Kissing lessons on a train to Fez

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It is strange to be in this country just to be. I know that I have left the US. And I know that I am here with my sister. But where is here and how long will I be there?

I arrived in Casablanca under cover of night last night. It is strange to fly into a new place at night, because the lights give you very little sense of the dimensions and textures and setting of a place. (In this case, however, even a daytime approach wouldn’t have helped me much, as I woke up only when the front wheels of our plane hit the runway and I was too groggy even then to process what it meant to finally land in Morocco after months of talking about it).

MC met me at the airport. She was late and came running through the terminal with her grinning freckled face and bags swinging in every direction; she had come straight from the train from Fez. There was a cab waiting for us and it drove us through the dark (was it desert? too dark to tell) to the city, then through the mostly-empty streets to our hostel. I sat in the back of the taxi and ate the figs and dates and peanut butter that MC had brought for us; she has been fasting for almost a month now for Ramadan, and had prepared a picnic for herself in order to break fast on the train. I occasionally remembered to look out the window to try and take in some of the city, but mostly I was too busy talking to my sister; listening to her explain the function of accusatives, genitives and nominatives in Arabic (it hurts my head just to think of it), quizzing her on the difference between a djellabah (casual) and a kaftan (fancy). I’d forgotten how much I love her dorky laugh and how excitable we can be together.

I had my first experience of Morocco as a place when we stepped out of the cab. The entrance to our hostel was a discreet doorway on a small courtyard, which was dimly lit but seemed comfortable and charming and alive at this time of night. In the courtyard there were only boys and men: playing cards, smoking, drinking tea, staring openly and intensely at the two of us collecting our luggage from the taxi.

The hostel was dark and the sheets smelled like hostel sheets normally do. MC’s friend Jessica (another gap year girl learning Arabic at ALIF) was in our room, and the three of us stayed up for a bit, talking about Moroccan food and shopping in Fez and all of the other important things I will need to learn in the next few months.

It was strange, though not surprisingly so, to wake up in a windowless hostel room in a city that I had not yet seen in the daylight. In the short taxi ride from the hostel to the train station I picked up no further sense of Casablanca, other than parts of it smell like fish and there is a slight breeze. MC—already devoted to her own city—says that there is nothing to be seen in Casablanca and that Fez (she has a feeling, though she hasn’t yet been to any cities outside of these two) is the best city in Morocco.

We are now on the train to Fez. MC has just shown me how to write my name in Arabic and how to greet our host family. “Salaam alaykum” I am supposed to say, and then (if it’s a female family member that I am greeting) we kiss, though there don’t seem to be any discernible rules on how many times. “I just go with the flow,” she says. “And sometimes I’m like ‘I don’t know what’s going on! Just kiss me!’” She scrunches her face, closes her eyes and puckers up to demonstrate.

This is all so new. Not just the fact that I am learning how to kiss whom properly while on a train to Fez, but the fact that it is my sister who is teaching me. I remember when my family came to visit me in India; MC was so eager to learn, and I taught her how to count to ten in Hindi and how to wear a dupatta appropriately so that it covers your chest. Now I am here, following her through train stations, letting her bargain and teach me how to just smile and say thank you (“shok-ran”). I am fasting because she is. I am on this train because she is. And I am here in Morocco, for the next two and a half months, because she is.

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