Day 6: Chefchaouen, Volubilis, Meknes, Fes

     Salaam! Long time no see! Apologies for the gap in entries--between travel fatigue after long days of touring and limited wifi connectivity, it's been difficult to find the time to keep you all updated on my language-fueled journey. But here I am, sitting on a couch in the second-floor hallway of our Fes hotel because that's the only place I can get wifi, brimming with tales and photos of travel galore to share before tonight's repose. Given that I have based my travels upon practicing and thinking about language, I am going to organize this catch-up entry around several language-related experiences. If you are able to make it to the end of the entry, I will reward you with a riddle.

    Notable Language Experience 1: Remember how I said I had yet to speak to a Moroccan woman? That changed on Day 3 of my trip. On the way home from the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, I shared a cab (known as a "petit taxi" here in Morocco) with two local women. The cab driver asked me if I spoke French, and I responded, "A little." He laughed and told me that if I could speak a little, then I could speak French, since after all being able to communicate with people is what's most important. His smile and laugh emanated warmth in a way I am not accustomed to from taxi drivers back in the U.S. He stopped a few minutes in to let two women traveling together into the cab--sharing taxis is apparently a common practice in this country. Once we were all in the cab together, it was one big happy family, the four of us laughing and exchanging remarks in a mix of Arabic, French, and English--naturally, given that my strongest language was their weakest, I was the quietest in the group. Yet, it was easily the best language practice I have had to date, and I wouldn't be surprised if it will be the best opportunity I have to speak French the whole trip. One of the women, the older one, dressed in a long black dress and hijab, didn't speak any French, but the younger one in a more colorful, patterned hijab and dress chatted easily with me. She started in English, but switched quickly to French once she encountered some difficulty expressing herself. She told me about riding camels and sleeping under the sky in the Sahara Desert, and assured me that surely my tour would include this experience (in fact, we are going to do the first, but not the second). My responses in French were short and to the point, and I didn't understand when they were all shouting at me to hide my wallet from a beggar on my way out of the cab, but I am still proud of having engaged in a real conversation with three Moroccans who didn't speak English.

                                                        Hassan II Mosque, from where I was riding 
                                                        the cab back to the hotel. You can see the ocean behind it.

Notable Language Experience 2: Fast forward to today, which was largely a travel day through several areas of Morocco. I tried to speak French twice, but both times were disappointing. Our tour group, GEEO, partners with G Adventures, which makes a big deal of its efforts to engage in sustainable travel practices. These include, for example, donating to local non-profits. In Meknes, we stopped at a center G Adventures supports that trains illiterate women in vocational skills so that they can enter the workforce. Several women, most of them young but one older, scurried in and out of the function room in which they had seated us serving a delicious lunch of chicken tajine. The older woman, who was covered from head to toe in a dark, simply patterned dress and hijab, ran the whole show, and our host told us that she spoke very good French. When I approached her to thank her for the lunch and said that it was delicious, she said thank you and smiled from ear to ear, but the conversation ended there. Later on in the day in Fes, I stopped by a Costa Coffee in a shopping mall and tried to order a strawberry iced tea, but I couldn't understand the cashier very well and he ended up switching to English with me. But hey, now I know I need to work on my listening comprehension of common words that come up in ordering drinks, so I have something targeted to work on to improve my language for next time. The strawberry iced tea tasted a tad medicinal, which just added insult to injury. But hey, when you're learning a foreign language, not every experience is going to be a winning one, and you'll never get far into the process if you don't understand that.

The tajine that the women's cooperative served us, pre-reveal

The tajine, post-reveal. A tajine generally consists of chicken, lamb, or beef that has been roasted in an oven for a long time in a special pot dedicated to this kind of dish that is called a tajine (hence the name of the dish). It is roasted in a blend of sauces, spices, and accompaniments that make for a delectable meal--this one was chicken and olives, and had been stewed in caramelized onions and some kind of organ meat, liver, we think (not sure!). Unfortunately there isn't a huge variety of traditional Moroccan cuisine--it's pretty much just this and couscous--so they do both get old after a time.

    Okay, it's almost time for the riddle, but since you've been so good and stuck with me this far, I'm going to throw in a few photos for good measure of Chefchaouen, a picturesque village we visited in Morocco's Rif Mountain range with walls painted in blue:

Above: pigments on sale for painting. Below: A staircase leading to a panoramic view of little blue Chefchaouen

   And finally, since you have made it this far, the riddle: Yesterday, we stopped by Tangier for a tour of the city before moving on to other destinations. Our tour guide was very informative about the Tangier medina and its notable residents, one of whom was Ibn Battuta (1304-Unknown?). He was basically an Arab version of Marco Polo, a Moroccan scholar who traveled a greater distance than either Polo or the noted Chinese explorer Zheng He, and who dictated an account of his travels toward the end of his life. This tour guide claimed that Ibn Battuta had overheard two Chinese people exclaiming "Pa-shin-ko" while in China, and upon asking them what they were doing, was told that they were gambling. He then supposedly recorded that "pa-shin-ko" was the Chinese word for gambling. Our tour guide's big reveal was that over time, that term "pa-shin-ko" shifted to "casino," our modern word for where people gamble in English. In other words, "casino" comes from the Chinese. As a Chinese teacher, albeit a non-native-speaking one, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what Chinese expression those men might have been saying that Battuta heard as "pa-shin-ko." If anybody has any leads on this, please educate me. Secondly, one of my historian colleagues on this trip tells me it hasn't even been firmly established whether Battuta made it as far as China, and that she doesn't recall it being mentioned in his travelogue. Plus, I looked up the etymology of "casino" today, and it seems to come from the Italian word for "house," which is "casa," at least according to Google. So, the accuracy of this story is dubious. That's the first part of the riddle--anyone have any ideas whether this account is rooted in historical accuracy to any degree? The second part--let's assume that it is a myth, as on the face of it it seems to be. Why would this myth have emerged in Moroccan society? Where did it come from, and what does it say about Moroccan society that it was here where this story of the origin of the word "casino" was eventually dreamed up? I'm all the more curious because there is nothing, literally nothing on google search relating "casino" to anything Chinese. But surely the tour guide didn't just make it up. It feels too specific for that. Please, I welcome any and all leads on either part of this riddle. For my own part, I guess I'll have to add Battuta's travel account to my reading list for when I get back home!

Tangier, the city in which I was first introduced to the riddle

Well, I promised I would leave you with a riddle, and there it is. Coming up next: Fes and then the Sahara Desert!

Edit: After initially writing the above entry, it occurred to me that what Battuta supposedly overhead might have been related to "pachinko," a Japanese gambling game. They certainly sound similar. But did he ever make it to Japan? Or was pachinko ever played in China? And wasn't it not invented until the 1920s anyway? But I'm starting to wonder whether somebody may have, in contemporary times, dreamed up an etymological connection between "pachinko" and "casino" based on the slight similarity of the pronunciation of the two words...