Stuff that is different and makes us cold

The last posting opened with a side comment about the unusually warm winter we’ve had this year in Morocco. Why, then, as I sit around the apartment doing Arabic homework, am I wearing fleece pants, wool socks, leg warmers, a long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, fleece, hooded down jacket and a hat? It’s due to a little something we like to call lack of indoor heating.

Medina and ville nouvelle residences alike are cold cold cold. Zero heaters, zero fireplaces, zero insulation, zero carpet… you get the picture. I think these absences are partly a traditional design thing and partly a cheap design thing but also a cultural thing: people here have an idea that it’s not healthy for the body to undergo sudden changes in temperature, as it would upon exiting a toasty house into the nippy outdoors. Valid? I don’t profess to know.

What I do know, however, is that our apartment has been an icebox. Cross my heart and hope to die: the temperature makes a distinct drop when we walk in the front door. Maybe because all the plastered and ceramic surfaces concentrate the chill more intensely than does the air? And speaking of the air: Cath and I realized we could see our breath in it the other day. Awe-some.

Compounding the indoor chillies is the mal-functioning of our apartment’s hot water system, something else that looks very different in Morocco than it does back in the states. Faucets in the latter typically release hot water upon a turn of the hot water tap. Here, we have a giant metal tank of gas living under our sink with a valve that needs opening to get the fuel flowing out to the fuse box on our balcony, where we stand on tip-toes while coaxing the pilot light to stay lit. I think it’s the fuse box that’s the problem. On good days, the flame catches after a couple tries, but sometimes it goes right out once you take your hand off the igniter – sometimes, meaning infrequently enough that we haven’t gotten it fixed (dumb dumb dumb) but also sufficiently often that a hot shower is always cause for celebration.

Our recourse in the fall, when it was still hot, was to simply take cold showers. With the winter dampness, we’ve been toting a pot of boiling water into the bathroom with us and bucket-showering, a practice that’s ridiculously incongruous with the swanky apartment we’re living in. We should just get the fuse box looked at, but given the rate at which things happen here, we’d be a week away from moving out (at the end of February) by the time anything was fixed. Or maybe we’re just lazy. At any rate, there are upsides to cold showers, right? Heightened appreciation of hot ones, for instance. Character-building. Low water and heating bills.

And yet… picking up that still-damp-because-there’s-no-heat-to-dry-it towel after a brisk bucketing… well, let’s just call it invigorating and leave it at that.

The funny thing about all this whinging is that it’s really not that cold here. Outside, I mean. Compared to Vermont. The winter temperatures swing between the high-30s on up into the high-50s. People tell us that it’s normally uber-rainy, but we’ve had almost more sunny days than not the past couple months. There have been only two days that I’ve gone running in tights and even long sleeves tend to feel like overkill. So it’s weird: on the one hand, I feel like I haven’t really had a winter here and that I won’t be ready for it to get warm again anytime soon, and on the other, it will be nice to do homework without attempting to simultaneously hold a pencil, turn pages and clutch a mug of hot tea.