An American Party Based on Lasers

        I thought I was free forever from 8 am calculus after a semester of it freshman year at Reed.  Somehow, I landed it again, and while the Reed math department is far from easy, the challenges I face in AUI’s Calculus II early morning section go beyond the normal scope of indefinite integrals and partial derivatives.  I came to my class bleary eyed (my body didn’t take long to waste its bonus hours of being awake from jetlag) but determined to make a good show for myself and the country I represented.  It became clear that I would be the only representation of said country as I looked around to see row upon row of Moroccans in their typical tight dark jeans and virtually identical leather jackets.  The professor, one epically named Abderrazzak El Boukili, entered the room in a pristine and perfectly symmetrical gray suit.  He asked loudly for the class to be quiet, saying that lateness and talking in class would not be tolerated.  Without smiling, he embarked on a lengthy tirade about the declining abilities of students from year to year.  While other teachers may react to this trend by inflating grades, his personal choice was to make tests count for more of the grade so that students become serious about learning.  He interrupted himself to pick up a student’s backpack and set it at a ninety degree angle with the table on which it sat, previously diagonally.  I decided that this professor was unlikely to enjoy my style of proof via descriptive paragraph of ‘why it just makes sense’ in my assignments.  He shifted topics to a powerpoint on applications of calculus to real life, going to the typical avenues of modeling functions for business and banking.  He then mentioned lasers, a surefire way to get my attention.  After delving briefly into the math and showing some diagrams, his slide changed unexpectedly to a picture of a rave.  With no emotion, and no other explanation than ‘this is an American party based on lasers’, he moved on to other things.  He spoke of modeling complex situations using functions with multiple variables.  His example was modeling happiness.  He asked the class what the most important variables were for happiness, but rather than accepting responses from them, he went on as though the question had been rhetorical, which I suppose it was.  ‘Faith’ he said, ‘is of course the most important variable.  Without faith you cannot have happiness.’  My mind wandered to Amy Fishburn mentioning that it was illegal in Morocco to try to convert someone from their religion.  At the end of the class, he brought me back to high school by taking role, noting for each absence that there are only five absences allowed before automatic dropping or failure.  He was completely unable to pronounce my name, but proceeded to an elaborate welcome which somehow was worded more like a challenge than an invitation, and served to make me feel even more singled out than before.  I left the classroom somewhat less excited about the semester than I had been before.

            There could not have been a more stark contrast of experience with my beginning Arabic class by the constantly smiling and welcoming Ibrahim.  He taught the class, made up entirely of Americans from orientation, a short series of phrases in small talk and took time to learn our names.  We wrote some letters in Arabic script, and that was that.  It was quite a relief that the world was privileged only with one Abderrazzak El Boukili.  My afternoon History of the Arab World class was along this same vein, with a warm and friendly professor Maghraoui, who explained to us that he had taught in Santa Cruz, the liberal part of America.  I sat across from a very wealthy looking and opinionated Moroccan student who I mentally nicknamed ‘the prince’ for his spotlessly shined shoes, fur lined jacket, and haircut which I would price at approximately a billion dollars, give or take a few camels.  In the course of the hour he managed to insult poor people and call Algerians backwards, even though the focus of the class had more of a get-to-know-you type vibe.  I suppose I did get to know him.  So ended my first day.

