Tapas!

Well, here i am at a bus station in spain waiting to take a bus to Sevilla. We have a week of brea from school, so i´m on a much needed break with 3 other teachers. we took a train then ferry to get to Tarifa, Spain. Tarifa is a really cool beach town that´s known for it´s surfing. The first thing I noticed in Tarifa is that it was so clean and i didn´t have to avoid looking at men - not that i would be staring at them, but in Africa i have trained myself to avoid looking at any faces! it is definitely refreshing to not have that in my subconscious. In Tarifa we found the Tourist Info office and found out that the bus we could take that would take us near to the beach town we wanted to get to didn´t leave until 5:30 & we would get to that small town around 8 and have to figure out how to get to hte little beach town from there. So we decided to splurge and take a taxi which was expensive but got us into the little town where we were headed by 3pm. It was the only night we didn´t have reservations for, so we wanted to make sure to get here before nightfall.

i had read on the internet that there was an annual tapas festival (little spanish appetizers) in this beach town. We were taking a gamble b-c i couldn´t find any tourist info on the town until right before we left (http://www.sanlucar.to/) so we weren´t really sure what to expect. We found a family run pension right on a cute town square. it was a tiny room, but not much at all b-w the 4 of us. the couple that owned the place live on the lower level and were really cute trying to communicate with us with our little spanish (they spoke no english). there were fair booths set up all over this one plaza downtown. the food was fabuloso! we would order a little tapas plate and each take a bite of whatever was on it and then if we liked it, order another plate or two, then move to the next booth. my favorite was a skewer of shrimp, crab & ham in garlic butter sauce. it was incredible & cheap!

today we are trying to leave sanlucar, but we couldnt find bus schedules from the internet, so we wandered around til we found the bus station and now we are taking a bus up to Sevilla and then over to Huelva and then on to a tiny beach town in portugal. we´ll come back from portugal in 3 days and spend our last 3 days in Sevilla.

Hasta luego!

All I Need to Know I Learned from a Taxi Driver...

I'm learning that one of the most interesting parts of living in this mega-metropolis in North Africa is the perspective on life that I get from the taxi drivers that I meet everyday. Many of the drivers ask if I am French, but the answer that I am American often brings a big smile. I have learned about everything from the first international agreement of the United States (the one that George Washington petitioned the Sultan for to aid in fighting off pirates), to where to sit in the football (soccer) stadium, to the woes of trying to obtain a US visa to join your 2nd wife in america... Wishing them a Happy Ramadan in Arabic (it sounds something like "my broke washer") brings an even greater smile and plenty of (undeserved) compliments!

Ramadan Birthday Party

Today was the first day of the Ramadan fast. I decided after much reflection to fast with the rest of society here. The muslim fast begins at the sunrise call to prayer - I'm not usually awake for that since it is around 5am right now, I think. Most people get up before that call to prayer in order to eat before the day's fast begins. Once the fast begins there is no eating or drinking (even water!!) until the sunset call to prayer. It was much harder to not drink anything through out the day than to skip the food. It did give me a chance to spend some extra time in prayer during my lunch break. The reason for the fast, as explained by my Muslim friends, is to learn to empathyze with the poor and also to spend extra time in prayer. The five calls to prayer per day are especially heeded throughout the month. After the evening call to prayer, the fast is broken with ftur - breakfast. Traditionally they eat dates and milk, then shebekia (a pastry), then harira (a hearty soup of chick peas and other veggies & meat). Then there is a pause in the feast schedule before dinner is served, sometimes as late as midnight or one AM!

This year the first day of Ramadan also fell on my friend Manal's birthday. She is new to our city and her family lives about 3 hours away, so I wanted to make sure she had a fabulous birthday celebration as well as a "family" around her for the first ftur of Ramadan. About 12 girlfriends gathered in our apartment and we had an awesome time celebrating and feasting. She was really touched that we cared enough to make the day special for her. Here are some pictures...

