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chartreuse327
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Name: Katie
Gender: Female
Interests: music...canada...my family...fresh fruit...fresh vegetables...pottery...the mountains...london...knitting... spanish...the wallace bros...sushi...ion zupcu... toblerone...diego rivera...my friends...birds...books... green tea...russian tea...coca tea... most other kinds of tea...simon & garfunkel...very dark chocolate... bookstores...fish...pupusas...curious george...olivia ruiz...bare feet...pen and ink drawings...the zoo... children...laughter...dried cranberries.
Expertise: i can probably knit better than you.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
Member Since:
2/9/2006
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| after a long dry stretch of no news from katie, here i am for one last update. at least, i'm assuming it will probably be the last; a couple of computers have developed some serious issues (probably has something to do with people checking email twice daily!), so it's increasingly difficult to track one down.
OH WELL, here i am!
time has passed so quickly; it's hard for all of us to believe that we're in the last week of this trip. what happened? it seems as though the end will never get here, and also that it's coming much more quickly than i'd like. this week will be mostly full of writing final papers and a visit on wednesday to sevilla; we also have a guy visiting from barcelona who's leading a workshop on islamophobia, which (so far) has been really interesting. he has some good stuff to say, and a lot of it seems to line up with what i've seen and experienced. so he will be here until tomorrow, talking about different factors in how we perceive islam and about his own conversion story (i think he was probably born into a catholic family in spain and converted later--fairly common story among spanish muslims), which i'm very excited to hear.
otherwise, goodness, what have i been doing?--we've returned a couple of times to cordoba, including a second visit to the mosque; i've been looking around the city for a group of old churches. there are fourteen of them altogether that were built or converted from mosques between the 12th and 15th centuries (side note: on my map of cordoba, "modern cordoba" consists of things built between the 15th and 19th centuries). i found five of them, and was able to see the insides of two; they're really pretty little churches, some of which are distinctly muslim in flavor. it's a fun project (although i think that it's done now, since as far as i know we have no more free time in cordoba).
the weather has been colder for the last few days, highs in the 50s. it's amazing how cold it feels. the house doesn't exactly have heat... there are heaters in all the bedrooms, but the main spaces are essentially open to the outside. so we wander around in huge warm comforters and sweaters all the time. i washed my jeans yesterday and am now hoping they dry fairly quickly, because in the meantime i'm wearing capris and really miss that extra foot or so of fabric.
and now for another last thing: as far as i know, again, tonight will be our last meal out in montoro. there are a couple of restaurants that we like to visit, one of which serves aMAzing garlic shrimp, and we'll be going there in a few minutes. another goodbye in the midst of all the others.
thank you so much, all of you that have been following this blog and keeping up with me and my wandering. i deeply appreciate your thoughts and prayers for me, and i'm very much looking forward to telling you more in person!
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| i'm still in awe of a climate where roses are blooming great guns in november, and in which i see orange trees and lemon trees in every plaza of every town or city. it has, evidently, been unusually cold this year (we seem to bring bad weather with us, given that it first sandstormed and then snowstormed on our return from the desert); even so, i went on a walk yesterday with michelle and had to take off my jacket. preposterous!
the past week has been a full one, as we try to readjust to real live homework. the complexity of relationships between islam and christianity is overwhelming at times, since i'm trying to catch up with 1400 years of history and to understand the modern end of things; spain (especially the northern province of catalunya and its capital, barcelona) hosts a large and constantly growing muslim population, and we hear a wide range of opinions on this issue: some people are terrified that "the moors are coming to invade again"--apparently forgetting that spain has much more recently controlled a significant chunk of morocco than the reverse--while others are trying to revive the (somewhat idealized) state of convivencia, "co-living," that existed in the 13th and 14th centuries. so we're spending quite a bit of time in cordoba, which was the capital of al-andalus when the muslims were at the height of their power, and which still shows a lot of arabic influence; we also meet up in both spanish and english to talk about the reading and reflecting that occupies a LOT of time from day to day. (just as a sign of the times, most of us haven't hand-written papers since we were ten. oh, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!)
i think that this is the agenda for the coming week, at least as i understand it.
monday: about 2 or 3 hours of classes
tuesday: visit to madinat al-zahra, which was one of the richest palaces/imperial cities that ever existed... sadly, it's mostly in ruins now. and also i think we're going to an olive museum place that day
wednesday: leave for granada at 10--i think it's about 4 hours away--to see the last muslim holding in spain, where the nasrid dynasty clung on until 1492.
thursday: tour granada more extensively. =the alhambra, which is basically incredible, an old fortress and palace that's one of the more remarkable examples of muslim architecture in the world. no big deal.
friday: we might have a little more time in granada, but also at some point we'll come back to montoro.
just in passing, i find myself missing arabic. specifically what about it, i'm not sure exactly. it's a pity that we were only able to do about a month of it. i also wonder from time to time what i'm going to do when i can't eat four or five amazing and delicious oranges every day, but i try not to think about that too much.
