Morocco Wet n' Wild

You'll forgive the prurient Spring Break-esque title for this post (it is March after all), but I assure you that the marked absence of nubile wet t-shirted (wet) young things drunk on anemic American macrobrews (wild) does not make it any less wet and wild. Or wet n' wild, as the case may be.

My yesterday was wet and wild but in a very less R-rated way. More of a PG-13 with extensive some profanity, drug use (double-strength ibuprophen) and violence. (Sadly no nudity). Mr. Cat in Rabat and I were in search of a restaurant that offered a vegetarian option beyond the norm (i.e., cheese sandwiches and pizza) - perhaps a szechuan stirfry or a textured vegetarian protein chili - and then we woke up, slapped our foreheads in disbelief at our own silliness, had a good laugh, and went out for the same artery-busting, palate-numbing old-same same-old. As we rounded the corner onto Follow the Leader, in front of La Pause Gourmande (LPG) café, I slipped and fell. I fell hard because I slipped hard. I slipped hard because they had just sluiced the sidewalk with dirty wash water.

Water follows the dictum "out of sight out of mind" in Morocco. It is the norm here to dispose of water - in any quantity larger than a teacup - by tossing it into the ether and letting fall (in this case, water) what may (in this case, drenching anything in its trajectory). Drains, apparently, are not a viable option. Nor are those helpful cheery yellow plastic sandwich board signs (see above) that caution pedestrians in such situations. I confess that as much as I appreciated Mr. CinR's catching me (he was holding my hand at the time) and preventing my head from splitting open like an over-ripe papaya, I would have been more appreciative if any one of the under-employed waiters at LPG (it's normal to see a half dozen or so of them loitering by the doors) had rushed to my side and inquired about my condition. Maybe even offering me free pains au chocolat for the rest of my earthly existence. But why would they? The sidewalks are always in various stages of drying; clearly this was my fault. What was I doing walking with my eyes off of the sidewalk anyway? Where did I think I was? - in the capital city of a developing nation that receives a gazillion dollars in developmental aid annually? Pshaw! A pox on my hubris!

The Plight of the Pedestrian, about which I have already bitched about ad nauseam waxed so poetically, is perilous enough without the added complication of water. The sudden appearance of water - water from seemingly nowhere I might add - can dampen a day in a myriad of ways. Like me, the inattentive pedestrian may slip, and then snap, crackle and pop something. That's assuming that he or she hasn't already been hit by a car trying to park on the sidewalk, fallen into a hole in the pavement, or broken any one of several bones crashing into a concrete parking pylon. I was fortunate: I only sprained my hand. I would add however that it hurts a great deal (but thanks to Mr. N and to The United Kingdom for the mighty drugs) and I am compelled to type this post with one hand - such is my dedication to this craft (or kraft).

Water can also descend from above in a decidedly non-precipitation capacity. Pretty much anyone in Rabat who can afford to do so employs the services of a cleaning lady; indeed, the city is populated by a cadre of haggard blue smocked ladies, their hair tucked under winding turbans and headscarves. Among their duties is the onerous chore of washing floors. Since Rabat's air is a noxious cocktail of flying dust, grit and polar icecap melting-car exhaust, floors here need to be cleaned about every 6 hours. Pails of water are sloshed over freshly swept floors and the water is then squeegeed out onto the terrace or balcony, from where the only way out is down through a drain hole contrived for that very purpose. I confess that I have yet to be the victim of this not-quite celestial deluge but only through the grace of Allah (whose wrath I have probably just incurred). Twice I've escaped a stinking soaking of domestic acid rain by a meter or so; once it completely soused my companion. She was not a pretty site. And she smelled rather peculiar.

The moral of the story? Alas, there is none. Do I really expect a thousand and one cleaning ladies to change their routines? No, but maybe they could look over the balcony for passers-by or shout out the odd "heads up!" before they hurl (or push) bucketfuls of dirty water over the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians. And maybe - just maybe - Rabat's cafés & businesses might want to consider placing a few of those pretty little "Slippery When Wet" signs on the very sidewalks they have just made treacherous. After all, they're decorative and functional (the signs not the sidewalks). One of these days, someone will sue. And that lawsuit might even be able to extricate itself from the quagmire of Morocco's bureaucratic judicial system and actually see the light of day. I just hope that I'm here to witness it. On second thought, maybe not.

My Foot Fetish (Or a Cat Navigates Rabat)

Behold my feet:

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then, in my mind's eye, my feet are the Audrey Hepburn of extremities. So enamoured am I with my little piggies that I take great pains to protect them - and occasionally photograph them before sweeping backdrops of nature (say, the Mediterranean Sea), knowing that such vistas will not detract from the grandeur of my feet.

