Getting lost in Marrakesh

I wandered Marrakesh alone all day, an experience in itself though I'm glad I did it.

I got lost plenty, made worse by the fact that most roads (even major ones) are often not marked with names, are not straight despite appearances on the map, and for the most part, those names are not on my map anyway! And made again worse by the fact that, with the streets always bending and changing, it's impossible not to get lost without holding a map, which only makes you be pounced on by 100 "unofficial guides" willing to nicely lead you (almost) to where you wanted to go, then charge a fee. Seriously -- everytime I pulled a map out. I would try to peek through my bag or find a quiet corner, but they always found me and were very difficult to shake. Anyway, didn't pull out maps often, no signs, and many times wandering in circles, which also makes it harder to shake the shopkeepers, madly clicking their tongues and screaming "hello, miss! Here, here!" in every language they can think of.

I give you good price: bargaining in Morocco

I bought many, many items today. Way more than I originally budgeted for, though it will work out overall. I think I got decent prices in the end (or at least, far, far below their initial offer), but still probably ended up buying some things I wasn't excited about in the end because it was the closest to what I wanted and I was trapped.

This included some interesting cactus fiber carpets, which it turns out you can hold flames to without them burning or scortching... sure to be helpful. Still, for the carpets, after a 30 minute presentation showing me dozens of carpets without being willing to discuss price, his opening offer was a ridiculous 6500 dirham (nearly $1000USD)!!! After I thanked him and tried to leave him twice, he finally settled at my maximum price of 600 dirham (~$90) for two. Hand woven with embroidery and seemed decent quality, so hopefully okay price. I'm comforted by the fact that he didn't seem thrilled with the final deal, not to mention it was less than 10% of the original offer.

I also got some beautiful embroidered small table runners and leather slippers, though one pair of the latter smell a little too fresh from the tannery -- definitely not what you want. I am set for Christmas presents I think. Every single item was handmade in Morocco start to finish and is unique, so I'm happy. :-)

New day, new adventures

I slept well (starting around 8pm and skipped dinner, but it was worth it), and the conference starts tomorrow, so I had all day today to explore and get thoroughly lost in the city and old medina (means "town" in Arabic) all day. And it was exhilarating.

So much to see! I bought an Eyewitness Guide to Morocco in preparation for my trip. Though many swear by the Lonely Planet guides (which my traveling buddy Ves has anyway), my guide has done me well (reconfirmed at end of trip as well). It's not so great for finding hotels and restaurants, as well as many "big picture" details (like where to find walking tours, etc.), but the history sections at the beginning of the guide were incredibly informative, and the pictures and descriptions of the sites are great. Especially important since in Morocco, if there's a non-Arabic description of anything, it's only in French. My Arabic is good enough to pronounce words I see and exchange niceties, and my French is probably just worse than that, so having the guide to give a good description was important in showing myself around town.

I took many pictures of everything I saw... too much to describe individually, though I did what I could on the photos themselves. (Thanks to Ves... I stole many of his pictures too, when his were better). I extracted a pseudo-"best of" and posted them here:
Today was packed full of adventures and mishaps which will no doubt richen my experience. :-) I'm attempting to write a journal of some of these experiences, but doubt I'll have time to keep it up. In the meantime,

• I'm also getting some weird reactions when I say I'm American (like unprompted "don't worry, America and Morocco are good friends"), so I'm now saying my name is Katie and I'm from near London when asked. ;-) So much for doing as the Romans do.
  

First impressions

I am here and well, after slightly adventurous trip losing my luggage (it arrived late yesterday, though the airport would not deliver it), and in typical me fashion, almost losing my poster at JFK. ;-) But only almost.

I was nervous preparing for my travels, primarily due to the fact that I'd be traveling alone as a single woman through a fairly conservative Muslim nation. My boyfriend, a Spanish-Syrian Muslim who grew up in the United Arab Emirates (very liberal) felt pretty sure that they would be very sensitive to my dressing style, so though I was heading to the desert in early summer, I had to take shorts and tank tops out of my repertoire. Shopping trips for ankle-length skirts and natural fiber shirts with short sleeves soon followed.

