RICK'S

So, click here to read our first real joint project--it's on a very serious topic. Casablanca

Residence Visa Processes Part 2: This is not Kafka.

The woman at reception: You have to see a man upstairs. But he’s away, come back tomorrow and I will take you.

Tomorrow. She points me down a hallway. You will see him. Room 316.

Room 316 man makes me wait. Then he says, no, see my secretaries. The secretaries chew over my name, cluck and flip through papers. They ask for dates. When was I here? More waiting. I wait.

A man walks in. Hello, you can come to my office. Down the hall. I never find out his name.

We begin an interview, which I had no idea I was there for. It lasts 2 hours.

Is there something wrong? I ask.

Oh, no, he says. It’s routine.

I give him the name of every school I’ve attended, with the exact dates. We realize I’ve forgotten to include a 6-month-long college job in a laboratory. No, he says, you must tell me everything. Those little jobs are exactly what I want to know.

This is all in French, mind you.

I tell him I studied oceanography.

Ah, he says, can you tell me why the ocean, the same ocean, sometimes it has very different qualities, the temperature.

The clarity?, I volunteer.

Yes, very different, he says. Why?

(I wonder, is this a test?) I mumble something about weather.

Have you read any books by Jacques Cousteau? Did you know that he was a Muslim?

(I wonder, do I understand French?)

The Koran, written so many years ago, gave a description of the oceans that is exact, he says.

(I’m convinced I don’t understand French)

You know, he says, talking slowly because I clearly don’t understand French. There is the sea. And there are animals that live in the sea. And there are rivers and animals that live in the rivers. And the animals that live in the rivers cannot cross to the sea, and the animals in the sea cannot cross to the river.

(What the fuck?) Smile. Nod.

Finally we make it to my second to last job. My French begins to fail me. I spent three years, I tell him, three years, working in New York for a … a…female dog on television. The word for channel is really awfully similar to the word for bitch.

We move on.

What is your religion?

I don’t really have one.

Ok ok, but what were you baptized?

I wasn’t.

No!

Pause. Looks intently at me.

Do you believe in God?

Pause. 

Yes?

As usual, my badass wife is being modest. Upon receipt of her pictured press pass, Solana hit the streets and got Obama reacts with the rest of GlobalPost's Team Islam, which resulted in our actual first story for GP. Here's the piece she reported _entirely_ in French. Which she started studying literally a month ago.

Where we've been

Don't give up on our blog yet! We've been inundated with work, thanks to a side project a friend threw our way. We're working, and no this is not an exaggeration, 7 days a week 12+ hours a day. That means less time to write a blog than you might think. Meanwhile, here's our first real piece on GlobalPost. 

Moroccan Residency Visa Instructions:

1: Take official letter from the Communi-cations Ministry to an agency named DGSN, which no taxi driver seems to understand. Ask a police officer where to find the DGSN only to be told that it isn’t around here, but there is a kind of petite DGSN you can try. 

2: Attempt to enter this place, which is called the police station, to be stopped and told the entrance you need is one block over. Wonder why you weren’t just told to go to the police station.

3: Pass through a metal detector which buzzes but does not prompt the three police officers guarding the door to stop cleaning their teeth with toothpicks.

4. Wonder what’s the point of the metal detector.

5: Speak to two women behind the counter as they eat their lunch. Say you need a residence visa. Wonder if their response, “Why?” is a trick question. Find out they cannot give you the forms until after 2 pm.

6: Try to have six photos taken, per the Moroccan government’s web site. Wait fruitlessly until 2:30pm in front of the photo place for them to open after lunch.

7: Return to the police station to see the same ladies now done with lunch. Get two sets of three forms in duplicate and a list of necessaries: 9 photos, a copy of your lease, two copies of the Communication Ministry letter, copies of your passport, your first baby shoe, your grandparent’s dental records and a lock of hair from your first pet.

