1 Year Later

Today marks exactly one year since I left for Costa Rica to kick off my big yearlong study abroad adventure!

I feel like I should write something profound but I am so tired right now from a week of filling in the gaps while my mom is out of town, getting myself ready to move back to San Diego for school, and teaching a dance class for my old dance teacher today while she is out of town.  But I guess I can share my version of a famous Tolkien quote that has drifted through my head a lot this year as I bounced from place to place:

Not all who wander are lost, but it sure is fun to get lost so you can find yourself :)

I hope you have enjoyed following along on my travels this year, and continue to follow me wherever my life takes me next!  I mean, going back to San Diego for school is kind of like traveling, right?

Update: Just because I keep meaning to throw this on the blog sometime...

To anyone who says they don't want to do a night hike Costa Rica because they are scared of spiders, or can't get scuba certified because they don't think they can take off their mask and put it back on under water, or don't want to go to Morocco because they don't want to see meat hanging in shops with the animal head there to show you what kind of meat it is, or even don't want to go somewhere because they don't know anyone or speak the language, here is what I have to say: IF I CAN DO IT, YOU CAN DO IT.

This year, I refused to let fear hold me back from doing things I wanted to do.  It was a conscious decision.  Apparently, fear is a lot more mental than we think.

10 Years Later

Sorry, this is another post that is more reflective than informative, but I wanted to write down something about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 and this seemed as good a place as any since it is kind of related to my travels this year.  Just a warning, I probably have a slightly controversial opinion on this (especially as an American) and I really don't mean to offend anyone.  If you don't agree with what I say, please keep it to yourself.  I am not telling anyone how to think, I am just sharing my own thoughts and feelings on the matter.  You don't have to read this if you don't want to, and you have now been warned.

9/11/01: I had just started 7th grade and was finishing my math homework (I think I was on number 20/21/22 or so) at the kitchen table waiting for my best friend and her mom to pick me up and take me to middle school.  My mom was taking my little sister to elementary school three blocks away.  The phone rang and it was my best friend calling.  "Turn on the TV.  The World Trade Center is falling down."  My mom came home crying.  The crossing guard, Alvin, had told her what had happened.  I can still hear her saying over and over again, "This isn't the world I wanted you to grow up in".  Of course, 12-year-old me didn't really know what she meant, so I just hugged her back and tried to look brave.  I knew that something horrible had happened, but I couldn't really grasp the bigger meaning of it all.  Like everyone else, we spent the day watching the news until we couldn't take it anymore.  School was canceled and there was a slight fear that San Francisco might be another target.

9/11/11: Ten years later, I think I know what my mom meant that day.  At 22, I have a better understanding of what that day meant for the world.  I have seen the American views of it, as well as some international views.  I have heard horrible stereotypes of the Muslim world and I have spent almost 4 months of my life living in a Muslim country.  I was in Morocco when Bin Laden was killed and I saw an art exhibit in Germany displaying the front pages of newspapers from all over the world from 9/12/01 covered in large headlines quoting former President Bush, "THIS MEANS WAR".  I have even been asked why the United States is still so hung up on 9/11 when terrorist attacks happen all the time and found myself unable to provide a solid answer.

On this day, September 11, 2011, I find myself not just sad for those who died on this day ten years ago, but also for all those who have died since then, everywhere in the world, as well as for those who now suffer from the bad reputation we have given to the religion of Islam.  I was reading an article a friend posted on Facebook about a Dutch Muslim politician and something he said rang very true to me: "On September 11th 2001, terrorists not only hijacked planes and killed innocent people, they, the extremists, also hijacked the religion of Islam".  I am also a little sad at what the American people turned into after 9/11.  It was beautiful to see how united everyone was and how we all banded together to help each other, but that headline on the papers from the next day just sounded barbaric to me now, and the fact that people partied in the streets when Bin Laden was killed made me embarrassed to be an American, especially when I had to try to explain that behavior to my Moroccan friends when I didn't understand it myself.


Overall, I am just not sure how I feel today.  All I can say with certainty is that I really hope the next decade sees more peace and understanding than the last one, from all sides. 

Update: Coincidentally, this post also marks 1 year since I created my blog :)

Home(sick)

I promise, I will write some more posts about what I actually did this summer eventually, but I just talked with my friend about this and decided I want to write a post about it.  She was saying, and I agree, that it's hard to talk about this with people who haven't studied/lived abroad, so maybe someone will find this who feels like no one understands and they will know that they are not alone :)

One of the most difficult and most rewarding parts of studying abroad is setting up a new life in a new place with a new family and new friends.  A wonderful feeling is when you realize that this new place has become home.  Yes, it may not replace your original home, but it becomes a home nonetheless.  Being homesick but feeling at home in this case feels a little odd, but you expect it.  What you don't expect is the reverse when you really do go home.  You are so happy to be home, but after a while that excitement wears off and you realize that you are homesick for your other home.  You are still happy to be home and feel completely at home, and yet you are homesick for this other place that meant nothing to you X months ago.  Maybe this doesn't happen to everyone, but it happened to me.  I didn't realize what the weird feeling was that I had when I came home from Costa Rica until I came home from Morocco: It's weird to feel homesick when you are at home.  I don't know what the answer is because I still feel this way when I stop to think about my other homes, but with time it has gotten easier to let those feelings of homesickness recede a little.  It helps that I really do love being home and my hometown is really where I feel the most at home, but I still ache with homesickness when I think about those other lives, other families, other friends.

