My Funny Valentine

A week or so before Valentine’s Day, Marrakech was swept up in Ashura celebrations. Ashura, which means “tenth” in Arabic, falls on the tenth day of the first month of the Islamic calendar, or Muharram, which is considered the second holiest month after Ramadan. The grandson of the prophet Mohammad was martyred on this day during the Battle of Karbala. At any rate, the martyr is honored with much musical merriment, especially drumming, by the local kids. Drums were on sale at every corner – hourglass shaped instruments with goat or fish skin stretched tightly across their tops – and the kids banged on them long into the night, for several nights, come to think of it, in a tunelesss, trancelike manner that would have been more welcome in a discoteque than our “backyard.”

It wasn’t until a few days later that we heard from Hamoud about Ashura’s other significance: as one of the few, perhaps only, Islamic holidays for women, and for black magic besides. He arrived blushing one morning while Amanda and I chatted over our morning pot of tea. “I have a story,” he offered, “but it’s a very bad story, and I should not tell you.” He might as well have said he had an elixir for immortality in his pocket; we weren’t going to let him out of the house without divulging what promised to be a juicy tale.




On the night of Ashura, he explained, men must be very careful when they sleep with their wives, especially men who have mistresses. Evidently, if a woman suspects that her husband is entertained in beds other than the marital one, she will entreat him to have sex with her that night. Instead of completing the act as if to produce progeny, the woman will collect her husband’s semen and wrap it up in a tissue, which she then hides beneath her pillow. The next day, she brings the specimen to an herbalist that practices black magic and has her create spell of fidelity for her husband. “If you like your mistress,” finished Hamoud, “it’s best not to sleep with your wife on Ashura. Tell her you have a headache,” he said with a laugh.

I’ve given the précis of the story, but let me tell you, when Hamoud first recounted it, he employed many a euphemism, such that Amanda and I weren’t positive we were clear on what he was saying and had to reconfirm details and ask him to elaborate several times. It was the equivalent of having the sex talk with your parents, or like the Friday months ago when Hamoud and a bunch of his friends decided to educate Samuel and I on why men wash before going to mosque on a Friday and why women are regarded as “dirty.” His delicious mortification in the telling led to our own increased embarrassment as the text of the story dawned on us. By the end, we were all scarlet-faced and giggling.

Later, we wondered if the herbalists take advantage of the holiday like the chocolatiers and florists do Valentine’s Day. Do they advertise in their windows, reminding women that there are just three days left until Ashura? Is there price gauging on the 11th when women are lined up at the door, Kleenex in hand, like so many scorned lovers?

When we asked Hamoud if he’d ever fallen under a black magic spell, he shuddered theatrically and said, “Oh, it is powerful, the black magic. I cannot tell . . .” Kiss and tell, indeed!

Older, but not Wiser

Bundling into Josh and Sandra’s car, we hit the road to Oukaimden for a skiing adventure in celebration of Josh's birthday. With skiers on both sides of our families, hell, you’d think we’d be looking forward to this. But we’ve managed to visit family in Vail for years without hitting the slopes once and the fear of getting hurt while trying to impress myself is real. As we snaked our way above the snow line, a 7-year-old Berber girl danced on the side of the road in time to the music inside our car, and others stood watching the passing stream of cars, which provide the daily entertainment on this bleak hillside.



We crept into the town’s carnival atmosphere with people clogging the streets and made our way past ugly mountain condo architecture to a rental house stocked with skis that would have been deemed old the last time we hit the slopes a decade ago. While we were resigned to skiing in old-school cotton cargo pants, we managed to sweet talk the owner into renting us a couple pairs of Gortex gloves – something we haven’t had in years – and promised to return his equipment by closing at 5pm. Of course, the Dowe-Sandes snickered to ourselves – there was no way we’d still be skiing at that point – a couple of runs and we’d be content to wile away the rest of the afternoon nursing hot chocolates in the sun.



The parking lot, as we drove from the rental shack towards the lift, was littered with aggressive kids trying to sell us cheap trinkets and bags of herbs, of the culinary variety. Josh wondered why none of them has considered a business ferrying skiers and their equipment from the lot up to the lift – a 15-minute walk, which at altitude (Oukaimden is Africa’s highest ski resort!) and in ski boots through 18 inches of dense snow, was a struggle. And on our so-called fresh legs, no less. When Josh suggested the ferrying enterprise to a man selling snacks at the bottom of the lift, he though it was “a good idea, insha’allah.”