8: You cannot bring those things back today. Said documents are accepted only between 9 am and 12 pm. Oh, and you need to go to another government office, across town, and get a stamp. One each. It makes the document official.

9: Wonder exactly how.

10: return to the photo store, wait another 10 minutes until they finally re-open after lunch at 3:30 pm. Ponder photos of the king in a cowboy hat, shooting a high powered hunting rifle.

11: Put off filling out the forms in triplicate until the next morning at 9 am. Become frantic when you realize it’s going to be hard to finish it all before the lunch-time witching hour.

12: Return to police station, set off metal detector, elbow Nigerian man out of your way. Ask if they really want to know every country you’ve ever visited, per the form. Answer: pick 5 or 6, whatever, not a problem. 

13: Remind yourself that this whole process was significantly easier than going to the Manhattan DMV or the Harlem Social Security office.

Barely legal.

We recieved official word and official papers today from the Moroccan government saying we can legally start doing the things reporters do. Since it seemed a little early to complain about our pay, we put out calls for a story.

But let's just say there's some rust that needs scraping from the college French.

A transcript, translated loosely from a call made this afternoon to what I believed was the office of the law professor who can give us the scoop on the success or not of a big-time overhaul of Moroccan Family Law that was supposed to grant women all kinds of new rights:

ME: "Ah, good day."

WOMAN WHO PICKS UP THE PHONE: "Good day?"

ME: "Yes. Good day. I am American journalist who makes an article about women. Women's law. I work for an agency of American news. I would like to make an article about the new women law."

WOMAN: "Yes, Good day?"

ME: "Yes, good day. I would like to make encounter with you for to talk on the subject of the new woman law and your opinions regarding success or not success these five years."

WOMAN: "Madame is not house."

ME [BEGINNING TO WONDER WHY THIS WOMAN'S FRENCH IS AS BAD AS MINE]: "Not at house?"

WOMAN: "Not at house."

ME: "I was believing this office telephone I call."

WOMAN: "[A bunch of stuff in Arabic]. Madame. No. House. See you tomorrow."

ME: "Okay. Yes. Maybe now is not well time for ask about my wife bring video camera to our encounter. I want to make Madame also encounter with video camera. Are you Madame's woman of clean-house?"

WOMAN: "Madame not at house."

ME: "Are you clean woman?"

[click].

Piratée

One crucial observation penetrated the exhaustion and jet lag during the ride from the Casablanca airport to Rabat. Even shacks cobbled together from corrugated steel, rocks and a tarp get satellite television. Just about everybody does. This photo is a shot of the phenomenon, though from the roof in our upper middle class Moroccan neighborhood. We hope to soon add a dish of our own. For a reported $60 bucks we can get that and a "piratée" connection, which allows free browsing on satellites the world over. Our neighbor demonstrated the system to us while we ate dinner with him Friday, connecting to a satellite called "Hot Bird." Onscreen appeared an English-language show featuring a man on a stage with his head up a donkey's butt. The neighbor gestured to the TV and said something like, "See? All in English." Don't worry, I'm 95% sure the Donkey was some dude in a costume. I can't wait.

Domestic bomb plots

Okay I went to college and I understand about the infinite relativity of cultural differences and I respect these differences and I get that they're one more part of our beautiful human brotherhood and whatever. And I've bathed using buckets in Pakistan and drank bad water in China and I respect that there's no moral significance attached to a particular region's level of technological development.

But since this is my little corner of the internet, I need to be real for one second: There are certain things that some cultures are just really bad at.

America for example, with cumbersome plans and punitive cancellation fees, is really bad at cell phones. In a bunch of third world countries, you can get phones that're easy to figure out, up and running in minutes, and allow you to swap SIM cards as you travel.

So, Morocco. It turns out Morocco sucks at stoves. The device you can see Solana lighting up there looks like the normal gas stove you'd hope to have in your NY apartment. But it doesn't use natural gas. Its fuel comes from a rubber hose snaking across our kitchen floor to a beat-up, high-pressure liquid butane canister lurking in the corner. Butane is the same stuff they put in Bic lighters. The stove isn't much more than a giant one of those, and it's not terribly safe.

