18th to 31st of December, 2017.
Liz invite Shawna’s family to come with us to this Christmas party we were going at night. So Cid drives us back home just so we could and take Moulay (Med is not coming because he is not a big fan of places full of people) and then come back to their home and get Shawna. She would bring some of those delicious treats with her.
The party it is in a Indonesia family house and Mimi is the hostess and Santa Claus. Everyone looks really nice and the food is great! Of course I could not wait to eat the sweets! So delicious…
I meet this peculiar man, Ali, who looks like a lot with Andy Garcia. He is from Lebanon and had lived in Spain, Uganda, Tanzania and now Mauritania. He tells me that Uganda is the most beautiful country in Africa and gave me some names and phone numbers around that area just in case a needed some help. He is charming and of course I feel that kind of flirt, as in all the other men I talked here in Africa, but he is not a jerk or anything close to that. He also tells me about his wife, a Romanian woman, and his three kids who are leaving in Spain now.
I talked just a little bit with Mimi but she looked to me like a really kind woman, who was just trying put all her friend and friends of her friends and nice people together.
I even won a Christmas gift! A great veil!
Back home, in the car, we have such a lot of fun with Shawna and Cid, singing some old songs including Eminen, Lose yourself.
I get excited because we supposed to have Christmas dinner with then on Monday, so me and Liz decide to buy some stuff to make a tabule with Hummus and some tortillas. Unfortunately, Shawna it was not feeling good that night so she had to cancelled. We eat, the four of us, at home and Med bought some cake for desert. We watched The Gremlins and Home Alone. They watched some Christmas movies every year.
Tuesday morning I supposed to come with Moulay to the University. It is the only one in the whole country so I had to see it. I am also excited to take one of those North American yellow buses they have it here. We eat some Bennas in the bus while waiting.
There are just three buildings on the campus of the University, which is kind of far away of the city: Medicine and Pharmacy, Science and Technology and the Moulay’s one, Literature and Human Science. The Law one is near to the city.
I have to say that it is bigger than I imagined but the infrastructure is quite bad. I cannot even talk about the women’s bathroom. What I can say is I have been to a lot of road Gas Station that looks like five stars bathrooms compared to the University ones.
They have this small Coffee which definitely do not support the big number of students. That, by the way, it is the better thing about it: the number of students is pretty big.
Of course since they are still under a strong society and religious manipulation (or doctrine, call as you prefer), they still have their minds pretty closed. Having me in there, a white bald girl, it is a completely weird thing to most of them. And again I have to deal with the whole kind of inappropriate and indiscreet looks.
The worse part is when this young boy approach and start to say such a lot of dumb things. He believed that Portuguese and Spanish are the same language and does not matter how much I tried argue with him he kept saying that stupidity. He also believe that Brazil is just about football and sugar. You know, I feel now that I should have argued more with him about that, but why exactly? So the last stupid thing he said it is, of course, about relationship: I should have babies and find someone to warm me in the cold times. I do not know how I should laugh in a book, but just know it that I am laughing now as I was in there. To finish the conversation, I just told him I could buy some blankets.
In the opposite hand, the three girls who stay to talk a bit, Moulay’s friends, they are pretty smart and nice. Oh, women! How luck I am for be one.
The other bad news is Moulay would not have any class that morning! Of course we could back home earlier but I really wanted watch at least one class. I might not understand anything but I would get the system. It did not work.
Back at home we take a nap and decide that after lunch we would go to a place nearby, with some dunes, and I could feel at least a little bit like in the desert. When we are leaving the house around 3.30 p.m. we bumped with Elhajd (the linguistic guy who studied in Turkey) and for no reason he decide to come with us.
It is not that his presence is unpleasant, but he is too arrogant and think he is always right. It takes us two hours walking to get in there. At the end it worth because the place is really beautiful and I love to draw in the dunes. Unfortunately it is a little dark and pass five already. But I take some good pictures and I felt a little peace over there.
We have to get a taxi to come back. At eight o’clock we would meet Sara (the CS who could not host me) in a Coffee.
