Early Morocco
Morocco was amazing.
the airport bit was amazingly hard. i had four layovers between New Mexico and Casablanca!
and talk about hassle; everything went down the day before i took off. i can now boast that i flew during a red alert! london hethrow was insane; there were ques miles long that i stood in apparently for no reason. i was exhausted and finding it hard to understand the Queen's english, so to speak. it took me ten tries, four different people, and three different ques to understand what 'the alleyway between the travel-x and the WH Smith' actually meant. to add to it all, a polite british woman would pipe up over the com every five minutes to say 'due to security reasons, if you leave your bags unattended, they will be confiscated and destroyed.'
they very pleasantly asked me to check my two precious carry-ons (saxophone and laptop). the laptop lapped its last top that day...the saxophone survived. these, in fact, were the only two bags i had with me for the entire trip! a broken laptop whose case became like a giant, unwieldly purse, and a saxophone in an airplane safe travel case (thank the great mother bird spirit i had that case).
i arrived in morocco three hours late without any phone numbers or addresses to guide me. but that didn't matter because i had no means of using a phone and telling people where i might be heading anyways.
after yelling at some phones i couldn't get working, i trundled off with my saxophone and laptop to the outside air. 'are you american?'
'maybe...'
'are you joel?'
from then on things went pretty smoothly. this was Said, my band mate Mohammed's brother.
the taxi ride in the morning, like every taxi ride to follow, was harrowing. i think moroccan drivers treat traffic lights and signs as passing suggestions.
after two hours of the 'pass and dodge' game on a two-way-one-lane road, we arrived in a small town the name of which it took me days to learn to pronounce- Imintanout.
we stayed in the village where our band leader, Fatah, was born. the house was this kind of Berber fort with a huge door and iron lock-and-key that went 'clang, shunk, rattle, shunk' when you tried to open it. inside was a courtyard and lots of rooms - a kitchen, several bedrooms (really bedrooms. like rooms where beds lived. lots of them) a dining room (a carpeted room with pillows where we ate Tajin after Tajin) and some bathrooms that ran off of well water. that you had to go get from the well. usually with a donkey.
it's all red landscape and clay houses and cacti and donkeys and people.
i was fortunate enough to have been kept up all night by jet lag (what an inappropriately named term); the soundscape of the sunrise in the Berber village was astonishing, to say the least. A chorus of roosters, the occasional Donkey solo, polyrhythmic owl ostinatos, micropolytonal insect drones, various bird counterpoints, and a collection of other sounds that i couldn't for the life of me assign a source to (something sounded like a wounded women's trio).
we were treated like celebrities in Imintanout. We ate a huge lunch at the mayor's house with one of the premier Moroccan composers and one of the most famous Moroccan musicans. We gave a private performance for them on the Mayor's lawn and were met with much approval. After our show (which was awesome, although a lot of people left the concert i think because our music wasn't so traditional) i'd get a lot of ' blah blah blah saxophone!' from people on the street (blahs being words in one of three languages, two of which i couldn't understand one bit). This worked out for the best when I found myself alone in town accidentally abondoned by friends, bandmates, and hosts. I sort of bounced from one group of people to another all the while speaking bad french until i found myself back stage at the festival taking video samples of this sweet stomping/flute playing ensemble when a fellow i barely recognized (after spending more time with Rashid and eating lunch at his house recognizing him became easier) saw me and said 'hey, do you want to go to where Fatah is?' This ended in an amazing dinner on a rooftop back in town with Fatah and his cousin's family.
Well, i could go on. And it probably will in some kind of blog format. I'll sum up the rest of the trip:
Once we were set free, we ate poorly and got ripped off until we got our bearings.
I jammed with a flute player friend, Ben, on the seaward wall of a castle keep next to some cannons at sunset.
Medina's wind and twist. My head never makes sense of them.
There are goats in trees! Lots of goats! in One tree! They climb the trees themselves!
Flute player (Ben) and i buy sweet Berber Jalabas that look like Jedi robes.
I talk to a guy, Mohammed - a Berber - on the roof of our hotel in Marakech in Frenglish for like three hours in the middle of the night.
We talk about how awesome Morocco is. He tells me i should jam with the street musicians in the square.
I jammed with some snake charmers. The snakes didn't dance to Donna Lee.