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| oh dear. this is going to be a problematic update, i sense, given that it's been several weeks, all of which have been action-packed. where to start?
at last update, i think we had returned from chefchaouen, the little blue city. we'd been trying to get to the sahara desert, as originally was planned in the morocco segment, but there's been serious flooding in a lot of morocco during the past few weeks, some of which was impeding our trip into the anti-atlas mountains in the south of northern morocco. BUT! we finally were able to go on our desert trip, and in fact got to spend an extra day away from fes--a nice treat, it's true. so we left fas on thursday morning and spent most of our day on the road, through the mountains and across farmland and by more mountains and a lake or two: amazing scenery. some of the girls in our group said it reminded them of utah; i've never been there, but i will happily say tht i've never seen anything like it. we stayed in a preposterously ritzy hotel that night, and headed on into the desert the next afternoon. definitely we got lost somewhere... it was awesome... and there was sand blowing everywhere and herds of CAMELS wandering around. oh my. and then we arrived at our second ritzy hotel and got ready to head for the desert.
my camel that day didn't take too kindly to me right away... and by that i mean that he definitely stood up before i was settled on his back, so that i was clinging for dear life with my hands and one leg till he got himself situated, and i could safely fall off. but in spite of that mishap, he was less grouchy the second time, and i got perched and we headed off into the sand. we had beautiful weather. it wasn't very hot, and while there was some blowing sand, it wasn't bad. plus, we had our cool berber-blue scarves, purchased earlier that day and tied ali-baba style (read: like tourists pretending to be local!). the ride was about two hours into the desert, to an oasis--complete with palm trees--where we stayed the night. some of us tackled the huge dune by camp--i mean HUGE--and some of us pulled our matresses out from the tents so we could sleep under the stars, which were incredible. we got up then early the next morning--in time for the sunrise--to head back to our hotel, and arrived at about 8 or 8.30. we had the rest of that day to relax, which was a life-saver (camel saddles aren't the most comfortable, and going downhill is a bit terrifying so i was holding on extra tight for half the trip, which equates to a very saddle-sore katie). the next day we travelled back to fas.
classes ended that week, with a very easy exam and elections immediately following. a lot of us stayed up all election night to see the results, and were (generally) delighted with obama's victory. quite a few moroccans mentioned him to me the next day, and were very curious to see what i thought of him; i have met no pro-mccain folk on this trip, and mostly i don't talk about bush. but obama is very popular here, so at least the city of fes agrees with the election.
last friday, then, we headed out of fes for the last time, squished into our large van and smallish car (the luggage was a tight fit, since most of us were bringing with us a fair bit more than we arrived with!); the small windy roads and airless van, plus the smell of my t-shirt--it was clean, but it smelled as though it had been dried over a period of about a week, which is precisely what happened-- combined to make me feel pretty carsick. but i switched seats with alejandro to sit up by the driver, and talked with him for a while. an interesting guy. he drives all over morocco with tour groups, although he can't leave the country; i asked where his favorite part was, and the immediate reply was fes (duh). he, like a lot of moroccans, seemed a lot more open-minded than some of our spanish host families were, interestingly enough.
AND NOW HERE WE ARE, back in spain. you should all google images of montoro, because it's really neat. we're all living in a house called casa maika for this last month, cooking our meals (eggs again! and real whole grains! you have no idea how exciting this really is) and washing clothes and studying sometimes, except for when i decide to update my blog instead of writing my stuff for class. montoro is very small, much smaller than cadiz, and is about 40 km away from cordoba, which was once the cultural capital of spain. we visited the great mosque today, one of the largest in the muslim world, really; when it was still truly a mosque, it could hold 20 000 worshipers. i've (once again) never seen anything like it, either in terms of the amazing islamic architecture or the ugliness of the cathedral plopped right in the middle of it. it's not that the cathedral is so ugly, exactly, but for the 21st century observer, it's really a pity that the 13th-century conquerers were so dumb as to add one more cathedral to the world right in the middle of this masterpiece. ugh, i sound like a guidebook, but i definitely mean it.
a lot of our time here is dedicated to studying moorish-spanish relationships--the more historical end of things-- and anabaptist-christian relationships. we have class a few times a week, and will also be spending a lot of time in cordoba. next week, we'll be in granada for a few days: very exciting. there's so much to learn; i know more than some folks about this whole crazy place, but there's so much under the surface or under the under the surface. we'll see wht i can pick up in the next weeks.
apologies for this mercilessly long update! it's hard to get my hands on a computer for very long, so i'm not sure how much i'll post during the last little bit of our time. oh well. cheers everyone! and hugs all around.