Leaving the Marrakesh airport to get my first view of the city though (sin luggage), I was struck by many initial observations:

• While the country may be conservative as a whole, immediately I saw women riding motorbikes by themselves, hair uncovered with tight jeans. Arms are nearly always covered, but still, a little more relaxed than feared. Nice to know.
  
  
• The landscape is sandy and dry, not so different from the natural UAE landscape, but yet it appears to be more naturally green.
  
  
• Drivers here are LOCO!! Lane lines optional, stoplights nearly nonexistant (and motorbikes ignore them anyway), and tailgating is an art. Glad I'm not driving. :-)

All in all, I'm loving it, and can't wait to explore further tomorrow!

In Morocco!

A few months ago, I learned that a conference publication of mine had been accepted to LREC, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in my research field of natural language processing. Good news after months of hard work. And the even better news is... the conference would be held in Marrakesh, Morocco!


مراكش



So, here I am, Day 1 of a 10 day adventure in Northern Africa. While the conference itself is only three full days (Wed-Friday of this week), I have arrived mid-morning Monday, have all of Tuesday to explore, and then have Saturday through next Tuesday to leave Marrakesh and see what else Morocco has in store. Because I attended a wedding outside New York City this Saturday, it was convenient to fly from JFK to Marrakesh (through Casablanca) on Sunday. Convenient, but a lot of traveling, and less conveniently, my luggage didn't make it all the way there with me. The airline claims that they'll deliver the luggage to my hotel when it arrives, but we'll see....
(postscript: they definitely didn't. I had to make my way back to the airport and pick it up myself later; fortunately I was carrying around my passport or I couldn't have gotten into the baggage claim, which I hadn't thought of before)

I really wish I had brushed up on my two semesters of Arabic before I came. Despite the fact that I learned the formal dialect and parts of the Syrian dialect (far different from the North African dialects), it definitely could have come in handy. Instead, I'm left with a 1st grade reading level and a vocabulary which roughly allows me to exchange niceties and shoo away the shopkeepers but not much else. Definitely something to brush up on, but I'll have to do it by massaging my memory or asking around, since Arabic-English dictionaries at my level (vowels included) don't really exist, and definitely aren't sold in these parts in any case.

All in all though, I immediately loved the chaos and the newness of it all. I'm exhausted from the flights, but can't wait to explore. :-)

Exploring Dubai (done right)

So I'm completing this a good week after my return from UAE -- the end of the trip was busy, busy, and life has been 10x crazier since returning to Baltimore and my research.

After a drive-by tour (at 2am after 20 hr of travel) from Dubai to Abu Dhabi the night I got into the country (I remember nothing), and some glances New Year's Eve and Day, I finally got my official tour of Dubai on my second-to-last day in the UAE.

I should start by mentioning that the weather, while great for an East Coaster, brought nothing but complaints from the residents. 65 degrees instead of 75, and edging on rainy. Still beautiful, but could be more so. Anyway, I'll include a mix of my photos and some from my bf's mother's previous visit.

The drive in: I truly believe that the skyline will be gorgeous in about 3 years, but right now it's pretty overridden by construction.
Dubai Internet City: No photos here, but you can find information here and here. 800-some companies, and were I to move here, my best hope for finding a suitable job, probably.

Burj Dubai: mentioned in previous post. With my bf's mother's connections we got an exclusive tour through the sales office to see what the mini-city will offer in the future. To the right you can see current progress in its construction -- about 100 of planned ~160 floors built. It was interesting to learn about how it had been designed specifically to direct wind to support rather than threaten it, etc. It's more than a tower though -- there's an entire gorgeous though overwhelming mini-city that is slowly being constructed immediately around it.

Emirates Towers: (link) We continued our tour, heading to the Emirates Towers. Two triangular towers, one a hotel and the other and office building, and both amongst the world's tallest. Between the towers was an exclusive shopping mall -- it's annual huge 20-60% off sale dampened a bit by the $1000 price tags on a cute pair of shoes, etc -- and a huge lobby where we had coffee, both western-style and traditional Arab style.