I meet another Berber whose email address is metallica-is-mylife@yahoo.com
Due to the dollar to pound exchange rate, i spend the remainder of my money getting a hotel room for my layover in London and I return home with $0.37 in the bank.
the airport bit was amazingly hard. i had four layovers between New Mexico and Casablanca!
and talk about hassle; everything went down the day before i took off. i can now boast that i flew during a red alert! london hethrow was insane; there were ques miles long that i stood in apparently for no reason. i was exhausted and finding it hard to understand the Queen's english, so to speak. it took me ten tries, four different people, and three different ques to understand what 'the alleyway between the travel-x and the WH Smith' actually meant. to add to it all, a polite british woman would pipe up over the com every five minutes to say 'due to security reasons, if you leave your bags unattended, they will be confiscated and destroyed.'
they very pleasantly asked me to check my two precious carry-ons (saxophone and laptop). the laptop lapped its last top that day...the saxophone survived. these, in fact, were the only two bags i had with me for the entire trip! a broken laptop whose case became like a giant, unwieldly purse, and a saxophone in an airplane safe travel case (thank the great mother bird spirit i had that case).
i arrived in morocco three hours late without any phone numbers or addresses to guide me. but that didn't matter because i had no means of using a phone and telling people where i might be heading anyways.
after yelling at some phones i couldn't get working, i trundled off with my saxophone and laptop to the outside air. 'are you american?'
'maybe...'
'are you joel?'
from then on things went pretty smoothly. this was Said, my band mate Mohammed's brother.
the taxi ride in the morning, like every taxi ride to follow, was harrowing. i think moroccan drivers treat traffic lights and signs as passing suggestions.
after two hours of the 'pass and dodge' game on a two-way-one-lane road, we arrived in a small town the name of which it took me days to learn to pronounce- Imintanout.
we stayed in the village where our band leader, Fatah, was born. the house was this kind of Berber fort with a huge door and iron lock-and-key that went 'clang, shunk, rattle, shunk' when you tried to open it. inside was a courtyard and lots of rooms - a kitchen, several bedrooms (really bedrooms. like rooms where beds lived. lots of them) a dining room (a carpeted room with pillows where we ate Tajin after Tajin) and some bathrooms that ran off of well water. that you had to go get from the well. usually with a donkey.
it's all red landscape and clay houses and cacti and donkeys and people.
i was fortunate enough to have been kept up all night by jet lag (what an inappropriately named term); the soundscape of the sunrise in the Berber village was astonishing, to say the least. A chorus of roosters, the occasional Donkey solo, polyrhythmic owl ostinatos, micropolytonal insect drones, various bird counterpoints, and a collection of other sounds that i couldn't for the life of me assign a source to (something sounded like a wounded women's trio).
we were treated like celebrities in Imintanout. We ate a huge lunch at the mayor's house with one of the premier Moroccan composers and one of the most famous Moroccan musicans. We gave a private performance for them on the Mayor's lawn and were met with much approval. After our show (which was awesome, although a lot of people left the concert i think because our music wasn't so traditional) i'd get a lot of ' blah blah blah saxophone!' from people on the street (blahs being words in one of three languages, two of which i couldn't understand one bit). This worked out for the best when I found myself alone in town accidentally abondoned by friends, bandmates, and hosts. I sort of bounced from one group of people to another all the while speaking bad french until i found myself back stage at the festival taking video samples of this sweet stomping/flute playing ensemble when a fellow i barely recognized (after spending more time with Rashid and eating lunch at his house recognizing him became easier) saw me and said 'hey, do you want to go to where Fatah is?' This ended in an amazing dinner on a rooftop back in town with Fatah and his cousin's family.
Well, i could go on. And it probably will in some kind of blog format. I'll sum up the rest of the trip:
Once we were set free, we ate poorly and got ripped off until we got our bearings.
I jammed with a flute player friend, Ben, on the seaward wall of a castle keep next to some cannons at sunset.
Medina's wind and twist. My head never makes sense of them.
There are goats in trees! Lots of goats! in One tree! They climb the trees themselves!
Flute player (Ben) and i buy sweet Berber Jalabas that look like Jedi robes.
I talk to a guy, Mohammed - a Berber - on the roof of our hotel in Marakech in Frenglish for like three hours in the middle of the night.
We talk about how awesome Morocco is. He tells me i should jam with the street musicians in the square.
I jammed with some snake charmers. The snakes didn't dance to Donna Lee.
I meet another Berber whose email address is metallica-is-mylife@yahoo.com
Due to the dollar to pound exchange rate, i spend the remainder of my money getting a hotel room for my layover in London and I return home with $0.37 in the bank.