LISBON- MARRAKECH- BARCELONA 2004 PORTUGAL: Tides and Tiles MOROCCO: Into Interzone Medina Medina O Let Me Sleep Like Prozac in the Desert The Chicken Thieves 1001 Guides through Fès Chilling in Chaouen SPAIN: Ruining of the Bulls MOROCCO (video) color, 4'22" June/July 04 View/Download: Quicktime- 240x180, 8.8 MB [ PHOTO ARCHIVE ]

Rabat / Morocco 28 - 30 June 2004 Green is the color of Islam. Kasbah des Oudaias. Rabat. From the train station I walk a kilometer to the Medina, the old city. It's late afternoon and most of the guesthouses have only shabby, depressing, or otherwise unecessarily large and expensive rooms. Tired and not intent to go to a sixth place to look, I take a tiny room in a back alley, second floor hotel. The room is scarcely wider than the bed, fortunate to have an old sink hanging on the fading blue wall. This Medina is alreday more interesting than in Tangier. I walk around for a long time, taking a lot of photographs, smiling at a lot of children, generating a lot of attention from the locals. In the hours I see perhaps three other apparent foreign tourists. My fumbling French and four word Arabic vocabulary prove crippling. However, by nightfall I manage to stumble upon an eatery where I can make myself remotely clear to the waiter. Yes. Food. Dinner, please. Sorry, NO Meat. Vegetables. -- Je suis Vegetaier! -- Afak, Makana Ku'lesh L'ehm -- And... I'm served a couscous dish with some vegetable stew, a basket of bread slices, and a glass of fresh mint tea. None of it is remarkable, but I'm hungry enough to eat it all and give the waiter an exaggerated thank you before disappearing out into the Medina passages again. Meatmen in the Medina. Rabat. My first night in Rabat is my third night of poor sleep. There is a glaring yellow street lamp just outside my screenless window, through which many bugs find their way in, and it's hot as hell despite laying naked on the white canvas sheets fresh after a cold shower. And the noise. Motorbikes, chatter, dogs barking, rusty metal gates sliding down, slamming. I feel alone, alien; but more than anything I just feel tired and uncomfortable and wish I could sleep. If I close the shutters it is almost dark but there is no air coming in and it gets hot. I can't do anything about the bugs except try to ignore them. Sometime around three I fell asleep. And just after six I awoke, staring at the peeling ceiling, slivers of reflected sunlight through the slots of the shutters slicing lines on the wall. Unsure whether to get up or lie there with hopes of finding another dream before the morning sweat would come and hope for sleep would vanish. The city is a sea of sound, waves of urban noise crashing on my tired aching ears. Armed with two coffees and a hat over my baking head, I wander the streets of Rabat, find my way out of the Medina and into the new city and find another room. Fourth floor, big windows and a balcony, hopefully cooler and quieter than my first room. No singles, so I take a double. More couscous, somewhere. But where, I don't know where. Maybe at Restaurant de la Liberation, where I seem to be showing up rather often. I go from one meal or glass of tea to the next, wait for the sun to go down so I can crawl back to my room and try to read, then sleep. I take a cold shower down the hall and sit out on the balcony to overlook the night town. I read for an hour, two, and feel like I could take another shower just to cool down. Instead I run cold water from the sink over my head, rub the towel quickly over my short wet hair and sit on the balcony awaiting scattered breezes before getting back in bed again. Bugs biting me. Bugs I can't find when I turn the light on and comb the bed. The sheets really are just canvas, of the same texture and weight like I would stretch for painting. At two I think I manage to fall asleep. After counting backwards from 500 wasn't effective against my itchy and heat-aggravated insomnia, I tried meditating on the afternoon's memory of this old man muttering, humming a repetitive Muslim prayer. It had sounded almost Hindu-- Rama Rama Rama Rama... The sun beating down on his dirty white rags. He's sitting on a block outside the café in the Medina. Rammah Rammah Rammah Rammmmah... I sleep. At seven in the morning the room already feels like an oven on defrost, and I go back out to the streets. I watch the overfilled buses sputter by. Taxis rattle on. Cosmopolitan Rabat youth strut their stuff, eat their ice cream cones. I try to play it cool and walk around licking a cold soft-serve cone too. Occasionally I pass some curious Moroccans who smile or wave to me. Tomb at Le Tour Hassan. Rabat. Detail of Tomb at Le Tour Hassan. Rabat. I managed to find a small bookshop with a fair amount of English material. I buy an Arabic phrasebook, which also has a short French chapter in it. And I spend a few hours at Rabat's Goethe Institut. After all it's been more than a week since I read Der Spiegel, the German news magazine I am addicted to. When I see they have pork on the menu of the café there, I decide not to patronize them and instead go to a small coffee shop for my afternoon espresso. At night, back at the room, I'm on the balcony mumbling to myself how I need sleep, and how it even looks more comfortable somehow for the teenage boy sleeping on sheets of cardboard on a trash-speckled rooftop below me. One more night of this and I'll crack. Do I go further south, farther from Europe and the accessibility of leaving Morocco in my dwindling heat-worsened depression? Or do I go north, already to Fés, and if it's good stay a week there, then maybe in the mountains a few nights and then on to Spain. After all I came here for Fés. The promise of a mad Medina and the thick of it all of Morocco. But Marrakech has an unknown charm to it, and a historical presence I feel I need to experience. If I can sleep, I promise myself, then I will go south, to Marrakech. And then somewhere on from there. Sleep comes. Like Prozac in the Desert >> REDHAUS • DESIGN • PRINTMAKING • PAINTING • TRAVEL • ABOUT • CONTACT ©2008 JPM / Redhaus