Harassment and a Carnival

One of the more challenging aspects of living in Morocco is the near constant harassment foreign women receive. While it doesn't happen very often in the small villages and towns we will be living in, it is prevalent in Ourazazate, where we have training, and in the big cities. One of the more annoying but harmless types of harassment is the shop owners and souk stand men who call after you trying to get you to come into their stores. A typical walk down the street includes calls of "Gazelle, come to my shop." "Parlez vous Francais?" "You are beautiful, come to my house for dinner." "Gazelle, do you speak English?" If you walk past a cafe, you often receive an invitation to join a group of men already there. In the larger cities, the men can be more aggressive – they follow you, or walk alongside you and continue to try to engage you in conversation. One of the reasons PC expects its volunteers to dress conservatively is to stave off some of this negative attention.
We leave tomorrow for our final visit to our CBT village, so I went out this evening after class to buy a few small gifts for my host family. After a walk around the souk and main street in town, I didn't have anything to show for my efforts. I was tired and didn't have the energy to deal with telling shop keepers that I don't speak French or to bargain over prices. (Many items get marked up, some 50 or 60% when a foreigner inquires about the price) Luckily, Arik, one of my fellow CBT-ers, offered to go with me for moral support and we found scarves and soap for my host sisters and mom, socks for my host dad and some Johnson's baby lotion for Ouassim. I also printed pictures I've taken of the village and with my host family and put together a little photo album for them.
Dinner was a special treat of pastilla (meat pie) without the normal vegetarian option so Tori and I went out for juice afterwards and to finish up our shopping. The date, almond and avocado juice really hit the spot – its almost a meal in itself! I was on the lookout for something to send my Grandmom for her birthday and went back to a shop where the owner had been kind and fair on prices to me before. I'd run into him earlier when I wasn't in the mood for bargaining and when he invited me in for tea, I told him I didn't have time and would stop by another time. He greeted me warmly and asked what I was looking for. I told him and he showed me a few things that were out of my price range. When I told him how much I had to spend, he showed me a few things and then brought out a beautiful necklace and sold it to me for about half of what I know others have paid for similar ones. It was refreshing and restored a little of my faith in the shop-owners in Ouarzazate.
On my way back to the hotel, I ran into a few people going to a carnival! They promised me real bumper cars, so I joined them. For a total of 15Dh ($2) we got into the festival, rode a ride and ate ice cream in homemade waffle cones! It was as close to an American carnival as I could have hoped for – there was corn on the cob, ice cream, and rides! The line for the bumper cars was long so we rode the "Cap Kennedy." It had a space/moon theme and looked like it was from the Kennedy era. We speculated that it no longer met U.S. standards for safety and was sold to this carnival. It was one of those rides where you sit with 2 or 3 other people in a car, with each car connected to the one in front of it. They go around in a circle, but the track has some hills in it. There is a modern version whose name I can't remember. Anyways, it was kind of like the wooden roller coasters because you could feel every joint and connection as we rode. All of a sudden something seemed to fall on us from above and we all started screaming, thinking the ride was breaking. It was just an awning coming up over the cars to cover us. Now we were in the dark and the ride started going backwards. We picked up some speed and then came to a halt! It was exhilarating, mainly because we all thought the whole thing would collapse at any moment.