I have a whole hell of a lot of super blonde hair that I do approximately nothing with. It’s an accomplishment if I brush it.
This hair calls attention to itself everywhere. Even back in Missouri, some of the middle school students in my classes (during my stint as a substitute teacher) called me Ms. Rapunzel. In my semester abroad in Ghana I got used to strangers touching my hair on tro tros and everywhere else.
One woman I met in Ghana insisted, repeatedly, that my hair must have been naturally black and merely dyed. It was awkward and I finally just relented and agreed with her in order to just let it go.
Here in Fez, the blonde haired/blue eyed thing is attention-getting, but it’s more about the general foreigner-thing. My class consists of eight (primarily American) girls and in our few days here, we have already been universally declared “The Spice Girls.” Everywhere we go, in fact, someone comments on this.
The bit that I wrote for Renee’s blog about traveling as a female keeps springing to mind here, but only to make me see (a) how cathartic writing that was -and- (b) how much I don’t have that same feeling now. I guess I am in a larger group now, and I could obsess over the problematics of that, but I seriously don’t want to.
Now, honestly, it’s just a frequent source of amusement. There is a pretty high tourist population here, in general, thanks to the Fes Festival (the reason we are here as well) so I imagine this experience is a somewhat skewed example of what we would have experienced any other time.
Aside from being Baby Spice, I have basically just been hanging out in Morocco. The class has been interesting so far. We’re an odd mix, because the course was designed for the Global Communications and Civil Society program and this is the first time no CS students are present — meaning that none of us are particularly eager to work in NGOs long-term.
I am currently enjoying the sweet wifi goodness of Barcelona Cafe, a departure from our usual source of sweet wifi goodness, Cafe Clock, which is your standard more-expensive-food-than-anywhere-else-because-all-the-foreigners-come-for-the-wifi establishment, but beautiful, because that seems to be a rule of building interiors here.
Today and yesterday we took these little minibus taxis, which remind me of trotros, but are even more miniature. Traveling as a Spice Girl has its pros and cons. Yesterday, we got in and the guy immediately started playing Hotel California for us. Pro. Definite pro. Today, we left and then our driver turned around to go pass us off on his friend and it was something of a debacle the was resolved only by the one girl in our group who speaks Arabic scaring the shit out of the drivers.
So far, this has been all sorts of amazing, but exhausting. Whenever I get a chance to stop in and check email, I feel like it’s impossible to get my words together.
I did, however, get a video together, because it’s Monday and it’s my day to upload for The Expat Chronicles. I will try to get more video up from the festival before I leave, but I’m not all that optimistic. My actual final project for the course is a video on these metal workers who are being relocated from the medina (where we are) to the new city for environmental and poverty reduction purposes by this NGO project. Super Spice Girl-y of me, I know.
We also have a class blog for which I have written two posts: a short bit of nonsense about cats: We Want to Hug Every Cat, and a co-authored srsbsns post about one of the discussion forums: Fés Forum: The Future of the Arab Spring.