Day 27: Tea with Alums and Leila Abouzeid

Today was a change of pace. Rather than class, we had an interview with Leila Abouzeid, a Moroccan author who wrote two of the six books we are reading this term. We discussed her books, Year of the Elephant and Return to Childhood, in addition to her thoughts on the Islamic feminist movement, Islam in Morocco, and the evolution of Moroccan society since independence. Based off of her books and our discussion, she is clearly a big proponent for the advancement of women in Morocco and supports what would be considered "radical" views on social life and politics. It was fun to talk to her all morning as we sat in a big circle in a classroom at ALIF. The interview lasted from 10 to 12, at which point we were free until the late afternoon.

I walked home with the group and we tried to buy some "Berber" sweaters in the Medina. We weren't getting very good prices because we were in such a large group, so I opted to go home for lunch and return later by myself. For lunch, we had some tagine. I rested up after lunch and then went back to the main street, Kbira, by myself. I bought a navy blue zip up sweater at a pretty good price. He started at 600, I said 80. He brought it down to 500, I said 80. He said 500 again, so I left. The walkaway won. He said 300. I said 80. He said 200. I said 80. Then the real negotiating began. He refused to drop the price below 200, so I walked out. When he didn't chase me, I went back and said 100. He said 180, I said 100. He said 170, I said 100. He said 170, I said 100. He said 160, I said 100. After some more back and forth, he refused to go down from 150 so I left. As I was leaving, the other sales guy said 120, so I went back in. When I kept trying to get him down to 100, he threw me out of the store, so I settled at 120. Considering that Alice and Christie had bought them earlier for 170 and 250, respectively, earlier that day, I was pretty happy with my bargaining.

I then wove my way through the Medina to the Sofitel Palais Jamai hotel, a gorgeous hotel that overlooks the medina. We were supposed to have tea with an alumni tour that Si Ron is leading around Morocco for two weeks. We weren't that excited about it, but it ended up being a TON of fun! All of them were from before the integration of women at Dartmouth, but they all had their wives with them. They had some cool stories and I even met a man who lived in my fraternity back in the 50's before it became Alpha Chi! After an hour and a half, it was time to leave. Our group left the alumni and went to Cafe Scorpion to hang out. I got home at 8 in time for a delicious dinner. After dinner, I packed for our trip to Chefchaouen and did some Facebook chatting and skyping to get caught up with people back in the States. I've also begun to watch a show called Through the Worm Hole with Morgan Freeman, a cool show about the crazy theoretical physics that scientists are doing around the world. Each show has a question that they discuss. The three episodes I have seen attempted to answer: Does God exist?, What are black holes?, and Is time travel possible? It's nice to see something really academic like this finding popularity on American cable television. Time for bed because we have an 8 am bus tomorrow!