I was warned, when I first moved to Morocco, that I should not expect to accomplish more than one, or maybe two things on any given day. One could, for instance, go to the doctor or to the bank, but not on the same day. Or even the same weekend. You see, businesses close when they’re not supposed to be closed, or the roads to said businesses close, or the parking lots close, or the place you think you need to go turns out to be entirely the wrong place altogether. Street addresses, if they exist at all, are not always chronological (this I learned on a five-hour dermatology expedition). And, if you do manage to a) find, b) access, c) park near, and d) enter your establishment of choice, it’s entirely likely that whoever’s inside won’t be able to help you anyway. You need to go to the other location, they say, or bring some obscure document, or (most commonly) COME BACK TOMORROW.
Tag: Yoga
Last week I tapped on my neighbour’s door to ask for a bit of flour. Because that’s what you do when you neither cook nor bake, but you find yourself craving cheese sauce, and that sauce needs thickening, and you know your neighbour has flour, because she gave you some the one and only other time you felt a need to cheese things up.
It’s pleasant, having neighbours from whom you can acquire flour twice a year, in exchange for several kilos of peanut and almond butter. It’s pleasant, walking in and being welcome in someone else’s home. It’s pleasant, chatting about how we’re really feeling about this juncture in our lives. Continue reading
I am beginning to think that everyone in this world has an analogue somewhere on another continent. And that a great many of them live in Morocco.
I’m sure you know what I mean: that niggling feeling that someone reminds you of (or perhaps is) someone else. In fact, one of the very first people who greeted me in Casablanca has a vocal cadence much like one of my synchronized swimming buddies in Canada. So, in my head, I call her “Morocco Sharon.” In the confines of this small campus, I have also met Morocco Dave, Morocco Catharine, Morocco Sarah; Morocco Tania, Stephanie, Krystal, Vera, Crystal, Paul, and Darlene; and, most curiously, Morocco Snow White and Morocco Barbie.
A revealing exposé of my secret grad school romance with a hoop:
I am a yoga experimentalist. Or perhaps merely the subject of a greater mega-yoga conspiracy, designed explicitly to stretch my tendons and my temperament in various hypothetically-possible ways. It’s okay. You needn’t worry. Yoga and I have a history.
It began at a weekend synchronized swimming meet in the late eighties, when, as a virgin yoga-attemptee, I worried that I might be doing something dangerously evil by lying on my back and thinking about my breathing when I should have been in church. My spirit emerged intact, however, until my next wobbly attempt, a decade and a half later, in the much safer environs of my local gym. I’ve tried power yoga, yoga fit, hatha yoga, and, in a more audacious experiment, Tai Chi (which I realize is not yoga at all, but I include to convince you of the scope of my yoga-quest). I like to think I have become rather good at it. I can twist myself in all sorts of unprecedented directions. I am beginning to think that Yoga and I are becoming too familiar with each other.
It was with a sort of giddy delight, therefore, that I discovered Hoop Yoga. “What can it be?” I wondered. “What does one do?” I rubbed my palms together in greedy anticipation. There’s nothing I like better than an adventure.
Yoga, I am convinced, has rescued me from a lifetime of back pain and immobility; but my first few sun salutations were more laughable than laudable. Here’s a story from many years back; I won’t say how many, to protect the identity of my esteemed yogi. . .
I went to yoga tonight because I had nothing better to do, and because I have a policy of forcing myself to see at least one human face each day besides my own. If I manage to leave my property in the process, I have done well.
I have been to a few yoga classes before, and a few million pseudo-yoga classes – those would be the ones with instructors who are athletes, not weirded-out hippies. In my last real yoga class, I was apparently unable to feel the earth’s energy sufficiently to have correct elbow-wrist alignment in my downward dog (a pose I had perfected in pseudo-yoga, or so I thought). In my previous class, the instructor had required different poses for women whose uteri were in different states. “That,” I had thought, “is none of your business, lady.” Then she had chastised me for choosing the wrong pose. I didn’t go back for three years.
But tonight I was in that annoying frame of mind that is characterized by both lethargy and restlessnesss, and since the neighbour and the paper boy don’t count as human faces in my anti-isolation policy, off I went.