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A Summer That Went by Too Fast

September 13, 2007

My extended family could not make it to my graduation ceremony because of unrest in the streets of Valencia, my hometown and Venezuela’s third largest city. Just a few days before, on the evening of Sunday May 27th, the country’s largest TV station, Radio Caracas Televisión, went off the air at exactly 11:59 pm. The Channel 2 bandwidth was immediately replaced by the newly-created, state-funded Televisora Venezolana Social to promote President Chavez’s “21st century socialism.”

Political instability and civil unrest are not foreign to Venezuela, a people who have witnessed a coup, looting, drastic currency fluctuation, and a three-month, nation-wide strike—all within the past several years. Something was different this time around, the more I looked forward to moving to Rollins in August, the more distant I felt from local politics. I was soon going to become an outside observer rather than a first-hand source.

The rest of my summer, contrary to the days leading up to my graduation, was less troublesome but more hectic as my days left in Venezuela were counted. In late June I flew over to Rollins for summer orientation. Doug Little, head of the Explorations program, made all of us incoming freshmen eager to start school in August. I felt Rollins was going to give me a break from all the turmoil in my home country.

Within a week I had set foot on four continents. A couple of days after Rollins, I went to Morocco for the entire month of July to visit my mom’s side of the family. We had a layover flight in Madrid before arriving at Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport. The jet lag kicked in but I was too excited to even shut my eyes. I felt powerless as I realized how much Arabic I had forgotten after nearly two years of not speaking the language.

We finally got to my aunt’s house in Rabat, the nation’s capital, and we all had dinner together, we were nearly fifteen people around the table taking dibs from the center plate. My aunts and uncles hadn’t changed, but my cousins were almost unrecognizable—it’s surprising how much people can change in two years. In the days following we went to downtown Rabat and to the several markets that fourteen different types of olives, dozens of spices coming all the way from India, and ten times more the variety of fruits available than in Venezuela.

After Salaat Al Jumu’ah (Friday noontime prayer), couscous would be served for lunch. Couscous is a dish unique to the Maghreb region and world-renowned; it consists of spherical grains of semolina wheat served with meat or lamb in a vegetable stew—best when topped with raisins and caramelized onions. There is always some left aside to be given to charity as part of tradition.

For the first time in my many visits to la Tour Hassan, I finally found out about its history. Originally started in 1196 with Yacoub Al-Mansour’s rule of the Almohad dynasty, it was intended to be the largest mosque in the world. Construction of the tower was discontinued three years later, leaving the minaret of the mosque incomplete. The over eighty-meter tall tower was reduced to its present day height of 44 meters with the earthquake of 1755. Along with the Mohammed V Mausoleum, the complex forms part of Rabat’s most important historical and tourist destination.

The Oudaïas is where all tourists are taken for shopping. Moroccan tapestry, woodwork, pottery, and souvenirs are for sale in what was formerly a military housing complex. The elementary librarian at my school in Venezuela used to live there when her father was stationed there in WWII. I bought a poster depicting the city of Marrakech to hang in my dorm this upcoming fall along with several other souvenirs for friends back home.

After a couple of weeks in Rabat, we drove up north to stay at a beach house for a week. With the Mediterranean Sea just a few meters in front of the house, we could spot camels being walked on the coastline and on really clear days, we would see the southern shores of Spain right across the Strait of Gibraltar. We went to the medina (city center) where you could here Spanish, Arabic, French, and several other European tongues as the tourists bargained the vendors’ high prices.

Our final week in Morocco came by fast, this is by far the shortest trip I’ve ever taken—half the length of my usual two-month stay—it was reduced because of paperwork I needed to file with the bank, obtaining my student visa, and Summer Orientation in late June. I went out with my uncle several times during my last week to the best pastry shop in downtown Salé, La Riviera, to get millefeuilles for the family gatherings we had in the late afternoon.

In early August, I traveled the Rabat-Casablanca highway for the last time to catch our flight in the Mohammed V Airport. After a tearful goodbye, we got on the plane on August 3rd to Madrid where we would stay for the night before heading back home to Venezuela. From the Barajas Airport we took the subway to our first stop, the Santiago Bernabeu stadium where the city’s soccer team Real Madrid FC plays its games. Our next stop was Plaza de Colón and walked down Paseo de la Castellana for the rest of the evening. Even though the language of my home country was conceived in the very city in which I was strolling, the local colloquialisms made “Madridian” Spanish seem like a foreign tongue compared to the Venezuelan dialect with which I was raised.

Before leaving for Rollins, I had a farewell party at a friend’s house and visited my former high school where my mom works as an English teacher and where my brother had just started his sophomore year of high school. After 14 years at Colegio Internacional de Carabobo, I was ready for a fresh start at Rollins.

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