Language in Morocco

Language in Morocco is very interesting. Depending on how you look at it, there are 4 languages in use.  First is Arabic, with two variants, the local spoken version and the standard written one.  Then there is French, which most students learn in high school, and which is the language of commerce and instruction in almost all the universities (I'm teaching in Franglais, which most of the technical terms in English, and the general discussion in French).  There is also Amazir (Berber), which is an official language but is spoken only by the Amazir people--in one of my classes, only one of the 20 students speaks Amazir.  Finally, the country knows what the international language of the world is, and is increasing instruction in English.  And all clothing (t-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball hats) with text is in English.

Tram station in Rabat.  The tram is a great way to get around.

Sign at the station, in three languages.  Arabic, on the right, occurs where an Arabic speaker would look for it, since Arabic reads right to left.  French on the left reads left to right.  Amazir is left with the center position.

Faculty of Sciences, Mohammed V University.

Signs at the university only have French on the left, and Arabic on the right.  This is a sort of equality of the languages, where both occur where a native speaker would look for it, and no one feels their language is secondary.

Dunes in the Sahara--Students from the Region

The second half of the fall semester is starting, and I'm teaching three modules.  Most "courses" run only part of the semester.  I'm teaching two modules to the geology master's students, and one to the master's students at CRASTE-LF.  There are about 20 students in each group, and they attend essentially all their course work together.  The geology students are almost all from Morocco, but about half of the CRASTE-LF students are from 10 other countries.

An example I have often used in my research and teaching involves a region in the south central Sahara where two orthogonal sets of dunes intersect.  I have been looking at automatically extracting worldwide dune characteristics from digital elevation models, and this region jumped out for it unusual characteristics.  I have always attributed this to shifting seasonal wind patterns, shown in the bottom two maps.  

For US students, this area is a long ways from nowhere.  Here I have a student who is from "near" here.  I put "near" in quotation marks because these landlocked countries are huge, and the population density in these regions is very low.

Dunes trending NE-SW in the top and bottom of the map, and NW-SE in the center.  Location shown by the red box in the center of the next two maps.

Average January wind patterns.

Average July wind patterns.

Night lights in NW Africa, with national borders.  The coastal cities stand out with bright white, with the Sahara a barren black with a belt from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan having no people or no electricity (or very little of both.

El Jadida--once Mazagan

This weekend we took the train to El Jadida.  It was a Portuguese coastal  fortress built in 1514, expanded in 1541, and held until 1769.

Portuguese city overlooking the Atlantic.

Last summer I was in South Africa and saw the Castle of Good Hope, built by the Dutch starting in 1666.

African castles visited in 2017.

Portuguese cistern in El Jadida.

Antique cannon at Terrasse des Paresseux in Tangiers

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The castle in Cape Town, with clouds covering Table Mountain

For a number of years I have been using a data set with digitized ship logs from the age of sail.  For some information on the source of this data set, try here.  The data mostly postdates the building of these fortresses on opposite ends of the African continent, but the weather hadn't changed much, and sailing ships still saw the came limitations.  The data set has no digitized logs from Portugal, and I have shown just the Dutch ships before 1755.

Note the large number of ships sailing south along the coast, past the Portuguese fortress; the winds are favorable for this.  Approaching the equator, the ships wanting to travel fast to the Indies go straight south and do not try to hug the coast.  Those that do hug the coast, sail very slowly (blue vectors), and give up before they cross the equator.  They could in fact be engaged in the slave trade; this data set has an almost infinite number of questions it could be used to address.  The ships going to the Indies would pass Cape Town, and the Dutch colony there could resupply then.  The ships on the return voyage would initially sail north along the coast, and then swing far west to catch favorable winds back to Europe.

Routes of Dutch ships before 1755. Colors show ship speed (blue is slow; purple relatively fast considering these were big lumbering merchant ships) and the arrows show the direction of travel.

Annual wind patterns, which go a long way to explaining the overall sailing patterns.  Both the vector length and color correspond with wind speed; 10 m/s is 22 miles per hour

Rain--at last

Yesterday there was a little rain, the first in the 6 weeks we have been here.  Today there was a fair amount.

