Day 10: Eat, Drink, and Tea Merry

Monday, July 1

Goodness gracious. Would you look at that date! I'm almost caught up!

You know what time it is?! It's time for another lesson in Cultural Adventures!!

 Part 4: Tea.

"What about second breakfast? And elevensies? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper?"

Yes, Pippin, there will always be afternoon tea.

Everyone in Morocco drinks tea. Most of the time, it's mint tea with sugar. And I mean sugar. And it's hot. They have an almost ritualized tea pouring ceremony. There is a special way to prepare it and pour it. If you care enough, you can watch this really boring video!

(Or at least the part where he's pouring it, which is around 3:04)

Everyone enjoys the tea, and they drink it normally around 5 times a day. Naturally, they don't understand when a person doesn't drink tea. Like me. I just... I don't like it. It's one of the only things that the smell is so overpowering for me, I can't even get it close to my face. It kind of makes me a rude American jerkface, but there's nothing I can do. It's not one of those flavors that I can just pretend to like.

Me and tea.

Fortunately, the host mother understands. Sort of. Not really. She doesn't try to force it on me anymore, at least.

Blasphemous

They also drink a lot of coffee here too, another thing I just so happen to not like, which makes me extra, super weird. Tea is more of a classically cultural Moroccan thing more-so than coffee, but men do sit around in coffee shops a lot during their free time and talk and read newspapers. (Women, however, do not go to coffee shops. The cafe is a place for men. Women, if they want to hang out in a similar environment, must find a sweet shop or something along those girly lines, but not a cafe. It's just too manly for us to handle.)

My day was good. Classes always feel kind of long, but that's just how that goes.

At the apartment, Noura is having some repainting and fixing done about the house, so there tends to be people here a lot. She's got the kitchen table shoved against the wall, the chairs stacked on top, and all her kitchen-y things put away. She basically spent her day constantly going, cleaning, making tea, etc. So when dinner time rolled around, she did not want to make it.

So she took us to a fancy restaurant! There was a pool, live music, and go-kart racing (?). But it was nice. We never saw a menu, though. Noura ordered for us. So we got soup, bread, dates, and a hard-boiled egg. Yaay. The same thing we would have had at home.

Oh well. The ambiance was nice at least.

It was a nice, cool night, so nobody was eating inside.

Then Noura drove us around the city to explore some. She stopped at the top of this hill where can see all of the city sprawled out beneath it. There were probably about ten other cars on this hill, and they all had dudes leaning against the sides of them, waiting for the ladies. Needless to say, we didn't stick around. But before we left, I got this lovely picture of Meknes!

You can almost make out a city in there!

There seems to be a lot of really cool places to go in the city, but they're really inconvenient and rather far from where we live, and it's harder to get a taxi at night because (a.) they're all full, and (b.) they're harder to see coming.

But all in all, it was a good day, right up until I had to stay up late and do my homework. Mmmmeh.