Just a handful of months before I moved to Rabat, both feet underwent rather intensive surgery which involved the breaking and realigning of several toes and the sawing off of the actual foot bone itself (both sides, both feet). After the anesthetic subsided, I woke up to the cruel daylight of ineffable pain and a scant week's worth of potent narcotics. After that and it was over-the-counter crap whose daily dosage I felt compelled to triple. Twice daily. I was unable to put weight on my heavily bandaged feet for 2 weeks (don't ask how I navigated my way to the bathroom), could not walk aided or unaided for 4 weeks, and could not walk without the use of a cane for another 3 weeks. But in the end, I got pretty feet (at least prettier than what I had) with 4 rather dainty scars . The fact that my feet would no longer bleed from the sides when I wore winter boots was a boon.

Yes, I am enamoured and I think, a little protective of them too. If they are tred upon or knocked against in any fashion, I still experience searing pain that runs from my feet to my eye sockets (a full recovery was estimated by my surgeon as being 1 year to never). North Africa is arguably an excellent location for one such as I because I can pad the earth in an assortment of flip-flops the year round as I'm still not quite ready for restrictive footwear. But Rabat isn't the best city in the world for a cat so highly protective of her paws. It is not a straight city. And by straight, I don't mean designed on a grid system. I mean that one can walk from Point A to Point B without great deviation of direction.

But if you've ever watched a cat then you know that it never walks in a straight line. It hugs the walls, it dips under cars, it (as one hockey commentator used to say) dipsy-doodles in its peregrinations. Rabat compels me to adopt the pedestrian behaviour of my namesake but I would be more amenable, more adaptable, if my feet weren't on their last life.

Why? you ask.

Sidewalks in Rabat are an obstacle course - it is a city in the constant state of feverish construction where sizeable bits of detritus from burgeoning apartment blocks litter the sidewalks - a steeplechase for humans in which the course always wins. It is nigh impossible to walk down a sidewalk in any of this city's neighbourhoods without risking a fractured ankle (or neck) from broken bits of pavement and sidewalk. It is surely impossible to walk down a sidewalk in any of this city's neighbourhoods without having to veer off the curb, circle the tropical plants installed in the centre of the sidewalk, repair to the street, step over a piece on concrete, circumvent the semi-submerged metal Redal manhole covers, duck under or around a tree, circumvent a parked car, play chicken with 5 Moroccans walking abreast (who will never yield to you), and avoid a gaping hole.

These nefarious maws in the sidewalk - out of which loom equally nefarious pieces of Rebar - lay in wait to swallow the unsuspecting pedestrian although, to be fair, not with the frequency and degree of menace as the sidewalk holes in Khartoum. But then again, this is Rabat not freaking Khartoum. You expect mortar holes in Sudan, not in Morocco's capital. The King lives here. But perhaps he never avails himself of the sidewalks. Perhaps he should.

Agdal has not been built on flat terrain: the sidewalks slope downwards as one travels north. Walking (physically) down or (geographically) up Follow the Leader is my personal Room 101, for the incline has been resolved by a rather schizophrenic decision to embed both ramps (worthy of a skateboarder) and short cockeyed steps (many of which are in a state of masonic disrepair) into the sidewalks. If ever there lived a crooked man who lived in a crooked house, then I can hazard a guess as to his street address.

Yes, no gentle descent on Follow the Leader - instead one walks for about 50 feet then takes 3 uneven steps down (or uses a steep ramp), walks for a bit, avoids a car, goes down a few steps, continues on, dashes out of the way of a parking car, manages a bit of sidewalk not usurped by an encroaching sidewalk café, continues on, crosses the street to avoid the exposed electrical bits protuding from an especially large hole at Place Abou Bakr Assadik only to find oneself in front of the mosque where one must go around the front step, avoid the beggars, continue on ... well, you get the picture. I live in terror of scraping my feet. This terror has a strong foothold in reality. Rabat is de-prettifying my feet.

My impediment of choice is the sidewalk pylon. No jaunty neon-orange cone this, but a fiendishly camouflaged chunk of squat concrete that may or may not have a faded red band but is usually the same colour as the sidewalk. I have yet to ascertain if they are to prevent cars from parking on the sidewalk (in which case they don't work) or to guide cars to available sidewalk parking. I trip over these and stub my feet on them frequently. This makes me cry and swear a great deal. (My mother will attest to an audible string of expletives which issued from my mouth when my foot knocked against a prayer kneeler in a church in Spain. So accute was the pain - and so profound was her guilt for dragging me into the church - that she disregarded my generous usage of the "F" word.) To compound the matter, many of these Pylons from Hell are moveable (and, not surprisingly, are frequently moved by the parking jockeys) so that I have no hope of memorising my trajectories.

One blissfully serene evening during Ramadan, Mr. Cat in Rabat commented that we could actually see to the end of our street without any obstruction (save one flowering shrub), and that was the next best thing to actually being able to walk a straight line. His standards have clearly dropped; either that or he shares the same foot fetish as me. That would put us on an even footing.

