WALKING ON THIN ICE

essaouira day 8, morocco day 41:

constant cry of gulls outside our door. seagulls have myriad voices - they sound at different times like porpoises, cats fighting, cats crying, a laughing maniacal mechanical clown from killer klowns from outer space… their default is a raucous obnoxious squawk.

this is a land of concrete, stone and stucco mixed with mud - peopled with backpacks, running shoes, stonewashed jeans- coke & pepsi on the side - all on cell phones watching tv.

the public baths here - hammams - are segregated into male and female, and have 4 rooms. you undress in outer room (down to shorts, underwear, or swim suit - though lady says she goes naked). inner room is sauna hot with a bin of scalding hot water and a bin of cold. you pour your own mixture into the two buckets they give you. you bring soap, a skin scrubber, and a dipping pan to wet wash and rinse yourself. i use 4 buckets of almost too hot, then sit and sweat in the heat. most men pay someone to wash them everywhere except the shorts, but i am uncomfortable with anyone but lady touching me, so go solo. the next room out is still hot but somewhat cooler (which isn’t used much where i go), and the last room is considerably cooler but still warm. figure if i walked from 40 minutes in inner sauna heat directly out to dress, i’d pass out, so sit and cool awhile.

on way back from my bath yesterday walking alone and refreshed through the narrow crooked streets with their white painted walls and multi-colored doors and trim in the sun with the bustle bubble of babel about, i felt high from happiness. a man called out, pointed to his wrist. can’t speak french so walked over, showed him the time. he smiled and pretended to steal my watch. we both laughed. he asked “francois?” (french), i replied english (english refers to both england and the u.s. here). he called out welcome. most folk guess i’m from the netherlands, or german.

i see moroccans pouring water over their left hand in the streets, washing the hand they use instead of toilet paper to wipe after defecating. watched one moroccan fruit vender stare in repulsed disbelief as a european left a greasy restaurant licking each finger of his left hand.

it’s hard to do daily shopping here - a small bag of fruit costs a dirham or 2, but the bank machines only dispense 200 dirham bills - none of the street shops can make change. and of course lady gives all our dirham coins away to beggars. they smile when they see us now, greet us. it’s hard getting and keeping small change coins when the dollar to local currency exchange rate is high like it is in poland, croatia, and morocco.

a friend worries my weight loss is due to parasites, that my flesh is eating itself. not to worry - my drop from 190 to 178 first 3 months of this year is due to changing my diet after my heart skipping and high cholesterol problems in croatia. from 178 down to today’s 172 is due to lady’s no longer feeding me. she stopped for two reasons - we have no refrigerator to store food, and must cook on a 2 burner gas camp stove… and she went on a diet so cooks less. plus basically since france we walk all day long, so i leave bits of my flesh in return trail - it doesn’t work though, the cats and gulls devour them.

looked up concrete because everywhere we’ve gone i’ve seen it used both now and then - been around 7,000 years according to cyber space - even used in the pyramids and the roman aqueducts. now why would aqua ducks contain concrete?

we watched wernor herzog’s “aguirre, the wrath of god” (1972) last night. bad insane money, power and fame driven folk steal command, then run the entire expedition into the ground, killing everybody in the process. couldn’t stop thinking of cheney bush and their iraq policy while watching it. i could easily see dick cheney in klaus kinski’s mad role. it was made while nixon was bombing vietnam and cambodia, so maybe the cheney regime overtones are valid. it is a marvelous movie with unexpected long gorgeous nature shots. the final scene is the mad aguirre/cheney chasing small monkeys overrunning the raft.