Saritha, a junior in the School of Sustainability also studying economics and English Literature, visited Spain and Morocco last summer through the Global Sustainability Studies Program. Ramakrishna was most interested in exploring the interactions between the two regions, especially when it comes to sustainability policy and practice. Here, she shares her observations from her travels.
The first thing you notice when you visit Granada is that it’s a very old city, like a lot of the places we had visited. You can see it in the cobblestone streets which my sandals were much too thin for and so many other aspects of the city. Visiting the Alhambra will probably be the most distinct memory I have of Granada and not just for the historical/cultural significance we were supposed to take in. It was a long walk uphill, stairs I wasn’t used to climbing and a lot of (hopefully) lighthearted complaining along the way. When we arrived, as expected the place was laughably touristy. Most people around us spoke English and we were all recovering from our walk, reluctantly buying overpriced water. When we finally entered and heard our guide explain the particulars of each area, I wondered how much of this all of us were really taking in, how a tourist fits into not only a foreign modern landscape but also an ancient one. We might hear a thousand anecdotal points from our guide but how strong would the impression be, 3 hours later when we were all dying for food and the hotel? The casual nature of tourism imposed on a landscape that used to be anything but casual evoked my usual cynical lines of thinking at first, which gave way to a sense of fascination at this irony, this dissonance.
The Sahara at night is probably the strangest place I’ve ever been. It’s a space that you might even describe as purgatorial. We’re used to landscapes with definite beginnings and endings, demarcations that make the land something we can process. We’re used to precision, representations of place that are recognizable. The sands not only continue endlessly, but they’re in constant flux, subject to the wind and other disturbances, our own footprints included. A group of us decided to go exploring once the sun had set, burying our feet in the sands, half falling down steep dunes. Of course, we really had no means of navigation, besides the noise of the faint drumming from the camp we could hear in the distance. We were all waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they never quite made the transition. Honestly, we weren’t must better than lost children, staring up at stars we weren’t accustomed to seeing, slipping up and down the fluid inclines.
I heard that Morocco has embedded within it a series of contradictions. After visiting Rabat and Marrakech, it seems as if Morocco exists in a kind of gray space, between the expectations of the modern present and its past foundations. Though I’ve heard this said about many different countries, experiencing it firsthand allowed me to understand what this really means. The landscapes of many developing countries, at least in my experience, have been so characterized. I think Westerners find it strange to see computer parts being sold on the floor of a marketplace, or to find familiar cartoon characters printed on t shirts sold in the next shop. It’s kind of like an incomplete collage, part of the organized chaos of modern Morocco.
When I was little, I hated flying, and I hated airports. I thought of them as an in between place, some kind of kid version of purgatory, which now that I think about it, is stupidly dramatic. I remember sitting on the floor of an airport gate distracting myself with my Game Boy Color, dread building in the pit of my stomach, not wanting to board the flight with my parents when the time came. Though things are different now, I can’t help but be a little nervous for our upcoming journey. Sky Harbor might be understood by its own kitschy Southwestern aesthetic, giving a sense of meaning to Phoenix, Arizona. But we know that this place is much more than overpriced cowboy dolls and grow your own cactus gardens placed in a store window. It’s easy to define a place when you have a narrative, symbolism, objects that make it easier to swallow the complexity of what makes a location what it is. This is what I’m thinking about a few days before flying out. I have worried about my own ability to navigate our destinations. I worry that I don’t know enough about the places I’ll be visiting, and I wonder if in my head I’m reducing them to these surreal images, and a few choice phrases I’ve picked up from our readings here and there.
