Morocco: the city of Fes

We took the opportunity to stay in a Riat, an old home of formerly wealthy occupants, within the Medina walls in Fes.

This pool in a Madrassa uses the laws of physics to make you think which ever end you are standing at is shallower then the far end although the pool is of exactly the same depth through out.

A "hip shot" of women walking in the street. In places where I didn't want to call attention to my camera I simply placed it by my hip and took random shots. I was suprised by how many actually turned out and weren't simply of odd pieces of ground.


Slippers in a leather shop above the fabled tanneries



The old walls of the city, crumbling now

Overlooking the leather dying pits and tanneries

An apothecary, Moroccan style

The blindingly white Jewish graveyard outside Fes city walls

Looking at the Medina from outside the walls

The inside of a carpet shop - beautiful carpets but no thank you, I don't want to buy three so I can sell two when I return home no matter how good a price I get for them. Here I patiently looked through the ledgers of the men selling carpets as he tried to find the names of other Alaskans he had sold to. Contacts are everything here.

A patient donkey on a street in the Medina

A window to weaving

Morocco: in words

Here are some snippets of my impressions of Morocco - pictures are coming, I promise. (Speaking of which, does anyone know how to make a mosaic of different images using Photoshop? I'd love to create one for you, but I haven't figured out how yet.)

First off let me say that Morocco, as I find is typical with many non-western nation, immediately penetrates all of your senses the minute you leave the plane. These places are vibrant with smells and sounds and colors, there is a sort of immediacy in everything that lacks in the more subtle, more contained and manner-focused western societies. I will try and share with you my impressions but I am sure that it will only begin to capture the feeling of the place.

Moroccan smells: donkey dung, jasmine oil, mint tea, baked earth, hyacinth flowers, tannery pits, new leather, fish, dust, smoke from the pottery kilns, the occasional smell of sewage less then expected, the smell of sheep that have been in the desert and often long without water

Moroccan sounds: the buzz of the muezzin early in the morning, the sound of the shuttle from a weaving loom, pounding on metal as artisans created the famous pounded silver, laughter, friends calling out to one another, tinny taxi horns, Arabic, French, and the clicking noises of the Berber like a bird in the brush, the hooves of donkey feet in narrow stone passages, loud shouting of men through the night (and how, I wonder, do they manage to get up for the 5am prayer?)

Moroccan visual: narrow, labyrinth streets, tall buildings, colorful mosaics & clothing, women dressed in gorgeous saris, leather works, pointy toes leather slippers, walls & gates to Medinas and around ancient cities, the dry Atlas mountains with onions piled under stone crates, Barbary apes hanging out with donkeys in a forest that seems too dry to be a home for apes, tiny steps and narrow passageways, homes dug out of the earth with put upon door fronts, symbolic colors: green for holiness, blue doors for Mohammad, red for Fatima, plastic bags strewn across the landscape as far as the eye can see, men holding hands or walking arm in arm down the street even a couple of policemen walking down the street hand in hand

Moroccan tastes: almost everything is sweet in Morocco with the exception of the olives which come with every meal. It is no wonder that so few Moroccans seem in possession of good teeth.

Highlights/lands of Scotland

Here are some of my impressions from a fall visit to Scotland in the company of dear friends.

Scotland visual: old stone buildings with brightly painted doorways and stovepipe rows, rolling hills of green with fat sheep, mossy crumbling old stone walls, instructional signs that take the most amount of words possible to convey the desired meaning, old graveyards, graceful outer buildings often transformed less gracefully inside, loch's and mist, swirling autumn leaves

Scotland smells: wet earth, slight fragrances of fire smoke and the occasional coal briquette, ale & meat dishes (such as haggis), the smell of damp wool, peat and loam, the smell of the first frost

Scotland sounds: the trill of the European robin (which is nothing like the American one), the dripping of rain or dew, genial laughter from the local bakery, warm woolen Scottish brogue.

And now, for a sampling of pictures.....

The village of Killn

View from Stirling Castle

View from the Munro Ben Lawrs

Old mill and falls in the village of Killn

Scottish street

Red doors

Blue doors

With S having bagged the Munro (I'm on the left)

This also happens to be the Munro on which I lost my spectacles

The streets of Aberdeen

Back in Alaska

I'm back! Admittedly, a little later then planned due to a 19 hour delay of my first flight resulting in subsequent delays there after. I had a fabulous trip and I promise to tell you about it in subsequent posts! Promise! I came home to a snowstorm - the kind that makes it hard to tell if you're even moving when you drive in it. The Diresputables are more then pleased to see me back and I them although we all have some schedule adjusting to do. My friend who watched them works a swing shift and so in some senses, they too have been in a different time zone. I always find that my stomach is the last to finally recover from jet lag. It wakes me up demanding to know why I missed an important meal and refuses to eat when it's actually meal time. I forced myself to stay up until 9pm last night, going cross-eyed from the effort and then managed to sleep most of the night although I still rose all together too early for a weekend after too little sleep.

While I was away the lovely Gill of Gill's Jottings awarded me my first ever blogger award! I was very touched by her comment about my blog "Wayfarer scientista who teaches me daily that you are never too old to learn, a fascinating blog!" THANK YOU GILL ! She awards me the community blogger award which celebrates people who reach out and make the blogging community a better one.


In my turn I award:

JEN of One Plus Two. While I suspect Jen has more then a few of these awards around she was the first to welcome me to blogger land and always leaves comments and has a wonderful blog. She is also the instigator of the "Just Posts" for a just world.

SKOOKUMCHICK of Feminist Engineer. She is the instigator of the Scientiae Carnival which has allowed me to meet many interesting researchers, expanding my community beyond that of the researchers I run into directly in my own field.