See this section on page 121 of one of our guidebooks: "Failure to be heedful of the dangers claims many lives in Morocco each year, and foreigners' lives are probably claimed in disproportionate numbers because they are unfamiliar with using bottled gas."

Which this foreigner can attest is true. Missing an apparently crucial little pressure-regulating valve -- not mentioned by the stove seller, the instruction booklet or the guy helping with the installation -- this foreigner attached the hose, lit the gas and created a momentary, high-pressure kitchen blowtorch. The gas blasted from the burner with such force that it blew out its own flame and began rapidly filling the kitchen with stinky, explosive fumes.

Since then, we've pretty much sorted out how not to burn down the kitchen or blow ourselves up. We've even made a couple of very nice meals, albeit gingerly. Morocco's latest terrorism scare came earlier this year when a cafe exploded in Casablanca, killing several people, and it turned out to be a butane stove mishap. This is a possibility folks here apparently just put up with. Having a bomb in the kitchen. Call me sometime and I'll tell you all about it. I have an awesome cell phone plan.

Homesick meat. (This probably will make more sense if you read upwards from the first goat heads).

We wimp out and opt to make hamburgers. We buy a kilo -- which, it turns out, is a shitload -- of ground cow from this guy. He only has 8 fingers total and isn't shy about shaking hands.

Lunch meat.

These guys try explaining what the heads are for and, near as I can tell, they're supposed to make really good sandwiches. How the sawn-off legs and brains fit in remains a mystery.

Adventure meat.

Tooling through the awesome, low-rent outdoor market where the diplomats don't go, we happen upon these nice-looking fellows. Those're brains over on the left in the pan, and some other tasty bits in the plastic bag.

It’s not that different, but it is

Last night we drank beer, ate tapas and listened to a salsa band. Women wore skirts, showed cleavage, sipped wine and danced. We might have been in Manhattan, or Paris, or London—any cosmopolitan city. I dress more or less like I dressed in New York and fit in with most other Rabati women, at least here in the city center. We have an apartment that is bigger and more luxurious than anything we could afford in New York, or California, or most of the other places we’ve lived in the US. (The photo above is a view from our living room.) The weather is just like San Diego. I’ve yet to see a camel. But then there are little things that startle me, emphasizing that I’m in a foreign country. A man walks down the street in front of us wearing a Djellaba, the traditional Moroccan robe, with it’s pointy hood pulled over his head in a way that reminds me of Lord of the Rings. The food smells of exotic spices. Across the street from our apartment, our neighbors keep a goat on their tiny patio. The sound of it braying is a far cry from the noise of the B61 bus plowing up and down Manhattan Avenue outside our Brooklyn apartment. And there’s a constant feeling that you don’t quite understand what’s going on. Those trays of live turtles at the market—they must be sold for dinner, right? Apparently they’re just a popular garden pet.

a little off the back and sides

You’d think moving to Africa would involve all sorts of exotic deprivations, which would inspire self-congratulatory anecdotes about one’s toughness and grant one license to moralize on the corrupting power of industrial comforts. But I’ve neither ridden a donkey to the well, nor gathered wood for the cook fire, nor chased vipers from my hut. My clean, well-lit apartment delivers water from its taps that turns out to be as drinkable as New York’s. My deprivations at the moment are of the same lame sort I’ve faced whenever I’ve moved to a new town. Such as: How do I find a place to do the laundry? Or: where can I get a haircut that doesn’t suck? Until answers come, I’m going to continue sporting the same coif I did in the third grade while doing our wash in the bathtub.

Les Microbes

Our unfurnished Rabat apartment has no stove, no refrigerator, not even light fixtures, but thankfully a certain key piece of furniture is standard here. The picture says it all.

It was bad.

It hit us both.

Thanks be to Allah for antibiotics.

A week and a day.