Dates & Olive Crepes (?) - to break the fast

Harira Soup

Friends to help celebrate!

Birthday Cheesecake :)

Care to join us?

The Hammam de Luxe

The Hammam de Luxe

This week I ventured out to have a second hammam experience. If you didn’t read about the first one, you need to go read that first – it was an adventure! This experience was completely different. Mary (who went with me the first time) had told me all about this luxurious hammam that is more like a spa than the traditional bathhouse. It is conveniently located right in our neighborhood on one floor of a ritzy sports club (I don’t think they really do too much in the way of sports there – the only schedule I saw there was for men & women’s spinning times). We paid about $11 each at the desk for use of the hammam plus a scrubbing and massage and then went up to the ladies hammam floor which smelled delightfully like one of Bethany's Aveda candles. We were greeted in French (o happy day!) by a très chic young receptionist who offered us cute flip-flops to wear in the hammam rooms and keys for two lockers.

This hammam was beautifully decorated with deep red and ivory tiles. About halfway up the tiled walls was a row of fancy tiles, and above that the walls and ceiling were painted an intense crimson red. The changing room was spotlessly clean and we went from there into the sauna room. We warmed up in the steamy sauna opening up our pores, soaping up with special hammam soap and breathing in the steam until we couldn’t stand the heat. Then we ventured out into the main washroom and sat on stone stools and filled up tiled basins that jutted out of the walls opposite the stools. We chatted with a couple other women who were soaping up at the basins. One of them is due with her second baby in another month. They welcomed us warmly to their country.

As the scrubbers finished with the women ahead of us, we were called over to the marble tables. I shuttered at the thought of stretching out on the cold marble slab (no ice cream mixing here though!). As I lay down I realized with delight that they were heated marble slabs. This experience just kept getting better. The woman scrubbing me welcomed me warmly to the hammam – she didn't recognize me and assumed it was my first experience at this establishment. As we exchanged a few pleasantries she welcomed me to her country as well. She taught me a few words in Arabic – although I am not sure I should say she taught them to me. Rather, she had me repeat a few words in Arabic until I got the pronunciation somewhat recognizable, and then her eyes would light up as she heard the Arabic word come stumbling off of my confused Western tongue.

When she finished scrubbing as many spare skins cells as she could find, and a good number of not-so-spare ones too, off of my body (this part really hurts – I think I need to find a less abrasive scrubbing glove), she told me to go shampoo my hair and then come back for the massage. I washed my hair over at the basins and exchanged a few words with the pregnant lady about how clean I felt and what a good job of scrubbing the lady had done. Then I went back for round two at the tables. The scrubbing is like the healthy portion of yucky (hhmm, I’m trying to think of something healthy that I really don’t like…) scrambled eggs (are those healthy?) that you eat because they are necessary to good health, but the massage is like Kim’s yummy coconut crème brulee or tiramisu from Dante’s on Route 10 or Rae’s pumpkin cheesecake or Donna’s strawberry shortcake or Dan’s lemon tarte or Tracey's pecan squares (notice I have no trouble coming up with yummy desserts!) for dessert – good thing it comes second or I might escape before the scrubbing!

The massage started off at the head – wow! Bill would be jealous of that head massage! Then she worked all the way down to the toes and stretched out my arm and leg muscles at funny angles to make sure I was really relaxed before working her way back up the to my head. My head got massaged from all possible angles. By the time she was done I was definitely relaxed.

After saying "shookran" (thank you) in as many ways as I know how, I made my way back to the lockers to find some clean clothes. What an experience! I was as clean as could be and more relaxed than I have been since I arrived. As we got dressed the receptionist came and asked if we wanted water or freshly squeezed juice to be brought to the relaxing room. Yes, there is actually a debriefing room with lounge chairs and women congregate there drinking fresh juice and chatting before heading back out to the real world of never ending work and catcalls from odd men on the streets.