            My schedule changed rapidly within the first week of classes.  I had taken a four week summer Arabic course at CSU right after high school, but I didn’t feel the need to take a placement exam based on this experience since I hadn’t revisited the language since then.  It became increasingly clear that I remembered far more of it than I expected.  As I took Ibrahim’s dictation along with the class, he began to skip me along his rounds of checking work, simply saying ‘jeyud jeddan’ (very good) as he passed me without a glance.  I realized that I wasn’t lazy enough to continue this for a semester, and I switched to beginning 2, which turned out to be much more fitting.  This movement opened my schedule up to the possibility of having only morning classes, and so despite my growing fondness for Dr. Maghraoui and disgusted entertainment at the antics of the prince, I switched to the section of Jeremy Gunn, a Harvard educated American with a dry sense of humor and a set of medals given to him as a distinguished guest of the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov.  My fourth class, Islamic Civilization with Dr. Ennahid, started Tuesday, and turned out to be very similar in content to history, but with a focus on institutions rather than events.  I soon noticed Dr. Ennahid’s interesting writing style in English in which he would capitalize every letter except ‘i’ and would often misspell things by removing entire syllables.  My Arabic class inconveniently changed times to the afternoon despite my hard work to attain free ones, and changed teachers from the relaxed and easygoing Muhammad to the strict, high-demanding Meriem.  While the very mention of her name to other American students invariably elicited a groan, I have so far risen to her demands (including writing a blog in Arabic, though my proficiency in the language makes me doubt the likelihood of a high following) and enjoy being challenged.  No language teacher can match up to my German teacher from elementary school in terms of strictness, so with her as my basis of comparison I have yet to find anything to complain about.

            The one part of my schedule which remained unpleasantly constant was the never smiling, ever compulsive Abderrazzak El Boukili every other day at 8 am, and a grueling two hour session each Thursday afternoon.  Each day brought another awkward interaction as he stumbled to pronounce my name and highlight my undesired uniqueness.  My need to defend truth and justice got in the way of my vow of silence one day when he equated interest compounded monthly to interest compounded annually divided by twelve.  One student spoke up with the compelling argument that he was wrong, to which the professor replied with the equally convincing retort, no, he was not wrong.  I raised my hand and gingerly explained that interest compounded monthly took into account the interest from previous months as part of the total from which the interest was derived, but was received by the eerily familiar counterclaim, no, it is not wrong.  I decided not to press it.  He had a surprising ability to work religion into just about every topic, which is especially impressive given the course content.  On one day:

            “Sequences are ordered sets of terms.  The terms don’t have to be numbers, there can be sequences of days, or weeks or years.  And who ordered the days and weeks and years?  The Creator. He is putting in order all of these days and weeks and years.”  He then seemed to realize that there was a non-Muslim in the class.  Rather than being dissuaded by this, he continued to address the whole class, but looked at me as he said:

            “Maybe you do not believe this, and you believe that humans ordered the days and the weeks and the years, but perhaps if you are doing some research, you are finding the truth.”

            He returned quizzes by saying who has passed and who had failed, going into lengthy reprimands to each of the latter group, interrogating them as to why they didn’t study.  He had a similar policy for absences and lateness.  His equation for happiness came up again one day unexpectedly, and he began to ask students what their personal equations were.  I thought that this was a rare spell of open-mindedness on his part, a notion which was quickly dispelled when he began each student’s answer with ‘faith and…’.  I knew he would come to me in hopes of provoking a discussion I didn’t want to engage him in for a number of reasons involving the hour of the day and the fact that he was responsible for my grade in the one class I can actually transfer to a chemistry major at Reed.  He looked at me and I dodged the question with an innocent ‘I haven’t found my equation for happiness yet’, which, although it didn’t satisfy him, didn’t get me entangled into debate either.  My policy remains keeping my head low so that it doesn’t get cut off.  I maintain sanity in the class by drawing the same thing every ten minutes until I can leave.  First, I draw a circle in the margins of my notes as perfect as I can manage.  Then, I draw intersecting perpendicular lines within the circle as close and as straight as possible.  Then, I fill in the lines in a checkerboard pattern.  My notes are covered in such drawings by now, but it has become a necessary part of surviving to 9.

Drinking in the Mystery

            We last left our hero wide awake at three in the morning having just taken a full night’s sleep.  It didn’t take long for me to fully unpack.  My room was surprisingly large, and came with my own closet, dresser, bed, desk, table, chairs, refrigerator, phone, TV and bathroom with a shower.  The only evidence I had of having a roommate was the presence of a picture of one of the aristocats on the far wall and a pair of ugg boots in the corner.  I read some of Uncle Tungsten to pass the time, and had breakfast as soon as the restaurant opened.  I got a pain-au-chocolate with some tea, and found some other Americans in the otherwise deserted cantine.  We told some travel stories, and I had my first experience of Moroccan tea.  At home, I have my tea black, strong, no sugar, no milk.  I thought I had mistakenly filled my cup with syrup upon first drinking it, it was so thick with sugar.