The state-owned telecommunications company’s revenue is apparently up 2.4 percent this quarter; Women are slated to take more seats than ever in municipal elections next month; Some kind of street protest erupted the other day with angry guys shouting outside the parliament building, waving banners and running from cops who half-heartedly gave chase.

Better reporters would know more about these things. I tell myself we have purposely refrained from journalizing, since our lack of credentials makes it illegal, but the truth is we’ve spent our investigative energy elsewhere. Getting phones, finding an apartment and becoming obsessed with learning how one buys a stove and fridge in Africa. Solana, above, is seated on one of three pieces of furniture we own doing some research. She might be propped on a pillow against the wall, but she’s got DSL internet—Monday’s success, rewarded with a nap on the mattress you can see back where we laid it on the floor.

Rabat Day 2

To accredit reporters to work here, the Moroccan Communication Ministry requires, among other things, four wallet-sized photos of the reporter, a letter from your boss saying you’re a reporter, a letter from the embassy saying you’re an American, and a copy of the press credentials issued by your home country. As the kind-faced lady working as the ministry’s press liaison listed these items in English and French, that last thing made the pulse of this reporter quicken somewhat. The whole list was beginning feel sort of uptight and bureaucratic and scary and perhaps portending some kind of endless succession of hassles and multiple windows with bored-looking functionaries standing in the way of doing our dream job, demanding all these different pieces of paper the last of which Americans don’t even have. So. This reporter starts explaining this, the lack of government press credentialing in America, and because he’s doing this in his rusty French he’s resorting to the longer Latinate words for stuff, which are usually also French words if you just say them in a French accent. The downside of this is you end up sounding sort of academic and possibly pretentions esp. when you’re talking about “la Constitution” and “Les droits du journalists en general en Amerique” and “la liberté du press” and you end up feeling extra dumb when the extremely nice press lady interrupts you. In French, then in English so you’re sure to get it, she’s like: Homey, chill out. We’ll just leave it out of the file and no one will care. So we’ve got that going for us. Also the lighthouse is very pretty.

Solana's Rabat Day 1

Yes, I’ve already admired the spice vendors in the old medina, eaten tagine, and ogled a good many djellabas.

But equally impressive was the selection on our hotel television: a clash of prurient excess and Muslim propriety.

Flipping on our hotel TV we came to Maroc 2—literally channel TWO—and were treated to a graphic shot of a naked woman masturbating to the camera, enticing us to check out some pay per view. We passed.

A few channels later we discovered what appeared to be some sort of Yemeni MTV. There played a video of a man in the desert with his camel, horse and falcon. During the chorus he and his other robe- and turban-bedecked comrades stood in a line, waving long shiny swords in time to the music. He appeared to be singing about a woman, a fully veiled figure with heavily made up eyes—her only visible flesh. The pinnacle of seduction comes as she unties her veil it sags for a moment to reveal…a glimpse of her cheek. Then an immediate cut to the money shot: a man galloping away on a white horse.

goodbye before hello

Before hopping the Atlantic we made a mad, cross-country dash to discard possessions, see family and eat perilously unhealthy food:

• had bacon, waffles and dishwater coffee in a dingy Pennsylvania motel.
  
• sold off the books moldering in Erik’s father’s basement, where we broke into the finest stash of Venezuelan rum Nebraska has to offer.
  
• washed down cheeseburgers with vodka martinis at the table of Grandma German in Pierce, Neb.
  
• ditched the Jeep in the capable hands of Erik’s sister, who sent us on our way with stomachs full of fried pork burritos.
  
• lounged poolside with the Pyne parents in Las Vegas and slept off a feast of beastly big ribeye steaks.
• rode shotgun through the Anza Borrego Desert, a region where gas stations sell travel-sized bottles of Henessey, which blends surprisingly well with gas station coffee.
• discarded Solana’s beloved Honda motorcycle 10 miles from the Mexican border, then drowned her sorrows in a Bloody Mary.