Weekend in Vannes

Spent a brief weekend on the south coast of Brittany in the beautiful city of Vannes. Here is a panorama from near the mouth of the canal that runs further inland to the port and city. I updated my website (www.aidanhaley.com) with a couple new photos from my weekend here. Check them out!

Teaching

Here is a picture taken by my program director Tony Franklin of me teaching my first class. Look at that handwriting! Yikes! I've been practicing too.

Learning is a funny thing...

Today, I was the teacher.

That's really weird to write and repeat in my head. Today, I was the teacher.

I was the teacher.

I have been in school for as long as I can remember and a couple years more. It has defined my life to this point. When people asked; what do you do? I chuckled, brushed the question off and responded, without belief and devoid of any seriousness, "I'm a student". In forms filled out at the doctor’s office, DMV, or the bank I have been a ‘Student”. My whole life I have been a student. In preschool, when I was four years old and moved to France with my brother and mother, I was placed in a public school where I learned to be thief, and became quite good at it. When I was in kindergarten, at the age of five I learned that being a thief didn’t feel good and wasn’t right for me. In fifth grade, I struggled to learn what a theme in literature was, and in eighth grade, I learned what it was like to really kiss a girls lips. Highschool and college were periods of learning so vast and fathomless I am too young still to see its true bottom. There were moments full of joys and heartaches, insight and confusion, ruin and reconstruction.

I was always that kid. That bastard of kid that teachers often loathed to see, but at the same time smiled slightly when I would saunter through the door. I am positive, more so than most other things in my life, that I have caused not one, but a multitude of gray hairs in most every teach that has ever come into contact with me. I have been called ‘cavalier!’, a kid with so much unutilized ‘potential’. Those words permeate through most of my youth’s report cards. ‘Potential’, it still makes me smirk. I was a punk, a leader, an opinionated (often wrong, but never in doubt) little shit that somehow got anyway with murder while the other kids seemed to get blamed for it. This kid sounds egocentric, and he was. The world was about him, what child’s world isn’t?

Suddenly, today I found myself teaching my first English class to five eight-year-old French children. I was no longer the one giving the gray hairs, but stepping into the world of receiving them.

I am in a small, crowded, makeshift classroom on a glorified farm outside the town of Plélauff, France. Its mid-August and it is a complete ghost town. There isn’t even a bakery and the church is locked up. A French town without a bakery or a church is something I will not speak of further because mentioning it seems blasphemous to me. I am looking down at Camille, Manuel, Stacy, Mathieu, and Sophie looking up at me with curious, semi-prudent eyes. I introduce myself and try to explain we will be learning about the weather and appropriate clothes to wear in said weather. This seems elementary, and it was, it had to be. Thirty minutes into it the lesson, after I had gone through serious doubts as to why I had even considered a path that placed me in the same shoes of so many adults I had cursed under my breath countless nights before a major due date, we had a moment. It was sweet and short, like most things beautiful in the world. The lesson finally clicked with the kids and a spark came out of their eyes. They became excited about the weather being ‘hot’ and wearing ‘shorts’ because of the heat. I couldn’t stop smiling, I was teaching someone something as insignificant as what hot and cold were, but that felt like a triumph. I finally realized why my childhood teachers were willing to put up with my friends and my bullshit. It was for moments like these. Those sparks, those mental clicks where a students finally understands derivatives, throws a beautiful pot on the wheel, or understands the symbolism behind Rose’s breast feeding at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. It gives teachers something special. I felt that today for the first time and it taught me something. I was the teacher today, but I never want to stop learning, regardless of subject matter.

Updates to start up again

I am in France now and have been re-inspired to start up the blog. tell everyone who's interested that i will start updating soon. In the meantime check out the new layout of my website www.aidanhaley.com and also you can follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/aidanhaley for all of you who have twitter.

Update

Have not posted since December, but if in fact people are still reading the blog about morocco then they will pleased to know that www.aidanhaley.com is up and running. check it out to see pictures of not only morocco but other parts of the world.

Mental photos

So this evening I am sitting on the top of our center looking into the southwest at the most amazing sunset and light I have seen in the past 6 months of traveling. The sun is now red and is about to go under the horizon, but in the last rays of light I'll describe the evolution of the light in the past 15 minutes. It started with the sun being low in the sky but still behind a layer of cloud, it was a bright gold, very strong light color like a really hot flame. The edge of the cloud and the open sky way a single ray of the brightest light; like a ribbon waving across the sky. The sky to the north and east was turning ever more purple but as the sun descended it hit the medina and light up the white buildings slowly turning them orange as the sun lowered. The depth in the light was amazing and you could see every corner in the countless building. The mosques rose above everything like orange pillars. A rainbow came out of nowhere in the north and was part of a purple that the sky was becoming. All of a sudden the sun hit the horizon and the sky turned deep orange and the light died on the city only to turn the cloud that was once this bright white gold into a pink deep fire. The sun turned dark red and then dipped below the horizon. The curtain of cloud is still red but slowly tiring. Cobalt gold dying into dark grey. Didn't have my camera, this is one of those mental photos. Now the call to prayer starts.

