Satellites Satellites and No Satellites

One of the quirkiest things I have discovered in my short time in Morocco is the Moroccans’ love for satellite television. So, it did not come as a surprise that as I ate lunch on Friday I saw my neighbors across the street installing a new dish on top of their house, to aide the 3 that are already there. I watched the men work and saw a heated discussion take place deciding where to put the newest addition to their collection. They decided on the highest point on the rooftop where the covered stairway exits to their veranda, it couldn’t really go anywhere else without taking another one down, and Allah knows that would be too much work. On every rooftop one sees satellite dishes, without fail. On top of my house there are 8 satellite receivers, all for one permanent resident. Khadija, our landlady, I will refer to her henceforth as “the old lady” as Phil my flat mate likes to call her. From my terrace it is possible to see 62 different satellite receivers, on about 8 surrounding buildings. The skyline of Fes does not have dramatic sky scrapers instead it is just that of circular white-ish grey rusting dishes.



After class Friday a friend asked me, “hey are you going to casa?” and I responded, “no, I didn’t know people were going, but, okay.” So I took a one-night trip to Casablanca for the 21st birthday of one of the students studying here. Going to Casa was only the first part of the journey, the second night was a surprise trip to Madrid for the real birthday party, I didn’t make that leg of the journey. Casa was, what Fes isn’t, in terms of night life, and by that I mean to say that a night life exists in Casa. So we arrived around seven after a 4 hour train ride and found a hotel that could take in all 14 of us, for 70 dirham a night, about 9 dollars. We then went to a bar/resaurant for dinner, I am pretty sure the place was more of a bar than a restaurant but used the restaurant half of the establishment as a façade for its, less culturally acceptable real business. This was evident through both the quality of the food and the dark hallway that had to be walked through in order to get from the main restaurant area to the back room bar. The restaurant had some live entertainment that would come in and play music and walk around and dance from time to time, it was more strange than entertaining. After dinner we visited a friend of most of the students I was with who had studied at ALIF last semester and now has an apartment in Casa, then it was off to another bar/night club. We walked into the bar through a restaurant and then had to go into the basement to get to the actual dancing/bar area. Other than the 7 women in our group there were 3 other women in the basement and about 30 men, debauchery in Morocco seems to be reserved for men only. We didn’t do much mixing with the locals.

Saturday morning I rode with the group to the airport and checked to see if I could get a really cheap seat of the flight to Madrid with them, I couldn’t, it was 238 euros after they had all paid about 50 for the round trip. So I made my way back to Fes on my own. I took the train and as I left Casa I found another, much stranger, skyline covered in satellite dishes, a Moroccan shanty town. These may have been the best living almost homeless people I have ever seen. Their shacks made out of cement blocks and roved in rusting sheet metal, the biggest being about 20 feet by 20 feet, all had satellite dishes resting on their rusty roofs. One such of these shacks, no doubt a rather prosperous or large poverty stricken family had built a second story onto their shack. It was strange to see such development in a place so poor, but I guess that must come with time, one has enough money to add on top of his tiny house but, either does not have the means to move or is too attached to his community, and thus, the supposedly ephemeral ghetto town turns into a real community, with two story shacks and satellite dishes.


I have just spent the last hour sitting out on my terrace. Tonight’s entertainment was not of the avian kind but of the astrological kind instead. The show I have been watching is a full lunar eclipse of a full moon. I didn’t know this was happening tonight so it came as a welcome rest after my day’s travels. The night sky over Fes is surprisingly pleasing, I would expect much less in a city of a million people. In addition to the relatively low light pollution, there are not the distractions we see in an American sky, I watched the moon for over an hour and saw only two planes fly by. Tonight lucky me got to see, in one night, what it usually takes a month to see. As Earth’s shadow curtained the moon, the rest of the sky came out to play. While the light pollution from the moon dissipated, some of the more elusive nighttime players made an appearance above the city of Fes. With the moon full, Orion, Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper all give great performances, but as it’s light fades 7 of our favorite sisters and the Dipper’s little counterpart show up and show off. The moon during a lunar eclipse is unlike any other moon, the sunlight’s glow, and reflections off the earth are obviously still shining on the moon, leaving a big orange hanging in the sky that matches the ripened oranges all around Fes. Studying the night sky over Fes has, however, left me with one probing question; where are the satellites that send the Moroccans their beloved signals?