I guess these last two posts have kind of been downers, but again I must emphasize that studying abroad is still worth it.  I loved my other homes, my other lives, and you know what they say: Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.  And hey, nothing makes you appreciate home like coming back to it after time away :)

Goodbye

This sounds like a final post, but it actually isn't at all.  It came to my attention today that it has been exactly 4 months since I last posted here.  As my dad pointed out, it was on the last 28th day of a month beginning with the letter A.  To try to get myself back in the habit of writing here so that I can attempt to catch this up to everything I've done, I will write a quick post about the hardest part of this year, on this current 28th day of a month beginning with the letter A...

In getting ready to study abroad, no one ever warns you of how emotionally draining it is to say goodbye.  I expected to be physically tired from all the traveling and packing and mentally tired from all the language- and culture-learning, but somehow I never thought about how exhausting it would be not to set up a new life, but to leave it.  Yes, I am tired of packing and unpacking, of planes and trains and airports and buses, of always having to plan where I will be next, of facing whatever stereotypes of Americans the world has, basically of everything I expected to challenge me this year.  But what has tired me the most, what almost stopped me from going to Berlin this summer, what had me more ready to come home than I have probably ever been in my life is the exhaustion of saying goodbye.

Saying goodbye to people at home was actually easy compared to the goodbyes I said before leaving my homes abroad.  When I said goodbye to my family and friends, I said it knowing that I would be coming back to see them again in the very foreseeable future.  Yes, pulling myself out of my life to go set up a new one somewhere completely different was tiring, but it was such an adventure!  The adrenaline made it easy.  However, when the time came to pack up my life back into suitcases and go back home, I found it much harder to say those goodbyes because, to be perfectly honest, I will probably not see or even talk to a lot of the people who were a part of my life abroad.

Costa Rica was hard, but it was just the first round so I didn't think too much of it while I was in Morocco.  But as the time came to say that second round of goodbyes to another place, another family, another set of friends and teachers and amazing program directors, I wasn't sure I could do it again.  It was around this time that I had to decide if I would go to Berlin for a 4 week program over the summer and I almost couldn't make myself do it because of the daunting task of making new friends only to have to say goodbye to them 4 weeks later.  What finally pushed me to do it was knowing that I could never regret doing it, no matter how much it hurt, but that I would probably regret not doing it.  I hate having regrets, and I don't have any.  When I got home from Morocco, I just remember feeling tired.  I was so tired of goodbyes.  Two rounds of setting up a new life away from home and then ripping myself out of it again was harder than I expected it to be.  But of course it was worth it and I wouldn't change a thing.  And I am so happy I went to Berlin!  There will be more on that later, I hope :)

Basically, the moral of the story is go anyway.  Just do it.  No matter how hard it was to say goodbye, it was so worth it.  I will admit that in the 2 weeks I had to travel after my program in Berlin ended I decided that I just didn't want to meet any new people because if I didn't say hello, I wouldn't have to say goodbye.  Cynical, maybe, but I just couldn't face adding more goodbyes to my list since I still had some old friends to see.  I just want people to realize that those goodbyes will hit you harder than any culture shock ever could.  Maybe they don't tell you about them when you are getting ready to study abroad because it wouldn't matter.  You can't prepare yourself for them.  All you can do is hope that you will see these people and places again one day and appreciate with all your might the life you had because no matter what, it will never be that way again.

After all that time getting ready for this year it feels completely surreal for it to be over.  But then again, after over a year away from my university it will be a whole new adventure that I am getting very excited to go back to...

To those working against me

Here I am, studying abroad in Morocco, enjoying myself and learning about a new culture with the hope that I can help educate people about how not all Muslims are terrorists and Morocco is a safe Muslim country and now some suicide bomber has to go and blow up the cafe I used as a landmark to find my hostel just a few weeks ago.  Not just that, but the students at my university have been protesting for the past 3 weeks and the atmosphere was getting tense until today when it broke.  The added tension of the potential presence of the King in Meknes for the agricultural festival caused a sit-in to turn violent enough that we were told to stay away from campus today.  I feel like up until today, I was definitely helping to spread the understanding that not all Muslims (or any group of people) can be represented by the extremists, but now I fear that all that growth has been or will be undone.

I just hope the world can continue to make the distinction between the few making all the noise and the rest of these peaceful and friendly people...