Todra in 54 hours

With ISP upon us, I wanted to try and go on one last grand adventure before I had to face the reality of starting my research project. I had aspirations of visiting the Todra gorge ever since I had read about it in the guidebook. It boasted 1000 ft. walls and a narrow bottom. The gorge is located on the other side of the Atlas Mountains near the desert, a long way from Rabat. To get there we had to take a 14-hour bus ride down to Marrakech, up over the mountains and then back up the other side of the mountains to the small town of Tinehir.

The bus ride was a surreal experience and would turn out to be the most interesting part of the short weekend for me. Mike, Kelsi, Henry and caught the bus leaving Rabat at 10 on Saturday night. These buses are a dirtier, older version of the tour buses we have been traveling around the country in our group for the past 3 months. They make constant stops in order to try and maintain a full passenger load, as to increase profit for the bus driver and decrease happiness of the customer. The most interesting of these frequent stops occurred at the base of the Tiz’n Tichca, the highest mountain road pass in Morocco. It was about 4 in the morning and I had only been able to daze off and on into lucid dreams of snow, Erica, thanksgiving at home and other comforting thoughts. To announce stops they abruptly switch the cabin lights on….brutal. I stumbled off the bus to three shops lit up in what was otherwise a surrounding darkness and freezing air of the high Moroccan mountains. Smoke was billowing up from two barbecues stationed in front of two butcher shops ready for hungry customers from the bus. I have the remaining image when looking into one of the shops of this solitary face in a sea of products surrounding it.



I drifted in and out of sleep over the next couple hours awakening to sunset over the now desert landscape. We arrived in Tinehir around 10 or 11 on Sunday, and quickly jumped in a grand taxi that drove us up into the gorge. The beginning of the gorge is beautiful with a long green palmary spilling out of the mouth of it, but as you drive further into it, and the walls become more spectacular, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is a very touristy destination. Hotels and small guesthouses are everywhere and there are a number of tourists walking along what is now a paved road bottom of the gorge. We decided to spend the night in a spectacularly placed hotel in the narrowest section of the gorge under a HUGE overhanging wall. Although exhausted, we managed to walk up a bit and sit on some warm rocks further down the gorge where it opens back up.







We were all very impressed with the physical beauty of this place, but we all agreed the infrastructure and people marred the experience. It is kind of disappointing to end the description at that, but that’s the impression I left with. We crashed really early that night and slept in. We woke up, packed and decided to start hiking down the road in hopes we would hitch a ride back to Tinehir. 4 or 5 km later we got picked up. Nobody wanted to pick us up. It was strange. Perhaps we smelled kind of funky from the bus ride the night before.







Back in Tinehir, we passed the time by talking with a local man who was nice enough to show us around without trying to get us to pay him. I had decided I needed to get back to Rabat to be able to start some work, so my plan was to leave the others on the 5 o’clock bus. I spent the remainder of my time shopping and bargaining, at one point being called a “Berber” because my price was to low. I think it’s the Moroccan form of the “Jew” insult. Little did he know…haha. I found that pretty funny for some reason: maybe it reminded me of high school and how my friends would react to me not ever wanting to spend money, I don’t know.

The bus ride back was long and uneventful, but when I finally got off the bus at 5:20 the next morning, I had a pretty unique experience. I walked through the medina virtually alone. It was eerie to a point where it hard to describe. Having lived in this city for the past three months and never seeing the streets empty left me under the impression of never really feeling alone. For the first time, I was alone. It was dark, and I didn’t have my key to my house. Being me, I didn’t want to wake up my family, so I decided to wander around as much as I could until I either got mugged or couldn’t stand anymore. I walked around, found some comfortable stairwells to take little naps in. Around 5:45 the call to prayer started and awaked the medina for a moment. It was amazing to just sit in the dark stairwell with a little light coming in from the street and listen to the prayer erupt around me. It finally died, and I moved on fearing the man of the house would come back from prayer and leave for prayer. The only things that were open where the mosques. I discovered new ones i never new existed, especially on the main drag where I am normally only used to seeing barber shops and street venders. At 6:30 I decided to ring my bell, my dad got mad at me for not ringing it sooner thinking I was crazy to wander the streets alone. I disagreed, but didnt say anything.

random facts:
-28 hours in a bus
-24 hours at the gorge
-stupid idea?
-it was cool to see people climbing in the gorge