A Cat in Castile

I haven't slept in weeks, passing endless nights tossing & turning & stealing the covers in anticipation of those impending moments - moments of ineffable magic and delight - when I can once again:

* walk without my eyes fixed to the ground, secure in the knowledge that I won't fall & disappear into a hole in the sidewalk, break a foot on the stub of a cement parking pylon, or snap my ankles slipping on wet pavement.
* walk in a straight line without having to weave in and out of cars parked on the sidewalks, dodge trees planted in meandering patterns in said sidewalks, and avoid the aforesaid holes and stubs of cement parking pylons.
* walk down the street and not be stared at, not be the unwilling recipient of stares, wolf whistles, and lurid comments (today it was a police officer in uniform).
* walk (see the theme?) across a crosswalk and not get beaned by oncoming traffic (yesterday it was a police cruiser), where getting to the other side does not mean standing in the middle of a street on the yellow line and wait for an opportunity to dart across frogger-style, where pedestrian traffic lights exist and/or are in working order ... oh stop! stop! I'm becoming gitty!
* drink liquor outside. And by outside I mean not inside. In public. Where people (and Allah) can see you and not feel compelled to judge you. In a bad way.
* order a veggie burger - hell! - go to a vegetarian restaurant. A restaurant that doesn't consider anything not a cow or a sheep a bonafide vegetarian option. Eat so much tofu, tvp and seitan that I'll never want to eat a meat-substitute again, that I'll run towards the first abbatoir I see when I get back to Morocco, knife and fork in hand.
* browse in book & music stores where they sell books and music. Books and music! Books and music that don't begin by invoking any god, regardless of how merciful and compassionate he (or she) may be.
* gawk at breath-taking works of art. Guernica! My dream - first conceived in a grade 9 art class - of standing in front of Guernica and hearing - of feeling - the screams of Picasso's terror-stricken horse pierce my brain is but hours away from reaching fruition.
* drink liquor (it bears repeating) outside. And by outside I mean not inside. In public. Where people (and Allah) can see you and not feel compelled to judge you. In a bad way.
*greet people with a sing-songy hola. Truly hola is the world's cheeriest hello. How can anyone say hola and not be happy? There must be another greeting for cranky people resembling a grumble or a snarl or pretty much anything in German.

The German comment was uncalled for (although wholly accurate) which clearly bears out how desperately Cat in Rabat needs a holiday. Cat in Rabat needs a holiday ex Rabat. For four days I'll be a Madrileña in spirit (and hopefully in spirits) and then it's back to reality. Back to Rabat and its treacherous sidewalks. Four days ...

Adiós babies - hasta la jueves!

Close But No Cigar

Imagine my surprise when, walking down Follow the Leader the other day, I came across a brand spanking new set of traffic lights across from the mosque. At least, I think they’re a brand spanking new set of traffic lights. Judging from the fact that I watched several cars plough right through the red light and half a dozen more screech to an eardrum-piercing halt (all within 20 minutes), I'm pretty certain they're new.

There is a dearth of traffic lights on Follow the Leader, so I, for one, applauded the new light. Notice the tense I used? Intrigued? You see, my applause was abruptly arrested (imagine me stranding on FTL clapping with one hand) when I realised that the city must have hired recent graduates from the What-the-Fuck-Were-They-Thinking Institute of Engineering as civic planners. Why? Well, imagine you are walking northbound on FTD and wish to cross over to the mosque-side of the street. Perhaps you’ve espied your favourite beggar & you’re feeling generous, or maybe you just want to avoid the cretins who hang out at the park on the corner of FTL and Rue Baht. Or, I don’t know, perchance the sidewalk with the missing tiles and exposed rebar and wires is deterring you for some reason. Either way, you want to cross. First of all, remember that in Rabat, traffic lights are normally positioned about 3 meters away from any corner and because there is a marked absence of pedestrian crossing lights, as a biped, you cannot see what colour the light is. In other words, you have to rely on whether traffic is moving or beeping to gauge traffic flow. Okay, standing on the corner, you realise that the light must be red (allowing for the ignorami who haven’t clued into the humongous piece of flashing metal suspended over the street and drive on through).

Feeling rather confident, you foolishly cross.

Ahhhh, nothing is easy in Rabat and there is a problem. Imagine! The problem is that the oncoming southbound cars are not yielding to you. No, in fact, they’re honking their horns in exasperation (or glee) because they will be forced to hit you. If they are to hit you, it is Allah’s will which makes them instruments of god (hence the glee). Halfway through the intersection, you realise that those bearing down on you have a green light and you must run for your life. Scurrying across the street you look back and, yes, the northbound drivers are still waiting impatiently for their light to turn from red. Half the street is standing, half the street is moving.