Excursion Summaries

Sorry this is all I have time to post right now, but here are the random thoughts/memories I jotted down after these trips:

- Volubilis: Roman ruins

-Ifrane/Azrou: A lot of hiking, beautiful view from the top, SNOW!!!

-Fes: Crazy medina, cool pottery places, saw them making mosaics and other ceramic items, leather dying place that smelled horrible but provided fresh mint to smell instead

-Casablanca: Hassan II Mosque was beautiful, got separated from the group with about 5 other students so we just wandered until we found them, later we accidentally (but happily) found ourselves in a gay club, pouring rain in the medina and running from store to store, finding a replacement for my green linen pants that I love but are dying, the successful hunt for Mexican food!

-Rabat: Tour was cool, gloomy weather, lunch at Upstairs, an Irish pub

-Beni Mellal conference on Border Crossing: Good smell, waterfall, Moroccan public speaking = reading the paper, controversy is over existence of problems not the actual stance on the problem

-Asilah: beautiful, art in medina, paradise beach and the forever-long hike to get there, baby kitty Asilah, missed our stop on the way there, almost left Hamid behind, almost changed trains when we didn’t need to, watching the sunset outside by myself, tajines in the house, shopping with the girls (pants, earrings, necklace), woke up early to walk around with M and take pics in the medina, bought breakfast, pancake with chocolate and cookies, lots of Spanish, invite to tea by the guy from Valencia who works in Asilah because it’s easier to find work there than in Spain, annoying teenager following me and M saying/begging “Please! Please! Please!”

Hammam!

Just a warning: This is about a public bath so it will include discussion of partial/full nudity.

ISA organized small group trips to the hammam for our first time, so my first time was with a group of about 5 girls along with Iman, our female ISA director.  We brought our shower supplies and towels, as well as mats, little water scoops, small plastic hair brush things, black soap (made from some part of olives), henna powder, spare underwear, and these little scrubby mitts.  Well, ok Iman brought most of that the first time but I now am in possession of all the hammam supplies!  We walk into the first room, which looks like a locker room, where a few women are laying or sitting down in their towels.  They are clearly done and are just hanging out, relaxing, before they get dressed to leave.  While Iman pays and gets us large buckets, we wonder if we are just supposed to start stripping here or not.  Tentatively, we start, and then a woman walks in and strips as fast as I have to during quick costume changes in dance shows!  This makes us more comfortable, so we strip down to our underwear (no bras), wrap up in our towels, and wait for Iman.  When we are all ready, we walk through a door into a steamy room that is mostly empty, and through to an even hotter and steamier room where there are women seated all around the walls, bathing.  There are two pipes running around the room, one blue for cold water and one red for hot, with little faucets every few feet.  We find a spot where most of us can fit, set down our mats, and start filling out buckets from the faucets.  We sit down and Iman tells us first to just use our scoops to pour warm water on ourselves.  After a few minutes of this, she mixes the black soap and henna powder with some water to make this green slime and tells us to rub it everywhere.  During this, another dancer in my group and I ask Iman if it is ok to take off our underwear since about half of the women in the room were not wearing any and it kind of got in the way.  She seemed surprised, but told us it was perfectly fine, she just never expected American girls to be comfortable with it.  We told her that as dancers and performers, sometimes you have to change in front of other people, so a lot of the time you just get more comfortable with it.  I know it seems weird from an American perspective, but bathing in underwear is just not that comfortable.  Note: Apparently full nudity does not fly in the male hammams.  After covering ourselves in the green slime (or as I like to call it, playing “swamp thing”), we rinse it off.  Iman then shows us how dead skin comes off in rolls if you rub a finger over your arm.  This next part was definitely the most different and memorable part of the hammam experience.  Two at a time, we go to the middle of the room with our mats and our scrubby mitts to where a couple almost naked women (just underwear like everyone else) are waiting to scrub us.  I lie down, and she takes some of the black soap and proceeds to scrub me cleaner than I have ever been in my life.  Without language, she has to point and prod and sometimes just grab me and move me where she wants me to be.  Almost every inch of me was scrubbed, and hard.  It even hurt sometimes, but I just tried to grit my teeth and bear it.  You can say “shwiya, shwiya” (one of our most used words meaning something like “a little”) to get them to lighten up, but I wanted to see what it was like to just let them do their thing.  After being scrubbed, we returned back to our corner to wash our hair and then use our own “nice” smelling soap before a final rinse off.  We used the little plastic brush things while washing our hair and I have actually started using the brush in the shower, too.  It makes it easier to rinse out all the shampoo or conditioner and makes my hair turn out smoother and less tangled.  After this, we walked back out to the locker room, sat for a little bit, got dressed, covered our hair (Moroccans believe wet hair is the quickest way to get sick so you have to cover your hair or they will cover it for you), and went home to relax.  I loved it so much, I have been back about every other week since :)