De Perros y Limones

Winter is Coming

Let us start with a negative.  The driving.  OMG.  Some of it has to be seen to be believed sometimes and this is from two people who drove in Sri Lanka!  The ability of some drivers here to astonish us with their stupidity goes above and beyond what you might call reckless or ridiculous.  Parking on a roundabout; turning sharply left whilst in the right hand lane; driving whilst smoking a fag, drinking a cup of coffee AND texting all at the same time; reversing back down a motorway or just simply stopping in the middle of the road to answer the phone.  These are a miniscule part of what we experience each and every week.

Autumn Beach

The worst, it has to be the worst, one was the bloke who tried to overtake me whilst we were driving through one of the many police checkpoints where you are supposed to not go above 20 kph.  Where they have those stingers in the road that will disable your wheels.  Where the coppers have guns!  Unbelievable! 

Motorcyclists that don’t text are a rarity here as well.

Pedestrians aren’t any better, well some of them anyway.  Okay, I get that crossing a major motorway might need to be done, as will be trying to hail a taxi on there as well.  Cycling across one is beyond stupid, however. 

Arty Shot

And there are those who cross the road.  I’ve no idea what goes on in their heads, perhaps it’s something like ‘I am going to cross this very busy road so what I will do is wait for a gap and cross really slowly, get even slower and not even look at where the oncoming traffic is.  I will do this because, somehow, I am protected from getting  hit and because I simply can’

One of the more scary types is the one who thinks ‘Here I am on a pavement.  It is a good pavement, well made and well maintained.  It is clean and it is safe.  So I will choose now to not use this pavement.   I will, instead, stand half a metre into the road so that all traffic in this lane has to swerve violently around me lest they hit me with their vehicle or, more likely, with their wing mirrors.  This is a good thing to do.’

Parking, Spanish/Moroccan style!

There are some things that you expect, such as the herder shepherding his goats across the road or the bus stopping at the place specifically not designated a bus-stop and idiotic taxi drivers but there are so many things that you simply cannot comprehend.  It’s fair to say that there isn’t a single journey that we’ve made that hasn’t had us wide-eyed.  And a bit scared.

I have been stopped a few times by the coppers, generally because I didn’t know what to do or couldn’t read the Arabic signs.  And each time they have been incredibly courteous.  I do the dumb tourist thing – which really isn’t difficult for me – and they realise that I am bit special.  They laugh, I laugh, we talk about how beautiful Morocco is and what it is like at the American School.  They invite their mate over and we chat a bit more.  We shake hands and off I go with a wave.  They have my total respect (plus I’m a bit frightened of them).  It was the same in Spain as well.  Obviously, should I attempt  to lead a revolution or agitate for regime change then I’m sure things might be different.

I love this photo. The beach in the morning

I’ve continued to work quite a lot, which has been interesting.  I found myself teaching Sonalee’s class again as well as her parallel class.  Teenagers really are moody, aren’t they?  I also found myself teaching a couple of global politics classes, which was a first.  It was in one of them, I think, that we had an earnest discussion about how useless the school would be as a haven during a zombie apocalypse – it has windows everywhere and a wall that is too low.  I feel that I have made a valuable contribution to the students’ learning.

I’m back in my natural habitat next week – the junior (elementary) school.  I’m also getting more confident in my coaching of football with the middle school.  I’ve learnt that parents, whether rich or poor, will always want to know why their darling boy isn’t in the 1st team.  I don’t think that will ever change.  I’ve also learnt that kids find it difficult to process that because one coach isn’t in school because he’s ill that he won’t be able to come to training either.  Some footballers keep proving that they aren’t the sharpest tools in the box.  What to do? 

To all of my ex-students now in university and to all of my friends who have done some postgraduate studying recently – kudos.  I’d forgotten how hard it is!  To start our course we were given a simple essay to write and to reference properly.  500 words.  Bloody Hell, it was harder than learning basic Spanish or, as Sonalee and I are doing now, learning really basic French.  500 words and the reading!  And the referencing!  I finally got round to doing it by deadline day but it does not bode well that I will have essays ten times that to write if I want to pass. 

Some of the reading was interesting, I have to say.  Some of it was tedious and some of it contained words that I had to look up online because I’ve never heard them before and one in particular was bizarre – I found myself reading about how to accurately measure skin conductance before I realised that I had absolutely no idea how I’d gotten there from the title of Sport Technology or even what skin conductance was.  Special thanks to the Tijuana Institute of Technology for that one.

Note the tail bottom right.

Sonalee continues to work incredibly hard at school, as do all the other staff members that we know.  It has been a real shock to the system after the year off.   She enjoyed the trip to Brussels and the half term break where we did nothing except take long walks in the morning along the empty beach.

Taking in Scaryclaw, for ‘tis her name much to the amusement of the vet, has provided some more stress and a lot of laughs.  She’s really annoyed Monte who hides from her in the laundry basket surrounded by my dirty underwear.  Luna has decided that she doesn’t like this ball of fur and so we can’t leave her alone during the day.  Luna has also decided that it’s really fun to jump over the front wall and loiter around the neighbourhood pissing a lot of cats, dogs and humans off.  The word incorrigible was invented for her.

One of the features of Rabat is the artwork on the side of buildings. Some of them are stunning

We find that we miss Spain and our place in Andalusia.  We miss our friends there and the simple pleasures of life in the village.  We miss Tango as well.   We think often of Sri Lanka and the people that we loved, some of whom are on their new adventure like us.  We realise we can’t be the only ones feeling a bit bewildered.

  • Some time ago someone built an amphitheatre on the beach. It must have been great in its heyday

Morocco is proving to be a learning experience for the both of us and the return to work is proving to be challenging, as we knew it would be.  The real shock for the both of us was the sudden onset of winter last week.  Blimey, when it rains here, it doesn’t muck about.  We were wearing shorts and t-shirt one week and then, boom, it was time to think about buying some heaters and shutting all the windows.

It will be just less than two months until we try to return to Spain for Christmas.  And in that time, I hope we will be a bit less unsure of how to live here because so many things are still so new for us.  Our French classes are proving to be instructive and quite amusing – it’s a class of about ten teachers from the school who:-

a) don’t to their homework

b) are a bit naughty and

c) turn up late for class.

I won’t tell you who one of the naughty ones is but she works in the high school English department and is very pretty…

Hasta Luego

Paul

To help with our French we can listen to the incredible MC Solaar

Walkies!

Paul

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