Mike and I have developed a very pleasant morning routine. I wake up around 6:00, practice yoga on my own for an hour or so, and then lead Mike through forty-five minutes of sun salutations, shoulder openers, and lower-back strengthening poses. My host says that he's lost six kilos during our two weeks of eating strictly paleo and practicing yoga consistently. He's beginning to feel his back pain and heel pain diminish, and I'm gaining confidence in myself as a yoga teacher. It’s really helpful to be able to work with someone like Mike: a complete beginner who is very dedicated and open-minded. I get to teach each pose to someone who is very happy to learn, and has no experience with other yoga teachers. If Mike consistently does something wrong, I know that it’s because I explained the pose incorrectly, and not because he’s been practicing it like that for years. Working with Mike is teaching me how to teach, and I'm experiencing how wonderfully fulfilling it can be to help someone regain his or her health. Mike says that meeting me has helped to change his life. There have been many things that have made me happy during these last ten months, but I think that Mike telling me that I've influenced him to be a healthier person has made me the happiest. I've decided to put a lot more energy into my "career" as a yoga teacher. Between teaching, practicing, and researching, I spend at least two and a half hours focused on yoga every day. I've never felt healthier. I've never felt more comfortable in my own body, and I don't want to lose this feeling. In Toulon (through absolutely no fault of my hosts), I hit a serious low, physically speaking. But Aimee Bourget has hit her high in Marrakech, and does not intend to let coffee, chocolate, alcohol, or sugar take her back to that lethargic low.
After yoga practice, I’ve taken to walking down to the Maîtress du Pain, a French bakery down the street from Mike’s apartment. There are several vendors in front of the patio, selling fragrant, colorful cantaloupe, strawberries, raspberries, and plums. As the café is right across the street from the French highschool, the customers are generally French. It feels nice to understand bits and pieces of the French conversations taking place around me. Eavesdropping always makes one feel less homesick.
I sit down in one of the round whicker chairs nearest to the seductive display of French pastries, take out my laptop, and wait for one of the smiling Moroccan waiters to approach me. They all recognize me by now, because I am the strange foreign lady who does not take sugar in her tea. My first couple of times visiting, I’d awkwardly blurt out, “Je voudrais un thé sans sucre, s’il vous plaît.” Now the waiters smile and ask, “You would like a tea without sugar?”
“Oui, merci,” I blush, embarrassed that my French is so bad they won’t even permit me to ask for my own damn thé.
Once my bitter mint tea has been gingerly set before me in a leaky silver teapot, I pour myself a glass (I’m getting much better at pouring the thin stream from a great height and not splashing myself with the burning liquid in the process), and begin to write. My nearly four weeks with Mike has seen the completion of two plays: a full-length play about children and their nightmares, and a twenty minute play about how negative it is for humans to dwell on the past. . If you’d care to read my short play, I’ve posted it as a note on my facebook page: What were you thinking about, John?
I’ve also been devouring Oscar Wilde’s many short stories, and find endless inspiration in his dry, satirical prose.
After a morning of yoga, writing, and tea drinking, Mike and I go out to lunch. As there is always cheap, delectable meat to be found, food in Morocco can be made very paleo-friendly if you have the will power to avoid the sugar, potatoes, bread, and couscous and the good-humor to disregard the shocked looks of the waiters as you say, “sans sucre, sans pommes de terre, sans pain, sans couscous.”
The waiters are always very shocked. Sometimes they laugh a little as they watch Mike and me dig in with our hands, casting the utensil-like bread aside.
Morocco surprised me in that bread is even a greater staple to its inhabitants than it is to the French. These desert people eat bread, jam, and butter for breakfast just like they do in France. They eat Moroccan bread (IMAGE) with their meat for lunch, and they consume large amounts of couscous and bread with their tagines for dinner. I’m generalizing an awful lot here, but I think that every Moroccan will agree with me that bread is the staple of their daily diet.
In other news on the food-front, I do miss pork. The lamb, rabbit, chicken, and beef are all well and good, but my mind forever drifts back to Maria’s pork belly crackle, and I find myself wanting to go back to a non-Islamic country purely for the pleasure of ingesting this forbidden creature.
As I have a good deal of time to myself and cannot occupy all of it with eating meat, yoga-ing, taking tea with couchsurfers, and writing, I spend the excess hours thinking. Mike’s shower is not very good and the streets make thinking suicidal, so I generally journal in my bedroom as Rachida (Mike’s maid) vacuums Spin’s abundant fur off the living room couch. To the melodious sound of that vacuum, I’ve had several epiphanies. I used to think that I could travel like this forever, but I’m beginning to realize just how naïve my dream of lifelong vagabonding was. I’m a hardheaded, passionate traveler, but I’m also an artist and a yoga teacher who would love to find a good community and to be financially independent. My last year at university was a bit isolating and defeating for me. I retreated to the role of playwright because I wanted to continue to be a part of the theatre, but to have a certain degree of separation from the utter madness that takes place within the rehearsal space. Although I would still like to have a bit of separation, I understand that art has always been and will always be a collaborative effort. I want to develop a healthy art community, and that’s someone impossible to achieve whilst moving around at the rate I do. Teaching Mike has revealed to me how much I love helping people regain their health, so I would also like to begin my career as a yoga teacher. Mike “knows a guy” who owns a hotel in Brazil and is interested in giving me a job teaching yoga in Rio for three months this fall/winter. This would be an excellent teaching experience to put on my résumé, and I think I’d have a fairly easy time finding work elsewhere after three months of teaching in Brazil.
I’ve found that travel teaches me about myself in a way that nothing else ever has. Living for a month or two at a time with complete strangers in new cities out of a 20-kilo suitcase has really taught me what I can and cannot live without. I can live without lots of nice clothes, makeup, movies, ice cream, and trinkets. I cannot live without a consistent community, a way to be involved in theatre, a venue in which to teach yoga, my fecking piano, my independence, and a pair of good shoes. Besides the good shoes, I can’t see a way to achieve any of the things I need whilst traveling the way I do.
My plans change quite frequently. In fact, I have yet to meet another human being whose plans undergo complete 180s with greater or equal the frequency of mine. Sometimes it can be hard to walk the line between open-mindedness and honesty with my needs. I put up with such awful treatment at Moyleabbey because I was trying to be open-minded about the situation. In doing so, I allowed myself to be treated very poorly in a way that was unhealthy for me. I recognize this line now, and am trying to walk it with much more care. I know that most of you who know me are laughing and thinking, "Well, it'll probably change again tomorrow," and you have every reason to think like that. However, in spite of my extensive reputation for speed of light 180s, I feel very strongly about these needs, and I finally know that I am capable enough to find a way to fulfill them. Hence, my new goal is to travel for three months out of every year (as opposed to traveling forever), spending one month in each country and interviewing as many people I can get to sit down in front of my camera. I want to spend the other nine months teaching yoga, being involved in theatre, having a garden, and enjoying permanent relationships. During the nine months, I’d make enough money to be more independent during my three months of gallivanting the globe, and I’d be able to give more to the people who host me.
So. That’s what’s been on my mind as of late. I think my head is finally in the right place, and I’m pretty happy about it.
Bravo ,go a head ........Youssef
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