A quick warm-up run on the rope tow reminded us that this skiing thing could be fun, but also that skiing is not like riding a bike. If we were once mediocre skiers, those were now our glory days. The spring-like conditions, while nice for a tan, made the snow a challenge. The relentless grooming we remembered from New England mountains was absent, and the deep heavy snow made it nearly impossible for us to turn: something that, as we were soon to remember, is crucial to skiing. But on the sunny, sunny bunny slope we sailed down blithely, taking in the fresh mountain air.



We got our legs warmed up in time for lunch and repaired to Juju, the local French restaurant, for some wild boar and cassoulet and a round of beers. As we basked in the sun, we turned around and saw a cloud role through the mountain dropping visibility to nil. This prompted all sort of cheerful stories about survival and death in the wilderness just as we headed back out.




Though the two of us felt we could honestly say we’d gone skiing, Josh was determined to take the lift to the top. “The view, the view,” he kept repeating. We noticed that something like 90% of the visitors to Oukaimden treat the mountain like a park: they walk, they toss snowballs, they take pictures. What they don't do is ski. In fact, most of the people waiting in the lift line intended to ride the lift to the top for the view and then turn right around and ride it on down. For Moroccan youths, the 45-minute round-trip on the chairlift provides some welcome privacy. As we made our descent, we looked down at the jagged rocks and nearly empty mountain. I would say “empty trails,” except there were none. This was free skiing, pure and simple.

Indeed, as we reached the top the view was stunning as promised and we looked out over a blanket of clouds below us. Josh and Sandra were determined to ski down - the Dowe-Sandes less so. Hadn’t they seen the terrain from the lift, we whispered to each other. “We saw the view. Now let’s take the lift down with everyone else,” I suggested. Somehow, gravity beat out sanity, and Josh lied to a local guide that we were all good skiers. And once you commit, you commit. We attempted a few hairpin turns dodging rocks, and then the mountain opened up before us, wide and steep. Groomed, or with light powder, this would have been a fun challenge. But in the hard, heavy snow, unable to turn, this was ill advised at best. By now it was 4:30, and the sun was off our side of the mountain, leaving a blue light and temperatures dropping precipitously. Each of us improvised our own way of turning, though nobody had better than a 20% success rate. Each failed turn led to a face plant in the snow, and our reactions varied from laughter to scowls. In response to a faint yelp, we turned to see Sandra half-buried in the snow clutching her knee in pain. Her skis sailed past us, gathering speed before they cart wheeled to a stop hundreds of feet below. We’d covered perhaps a twentieth of the slope, and Sandra would now be shuffling the rest of the way on her butt. This was not skiing, in any sense, but rather trying to get down the mountain in one piece, before the sun went down. Break a leg in Vail, and the world’s top orthopedic surgeons wait for you at the bottom on the mountain. Break a leg in Ouikamden, and well, good luck to you.



Would we be mentioned in next year's Darwin Awards? Slowly, and with myriad images of death-by-stupidity in our heads, we tumbled towards the chairlift's midway station, hoping for a ride down. Sandra, meanwhile, was careening down the precipice at a terrifying speed, Josh hot at her heels. With a wrenched knee and no skis, we reasoned a sled was the only way to get her to safety. After prolonged negotiations with the midway station agent, a rescue sled, which Sandra described as very Joseph Buyes, was secured and the elegant injured one dragged across the face of the mountain to the lift. Once Sandra and Caitlin were loaded onto the chairlift and headed down, and despite the last half-hour of terror, Josh suggested, without so much as a wink or a smirk, that we might finish the run.

And so, as we celebrate a birthday with a bit of mountain danger, it seems that while we keep getting older, we do not, as promised, get wiser.

Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble

“Let’s go to the hammam today,” Amanda declared over breakfast. Some readers might recall our guest blog entry a few months back from Laura Fitzgerald, describing a rather gruesome trip to a hammam in Fes. Her tale instilled a level of trepidation about venturing through the doors of the steamy local baths that I’ve been unable to overcome. The hammam has actually become a sort of mythical place in my mind where one is manhandled, naked, among staring Moroccan women, skin raked off with a sandpapery gommage glove, too hot water poured over exposed pink flesh followed by the inevitable pounding by the house masseuse. Perhaps not the ideal way to issue in a new day. But hey, this is Amanda’s vacation and we’re looking to push our comfort zones a bit, so I agreed to the excursion.

Hanan, our cleaning woman and protector, set off to the souks in search of the necessary hammam accoutrements. She returned with two plastic buckets, bubblegum pink flip-flops (how she managed to find size 10s in a country where women top out at around five feet and have shoes the length of my hand attests to her myriad skills), gommage gloves, a plastic bag filled with gooey black soap, several softer hand mitts for regular soaping, a plastic mat that might have been a yoga mat but for its lurid palm-tree print, and a pair of small plastic bowls – also pink – used for scooping water from the larger buckets. We packed up our own towels, shampoo and moisturizer and headed over to the Ben Slimane hammam, which is just around the corner from our house. One of my favorite smells on the route to and from our house is the clean, soapy smell that emanates from the hammam, along with that of the burning wood used to heat its chambers. Most days, there’s a wagon mounded with wood chips parked at its door, its mule lazily chomping on a pile of greens.

