life is a Monthy Python movie

Do we (or maybe it's just me) always miss the places where we are not at the moment of thinking? If not always then at least most of the times? Are we unhappy to be where we are right now and always miss the past or look forward to the future? Even if the past was not that good and the prospects of the future are not either? I was already described by someone to be 'a man with no presence - just with the past and future'.

'Yeah...things are slowly coming together. I got the washing machine last night but the refrigerator they were supposed to give me smelled like a dead animal so I am thinking about just buying a small used one for myself.'

When I read what my habibi wrote me about his recent flat experience I got nostalgic. I kind of miss this ridiculousity of the Third World countries. The shitty services you have there sometimes make you totally pissed off but sometimes when you are simply helpless you just can't stop laughing and you wonder that you must have missed the moment when world became so surreal and ridiculous. In my second flat in Rabat in the quartier called Hay Nahda II (mentioned here http://kamil-in-morocco.blogspot.com/2008/02/experienced-restarted.html), I went through the most crazy flat experience. First of all, the flat was in a totally poor and 'wild' part of the city where many Moroccan that I know never even went. I was pretty scared to live there having heard weird stories before moving in but later it turned out to be really cool. I had connection with local people in the shops and it was fun. But the flat itself was the most fun part. One thing was the cockroaches. They were everywhere and firstly I was disgusted to live with them but then the killing part became hilarious and I felt as if in a computer game. Once on the kitchen shelve filled with glasses I saw a mid-size cockroach moving quickly from one end to another. It looked hilarious when you could see it ten times bigger through the glass of the glasses that he was passing one by one. It was like in a Hitchcock movie. The other thing was the shower. When we finally managed to install the gas heater and a gas bottle we discovered that there was a problem with the pipes. When you showered there was only the cold water coming from the shower receiver. When you opened the hot stream the water was indeed coming but from some other whole down in the wall which turned out to be the end of some other random pipe. You had to bend on your knees to get a bit of this hot stream but still only the cold water was coming from the main stream. By chance, I discovered that if you closed the down hole the water would magically run from where it was supposed to run. But as the stream was pretty strong you could not easily stick it right away. So what we were doing for the first few days was showering and standing on one leg while the second one was bended and the foot was leaned against the wall to stop the stream from running from the whole. You would look like a hooker standing by the wall or a street lamp. Did I mention the water running from the sink in the hall when it was open in the bathroom?

Another famous story is the fleas’ issue. In my last house in the kasbah the roof terrace door was always open. There was a female cat going inside and outside and eating out our food in the kitchen (usually from the garbage but sometimes she would jump on the table to grab whatever seemed tasty to her). We were almost about to stop that from happening but suddenly the cat gave birth to four little kittens in the closet in the bedroom on the ground floor. We were not cruel to throw the whole cat family away. But later, one of us started to feel really bad. She had some bites on her skin and they were really itchy. We figured out that the cat brought fleas. The kittens were not babies anymore so we decided to throw them all on the terrace and let the mother take them away. She was furious and wouldn’t let us approach them. We waited until the day when she was gone and quickly before her returning we brought the kittens outside. The mother realized that and brought them back on the stairs leading to the roof. She was still furious and wouldn’t let any of us pass her. We couldn’t live in a house threatened by a cat. Again, we waited until she was gone and then threw the kittens away. But there was a problem this time. We couldn’t find one of them. After a while of searching we ended up seeing it in the corner. We were just about to throw the last one away when we saw the mother coming back. Full of fear and screaming insanely ‘faster before she gets in!!!’ we closed the terrace door and put a chair to block it (it looked as if we wanted to prevent a psycho killer from getting to the house). We opened it slightly only to see her waiting for getting inside and tearing us off into pieces. There was no way we would throw the kitten out. Then we saw the mother leaving and going to the open living room roof window to, as we thought, jump inside, went up the stairs and tear us off into pieces. In panic, we screamed again: ‘quickly!! Close the downstairs door to the roof!!’ That’s how we ended up being stuck on the staircase between two doors with no light and a small kitten. The scarier thing than seeing a psycho killer wanting to kill you is when you do not see him but you do know he is somewhere there. We looked through the whole to see whether the cat was still there. She was not but she could have been out of our sight waiting for us to tear us off into pieces. We quickly threw the kitten on the terrace and escaped the stair case. Luckily no one was hurt but it was not that obvious while being trapped there.

My first house was invaded by ants (always) and lizards (from time to time). I remember one night someone spilled some coke on the kitchen table at night and when we woke up we saw the ants lined up around the stain drinking the coke. It was almost a perfect circle made of ants. It looked hilarious. It was the first time (and definitely not the last one) that I thought that maybe it had been ants that invented the circle and not the people. We were sometimes as well visited by lizards. Once we saw one hiding behind the refrigerator. My friend panicked. She said she would not fall asleep knowing a lizard was in the kitchen. So for one hour we were shaking the refrigerator, moving it, putting the broom stick to scare it (and taking pics in the mean time) etc. The lizard finally left. Other lizards would come into the house more in the future but we would never tell my friend about them. At least she could sleep well.

And listen to the story of the red basin. For more than a year of living in Morocco I never had a washing machine so would always have to do the laundry in the basins and buckets (I don’t miss it anymore even though it was sometimes hilarious to do it). So one morning, I took over all the big plastic bathroom vessels to do all my laundry at once. It was ready by the evening and all of them including a red middle-size basin were free. It turned out later that we were having a lot of people over for a dinner. There were not enough pots available. When I entered the kitchen I saw someone preparing the fruit salad in the red basin that had been filled with my socks and underwear the same morning. ‘Excuse me. Should we tell the guests what it was used for a few hours ago?!’ I said. ‘I don’t think so’ the cook replied. I don’t remember anyone complaining about the fruit salad.

In Belgium it's different. It's not always truth what I am going to write now but the services are way better, the flats nicer, there are no basins you can use both in the bathroom and in the kitchen and everything is more sterile and cleaner. You usually have fewer situations like 'smell of dead animals'. Even the huge spiders in my room are not the same as cockroaches, ants, lizards or fleas in Morocco.

Am I totally insane to miss the Moroccan cockroaches? My friend once wrote that she missed the Moroccan fleas once she had left the country. And she was pretty sane. So maybe it's not that bad with me either?