Saturday, October 21, 2006

 

Night Swimming Deserves a Quiet Night

I don't think it is a great mystery to anyone that knows me why I bring a towel with me when I travel. I aint no strag. And it thus follows, by the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" school of logic, that if I am going to bring a towel with me on vacation, I might as well bring a swim suit. This all made perfect sense to me in my head (as most things that make little sense IRL do) so I brought my swim suit along. This may have flown in the face of the presumption I had made about the weather being chilly in Africa (which you will have read all about if the internet ever chooses to publish that post, or the identical copy I made some five minutes later), but I figured no harm could be done by bringing my suit along.

And in the immortal words of Lewis Carol and Jervis Tetch, "Kaloo Kalay", my ill founded forthought paid off. For when I arrived at the Ibiz Hotel in Marrakesh, what did I find in the courtyard? None other than a refreshing looking pool surrounded by exotic fruit trees. The trees bore bananas and oranges and lemons, while the pool bore a rotund woman in a bathing cap lazily swimming the perimeter of the pool.

The pool looked so inviting, not only due to the heat, but more so due to the act that I had just been restricted to a seat (be it plane or bus) all day, and so the pool afforded me the unequalled opportunity to move freely through all three spacial dimensions. I decided that I should, nay, must, go for a swim after I'd unpacked.

However, by the time I'd unpacked, the sun, source of all heat in Africa, had already set. It was that time that I'm never sure whether or not it is dusk, when the sun is down but the sky is still blue. And though it had taken me longer than I had expected to get down to the pool, that same woman was still circumnavigating the pool. I could not deny myself the refreshing pleasure of the pool any longer. I dove in. It was everything I expected.

Swimming under water is the closest thing I've ever experianced to flying. And though I one day would like to try sky diving, I doubt it would afford the same satisfaction as swimming. For it is in water that you can control your speed and possition in all directions. Skydiving, though it might feel like flight, one must remember, is just a body accelerating in one direction.

Getting out of the pool was chilly, but the experiance had been refreshing. And a warm shower made all right with the world.

It was my own rhetoric as to how good the pool felt that convinced everyone at dinner that we should have a pool party that night. An idea that sounded better on paper than it would have done in practice. Especially since, it seemed, I was the only person who had brought a swim suit. However, when eleven o'clock rolled around, I was not the only one ready to take a dip. Only half of we Moroccan IESers showed up at the pool, and most of those that came showed up in sweatshirts. But sure enough beside the pool, ready to jump in, was my roommate (for the trip) Kevin.

Kevin, clad in a pair of gym shorts, was just as eager to make the most of the Moroccan adventure as I was. And so we went for a, albeit short, swim in the African moonlight, while the other IESers looked on like, as Victor (my History prof who came on the trip too) put it, Mermaids. Liam, Kevin and my other roommate, insisted that he was a Mer-MAN, but we all know the truth.

The next night the group stayed in the city (and I use the term very loosely) of Ouarzazat. There we stayed at a hotel that looked far more classy than we could ever have expected for a school group like ours. It looked like one of those hotels that was a former abode for some monied type of person. In reality the hotel had only been finished some two weeks previous to our arriving there. But the food was good and there was a pool. After dinner Kevin and I decided to reprise our antics of the previous night, we even convinced Liam to come with us. But where our swim in Marrakesh had been refreshing, this swim was only cold. The Atlas Mountains do not provide the most appealling weather for aquatic activities during the month of October. But there are other reasons for swimming than to cool off. Swimming can be an adventure if you make it one.

Now maybe the cold water had gone to my head, or maybe I'm just bad at making decisions. But as I returned to my room, shivering, having not yet recieved my warm shower, I ran into a couple of the girls from the trip. They were dismayed that we were done swimming. Now I know what you're all thinking, and who knows it may be the truth, but I tend to think that the reason I returned to the pool was of a more innocent nature. I think that the part of my brain that allows me to say 'no' had simply frozen, and become useless.

I am glad that I returned to the pool. Though the water greeted my skin with a frosty sting, and the conversation with my fellow swimmers consisted mostly of how cold it was when one removed themselves from the icy water, and how it created such a terrible catch 22, the swim got all the more exciting when Muhammad arrived.

Muhammad worked in the kitched of the hotel, and at first when he came out to the pool we thought it was to kick us out. But Muhammad only wanted to talk to us. He was very nice. But most of the Moroccans were very nice. What made Muhammad special was, like his namesake, the message he brought us. In our conversation with him we learned that one of the major components to the Ouarzazatian economy was the movie studio just outside of town. It was here that many scenes from "Gladiator" were filmed, but Russle Crow does little to excite me. It was in this area that "Flight of the Phoenix" was filmed, and therefore it was nearby that Hugh Lauri had taped his audition for "House" in a hotel bathroom. The message brought by the Rasul that really got me excited that night was about the movie filmed in this town about thirty years ago. A strange little movie called "Star Wars". I was on Tatooine!

There was no pool in the desert, so there were no nocturnal aquatics in the Sahara.

When we got to the hotel in Fes, there was something eerily familiar about it. It was another Ibiz, but it was not just similar to the one in Marrakesh, it WAS the Ibiz from Marrakesh. You might say it was an exercise in cookiecutter architecture, but I believe we had stumbled upon an actual factual doppelganger. Kevin and I, who had developed a taste for nightly adventures, went for a swim in the familiar pool right away. When we surfaced we found a couple of our IES cohorts waiting for us. They asked us if we wanted to join them as they explored Fes. We agreed assuming they would grant us time enough to change.

They did not.

Kevin and I found ourselves wandering around the Fes night market dressed in swim suits and sweatshirts, still carrying our towels. My Ithaca sweatshirt has lost its zipper, thus it does not close. I was forced to Mcguyver myself a dickie out of the towel. I hope we started a new trend.

That night I capped off the night with a quick swim, and a couple chapters of Moby Dick.

It made me very sad to find there was no pool at the Casablanca Ibiz our final night. Drinking sodas in the hotel cafe lacks the adventure of night swimming. But then I met a man who had no feet and I was thankful for all the night swimming I had done.

More Excitement to come.

-Arthur Curry



Comments:
Huh? What? I didn't do anything. I didn't... Somebody's throwin' stuff. You gonna build a fire or what?
 
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