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.
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