ATHENA DANOY of Sipping Hot Chocolate. Athena's blog was one of the first I regularly visited and I love seeing the world through her camera lens. When I first commented on her blog I was so delighted that she replied to me.

MAD HATTER of A Mad Tea Party . Mad has taken topics that I have discussed on other blogs and written new posts about them and has made for very lively dialogue that is much appreciated.

Going on Vacation

I'm headed off for traveling adventures tomorrow and it's likely that I will be completely out of touch (& yes, that means not blogging or reading blogs) until I return the 1st of November. When I sent my itinerary to my sister she asked "And where aren't you going?" and it's true, I'm doing quite a bit of moving for such a short trip. But oh(!) I'm so excited. Here is the sketch of my trip:

SCOTLAND: Here I will be visiting a dear Swiss friend who is pursuing a Post Doc in Aberdeen. We will be joined by her boyfriend who is originally German but lives in Switzerland, another dear friend. We met when they became my housemates in Fairbanks, Alaska where they had come for his post doc and a portion of her PhD. There she fell head over heels in love with the Disreputable Dog despite the fact that the first words out of her mouth to me were that she did not like dogs.

All map courtesy of Meriam-Webster's Geography

MOROCCO: This is the original pupose of the whole trip. I will be meeting up with a very dear Dutch friend who I met in Ghana. We're making this a girls trip. We both like to travel footloose and fancy free and we haven't made and determined plans although we have vague ideas in mind. I've never been to Morocco and am terribly exited about seeing the architecture and the textiles and to feel the heat of the desert.

HOLLAND/ NETHERLANDS: I will head back to the Netherlands with my Morocco traveling friend to met her family, her husband and two children of whom I have heard many stories and whom I have yet to meet. I suspect they're equally curious to meet me especially since I'm dragging their wife & mother away from them for a week. And I may have a chance to visit the school for mentally disabled kids and talk about Alaska while I'm there.


Does that not sound like a fabulous trip? A little summer in Morocco before returning to the winter of Alaska. Exotic sights and sounds and smells and yet the comfort of seeing very good long held friends after a long absence? And there's sure to be a little adventure and some unexpected, unplanned events in there to boot.

Meet Chukchi the Walrus

Recently, co-workers rescued this little guy from certain starvation in the Chukchi Sea. It would seem that his mom never made it back from a foraging trip. As he is a yearling he is not able to live on his own yet. He is currently getting cared for in our facilities and because walrus require constant attention will not be able to be returned to the wild and will instead go live out the rest of his life at Sea World in San Diego. Edited to add: He weighed in around 400lbs and alomst 5ft long with 9inch budding tusks.

Picture taken by Amy Haddow

Fun Facts about walrus:

1) The plural of walrus is walrus
2) Walrus can live up to 50 years and spend 3-5 years being raised by mum, nursing for the first 2 years of their lives
3) They are circumpolar in distribution, living in the high arctic and are dependent on the seasonal availability of the ice pack.
4) They are prefer shallower waters and eat primarily mollusks (clams, etc.)
5) They have amazing suction mouths...a walrus can suck up a bowling ball with it's mouth and move it. This causes havoc with captive animals as when they get bored they suck bolts out of cages and move entire gates.
6) An adult male can weigh up to 2 tons!
7) There are 3 sub-species of walrus but they are the only living members of their family and are thought to be related to bears.

Top 10 Ways to Get Through Winter

I am inspired by some of the comments from my last post to post a partial list for you on things I find key to making a long, cold, dark winter a success. If you live in a place that experiences winter, what's on your list?

The Disreputable Dog sleeping after a hard ski in 2003

1. Get outside when the sun's up. It's in the middle of the day? Take a long lunch break. All that office work will still be there when it sinks but if you wait until the work is done the sun won't be.

2. Be active outdoors. That lunch break? Go skiing, walk to the post office, ice skate. Moving in what daylight there is can make a world of difference to your psyche.

3. On a nice day take a minute for the sunrise. Go find a window. Watch it. Breathe it.

4. Light your house well. When you wake up turn on all the lights it will help you wake up. Use light to help you keep your circadian rhythms from wandering too much as in my star light on a timer. A good reading lamp is also very essential.

5. A good potluck recipe! Potlucks are huge in Alaska, particularly in the winter. Winter is the time for socializing, for cookie exchanges, craft nights, movie nights, sauna nights, etc.

Myself, a friend, and the Disreputable Dog in Fairbanks around noon 2 winters ago
(That's ice fog you see there - lovely stuff)

6. If you have an outhouse use blue house styrofoam for a seat...it's insulated and thus doesn't get cold (but store your toilet paper indoors so it doesn't collect ice crystals).

7. Layers! It's always cold outside, it's always too hot inside. Be prepared to layer up and layer down and make sure that you don't forget any key body parts.

8. For the love of digits...buy yourself a WARM pair of boots and a good pair of gloves and don't leave your ears uncovered unless you want frostbite.

9. Go camping! Yes, believe it or not, there is nothing more wonderful then snuggling deep into your sleeping bag with the northern lights playing above your head. You don't have to worry about bears - they're all asleep. And you can pack things like ice cream and not worry about them melting!

10. Hot drinks, plenty of firewood, checking your fuel tank & not letting it get too low, covering your window with plastic....and remember not to leave liquids in your car including, but not limited to, laundry detergent....yes, if it is cold enough, it will freeze. Realize that things such as plastics will be more fragile then usual so be careful. Keep a spare key handy!

11. Bright colors! They keep things cheerful and they make you more visible to traffic. Beautiful bold colors, fun socks and scarves, fun stripey long underwear...ever notice how much winter gear is black???? Why?