When we arrived, the plants in the window box overlooking the streets looked dead--so dead I did not take any pictures, but we started watering them.  And to show the resiliency of life, quite a few came back, notably some red geraniums.  A yellow flower, which we have not yet identified, is about to bloom.  In the background, rain in coming down.

Another view of the cross street, and the geraniums.

View from the back of the apartment.  Not easy to see the rain, but the dead giveaway is the complete lack of drying laundry from any of the porches  or windows.  It seems most Moroccan apartments have washing machines, but no dryers.  The courtyard, the roof, the balconies, or the windows.  The grate, and the white screening in the bottom of window grate keeps the drying laundry from falling.

The clothesline, and the clothes pins, on a sunnier day last week.

Contrasts

On the train to Tangiers, I got this photo as we rolled through the Moroccan countryside.  It could be just about anywhere, and summarizes some of the contrasts in the country.  In the foreground, there's the modern, motorized transport to zip the farmer, a friend, and their produce off to market.  In the background, the timeless way to get the job done, with a donkey.

But it's not just anywhere, but a very particular location to which I did not have to pay any attention when I took the picture.  The camera recorded the GPS coordinates (and note it was my camera, in partial true optical telephoto mode, and not my cell phone).  If you don't check, all this, and more information, could be in every JPEG you share.

I can map where this photo was taken on the map with the topography and the rail lines.  The purple squares are all the photos that survived the culling when we got home, and the small black square in the center of the image is the location of the donkey.

We have seen other equids; this one was on one of the streets in the medina of Fes, which goes forever and and which would never allow a truck to get through.

Here is another horse cart, on the roughly parallel other main street (as close as the curving streets can be called parallel).  This street is wider, and in fact trucks can go through (notice the trash truck in the background).  They did not even fold in the mirrors while driving, and until I saw them squeeze through, I would never have thought they would make.  This is one more reason we don't intend to drive in Morocco.

The last horse we saw on our way to the train station in Fes.  The night before we had dinner on the second floor of the restaurant right next to the green gate (it's blue on the other side), whose umbrellas are visible.

You ate what?

One of the nicest aspects of dining in Morocco are meals on the roofs.  Getting up there an involve very steep and narrow stair cases without handrails, but so far going slow and steady has been fine.  We've had breakfast on the roof in Tangiers, dinner in Fes, and then lunch in Fes on a really hot day (it's supposed to over 100 F later this week, the middle of October, when the average temperature is supposed to be only about 75 F; this could be a record high).

So on a scorching afternoon, we make our way to the roof, and start through the menu--the French version of course, but I photographed the English version.  There was the burger, with Taza ketchup, and I knew what I had to have.

The menu.  We did not have time to wait for the 7 hour roasted lamb, so had to settle for the burger.  Taza ketchup is sweet and distinctive, unlike the burger which is just like beef or bison.

The burger as presented.  The washed out background shows how nice the shade on one corner of the roof was.  While we were there, as three groups went one level higher up, seen to the upper left of the photo, but quickly retreated because the shade was not complete up there.

Same view, but with the lighting adjusted to show the view from the roof and the adjacent minaret.  On a lazy summer mid-afternoon (in October), nice just to sit and observe.

One of the children, when told about this via text message, could not believer I would eat such a burger.  This is one of the same kids who ate really interesting food in Iceland.  There is just no accounting from what people will eat, but you can argue if the food is for the old time locals, or just the tourists.

Tin-Tin's Restaurant

While in Tangiers a few weeks ago, we went to the "best" restaurant in the city.  That is of course a subjective assessment, but our guidebook recommended it highly, as did the web reviews we looked out.  How we ever found anything traveling in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, before Google, I really cannot remember, but there is WeeFee everywhere in Morocco, once you learn to pronounce it properly (no WiFi to be found).  You just have to ask for the "mot de passe".

The restaurant is a little hole on the wall off a staircase, with a log line.

Eventually you get to the head of the line, and realize there is no menu. There are also only a handful of tables, some of which are long and can have multiple parties seated there.  It reminded me of Legal Seafoods in Cambridge, way back when they were all the way out on the docks, and their current location in Kendall Square was just a touch dicey. There is a display board showing some options, but once you're seated, you don't have any choices and they just start bringing food and drink, a bottomless glass of fruit juice in a wine glass.

