Springtime in Morocco

There are flowers  in the fields

Change is in the air

...oh yeah and we started playing Dungeons and Dragons

Food Exchange

For us food is a big deal. We love eating it, growing it, cooking it, buying it and most of all, sharing it.  For us, Farraha is a great place. For the first time in a good two months we are shopping for our own food. Every Saturday we walk about 50 minutes down a mountain to get to the one-time-a-week-souk. The souk is lively and loud and stinky in places.  There are vegetables, clothing, olives, olive oil, dates, chips, beans and spices,  traditional hats and aprons and any type of plastic bucket or basket you could ever want. There are blacksmiths and cobblers, beggars and fishmongers and there are men who will kill your chicken, bleed it and defeather it in about 5 minutes. The first time we went to the souk we stood transfixed in front of the defeathering machine for about ten minutes. It had taken us about twenty minutes, with three people, to do the plucking they did in 20 seconds! At the souk there is always someone there who we know from the village who is happy to walk around with us and find us the best deal.

 

Oh Poor pony. It's actually a donkey and this is right before Brandon made it trip and fall to its knees.

In addition to all of the lovely vegetables, beans and fruit that we get from the souk, the people in the village have been so kind and giving toward us.  Most of the village is related to eachother and the Nazik, the woman who started the center where we are working is their relative, so we are treated very very kindly. 

Our delicious bread comes from two of our neighbors from whom we buy it every day. Eggs come in twos and threes from different neighbors and from the teacher at the school. We buy six from him everyweek.  Brandon asked Azzadine one day where we could buy milk and since then we’ve had milk brought to us almost everyday.  It’s amazing, and a little overwhelming. We’ve tried to pay for the milk but we’ve been refused multiple times (we've finally started to pay for it, hooray!).

Yum! Watch that cream separate!

Jennifer was starting to get anxious about us receiving too much and not giving enough and also the milk was piling up. But what could we give? One time we gave a bunch of white turnips, the result of a miscommunication at the souk where Jennifer thought she was asking for 2 Dirhams worth of turnips and instead we got 2 kilos.  Another time we brought some homemade cheese to another neighbor.

Yesterday we bought ½ kilo of sardines, marinated them in hot pepper oil, loads of salt and oregano and grilled them over coal and brought them to another neighbor. The balance of the food exchange is slowly starting to be restored. 

Now what to do with all of the milk?  Jennifer has been loving spooning the separated cream into her tea in the morning, we made a batch of oily crepes, we made some quick, paneer type cheeses, but most importantly we “discovered,” quite by accident, that if you leave the fresh milk for a few days  it will congeal into a sort of yogurt (that was the yogurty stuff that our neighbor brought us on the first day we were here). After straining the whey out it becomes a lovely soft cheese that is delicious  served with warm garlic oil and fresh tomatoes. Yum Yum.

 Banana and chocolate crepes

 Olives and olive oil with every meal

Hello Maroc

We are very happy to be here in Morocco. We never really thought that our trip would take us to Africa where we would learn to speak Derija (Moroccan dialect of Arabic)! We feel a little surprised to be here despite the fact that we had been planning to come here for a least a month before arriving and have been here two weeks already.

 Brandon is in the kitchen now making bread pudding in a Tagine (the clay conelike pot that many Moroccan dishes are made in). The round 12,” thin loaf of bread came from our neighbors from whom we buy bread everyday and the milk came from another neighbor’s cow. The bread is eaten with every meal. At meal times we eat from a large communal plate and use small pieces of bread in the first three fingers of our right hand to scoop up small bites. It’s a really nice way of eating slowly!

We feel very lucky to be here and to be able to live with the people in this village as their neighbors. They are incredibly kind and giving. The first day we were here in Farraha, one of our neighbors came by around lunch time and brought us a platter with bread, two bowls of homemade yogurt with a kind of wheat cereal in it and a plate of French fries! Brandon was ecstatic about the French fries. People here are very worried that we won’t be able to feed ourselves.

