to go now and figure out how to

1. Buy a candy bar and a diet coke (coca light)

2. See how Jenny can post here so she can relay what is happening in the hospital ( not the cleanest place I hear).

3. See if I can remember how to get home.

Ciao

Down Town Marrakech

Flying to Maroc part 2

I posted that one a little early to see if I could test it out.. It was certainly not meant to enthrall!

I figured that this year, I was going to try to incorporate pictures into my breathless telling of our adventures. These pictures are going to be especially important this year because I have been sleeping quite a bit to recover from the jetlag and stay out of the heat! Please feel free to click on any of the pictures to get a bigger version.....

So here we are ready to go from minneapolis on saturday at about 7pm.


The flight to london was a lot shorter than I remembered and I had barely fallen asleep after watching Blades of Glory and playing bejewelled when the lights all came on and we were in merry olde england.

One amazing part of this tale was the fact that there was no one sitting next to me on the flight and Jenny was able to move next to me. This was perfect because it would have been very difficult for her to kick me while I attempted to sleep if she was a row ahead of me!

A not so amazing part was he size of the bag of combos that the guy ahead of me had. It was the size of a one gallon plastic bag and he might as well have been practicing the cymbals for how much noise it made.

(Still not as bad as last time when the couple ahead of us took pictures of each other for 5hrs in the dark plane, each flash piercing my eyelids. I have often wondered what those pictures looked like and WHO would look at those)

So we arrived at London in the morning and since we were taking a totoally different airline to Morroco we had to check out and recheck our bags... Finding anything in the London terminals was a chore! I have never been in a place that was so busy.

We found the atlas blue check in and after we checked in and went through the xray machines ( we got in trouble because anyhthing you were holding had to go on the machine but I tried to put something from my pocket in the machine and that earned me a good british scolding)

After we checked through we bought our host Rachid a few wedding presents and ate at a place where I ordered the British breakfast. According to this breakfast, all british people will have a heart attack in the next five years. It was 4 kinds of meat and eggs and the only difference between it and the American was the fact that Americans love to eat pancakes apparently. I was almost compelled to get it out of national pride.

The flight to Marrakech was very much like a four hour nap to me but Jenny reports it was very nice. We landed and got off the plane, went through custo,s so the king would know where we are at all times and met our host Rachid.

Rachid is an old friend from our other trips and it just so happens that he is getting married in a couple of days! We are kind of guests of honor at the wedding and we are staying at the center of all the madness at his apartment. The apartment is actually his Father in laws lower level.

The place is abuzz with excitement and as all good grooms, Rachid is oblivious to it all. (He was planning to work on his wedding day)

The father in law was very excited to talk to us and show us his house and his son, TaHa.(In orange tshirt)

The center of the house is a room full of couches where I have been sleeping a lot and Rita (Rachids Fiancee) s father spends a lot of time telling us in broken english that

learning Arabic is SO EASY! All we need to do is learn 30 words a day.





Finally, I will include a picture of the average meal here. The first is a picture of what I was served by myself and the second is a meal for four. Fending off offers of food is a full time job here. The meals mostly have been whole fish fried up and eaten by hand and a type of saffron chicken served with flatbread. This is always complemented by some tea and more bread. If Morrocans went on the atkins diet, they would starve to death!



We spend most of the day avoiding the heat but at night and morning we go around the city by taxi running wedding errands and paying bills. Jenny has also started observing at her hospital where she was told that everyone speaks english! Guess what? They dont!




More to come. We have already slept outside once and I have showered with a bucket twice!

Flying to Maroc

Let me start out by saying that it is 17:58 in Morroco (whatever that means) and from what I can see it has to be about 100 degrees outside.

I am sitting in a tiny cybercafe where it is 50 cents for an hour of internet and the guy here just turned on a fan to maximize the amount of hot air that is blowing in my face.

Current Conditions updated 12:28 PM ET

104°
99° 69°
Mostly Sunny

On top of all that the keyboards here are really different so I need to concentrate to type!! The number keys are the worst. You need to push shift to type a number and there are about 4 symbols on each key!

Jenny and I flew to London on Sat night after we stayed with Hannes and Laura in Minneapolis. We had a great time with them and they really got our positive feelings up! This has been a busy year and we are both looking forward to this trip as a relaxation.

However, wait until I show you a picture of a toliet and then you can see how relaxed you could be.......

Google Needs Your Help!!

What would you call this image?





Google has no idea either....

They want your help via a game where you match names for images.

It is far from perfect, and you really feel like you have wasted your time, but I GUESS it is good for society.......


Check it out

Went Hiking on the Superior Hiking Trail

This week was the last week of medical school, so to celebrate we went camping.

(Please not that I am not in medical school, but I know everything about the gossip of medical school which seems like the best part)


Jenny and I hate camping.... We discovered about each other after professional campers/ classmates asked us to come. (Probably to add humor to their day.)

Professionals

Don't get me wrong. We are willing to try new things and we consider ourselves adventuresome, but the thought of not showering and sleeping on the ground does not make us jump into the car and shove off. I guess we are adventuresome as long as we can shower....

However, we decided it would be fun, so we begged for other people's stuff and we set out. We drove up to Silver Bay after the normai stopping at gas stations and McDonalds.

Obvious professionals

After seaching we found the starting point and started hiking. The hike in was mostly uphill and gorgeous. We went by the Bear and Bean lakes and ate lunch about 3.5 miles in. There I turned my watch off and forgot to turn it on until later (hence the straight line instead of following the trail.)


At the beginning

Bear or bean lake
We finally arrived at the campsite and unpacked the tent and had a delicious dinner of hotdogs and smores. Of course, that was all we brought (along with approximately 100 lbs of trail mix) so the number of hotdogs and smores eaten were rather embarrassing.

Which leads me to ask this question.... Who are these people who like burned smores? I think they are the same as the ones that prefer regular hotdogs to cheddar ones.


Sitting around a campfire at night is fun hanging out with friends is even more fun. Having some smores is always a good time and my main job was sharpening the sticks used for cooking. However, it was better than jenny's job which was to get smoke blown in her face and get sleepy. (Also, she burned all the marshmallows she could.)

After a fun night hanging with our new friend (Bud, a guy who invented his own tent and sat with us all night roind the campfire.... Luckily he was not a psycho serial killer as movies would have me believe.)

We went to sleep, had a breakfast of smooshed bananas, and smooshed PB and J sandwiches, and started walking back.

We picked a little shorter trail home and here we are. It was a great little trip and a learned a few things.

1: Hiking uphill is easier than hiking down hill.(My feet looks like my dad's by the end)

2: You don't need to look like hiker to be hiker.

3: The key to hiking is good weather.

4: Food should be non-smooshable.

5: Always be polite to "Bud" because you never know.

6: Hiking with friends is a great way to end this little slice of our life.



The End