Chocolate Cocaine: Update

     If you've ever watched Unsolved Mysteries and are like me, some of your favorite episodes might just be the ones with the "Updates" that follow the story of the mystery.  I promise you this won't be that satisfying.

     In any event, a couple of my friends ended up talking about a mysterious brown powder that sounded eerily familiar to that offered to me a couple months ago by an aging Moroccan woman.  I thought there was a slight possibility it could be chocolate-tainted cocaine.  As it turns out, I'm now convinced it was actually "snuff." 

      You can read about it here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff

     Any street cred I may have once had is now gone.

     Long live Robert Stack. 

Halftime

     Winter break started for us in mid-December, and those last few weeks of class (coupled with Eid Al-Kabir and cold weather) made us crave a break pretty bad.  Even the most dedicated of us began to check out a couple days early, just because we were tired. 

     So I went to France.  My trip was planned for quite a while and I was pretty excited about it.  I have a couple French friends who were students at OSU for a quarter back in 2007, and they were nice enough to let me stay with them while here.  What's more, they're really a lot of fun to hang out with and my friend Sebastien took me to his parents house with him to celebrate Christmas.  

     It's been a very relaxing time.  Warm, real showers and central heating have been quite the luxury.  Plus, there is never really a time I've had to be anywhere or do anything except for Christmas, so I've had the freedom to do whatever I want with no one to answer to.  

     It's 9:34 a.m. right now on January 5, and I am somewhat excited to go back to Fez.  As you know, I've been studying Modern Standard Arabic, which is formal Arabic and somewhat useless around Fez.  It also is the more academic form of Arabic, and what I was studying at Ohio State.  In my last few weeks in Fez, I was starting to become frustrated with how little practice of the language I was getting outside of class, because it really would have helped me with my work in class.

     However, now I will be studying the dialect.  This is good for a number of reasons.  First, it will be useful, both now and for the rest of my stay in Morocco.  Second, I won't be studying out of Al-Kitaab (the MSA book we use here and at OSU), which means I get a break from our standard pace of learning.

     This break has kind of felt like halftime during a big game.  It's been a nice chance to catch my breath, take a step back, and re-evaluate how to approach what I've been doing.  The game's about to begin, so I've gotta get in there.  Four months down, five to go.

So we ate a couple sheep...

     So the end of that story is a little delayed, and I apologize for that.  The next day was the great gettin'-up-mornin' for the sheep.  Half an hour after I get out of bed, the family carries sheep number 1 upstairs, past my bedroom door, and out onto the terrace just outside my window.  

     Warning, graphic content ahead.

     In Fez, division of labor is taken to pretty much the extreme.  I'd be surprised if there wasn't a guy somewhere whose job it was to tie other people's shoes.  Anyway, there are guys whose job it is to carry a knife around town and slaughter your sheep for you.  These guys came, Hajj Mohamed (the host dad) made the inital neck cut, and the "professional" slaughter guys went to work slicing open the rest of the sheep's throat.

     Sheep Number 1 was not done well.  The second sheep was slaughtered much more efficiently, though probably no more satisfactorily from the sheep's point of view.  By the way, I've made a mental list of those who've been complaining about me not updating my blog, and I'm going to make you watch the sheep video when I get home.

     So once the sheep is slaughtered, the break off a couple limbs, hang it upside down, and peel the pelt down off of it.  They remove the internal parts (putting those on a platter, to be eaten, of course) and in doing so pull the intestines out.  The intestines are by far the worst part, because they pull out yards and yards of it, and it smells like poop.  Outside my bedroom window. 

     So now it's all over but the cooking and the eating.  

     Some stuff you eat on a kebab, other stuff you eat in a tajine.  The kebab meat is a little dry, and the tajine smelled like a foot.  I almost got sick eating the tajine, because it smelled so bad.  Only at one point did I really ask which part of the sheep I was eating.  It had the consistency of smoked fish, had no real odor and no real flavor.  I asked and Khaled leans over and tells me he'll tell me after dinner.  Turns out to be sheep testicle, which, surprisingly, doesn't taste terrible.  

     So that's the end of day one.  Meanwhile, you still have to live in this house and there is a de-pelted sheep hanging from the bathroom door.  Small blood spots on the bathroom floor where it has dripped a few.  And, of course, it smells like sheep still. 

     The second day of Eid rolled around, and it is tradition to eat the head for lunch.  So they cook the head in its entirety, place it on a platter, and then put that on the table.  Fur and all.  You peel back the fur, which reveals some of the most tender meat ever.  The cheek is extremely good.  The ears were the worst part that I ate, because they're stretchy.  I didn't try the eyes--just couldn't bring myself to do it.