travel notebooks

These are some of my travel notebooks, as described in this piece that was published in rob mclennan's ottawa poetry newsletter blog.
Indeed, I don't live in Ottawa and I don't write poetry, but I'm not the only hitchhiker on the site.
http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.ca/2016/03/on-writing-89-alice-zorn.html

discovering tajine

This image looks like it comes from Grimm's fairy tales, but I took it in Morocco--in Essaouira in 2008. I was thinking of Morocco this morning after reading Kathleen Winter's latest post on her blog. She credits me with introducing her to tajine.
http://kathleenwinter.livejournal.com/57006.htm
Kathleen has such a curious nature that she would have discovered tajine all on her own. If nothing else, she lives near the Marché Jean-Talon where the clay dishes with their conical tops are sold. She would eventually have broached the topic with some Algerian butcher. What do you do with this? Is it a cooking or a serving dish?
Or she would have asked Dear One who's quite good-natured about his role as researcher and occasional errand-hound. (I'm thinking of last winter when she couldn't find suet to make English Christmas pudding. One needs suet specifically because it has such a high melting point that it retains its shape much longer than another more palatable fat one might consider using as a substitute. Not everyone fancies the fat from around a cow's kidneys. Dear One went off into the city and returned with suet a butcher gave him gratis.)

I first saw tajine dishes in Morocco in 1998. Every morning the smaller restaurants would set up an outdoor table lined with individual clay braziers. Tajine dishes would be filled with squash, lamb, chick peas, fish, artichokes, chicken, or kefta and set atop the braziers. I wish I had a picture, but I didn't take many in 1998, and when I returned to Morocco in later years, nobody seemed to be making tajines like this anymore. Too bad. The aroma was so tempting! All morning you could smell the stews slowly baking. At noon the tops of the tajines were lifted. Everything was cooked perfectly. Something about the porous clay (which I always soak in water for a few hours before making a tajine) that retains the juices, the very slow heat--at home, in my oven, I bake a tajine at 250F--the high conical top.
It's a wonderful winter meal because you can layer a tajine with many possible ingredients, set it to bake for 3 or 4 hours, come home to the delicious aroma of a meal ready to serve. Traditionally, in Morocco a meat or fish tajine always includes a fruit. That can be a dried fruit such as prunes or apricots. Or fresh fruit. Or even green olives which are considered a fruit in Morocco. My favourite tajine is chicken with citron confit (pickled lemons) and green olives. I make it with saffron. Obviously you can make vegetarian tajine as well.
When Kathleen wrote about tajines, she said I'd learned about them on my trips to Morocco and Tunisia. In fact, when we ordered tajine in Tunisia, we got a potato omelette cut into squares. And of course, if you're so naive as to say, "This isn't how they make tajines in Morocco," the waiter will dryly inform you that you're not in Morocco. Indeed.
Tajine dishes come in different sizes. In the market in Marrakech I saw a man layering potato slices in a tajine as wide as a bicycle wheel. Below that he had fish and wedges of pumpkin. He had yet to build a teepee of green beans and stud the mound with chopped tomatoes.
I have a scene with a tajine dish in my novel, Arrhythmia. At one point, I thought a possible title for the novel might be Tajine. But the Moroccan character in the novel isn't as important finally as he was in the first version of the manuscript.
I think I still need to write about Morocco.

tools to advertise

Yesterday I was walking down the sidewalk behind a man carrying a plastic bucket filled with various tools and rags. I recognized the trowel--a flat, diamond-shaped blade attached to a wooden handle. It's used for scraping mortar across bricks or stones to build a wall or a structure. My father had trowels. He built the cinder-block shells for the two houses we lived in while I was growing up. 
I had to get to work, but I couldn't get past this man with his bucket and trowel... tromping through the dirty, ankle-high snow along a Montreal sidewalk. The path was too narrow to pass him, the snow on either side piled too high. I had to follow his bucket until we got to a street corner where I leaped across the pond of frozen slush that skirts every Montreal curb at this time of year. I wondered if he was on his way to a job or returning from one. I was impressed by the portability of his trade.
I was reminded of the buckets we'd seen in Agadir in Morocco. We'd walked far from our hotel to look for the bus station. In 1998 it used to be in the center of town--no more than a street where ancient, rusted buses groaned to a stop and took on passengers who waited with threadbare bags tied with twine. People didn't wait in a lineup. When the bus lumbered up, sagging to one side, everyone rushed the door . Elbows, bags, butting heads. Whatever modesty hijabs represent in theory did not translate into civil bus manners. Men smoked with manic intensity, not jumping on a bus until it had already started to pull away--which the driver seemed to know since he kept the door open. The plaster wall along the street was black, pockmarked and corroded with bus fumes. The men hawking tickets rattled off sounds with no vowels. Not a single name we could recognize. We finally asked, "Marrakech?" The man barked something like "Brrrksh!" A bark from deep within his throat, though his mouth never really opened. He peeled off two wee bits of paper with something scribbled across in Arabic and took our money. We tried to ask where we were supposed to wait. He jabbed an imperative finger at our feet. Like... here? He didn't mind taking our money but felt no compunction to enlighten us. We were white people. Strangers. Foreigners. We were supposed to take one of the expensive tour buses down on the beachfront, not hike up into this dirty part of town.
That was the bus station in 1998. By 2008 it had been moved into a large building of several stories (three?) with ramps where the buses pulled up. It had been moved too--far enough from the center of town that tourists weren't supposed to find it. We had to walk very far from our hotel. When we stopped along the way to ask for the "gare d'autobus", we were already so far from where foreigners were expected to wander that no one understood French. (Or seemed to understand--a subtle distinction with which I'm familiar, living in Quebec.)
Along one of the main streets we saw a display of buckets on the sidewalk, all in a row. The buckets held hammers, wrenches, rakes, trowels. Each was arranged with fanciful inventiveness to display the maximum number of tools to advantage--also to catch the eye because there were so many buckets to choose from. At first I thought the tools, splattered with hardened mortar, dirt, and in some cases maybe even broken, were for sale. Then a small truck pulled up, a man darted from the shadows, grabbed his bucket, and jumped in the back.
These were workers, advertising their trades. Each bucket was a concrete affadavit, a pledge of willingness, a record of ability. Each bucket, examined individually, was as interesting as any installation piece.