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| our trip to the desert was once again postponed, due this time to a combination of bad weather in the mountains and massive flooding farther west. we're hoping that we'll still be able to go, although some of our families and teachers are a little doubtful that it will work. we'll see. if it's safe enough and we have enough time, we'll try to make that happen.
even so, we did get in a trip this weekend--moved up a trip that was supposed to happen later, to chefchauoen, a little city in the northern part of morocco. after the muslims and jews were finally expelled from spain in 1492, a lot of them chose to resettle in chefchauoen, the result being a strong spanish flavor in the architecture of the city. moira had told us beforehand that everything in the city was blue--that used to be the case in several cities, i think, that there was one common color for everything; in meknes i thought it may have been pink, at one time. so when i first caught a glimpse of chefchauoen, i was a little disappointed; only maybe a third of what i could see was blue.
but oh my. we took a walking tour of the medina and of the ruins of a monastery halfway up the mountain on saturday, and the city is in fact blue. the bottom story at least, and most of the doors, and streets with no outlets, are all varying shades of light blue. it's beautiful... add to that the combination of tile roofs, surrounding mountains, and exhaust-free air (that in direct contrast to fes!), and we ended up in one of our favorite parts of morocco.
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| so.
originally the plan for this weekend was to travel into the desert for a day and spend the night there... but the weather for our bus trip back to fes was predicted to be awful--rain and snow all through the mountains--so, at the last minute on friday we changed our plans. we'll go to the desert next weekend, and instead we travelled yesterday to the ruined roman city of Volubilis and to Meknes, which is the mother of fes, they say. it was another of the ancient imperial capitals, as was fes; the two cities were i think founded by the same person, hence the "mother of fes" part.
so we left at about 9 on friday, travelling in a big van and an SUV-ish thing. it took about two hours to get to volubilis, on very bumpy roads, but for me it was well worth it. it was wonderful to be in a big (BIG!) open space with actual moving air again--hard to find in the medina, i tell you. it was really warm and sunny, and the ruins are on the top of a hill, so we could see for miles. it was beautiful. the ruins themselves are in more or less good condition. a lot of the buildings can be clearly identified, if you know what to look for--i don't, but our multilingual guide does, so it was okay. you can find the old steam baths, and see the main street, and the temple, the marketplace, and the court senate thinger. there's rubble everywhere, but it's very nicely organized rubble  there are also still several old mosaics on the floors in some places: the 12 works of hercules, the story of medusa and perseus, a fisherman, bacchus and ariadne, and one of my personal favorites, which was called the tree of life, i think. they're still open to the air, which is pretty incredible; you can't walk on them, but there they are. beautiful. there was a man selling prickly pear fruits, and someone wandering around selling postcards for way too much. we spent about two or three hours there, all told... i enjoyed it very much (obviously).
after that we headed to meknes, about 45 minutes away. we had reservations for lunch in a pretty ritzy hotel (i felt rather ostentatiously foreign): fresh vegetables, some of which we could eat; tajine of chicken and carrots and potatoes (tajine means both the rather distinctive dish the meal gets cooked in, and also the food inside the dish); and the best bread i've had since we got here. so we all ate too much and then they fed us some fruit besides, and THEN sent us up to the terrace for tea ("berber whiskey," said the man, as he poured it... in reference to the indigenous and generally very poor people of morocco, some of whom continue to live traditionally in the desert, preserving their own language and customs and such). i think we were supposed to tour the city a little more than we actually did, but we saw the equivalent of bab boujloud, the door from which we catch our taxis, and we got to see the mausoleum of the kings, about which i know almost nothing, but it was beautiful. we saw open space!--it was bizarre! almost like a plaza or something. it was the size of two football fields, maybe, and had stores and restaurants all around it, and a market that was pretty swell. so i went with steven r and abigail to the market and we walked around and smelled spices and took pictures of a cow's head in one of the meat stalls and looked at tables and tables and tables of sweets and i got to hold a baby chameleon he was rather cute, in that weird little lizard-with-eyes-pointing-in-two-directions-way. and the same shopkeeper had a turtle that was trying to escape. i tried to take a picture but (not even joking) the turtle was going too fast. ridiculous!
after that, i at least was feeling tired an a little over-stimulated, and i'm pretty sure i wasn't the only one; we headed back to fes, and at least in the SUV most of us slept the whole way.
it wasn't a desert. but it was pretty nifty anyways.
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