After fish soup, there was a cast iron pan with spinach and fish, then this grilled fish and skewers of fish.  Finally fruit for desert.

The restaurant's alter ego is this cartoon character, which I seem to remember from childhood--maybe from the TinTin books.  I think he liked spinach, which was featured in the second course.

Moroccan Trains

We spent a weekend in Fes/Fez.  The map above shows our return trip, when we were in first class with nice air conditioning.  The trip Friday was in second class, with no air conditioning, although we read that both classes are supposed to have air conditioning, an it is equally reliable.  We missed the cool air, since temperatures have been in the 90's this past week, proof that climate change is fake news (no, wait, not the case).

Between Fes and Meknes, note the speeds near 150 km/hr, while traversing the flat plain with fertile agricultural fields and most of Morocco's vineyards (which we did not see from the train).  After a stop at Meknes, the train turns northwest, and trundles along at much lower speeds, since it drops off the high ground, and makes a number of sharp turns.  Where it hits the flat coastal plain and turns west to Kenitra on the coast and the next stop, the speed picks up.  After the stop on Kenitra, it's high speed again until getting to the Sale-Rabat suburbs.  We sat on the bridge between them, where it looked like they are single tracking, probably to work on the new TVG lines coming soon.

The Fes station looks like it has just had a major overhaul.  It cannot be for the upcoming TVG, since the steep climb up to Meknes won't support the higher speeds.  But the station, like the one as Casa Port, shows what train travel will be like when the work is finished.

Then it was home to Rabat, where the station looks like a construction zone.  This was the scene on our first train trip two weeks ago, and already it looked quite a bit different today, and for the first time in three Sundays, there was no work underway this afternoon.

(GIS) Mapping the Buildings in Agdal with Cats.....

Just as we were moving to Rabat, I got an inquiry about my MICRODEM GIS program.  The user wanted more control over the pattern fill.  Now that we are settled in, I got around to making the change.  Actually, the capability has been there for a while, but I haven't used it, and it was not particularly laid out in the documentation.

Now you can use "any bitmap" as the brush for pattern fills.  I have not tested an upper limit (I have been to 100x100 pixels, and you probably won't get good results above that, and likely not with that.

First test, with a kitten picture.

Second test, with a selfie.   Why?  Because I can.  There's a white border, which is only partly transparent because it was a JPEG and that makes some of the white "not quite white" and thus not transparent.

Third test, a limestone brick pattern, which you might actually want.  The program has almost 200 patterns, which tile automatically, back from the days when they were used for geologic stratigraphic  columns.  It's now called a map pattern editor.

Playing around with this, for our Adgal neighborhood, shows some of the quirks in the OpenStreetMap data, which is crowd-sourced like Wikipedia.  The map above shows a road going into (under?) a building; we have to walk by that the next time we are out.  This map shows extreme detail in the buildings in the south part of the neighborhood, and hardly anything to the north.  I've noticed the same thing back home; the area around Severna Park is well mapped, but the adjacent area near Chesapeake High School is not.

Taking the Train to Casablanca

Yesterday we took the train to Casablanca for the day.  The city has two train stations, and we went into Casa Voyageurs, and returned from Casa Port.  Casa Port is the first of the train stations we've seen in Morocco (Rabat Agdal, Rabat Ville, Tangiers, and Casa Voyageurs) that is not a construction zone), and has been fully renovated recently.  The waiting area at Casa Port is now full of mall shops, including the ubiquitous McDonalds, and it's clear from what you can see at the others that they will share the same style.

I tracked our progress on my phone, and logged the positions. 

Our progress to Casablanca (top track, SW corner of map) and back to Rabat (bottom track).  The top speed of 160 km/hr is 100 miles/hour.

The train trip down made fewer stops (shown by the speed drastically slowing for the stations), and took 5-10 minutes less than the return trip.  The return trip made three more stops.  Both trips had a stop in the Casablanca suburbs, which does not show up as clearly as the others on the map because the train cannot attain its full speed until it reaches open country side well outside the cities.

You can also see the bend the train travels to get to Mohammedia, which will be bypassed by the TVG (fast trains) whose route is under construction to go with the refurbished stations.  The new route, visible from the train now, straightens the route. 

Rick's Cafe on the corner of the Casablanca medina.  They were not open mid-afternoon, so all we got was this picture..