Jesus H. Christ, it’s bad enough that crossing a street here makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a scene from The Fast & The Furious, but installing a traffic light that taunts you with its façade of safety and, dare I say, civilisation, is just plain cruel. And mean. And dangerous. To think that I used to get annoyed when, back home, lights within several city blocks weren’t synchronized – now I have to contend with the same set of freaking lights. Serves me right for being a princess. So yeaaaaaaaaah! to the city for installing a much-needed traffic light but booooooooo! to the retards who skipped the class on traffic light synchronization. Hope they didn’t ditch elevator class too.

To Market, To Market

Got a rejection letter today from an editor so I'm not feeling terribly inspired (least of all confident in my epistulary skills) so I'll offer a snapshot of my relatively prosaic afternoon as a mean recompense for my usual wit.

... just took a walk down to the grocery store & back, and felt compelled to share the sites and sounds of my little trek.


The Walk Down:

1) The Not Nice Men. Well, that goes without saying because I stupidly began my walk along the café side of the street to avoid the beggars. Clearly, I was asking for it.

2) Death (okay, two near death experiences) both involving black Peugots. Well, that goes without saying because I stupidly decided to exercise my right as a pedestrian and cross a street where there were cars. For such hubris, I deserve to be punished.

3) The Beggars. Well, that goes without saying because I stupidly walked along the mosque side of the street after having risked death by crossing said-street, only to avoid the Not Nice Men who frequent the cafes on the other side of Follow the Leader - so really, that was my fault. Seeking alms in front of god's house is a prime real estate opportunity for our mendicant brothers and sisters, but there seemed to be more than the usual number out today, although the regulars were there: the mother with the hydrocephalic child, the blind man (ooops, visually challenged) in his crisp white jellaba, the assorted old crones who look like extras from Macbeth ...

The Grocery Store: For the curious, this is the Label Vie on Follow-the-Leader, the less salubrious instalment of a chain of minsicule grocery stores. Indeed, it has been nicknamed by a friend as 'the Dirty Label Vie' to distinguish it from its sparkling, wide-aisled brethern. All in all, it was a fairly benign (or at least, not a malign experience) today. True, I had to wait 5 minutes for my fruits & vegetables to be weighed, I was hipchecked & poked in the ribs by half a dozen people who just had to pass me (without excusing or announcing themselves) in aisles that are about 2 1/2 feet wide, a kamakaze kid with a kiddie-size shopping cart ran over me foot, and the woman behind the cheese counter sniggered at my French but they did have pretzels which weren't cooked in beef tallow and the check-out girl was abnormally generous in dispensing the plastic grocery bags - so who am I to complain?

The Walk Back:

1) The Dead kitten. Well that was just plain nasty. No one needs to nearly walk on top of anything dead (unless it's an ex) but dead kittens are particularly heart-wrenching. At least for me - I confess that I do have a colleague at work who refers to them as city-rats. All of Rabat's female cats that survived the last Stalinistic purge (remarkably, all of our neighbourhood cats disappeared one night) went into heat about 3 months ago and now a gazillion kittens are running amok. Evenings in Agdal are punctuated by the mewling of starving kittens - a questionable improvement on their mothers caterwauling in heat a few months back. I confess that I routinely carry cat food in my purse and am generally watched with incredulity by many a concierge as I dump turkey & giblets underneath parked cars and on sidewalks. *Sob* this little one was cute ...

2) The Beggar by the Boulangerie. Well, that goes without saying because I stupidly wended my way back so that I had to pass the bakery and she's a regular. I knew she would be there so I am either stupid, or subconsciously I wanted to see her. The last time I passed her by, I gave her my doggie bag of eyes-too-big-for-my-stomach pizza from that afternoon's luncheon, so I figured that my karmic debt (vis-à-vis her) has been paid in advance until 2007. She was cramming a baguette into her mouth as she accosted me, so I didn't feel terribly guilty. That'll teach her to speak with your mouth full.

3) The Rooster. What can I say? - I could hear a rooster crowing from some backyard or apartment roof or balcony, as I walked the rest of the way home. In Agdal. Go figure.

4) Urinating child. Well that was just plain nasty. No one needs to nearly walk into anything urinating. Squatting in the middle of the sidewalk, she was doubled over watching her prodigious stream of pee splash the sidewalk, mesmerized as if she were watching the cascading majesty of Niagara Falls. I guess a sidewalk is as good a place as any to defecate - especially when you're five years old. I mean, it's there and you have to go, and you're not wearing knickers anyway so it's pretty convenient ... as it turns out, she was the child of The Beggar by the Boulangerie. Next time I pass by, I'll toss some underthings her way instead of my pizza box.

5) The Rooster. Did I mention the rooster?

... that's about it. So glad the day was uneventful.