Bur Dubai: The central area of the city. A lot of neat old shops and traditional style buildings, the Dubai museum, and what's referred to in a dramatic understatement as "the Creek".


Jumeira: Jumeira is the jaw-dropping area of Dubai that everyone hears about: the unbelievable resorts, the (completed set of) Palm Islands, and of course the Burj Al-Arab.

We started our tour having a late lunch at Madinat Jumeira resort, followed by a ride on the resort water boats (abras) which carry you to your destination (again, only meant for guests). We then walked through the "souk" or market -- I expected something traditional, but here of course everything was very upscale and beautiful. A lot of wares from India and Pakistan.

From Madinat Jumeira, we had a lovely view of the Burj Al-Arab, the world's first seven-star hotel, where we had some expensive coffee and dessert.

Views from inside Burj Al-Arab

Royal Mirage: more beautiful buildings filled with more beautiful people. :-)

Palm Islands: Three sets will be built, but so far only one set of islands has been completed: The Palm Jumeira (building construction still in progress). We saw them at night, and construction pictures aren't so pretty to show, but here's a sight from the sky... (real and envisioned)


All right folks, that's enough for now... I'll try to post my closing thoughts sometime before I leave the country again. ;-)

Exploring Abu Dhabi

Day 5 in the UAE -- I leave the morning of Day 7. So soon!

Days 2-3 were spent (mostly) traveling to Dubai for a New Year's Eve celebration (Paul Oakenfold DJing at the World Trade Center), which didn't turn out nearly as interesting as I'd hoped, and moreover didn't turn out to let me see much of the city. Evening 3 and Day 4 were spent exploring Abu Dhabi, and in about an hour I will go with my boyfriend and his mother for a much more thorough exploration of Dubai.

Abu Dhabi's economy is 90% oil-based, and it's fairly obvious that they don't quite give a rat's ass about tourism yet. :-) Yesterday we went to the main tourism "highlights" of the city -- an old fort which is the oldest building in Abu Dhabi (1793) and the "Heritage Village" which features a reproduction old Bedouin village and is supposed to describe what the area was really like before the oil and skyscraper train hit them. Either would have been far more interesting if there had been pamphlets or information posted somewhere --heck, in any language -- telling us what we were actually looking at, but the few workers we could find were worse than useless.

• Qasr al-Hosn (the Old Fort): Oldest building in Abu Dhabi meets the modern city.
  
  
• Heritage Village: "Excuse me sir, can you tell me if there is a camel to ride somewhere [as advertised] in this Bedouin village?" "Uh, no m'am." "Are there animals at all?" "Uh. no, sorry." 10 meters later, there is an uncaged camel along with caged donkey, caged horse, and caged dog (yes, dog), and 30 meters on the other side, there are cages full of goats, sheep, and a water buffalo. Thanks, guy.
  


• Formal Garden: One of many "garden" parks in the city, where my boyfriend's mother used to take him when he was a boy. Fantastic for small children I think -- everything from the normal slides and swingsets to huge moonwalk-type inflatable rides and games, and all this for 1 dirham (27 cent US) admission price in the middle of the city.
  
• Other things we didn't get to see much but are nice: The Emirates Palace hotel (most expensive hotel ever built, built specifically to be a meeting place for leaders of the Gulf Countries and foreign dignitaries) and the Corniche walkay along the northern edge of the island.
  

All in all Abu Dhabi is a nice little city though. Not a lot to see, but clean and compact, and being surrounded by water makes it more lovely. I wish it wasn't quite so commercial -- both Abu Dhabi and Dubai bombard you with advertisements literally every 20 feet on the roadways, but other than that, okay.