Moulay is looking kind of nervous to meet Sara. The biggest sign is that he does not want get in there late! I mean, I have not talk about that yet, but this is the Mauritanian style: nothing here it happens in time.
Sara is nice. She is also kind of shy but speaks with all of us without any problem. We stay for a while in the Coffee Shop. She tells us that, as the same as Liz, she was travelling around here just for a few days but fell in love for the country and decided to come back to live. She is living here since February this year. I have no idea how people do that. I mean, just to get inside the country it is so complicated that I cannot even imagine asking for a resident visa and a work visa and all those stuff. There is one thing that she says that upset me: “You vegetarian are mean because you eat the animal’s food”. My problem is, when I heard something so dumb like this I simply freeze or maybe I just lose the hope of arguing with someone who say something like that. I mean, even if she does not really believe in that, why the meat eaters always have to attack the vegetarian ones? I never ever attacked anyone. If you come with the excuse that you always are attacked by vegetarian, try to be a little more smart and just attack those ones back and not anyone that you meet and who might are the nicest one you will ever meet.
Then Moulay starts acting really weird, in a very bad way. He says to Med, for example, when he starts to smoke near me, that he should stop because it was annoying me. When I say it was OK, Moulay had the audacity to put words in my mouth an said I was just trying not to be rude and Med should stop smoking. And when we go to eat, at the table he start to gave orders to Med in how he supposed to gave the food to Liz, taking the chicken and put in her plate. And worse: using the ridiculous sentence “Take care of your wife!”. Yeah! So everyone starts to get real piss with him.
We supposed to watch Die Hard that night but after me and Moulay come back from walking Sara home, Liz and Med were tired and they slept after less then 30 minutes of the start of the movie so we all went to sleep.
I think I am starting to be less tolerant with Moulay because I have been here for over a week already. My patience is kind of passing the limits. I do not know if I would be like these with everyone forever. I remember my three months in Ireland and Spain for example. I was OK. Anyway, last night I completely lost my mind with him. Since Liz and Med could not watch the movie with us and Moulay’s computer it was in the Library, we decide to watch one of the two I had in my computer. When it started, we realized that the sound it was not good but there was nothing we could do. So after Moulay keep complaining I decided to move the computer closer to us. When he started to say “To move the computer closer will not…” I get up and said we would not watch the movie anymore. He still try to argue, saying that there is a better quality that 1080, basically saying that it is my fault the movie is like that. At that point I just shut down my computer and say that is it. To make it worse, before I go to sleep, he search for this website where he read about how the Yifi (torrent page from where I downloaded my movies) changes the quality of the movies and some more blablabla. I know for sure know that sometime he has no idea how to live with other human being.
I do not know exactly what Liz and Sara saw in Mauritania. Both of them used the term “relaxing” to describe what they think about it. I would use “chaotic”. For me everything here is chaos: the traffic, the food, there is no order at all in anything. And you are listening this from some one with Anarchic principles. But I am organized. I like to be in time. I like to have a plan and know how and when I will do the stuff. Mauritanian people live in a weird kind of Carpe Diem, with no organization at all, a lot of dirty and sand. They do not eat healthy, they do not make exercise at all because since the taxis are cheap (of course they could save the money of five rides for two good and complete meals) they go everywhere by car.
Last night Moulay said something that maybe make sense: they might not get concerned about the tomorrow because they know that if anything goes wrong, if they need money or anything else, they can find help with the other Mauritanians. Not just family or friends, you can also find help on the streets from strangers. So this fact kind of make them become lazy. And this is not a racist thought from a foreign, it came from a Mauritanian. So maybe Liz and Sara felt in that way about not planning the future, the tomorrow, and that is why they like it here so much.
Since a few years to now, I developed this kind of necessity to be organized. It used to be worse before I started to travel, of course, but is still on me. It is something that makes me like that movie with Ben Affleck, The Accountant, for example. Right now I have at least an idea of a ten years travel plan. But also it is not a big deal because I do not plan to have a job, a safe money or something like that, an official travel route that I cannot change, no. I am adapting all the time. But anyway, I definitely could not live in Mauritania for longer than two weeks.