Upon entering, we paid 8 dirhams apiece and were ushered into a changing room, where we stripped to our skivvies and then modestly tied oversized white bath towels around our bodies before dropping off our bags at the “coat check” (another 20 dirhams). Modesty didn’t last long. No sooner had we entered the first steam room, where we’d been led by a rotund headscarved woman of indeterminate middle age, than she grabbed our towels and unfurled us like two reluctant flags. A small naked boy of about five looked up at us in horror. “Where have these two white aliens descended from, and mummy make them disappear,” his look said.

It’s worth noting that the temperature outside (and inside our indoor-outdoor house) is in the low 60s these days, and the nights are downright freezing. Amanda has gamely doubled up her socks and donned a djellabah – this is a girl with significant NOLS experience, e.g., she knows how to stave off hypothermia – but even so, we were both looking forward to the warmth of the hammam. Within minutes of entering the first steamy room, our body temperature had gone up at least 10 degrees, and we weren’t sure if the heat or the embarrassment had turned our skin Marrakech red.

“It’s kinda like learning how to take a bath again, isn’t it?” Amanda asked as the various hammam staffers and clients directed us to fill our buckets from the scalding tap, cop a squat on our yoga mat, and then slather our now perspiring bodies with gooey black soap. An eighteen-year-old girl with perfect skin and perky breasts of the sort that inspire both envy and nostalgia cozied up to us and offered to help with the gommage, or luffahing, that follows the black soap application. At this point, we were both sitting cross-legged on the mat in a room with about 20 other woman of all shapes and ages in various stages of bath. Steam rose from the tile floor and from the buckets of water littered about the room. For the first time in Morocco, we felt part of a community of women and instead of averting their eyes and shrinking away from us as most do on the streets, they adopted us, admittedly like two curiosities, into their inner sanctum. Stripped down to our undies, maybe we’re all just girls who relish a break from the constraints of the outside world and the chance to chat and laugh without inhibition.

After Amanda and I had done what we thought was a thorough sluffing, we started in on the shampoo, only to have a very large, doughy woman with the most enormous pillowy breasts I’ve ever seen – terrifying, to be frank – wag her finger at us and insist on continuing the gommage that we’d, in her mind, not properly finished. Furious debate over the price of said services ensued between the marshmellowy woman and our nubile friend, who was incensed about the apparent attempt to gauge the newbies. I wanted to call off the negotiations, mostly because the verbal battle seemed so incongruous in this world of steamy relaxation, but to be honest, I was so over heated I could hardly think. Up first, I succumbed to her rough ministerings. Did I mention that she was fully naked, by the way? We thought the underwear rule was sacrosanct! First she grabbed my arm, driving my hand into her tummy-breast rolls, and began raking the gommage glove down my inner arm, pausing every now and then to show me the vast quantities of skin she’d removed. Not sure whether to be further embarrassed at the condition of my skin, or impressed with her work, I responded with a simple, “oh la, la,” which seemed to please her. Next, she flipped me onto my back and I found my head resting on her inner thigh as she worked away on my stomach and sides. This, I felt, is the crucial test: fight or flight . . . or just succumb. I opted to embrace the ludicrous scenario, imagining myself melting into the soap-scented vapors, and grateful that I’d been first to go “under the glove.” “Poor Amanda,” I thought, who’d watched the proceedings in silent dismay, “you’re up next!” Her efforts at distracting our glove-wielding tormentor by scurrying to and from the tap, filling every water bucket in sight with boiling water, failed, and soon she was splayed out on the steaming tiles with the woman’s knee on her sternum. Needless to say, the No Cameras Allowed policy was a real bummer, but something tells me this experience will remained burned into our mind’s eye.

You know the story about the frog, who, when put in a pot of tepid water that is then heated to boiling, will remain in the pot unable to move until he has been poached? Well, somewhere between the last scrape of the gommage glove and the dousing with a bucket of hot water that followed, Amanda’s and my eyes locked and we knew it was time to get out of the steam room or we risked boiling ourselves. We rushed to the outer changing room, where it was an easy 40 degrees cooler and lay back against the benches, huffing and puffing as if we’d just run a 10K. A number of the women who moments earlier were laughing with us in the baths, were now getting dressed and reaffixing headscarves, their body language indicating that we’d re-crossed the line and our old roles resumed.