Dubai I haven't been too impressed with so far, though seeing it thoroughly today may change that. The prime development of the city is along one (Sheik Zayed) road, which means it's fairly one-dimensional, prone to high traffic, and completely unwalkable. The development rate is ridiculous --for every skyscraping hotel, you literally see 2-3 more being built. On the other hand, once that building is complete and there is less construction about, the skyline will be impressive and beautiful, if overwhelming. Right now there are only pieces here and there that stand out, the Burj Al-Arab hotel (I haven't seen it up close yet) and Emirates Towers included. On the sillier end -- Mall of the Emirates (the largest mall in the Middle East, complete with an indoor Ski Slope -- yes, really) and Burj Dubai, one of several buildings in the world claiming it will be the world's tallest, with actual plans not being released so no one will scoop them but rumors of 162 habitable floors -- 100 built so far.

More to get to later

• Signs in Abu Dhabi: "Buy one of our luxury apartments, and we'll throw in a free Jaguar". Que ridiculo. ;-)
• Posters everywhere of UAE's founder and late ruler, along with the current. Respect is nice, but this borderlines uncomfortable for me.
• More about division of the natives
• UAE's 90% ownership of Crabtree Valley Mall, my hometown mall a mile from where I grew up.
• Food
• Stray cats. They run around everywhere in both Abu Dhabi and Dhabi... kind of crazy when you see it.
  

In the Middle East! (first impressions)

Today is the beginning of my second full day in the United Arab Emirates*, visiting my boyfriend's family who live here. I'm staying in Abu Dhabi, though will be spending some time in Dubai (images) as well. I'm only here until Jan 5 -- there's a lot to see in not very much time!

Travel was long (12 hours from Dulles to Kuwait City on United -- bad food, okay service, limited movie selection, but an Ambien from the guy next to me helped me sleep through most of it. 2 hours from Kuwait to Dubai. Both flights full.) but not unbearable. It's a nine-hour difference here -- highly unlikely I'll recover from jet lag before I leave though, so I'm just making the most of it.

First impressions: Many, and my thoughts are a bit jumbled so sorry for that.

• So far, everything feels very modern and western. Buildings and streets feel about the same, the supermarket/mall felt the same, the crowds haven't felt too different.
• English: Is everywhere -- almost every sign, building, etc is translated in both English and Arabic.
• Airport: Dubai's airport was incredibly crowded, especially considering that my flight arrived 12:50am! The lines in passport control reminded me of US control at peak times. Several women on my Kuwait-Dubai flight were covered up to their eyes, though they interestingly did seem to be co-mingling with men. Perhaps the men were family members though.
  
• "Natives": I've seen very few native Emiratians so far. Of course, they are only 20% of the population here, but it still feels odd. There is not a lot of intermingling, primarily I gather for the cultural reasons that the native population is far more conservative in their Islamic traditions than the greater population, though a good portion of the 80% expatriots are indeed Arabs.
• Westerners: Are everywhere. My impression has been biased of course, as I am staying in a Spanish-Syrian household and last night his mother held a dinner party for friends -- probably 2/3 Spaniards and the rest a mixed crowd of expatriots. His mother works at the Spanish embassy, so in turn much of the crowd was Foreign Service related. It was interesting to meet a related ambassador, but even more interesting to meet people ~my age who were the children of embassy workers. The three daughters of the ambassador were 19, 21, 22, were very close, were obviously privileged though also grounded, and had lived a variety of places -- Cameroon, Guatamala, China, the Netherlands, Spain, US, no where more than 4 years at a time. I met a man who works at the Canadian embassy and has moved his children to Ghana, Cairo, and more. In addition to foreign service workers, I met families associated with the energy industry (I tried not to make a face) -- moving throughout Middle East, UK, Spain, Netherlands, etc.
  
• Status of Women: Again, so it doesn't feel much different here than at home. There are many mixed messages --at the grocery store for example there are checkout lines "Reserved for Ladies and the Disabled" (this is apparently bc many native women are not comfortable sharing a line with men). Culturally here women not only stay veiled -- everything but face and hands covered and no pants allowed -- but also cover all of their face but their eyes when in public. As I mentioned, I've seen little of this though.
  