            The new international students all gathered in an auditorium, where the student ambassadors and the maternal but businesslike international programs coordinator Amy Fishburn told us some of the basic information about the school.  Contrasting rather starkly from Reed, the AUI administration took an ‘en loco parentis’ approach to student affairs, and was involved in nearly every aspect of student life.  Alcohol was strictly prohibited, and possession on campus was grounds for expulsion.  Illegal drugs were treated similarly.  At the same punitive level was entering a dorm of the opposite gender.  There was a curfew of midnight for the campus on weeknights.  We introduced ourselves among the international students.  They were mostly American and female, though other nationalities included a German, a Brit, and a girl from Japan.  We filled out some paperwork, got our class schedule, and listened to a speech by the president to the incoming freshmen’s families via translating headphones like we were in the UN.  I’m not sure if ‘party the house’ directly translated.  The student ambassadors walked us into the main town of Ifrane and over to the marche, which is French for market.  It contained everything from cell phones to dead goats hanging by their feet.   Merchandise were stacked on top of each other in displays that clearly favored quantity over quality.  I searched for coat hangers and musketeers bars unsuccessfully.  When we got back there was a supposed pizza party, which was really a chance for the student activities leaders to persuade the incoming students to become active in the AUI clubs and community.  For all the cultural differences of this place, the orientation was strikingly similar to one from the US.  The students in charge wore matching tee shirts, and moved and spoke with an awkward level of enthusiasm for the duration of the presentation.  I stayed silent while waiting for the pizza because my French isn’t good enough for sarcasm yet.

            I drank Moroccan tea again the next day, more for its temperature than its flavor.  The cold was particularly unpleasant in the mornings in the academic buildings where we had our orientation meetings.  All of us sat in tiny plastic desks reminiscent of elementary school and shivered while we were lectured to about culture shock and the Moroccan mindset.  I wish sometimes that I was not in the habit of giving my coat to anyone that looks cold.  The counseling personnel, including one of the foremost psychiatrists of Morocco, gave a talk in the slightly warmer auditorium as a nice break from the freezing upstairs classroom.  When the culture lectures finally finished for the day and we had learned that Moroccans don’t like to stand in lines or arrive to events on time, we had some down time with non-required events.  The next thing marked on our schedule was ice breaker games put on by the student activities leaders.

            I decided that the icebreaker games would be a good place to start finding Moroccan friends.  What I had thought would be a series of small group get-to-know-you types of activities ended up being a grueling obstacle course bordering on hazing.  I looked around to discover that while I was wearing the usual corduroy pants and sweater, everyone else was wearing athletic clothes, and that all but a handful of the international students, all male except Rebecca, had wisely stayed away.  As I pondered my own escape route, I was dragged to a team by one of the Student Activities leaders from the night before.  My teammates were discussing something emotionally in Daraja.  I introduced myself in French, which they politely acknowledged before continuing.  The Student Activities leaders outlined the course of the games.  As they did so, I became less and less inclined to participate in them.  The first step of the obstacle course was to drink a glass of what they referred to as ‘mystery drink’, spin around ten times in a circle, and run several yards to a finish line.  The mystery drink was bottled with brown paper around the outside to hide its identity.  The next task was to fill a five gallon tank with water from a barrel a long ways off.  The only vessel for transporting the water was a bucket in which numerous holes had been drilled for our convenience.  After this, there was a partnered sack race with two sacks tied together with rope.  Next, we had to crawl on our stomachs through a sand pit under a net weighted down with soda cans full of sand, all the while pushing a basketball in front of us using only our heads.  Completion of this task led to a wheelbarrow race, and then bobbing for a ping-pong ball in a basin of what looked like chocolate milk but later was revealed to be muddy water.  We had to put the ball into a spoon with our mouths, then carry the spoon in our mouths across another race.  The finish line lay at the end of a slip and slide, where another Student Activities leader waited eagerly with a hose.  Even with my restrictive clothing, I helped to pull my team to a slightly closer last place then they would have had without me.  When a teammate asked me if I had had fun, I said no.  Mystery drink turned out to be orange juice saturated with paprika.