 During the day we work at the center which is a 5 minute walk along a trail. The view from the center is amazing! Clearly our limited knowledge about Morocco did not prepare us for the lush, beautiful, green foothills dotted with olive trees that surround us on all sides. Despite the green, however, the countryside has been in dire need of rain which makes itself very apparent in the diminishing level of rainwater in the catchments that feed the toilets and bathroom sinks at the center. The center is a newly built building for the children of the area to come after school. Jennifer has been working with the founder of the center to create a self-sustainable system for the center that can exist with or without her and with or without volunteers. The idea is to create an after school center where the children have a quiet place to work but also to create a place where they can develop their curiosity and thirst for knowledge.





Everyday is a different type of adventure. Language is a funny thing as everyone speaks Derija, an Arabic dialect, and some people speak a bit of French. Our language of comfort has become French. How strange, especially since neither of us speak it comfortably. Sometimes it feels like driving out of control in an arcade car racing game. The only way is forward and even if you take the turns too close and smash into the rocks you can still get up and keep racing.

Goodbye Portugal

After we left the farm we headed to Porto where the first thing we did was eat Chinese food and the second thing we did was get into the shower and stay there for a long long time.  We spent the night in a cute little film themed hostel with endless cups of tea in a red Amelie inspired room. We tried to hit up the Porto nightlife but for some reason everything was closed. 11:30 pm is too early on a Thursday night?  The next day we walked around Porto a bit until it was time to pick up our sweet little rental Hyndai. 

Everything will be alright?

"do you know this mustache?"

A tribute to Portuguese writer Jose Saramage, author of Blindness. 

I loved this little guy!

This was an outdoor/indoor market in Porto that we ran through on the way to pick up our rental car 

we wished we could have stayed and looked around. 

On our agenda was PORT wine tasting in the Unesco World Heritage site of the Douro Valley (Brandon says that sounds snooty-I think it does too!), the only place in the world that Port Wine can officially be made. The ride through the Douro Valley was amazingly beautiful with houses on steep terraced hillsides with regional varieties of grapes.

We stopped at one vineyard where we tried 7 Ports and a lovely lady served us wine with Jennifer translating the whole time. Half way through the tasting we asked her if she spoke English. Oh yes she did, perfectly in fact, so here Jennifer was translating haltingly, trying to understand the Portuguese descriptions, remember them and then explain the subtleties of Portuguese Port, while the whole time our pourer spoke fluently! She must have had a laugh.

After Brandon bought a bottle for us to drink later, we made our way to Pinhao, a tiny little town on the Douro River.

First and only time I've ever partook in drinking an entire bottle of Port in one go. 

We stopped into a butcher shop to get some cheese to go with our wine and were surprised with the most amazing experience. After letting us try generous tastes of every cheese they had, the butcher brought out their homemade liquor, gave us samples of almost every one of their home smoked and cured meats and treated us to homemade wine with grilled bacon and chorizo. The butcher kept asking us if we were in a hurry, to which we responded gleefully “no!” We spent about an hour an a half there and left with a bag full of  salami, prosciutto, blood sausage, smoked ham, cheese and bread.

Brandon says that if he had more control of his masculinity, he would have been weeping at the butcher shop. I also told the butcher that my husband was in heaven to which he sweetly smiled.

Drive by shooting

Beauty

Brandon in a meat trance (the black thing behind him is a boar face)

sorry vegetarians

The piece on the right is a pound of prosciutto

After a night of Port and pork (and chocolate too-apparently they go well together) we arrived in Aveiro where we played in the Portuguese indoor Ultimate championships (our goal is to find Ultimate wherever we go).  We had a great time with these friendly Ultimate players who hug and have a heart to heart with their opponents after each game.  The day was capped with a rollicking dinner for 50, almost all of the club Ultimate players in Portugal (watch the video till the end and you’ll see Ultimate players doing what they do best: get themselves in trouble). We were lucky to be able to crash at a teammate’s house for a few hours before our flight out of lovely Portugal, a destination definitely worth a second visit!