  On the other hand, manequins in the mall had hard nipples sticking out, and American TV of all sorts is broadcast here -- my bf's 14 year old sister is a devoted follower of "So You Think You Can Dance", which somehow felt a bit risque. :-) Also, I went to a bar last night, where "natives" and westerns were both around and my bf told me it was very new that natives would even feel comfortable to be seen drinking in public. Note that we only saw men, no native women.
  

I'm going to try to go back to sleep (hasn't worked for the past hour or so). Tonight we head to Dubai to celebrate New Year's Eve... should be an experience! :-)

Back to Prague

Last night I left Saarbrucken for Frankfurt, where I met up with my friend Ashish from undergrad (lots of fun, despite transportation fiascos), and this morning I flew from Frankfurt to Prague.

I try to keep these blog entries from ever getting too long or wordy, and with that said it's difficult finding the best words to describe the sense of peace I feel to be back in Prague. It's more than an appreciation for the beauty of the city (which during the Advent season it certainly is, even if the streets are overwhelmed with tourists more than the 40 degree weather would typically suggest). More also than the thrill of seeing old friends.

I admit, a part of me was excited about leaving Prague to return to the U.S. last May, though I knew I'd miss the views and some of the people. Returning today though, I find a sense of belonging and completion; I feel like I've returned to a home. I love Prague for both the castle and the ugly graffiti, the rich culture and the frustrating tourists who clog the streets but never bother to learn where the real values of thee city lie. It's like loving a sibling for both friendship and flaws. There is a certain satisfaction in my heart as I navigate across town through the clogs of tourists, knowing that to them the city is only a beautiful stranger, but I've experienced a touch of its intimacy.

The feeling surprised me a little. Living in Prague for my brief four months, I reached the conclusion that I would never be really happy living abroad long term; always feeling like the outsider trying to adjust and fit in. This makes me reconsider a bit whether I could adjust and live long term as an expatriot. I'm not convinced that I could... but I've never believed that home is simply the place where you've grown up when it comes to the U.S., and I'm at a place in my life where I'm debating opening the circle a bit further.

Hello, Prague. I've returned, and I've missed you.

Fool me once...

Drats, foiled again!

First off, I admit that the title of this post was just a little bit of an excuse to call attention to one of my favorite Bush quotes.

With that out of the way, I really did have a point here. :-P And that point, it turns out, is mushrooms. If you know me, you know that I do my best to be open-minded with food... but mushrooms and olives are where I draw the line. Or at least try to.


Back in August 2004, I was just beginning to start traveling (my only previous lone trip to Europe was Prague in March 2004 -- who knew I'd be starting a trend?). I was in Geneva, Switzerland for a conference, and went out to dinner with some colleagues. The menu was in French, as that's what most of the western Swiss speak. I asked the girls I was eating with to translate the menu, and I chose what I wanted. When it came time to order, I wanted to be self-sufficient so I ordered for myself, in French. And it turns out, I remembered the wrong thing! ;-) I was one line off. The meal arrived, and I was expecting something like pasta... and it's a bowl of mushrooms! only mushrooms! in some sort of gravy sauce! I was horrified. I ate nearly half of it, then finally confessed to the other girls what I did and one was nice and traded the rest of her meal with me. ;)

Of course, after that experience I was certain to memorize the word for mushroom -- champignon in french -- and since then, for each country I visit, I make sure to learn the word for mushroom so I can avoid it. A foolproof plan.

And THEN -- Germany foiled my plan!

A few nights ago in Germany, I again went to the restaurant below my hotel to get a pizza for dinner. Straightforward, yes? After almost two weeks in town, I knew a few German food words, and "Champignon" (just like the French work) was early on my word-spotting list. Based on my confidence, combined with cheapness, I ordered one of the more simple pizzas from the menu. Pizza arrives... COVERED with mushrooms!!

For all you fellow mushroom haters who may choose to wander Germany in the future: it turns out there's a second, secret word! "Pilzen". I felt tricked :) I saw that word on the menu (with the words for cheese, tomato, and pepperoni which I knew), but thought of the beer ("Pils" in German, "Pilsner" in Czech") and figured it was just a spice of some sort.

Again, I sucked it up and ate the mushrooms. Ay de mi. :-P