To the family two doors down who had their Ram delivered at 11:23 pm last night.

Cutting it a little close, weren’t we?

Mbark l-Eid Said, everybody! !عيد مبارك سعيد

UPDATE: The holiday is all but over. I may give a more in-depth rundown of the day’s festivities later, but for now I thought I’d pass on my personal highlight, the winning quote of the day.

It comes from my three-year-old host brother, Mehdi. He and I were watching as his father sacrificed, then dismantled, the ram. “Ah!” he shouted, the final piece of skin peeling away, “It’s made of meat!”

Runner-up goes to my 13-year-old host sister, who, once the skin had been removed and the organs were starting to come out, sighed and turned towards the door. “I’m going inside to watch Oprah.”

Don’t even get me started with your invocation of John Adams.

Maira Kalman’s latest op-ed piece in the New York Times, entitled Back to the Land, touches on not only our agricultural system, but the way we live our lives. Espousing the organic and slow while eschewing the hectic bustle of the modern, it longs for a return to mindfulness and appreciation of the beauty that surrounds us. It’s thoughtful, beautifully made, and one of the most maddeningly simplistic pieces of garbage you could ever read.

First, let me say that I have nothing personal against Maira. She seems like a nice enough sort of person, but the kind that would want to live in Lake Wobegon. This is the problem.

So you want to make pumpkin bread, do you?

It’s mid-way through the process of peeling, de-gooifying, chopping, and cubing that you being to question just how badly you want that pumpkin soup on Thanksgiving.

But then you remember… you really, really, do.

Eid al-Adha is so commercial these days.

A recent Best Buy ad in the States:

Eid is this Saturday, by the way! I’ll be spending the day with my host family, and will be doing plenty of baking this week in preparation. You can read my account from last year here.

I’ve gotten lots of traction the past few days in attempting to explain Thanksgiving to people here. I end up framing it as the Pilgrims having a big party to celebrate not starving to death. This narrative works better than the harvest/friendship angle, oddly enough. I’ll be celebrating belatedly with some other volunteers after Eid passes, but to get in the spirit of things I’ll be doing two things: first, I’ll be re-reading The Wordy Shipmates (did you know the Puritans nicknamed the Pope The Great Whore of Babylon? Because they did!).

Second, I’ll be watching this on a loop.

Happy Eid! And Thanksgiving!

And Joe Biden was totally in Watertown the other day.

The ‘09-’11 Environment and Health stages are in Marrakech this week for a training session.  Guess who else is there right now?

(CNN) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday praised as “one of the best” the oldest Peace Corps volunteer in the world, an 85-year old Florida woman serving in Morocco. full story

Three things.

First: Hooray Muriel!

Second: Hillary is chillin’ in Kech! The new Sex and the City movie is also filming scenes in a few Moroccan cities right now.  We’re so chic.

Third: The first thing that popped into my head upon seeing this pic (after ‘HillaryMarrakechPeaceCorpswoooooooo!’) was, ‘Hey! Joey got a haircut!’

Somebody bought shoes.

And that somebody was me.

A Note From Our Sponsor

My Letter From the Editor in the latest issue of the PC Morocco newsletter:

Dear Readers,

Acronyms are tricky things.  They can be time saving wonders, allowing you to blow through an explanation of last month’s mishap at IST where a few PCVs and an HCN decided to start some PCRs that before you knew it ended in a conflagration of heretofore unknown proportions.  They can also act as a sort of secret handshake; who but us would even know what that sentence means?  Like watching Noor and hating on Daylight Savings, it’s shorthand for, “yeah, we’re cool”.

Of course, acronyms can also be ominous, haunting specters, chimeric apparitions that emerge from the ether to feast on your most secret hopes and dreams, reducing them to a puddle of turgid goo, your apostasy complete.

This past weekend I had the chance to experience both extremes.  I took the GRE.

Das Wandern

I went to Germany?

I went to Germany! Two PC friends and I escaped the late summer heat and headed north to Allemania, where we enjoyed the land of Angela Merkel, giant pretzels, nougat, and odd fixations with Native American culture.

It was easily the most vacation-like vacation I’ve ever had. It’s easy to forget how stressful our lives here are compared to things back home. In Morocco we’re always ‘on point’, constantly aware of our intonations, mannerisms, and dress. We’re also constantly gawked at. In Germany we could simply be for awhile, which was more wonderful than you can imagine.

After a week and a half getting settled back in the village I’m already getting ready to leave again – this time for Rabat, where I will be taking the GRE (guh), and afterwords I’ll stick around a few extra days to help edit the PC Morocco newsletter.

And then it’s Halloween, which pleases me greatly.  It may still be 110º, but I’ll be damned if there won’t be pumpkin bread.

Drums are loud.

This is Mohammad Boota.  The NYTimes ran this story today about his avocation as a Ramadan drummer, waking people at 4am to eat sohor before the sun rises and the day’s fast begins. Brooklynites: none too pleased!

Souss American Life: Butagaz

My butagaz tank ran out this morning. As I was making pancakes at the time, I was rather put out. What does this mean, exactly? Behold!