I stay up late on my first night in my new room, and so I wake up late on my first morning.

Around me are sounds I do not know, the pace of the house which so far is unfamiliar to me. I listen to voices talking outside my room, footsteps, the sound of gas from someone cooking on the gas can, someone’s Youtube playing in a room nearby. I feel low and calm and shy, I need to pee and I want to wash myself but I am not sure how to do it in this house.

Finally I dress and dare myself out of the room. The toilet is on the other side, two stalls of which the light works in only one, traditional holes in the floor. A small tap is at the height of my ankles, the sound of water filling the small bucket for flushing covers the sound of me peeing.

I come out and wash my hands in the sink, then peer up through the open ceiling all the way to the sky. I find it gray and drops of water are slowly falling on the grids between the floors.
“Il pleut,” I say to myself, remembering the French lessons.

A woman is cooking next to me and I decide to practice the French on her even though I am feeling shy and actually don’t want to talk to aybody. I need to find out how people normally shower here – is it in the small bathroom stalls or maybe in their own rooms? After only two sentences it turns out that the woman is from Nigeria and that her first language is English. On this introverted day I sigh out in relief. She tells me that yes, normally people take showers inside the small toilet-stalls and as I later find another woman brushing her teeth only draped in a cloth outside of one them, I feel confident enough to wash myself later on, too. The turbulence of the past week makes me want to avoid mistakes and create unnecessary culture chocks and even though a part of me sure does grow annoyed over my own self-restrictions and timidity, I allow myself the space to be as shy and careful as I need. I take time to myself.

For breakfast I have some olives and bread. I make my way very quickly to the market and keep to the sides of the streets to protect myself from the rain.

Somehow I don’t get lost and I eat my breakfast sitting on my bed, which is just my sleeping mat and sleeping bag rolled out on the floor of my tent in one end of the room. It’s spartan but it’s my nest, so it’s safe.

A knock on my door, and a smiling Moroccan woman is gesticulating to me to follow her. She lives in a room next to mine and we already said hi before. She is holding a small teapot. She invites me to sit on her bed and she serves us sweet tea in small glasses and bread drenched in honey. We don’t share many common words but she urges me to eat with her smile and her hands. She wraps her hair and then makes a video call to two people who might be her children: a young girl, maybe eighteen or twenty, smiling and smoking and washing dishes in Algeria and a young man lying in a bed and minding a toddler. I sit by and watch and eat and smile and am just easily welcomed. Some people pass by the room as I sit there; a young girl who asks something, a woman from the next room who is also named Aisha and is from from Côte d’Ivoire and a shy-looking and skinny young woman who might be just a little bit younger than me. She asks something from my host as she stands pressed against the door frame, then asks for my name and tells my host that I am beautiful, “zoeena”; one of the few Darija words I recognize. She slowly leans forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek, then disappears quietly and swiftly like the street cats. In my state of shyness and introversion I let it all happen to me, I let the languages wash over me and later I thank for the tea and retreat back to my room.

When I go out it has stopped raining and it is already late in the afternoon. Aimlessly I walk around the streets of the Medina and they all seem new to me and I am caught up by the same happy-dreamy feeling as when I first arrived, as always when I first arrive and feel both attached and de-tached to the place and myself, very vibrant and alive, very strange and yet like anyone else, anonymous. Happy and at the same time weird and new and paralyzed.

Happy because: all I really need is some coins in my pocket and the cheapest bread to warm my belly and allow my eyes to clearly see all the colors that the world has to offer, my ears to drown in the sounds, my body to dance with the rhythms all the way from the skin to the heart.
Weird, as: my soul, my inner body always staying a few steps behind as I walk, not ever fully with me, needing so much more time to arrive.

In this new Tangier I recognize some places but I see them for the first time. In the rain, the light is different and the streets empty. The doors, the houses and streets that I know now suddenly have turned around and I find them again in new places. Sometimes I suddenly find that I have walked in the same street before but in a different direction and with a different mood, and I take the same photos but now in a new light, with a new spacial frame of reference, a new feeling of direction; where the sea is and where the square is. With this feeling, the doors and houses I recognize now seem turned upside down and when I pass by places that I feel like I know, I feel lost and thrown out of balance by the familiar.

I buy tangerines and visit my friend in the reception at my first hostel. He greets me as if we’ve known each other for years and we chat about his new baby and I tell him about my short time at the other hostel, about looking for a home and finding it. I admire his way of making me feel like a friend in an instant and I make a little note in my heart to learn this skill from him.

As I pass the square my Senegalese friends invite me to sit with them and I laugh at the small boy trying to arm wrestle with one of them. We chat briefly, they ask me how I am. Then I tell them that I am going to find some food and slowly make my way up to the Kasbah. Joël has left the town for a few nights to play a concert but I want to ask Jonas to have dinner with me. I don’t want to eat alone and am longing for someone familiar even though I anticipate that the language might be challenging; we have never hung out alone before and Joël has always been our translator.

When he opens the door he is happy to see me and my worries wash away by his calm. We make our way out of Medina and into the city, have warm and grateful bayssara with bread, wander around for a few hours and yes, talk, slowly and carefully, hands and signs mixing into our clumsy English and French.

Back home the reception in my room doesn’t work so I go up to the terrace and I do my French lesson on the application under the dark sky with the seagulls rioting above me. Cold, uncomfortable and determined.

And back in the room I write it all down even though I have no idea of what will happen to all the words later and I calm myself. I calm my fear of not being able to do enough, to give enough, I calm my fear of somehow failing. I remind myself that this is my life, one day at a time, one place at a time. All I need is to stay with the moment and do my best to be true to myself. It is enough. It is all I have.

I have no idea of what will happen but I am step by step learning to live in the peace and turbulence of the present. This is what my life is like. I am traveling and I have been very, very lucky. I don’t know who I am yet to meet, how the rest of Africa will be, but I am here to learn about the small, the tangled and complex and the slow. And I want to dedicate myself fully to it.

…

(This story told in pictures.)