            After sleeping through dinner and karaoke and waking up in the middle of the night again, I went to another day of orientation lectures in the cold classroom about safety and academics.  We filled out residency paperwork in triplicate in French, and then I was free for the rest of the day.  I was less excited about this when I realized that neither hulu nor Netflix instant view were functional in Morocco.  I managed to stay up late anyway, and the next day slept through breakfast instead of dinner.  Orientation concluded with a trip to the nearby town of Azrou via grand taxi.  A grand taxi is no larger than a regular car; in fact, it is a regular car.  I was surprised by this because I had been told that they held six people.  With two of us in front of each taxi and four in the back, we rode without seatbelts at breakneck speed over beautiful green hills to the town.  We wandered around little shops with carpets and woodworking and tagines decorated with lead-based paint without the government caring.  I was particularly enthralled by the metal teapots and shiny boxes.  When I travel I am without exception compelled to purchase ornamental boxes of a size that makes them useless for actually carrying anything.  I was proud of myself, however, because this time I bought my useless boxes by bargaining in French.  Not only did I get the price down substantially, but the vendor thought that I was French, a bonus.  When I got back, I set an alarm and went to bed at a reasonable time in hopes of stabilizing my sleep schedule before my eight o’clock multivariable calculus class the next morning.

Seven Airports Later

            This comes as a welcome break, as my previous semester could be described, in the most optimistic terms I can muster, as chaotic.  It’s best thought of as a TV show rather than an experienced reality, both for the purposes of entertainment and coping.  I’ll be spending the next several months on the other side of the world from where I was, and am now at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.  My journey started (after coming home from school in Portland) in Colorado, and ended seven airports and three days later.  The plan was to go to New York, to another airport in New York, to Philadephia, to Paris, to another airport in Paris, to Fez, to Ifrane.  Why this was the cheapest way to do things is anyone’s guess.

            I visited friends of mine in New York and New Jersey for a bit to establish a sort of base camp for the journey.  My buddies Lauren and Adam got me from JFK and drove me through grueling traffic just as it was starting to snow.  I got to visit their home town of Closter, see the show House for the first time, and discover a hidden talent for Kinnect Boxing.  Despite several inches of snow the next day, Lauren and I went into the city to meet up with our friends Jeff and Eitan.  It was my choice of what to do, which meant that everyone experienced several hours of the enjoyment that only dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum can bring.  Many of my actions are guided by the intent to look at shiny and colorful things, so we also spent a good deal of time in the gems and minerals section, where we were privileged to view an out of date and mildly racist video on the relationship between humans and gold.  We walked across Central Park to the Met, but didn’t end up going in since we were all so hungry.  I wanted a picture on the Met steps so that I could photoshop myself into a similar one which my friends had taken during the summer.  Lauren pointed out that the original picture had been taken in hundred degree heat with no snow on the ground, and so the fact that I was wearing a coat, gloves, and a scarf might make the blend somewhat noticeable, but I was not swayed from my course.  I ate untold quantities of Italian food, and the next day set out again, this time at La Guardia and with one fewer bags due to weight problems.

            My favorite parts of airplane flights are the very beginning and end, because as you look out the window all of civilization and nature looks like a model of itself.  At night, the streams of white lights coming toward you and red lights going away make the cities look like some kind of giant organism that metabolizes blue and green light.  My flight from New York to Philadelphia remained at about that height for its duration, so my eyes were glued to the window for the whole of it.  I got some decent pictures of New York City from above.

            Once I was in Philadelphia, I searched for the gate of my flight to Paris and the arrival gate of my as yet unknown travel buddy Kim, where I was supposed to meet her.  After about an hour of wandering around the Philadelphia airport, which has all the comfort and design quality of a Sarlacc pit, I realized that I had left the security area and had about ten minutes to get back through it before my flight boarded.  I made it on time, but without making contact with Kim.

