Two Months in Tangier

by Leah Gilman on September 4, 2011

I wish I had had the time to write all of you while I was still in Morocco, while the smell of fresh orange juice was still waking me up in the mornings and I was sitting in my secret fig tree on the edge of my campus.  But maybe you’ll be glad to hear I spent hardly any time in front of my computer and instead the trip was a whirlwind of travelling any weekend I could and learning the streets of Tangier like it was a new home.

If you don’t know already, I spent my two months summer in Tangier, Morocco on a Critical Languages Scholarship.  To be honest, I felt nervous about going when I left.  I loved my time in Cairo but it was harder than I had expected and wondered if city-life in Tangier would resemble my previous trip much.

But it didn’t.  On my first day in Tangier a couple friends and I wandered through the old medina, nibbling on street food and trying to convince the people we passed that no, we don’t speak French or Spanish.  Yes, we actually speak Arabic…shwaya. At some point we came to the edge of the cliff overhanging the Strait of Gibraltar.  Leaving the sweet shade of the ancient white apartment buildings, we scrambled down to the water.  I don’t know how many times I stumbled because I was starring at the ocean instead of where my feet were falling.  After we had rolled up our pants to dip our feet in the water, I looked up and saw my first glimpse of Spain’s coast across from me.  And suddenly I was absolutely in love with Tangier.  I could see myself living there one day.  I wanted to call it home.   I wanted to know the names of all the streets and all the people buzzing in them.

Over the next 62 days I did my very best to do just that.  I will always be an outsider to the city in a lot of ways. But in others I had become part of its daily rhythm, or during Ramadan, its nightly song.   It’s not hard to become immersed in the city that way; I hardly met a single person who didn’t want to share a moment or hour of their life with me and just like many places in the Middle East, people will drop everything in a second to offer you their tea and stories.

If there’s anything I can offer you for your future trips abroad it’s this; make the most detail oriented log of your trip you can.  A diary.  A blog. A list of the places you went.  Because even just two months felt like an absolute blur to me but now I have a 24 page Word document that covers every single one of my days in Morocco.  Every night when I got back to the campus I would write what I did that day, where I went, what I felt, who I met.  If you read through it maybe you’ll find patterns or gaps that you’d like to fill.  For me that meant one month into the trip I realized I was able to get to know Moroccans on a certain level but not on others because my Arabic was limited.  I could talk about politics, protests, my general life and theirs, but I wasn’t truly getting to know the people I met on a deeper level.  Pushing myself to get outside my comfort zone in Arabic was difficult.  For advanced Arabic speakers we all know how to discuss the Arab Spring backwards and forwards.  But honestly asking someone what makes them tick in a foreign language probably doesn’t feel very natural to us.  With classes my knowledge of vocabulary and grammar grew but it took me a month to wake up and realize if I wanted to form real relationships with Moroccans I would have to walk into unknown Arabic language territory.

Some conversations I ran into dead ends or failed to communicate exactly what I meant.  But especially towards the end of the trip I at least started to feel like I was truly getting to know the people I shared tea with.  It’s a start anyway and an incredibly rewarding one to say the least.

I don’t know if the Flagship program will continue in Morocco but I’ll be returning inshahallah.  If you ever make it to the beautiful country I’ll recommend to my friends visiting every coffee shop you can find in Tangier, the old medina in Fes, and my very favorite place, the village of Chefchaouen that sits in the Rif Mountains and where all the buildings are painted an airy blue.

(I posted pictures on our flickr site if you’d like to take a look at all this beauty I’m talking about: http://www.flickr.com/photos/utarabicflagship/)