The day I went to Africa: Friday, Feb 8

This is not a summary of that day. That would be impossible. This is just an abridged version of an excerpt from my journal:

Next we went to the restaurant, another whitewashed building tucked back into the alley, that once inside, was surprisingly spacious. Rachel and I immediately recognized many elements of Arabian art. I especially liked the lacería. I have decided that if I ever own a house with a kitchen, I am going to decorate it with boldly colored azulejos en patterns of lacería. Indeed.

I ordered a Fanta, which came in a bottle, rather than water, and got ready to enjoy a delicious feast that I hadn't even expected to be part of the tour. Rachel decided to eat as well and save her bocadillo for supper.

By my watch, I noticed that they were feeding us lunch at typical Spanish time. Since the restaurant was basically deserted, I wondered when typical Moroccan time for lunch is.

We were seated with the Brazilian family. We were in for a treat.

The waiter came with our sodas and popped off the metal caps with style. Our first course was an opaque soup, in which we dipped triangles of the round bread that I had wanted to try in the market. The next course was skewers of savory beef pieces, and after that we had our main meal of couscous with chicken on the bone and the most delicious carrots ever and other vegetables. Everything was so delicious, but what was even better was the conversation.

I like languages.

The Brazilians, at least Mom and Dad, knew a little English and quite a bit of Spanish, as well as their first language, Portuguese. Rachel and I were fluent in English, but spoke quite a bit of Spanish as well. Actually, more than they did, although I'm sure they can hear Spanish better than we can. But we didn't know any Portuguese. And their son knew nothing but Portuguese and the basic words he had learned of other languages in school. In effect, we could not have a conversation in either of our first languages, which made us equals in the realm of Spanish.

We talked about languages, travels, plans, food, and school systems. This family was on vacation in Europe for an extended period of time. They really enjoyed the breakfast at the hotel where they were staying in Algeciras. We talked about breakfast for a while. In both English and Spanish, the word means "breaking the fast." In Portugese, it is "coffee of the morning: café de la mañá." And desert in Portugese is literally "sobre la mesa" and it sounds very similar. I said that if I were to invent a language, I would call desert "en mi boca" but I don't think that they got the joke.

In Brazil, many schools serve breakfast at school. They asked us if that was true in the United States. I told them that that was usually only the case in districts where many poor people whose parents can't take care of them live. "Poor people in America?" They scoffed. It's true, I told them. America is not what you see as a tourist or as a moviegoer. But then I thought about it from a Brazilian's perspective. In Brazil, a poor person doesn't have what a poor person in America has.

The main problem in Brazil, though, they said, is that there is such a huge wealth gap. There are a few rich people, they said, and then there are masses of poor, and there are very few people in between. They must be among the rich few. Maybe they consider themselves middle class. I don't know. Or maybe those people on our tour were famous or high up in the government. Maybe he is an embassador and feels he has the right to travel all over Europe and still comment on the sadness of the wealth gap. What gives me the right?

Their ten-ish year old boy was so fun. He liked to jabber, and I don't think he realized that we couldn't understand Portugese hardly at all. Being a bright little kid, he probably understood everything we were saying in our ultra-slow Spanish, so he wondered why we couldn't understand what he was saying. Or maybe he didn't even notice until later that we weren't understanding. It was super cute though, and his dad tried to translate some of it into Spanish or English if he knew it at all. It was fun to just play around with the languages, push them and stretch them, because we had nothing to lose.

At one point towards the beginning of the conversation, the dad was really trying hard to speak in English for us. Indeed, stuff like that is what he was learnign English for. But alas, he finally threw up his hands and shook his head and said, "I am just confusing myself. Let's stick with Spanish." Except he said that in Spanish. But I haven't learned to store Spanish tone and wording in my head yet, so there you have it in English.

We talked about learning languages, since that was obviously something that we were all involved in. How had they learned Spanish? School. And necesity for travel. How had we learned Spanish? School, and necessity for travel. What languages do they teach in schools in the United States? Do many people learn a second language? Mostly Spanish and some French, German, Japanese, and such, but sadly not very many people ever learn a second language. "Many people in the states never travel outside of the country and never pay any attention to what is going on in other countries." Rachel commented.

"But don't be to hard on yourselves. The same is true for Brazilians," Mr. Brazilian replied. "We don't like people from Chile [if that's right next to Brazil; I'm forgetting now] and people from Chile don't like people from Argentina. Just because. But we are okay with Argentina, for no real reason. People don't really know anything about each other, they just decide things and live their life however they want to. It's the same everywhere, that no one really cares enough to know."

"Podemos decir que todo el mundo tiene un problema porque todo el mundo no sabe nada de todo el mundo," I summarised. We laughed. But claro, we weren't including ourselves in that mundo of ignorant people. As we spoke (in three languages) we were seeing the world.

We finished the meal with "Whisky de Marruecos" which, alas, was not one bit alcoholic. It was syruppy sweat mint tea, with texture at the bottom, and it was absolutely delicious.

The beauty of being in Morocco was that suddenly I was a Spanish speaker as opposed to an Arab or Beréber speaker. In Morocco, hearing Spanish was like hearing English while in Sevilla. Not too uncommon, but special enough to say, "Hey, I understand that! That's my language!"

I was in Africa when I first could say of Spanish, "Hey, that's my language!"

Super fun. Language high. A trilingual table. Una mesa multilingüe. Don't ask me how to say that in Portuguese.