            The flight itself was only six hours long, which was two hours shorter than I had calculated and four hours shorter than it felt like.  I spent most of it trying to sleep, my failure at which can be explained by the fact that I wisely packed my travel pillow in my checked bag and was sitting in the middle of the central four columns of seats.  I also had several cups of tea once I realized that it was available whenever I wanted it, which may have been a bad move.  As the lights turned on for breakfast to be served, I realized that I was done processing all my tea.  The bathroom at the front, near where I sat, was in use, so I went to the back.  By the time I got to the front of the line, breakfast was being served.  The cart was at the row past mine when I tried to get back to my seat.  Both aisles were blocked by carts, and long story short I spent an hour of the flight standing up awkwardly in the place at the back of the plane where stewardesses make the coffee.  If this were not real life, I might have befriended the stewardesses, who would in time have accepted me as one of their own, but instead I stood silently and tried not to make eye contact.

            When I got to the customs line, I asked a few people if they were Kim, but none of them were.  The whole customs process took about ten minutes, and despite my rehearsing a veritable life story in French over and over in my mind, exactly zero words were exchanged between myself and the customs officer on duty.  At the baggage claim Kim finally found me, and I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy to see a stranger in my life.  Our troubles were far from over however, since the directions to the inter-airport shuttle which Kim had found online were wrong on all counts.  It took the special powers of both of us, my years of studying French and Kim’s basic sense of direction, to get where we needed to go.  Even so, it was good that we budgeted so much time for it.  I think the people with whom I spoke thought that I was not an American, but rather a very stupid French person, as when I asked for clarification, instead of switching to English, they got annoyed and said things slower in French.  I guess that’s something of a step up.  Things were not helped by the fact that two people gave me incorrect directions, nor by the fact that there are two unconnected departures levels at Charles de Gaule.

            Somehow we made it to Orly, where I was once again a stupid French person until we found the location of our gate.  We took a rest in some comfy chairs, though if we had known what security would be like it may have been a shorter one.  Even budgeting an entire hour for the process, we only just made the flight.  America and Europe both have numerous unusual security requirements, but unfortunately they are not all the same ones.  As such, I had to go through the security gate four times, representing each time someone found an electronic device among my belongings.  I had the joy of being stared down by a large French guard as he tried to determine my gender to send me to a pat-down.  He wanted me to give him my passport so he could check my gender again, though one of the other guards had instructed me to put it in my bag so I had to go through the gate yet again.  Both of my carry-ons were opened and searched, and Kim was similarly harassed.  When we finally got to the gate we thought we had seen the last of it, but a stewardess told me in French to come with her, doing the same to a number of other passengers.  I didn’t catch why, but by the tone of voice the other passengers were taking I knew it wasn’t good.  Kim and I ended up having to check our second carry-ons, despite their extreme lack of threat as determined by the security personnel.

            The Royal Air Maroc flight had a very exotic feel to it, with pretty curtains dividing areas of the plane and the safety instructions read in Daraja (Moroccan Arabic) and then French before speedy and slurred English.  My body finally lowered its comfort standards to a level where I could fall asleep, and I awoke to a view of red hills and citrus orchards as we approached the airport.  We joined up with Elizabeth, a third exchange student, and as we were filling out customs forms the size of note cards a student ambassador of the university named Selma came and found us.  We got in a small van with some other exchange students, all American, and picked up another at the train station.  Both the station and the airport were surprisingly pretty, with large arched doorways with decorated edges.  The process of driving in Fez reflected little respect for such things as lane lines, seat belts, stop signs, and keeping a few car lengths between you and the car in front of you.  Livestock grazed along the roadsides even in the middle of the city, and people rode donkey carts as well as cars.  The climate was more or less like California in its warmth and humidity, and the red dirt, green vegetation and blue sky made a really beautiful color palette for our ride.  Everyone had horror stories about delayed flights and security looking for bribes to share along the way.  The university was up in the hills quite a ways, where it was much colder and dryer than in Fez.  The guards at the gate let us in.

            Selma got us orientation packets and room keys, and showed us the location of our buildings and the campus restaurant, where dinner was being served until a little later.  I had been in conflict in my mind over whether to shower or nap first, but at the time nap won out.  I got in my bed and fell asleep for the next nine hours.