Morocco

Morocco

Hello again! It’s bit later than I said, but regardless, here’s the promised entry on Morocco .

Our port this time around was Casablanca , and while it has a movie named after it and is the largest city in Morocco (I think), it is not a very interesting place. Rick’s Café does exist there, but it was made for the tourists and was not the one actually in Casablanca. It’s also a horribly overpriced place to eat, or so I’ve been told. Casablanca does have the 3^rd largest mosque in the world with the tallest minaret, though, which I went inside on my last day there. They make you take your shoes off inside and SAS told us girls to cover our arms and heads when we went inside, although it seemed as if the Moroccans were used to tourists and didn’t really enforce the head covering. I still wore one for most of it, and let me tell you, I can’t even imagine wearing something on my head all the time. It looks pretty cool, but not having the choice to remove it is something I would not enjoy, and most of the women I saw in Morocco were always covered up. The younger children and a few young women, one of whom I talked to a bit on the train and helped me get off at the right station, didn’t have them on, but the norm was clearly to cover up. We were also told not to wear shorts or revealing T-shirts, but I did see tourists breaking this norm (although I personally tried to dress conservatively). Anyway, it makes you appreciate being able to wear whatever you want.

So before I got sidetracked I was talking about the Hassan II Mosque. It was pretty cool inside – very similar to the Alhambra , for obvious reasons. It was interesting to see mosques with minarets that were much slimmer than what I was expecting, since I was expecting the more round ones like in Aladdin. I think there are mosques with that type of minaret, but I didn’t catch why the different types exist or where to find the more round ones. Anyway, the Hassan II mosque also had a green laser that pointed toward Mecca at night, which I found sort of funny, because I definitely don’t generally associate holy places with green lasers, even if said lasers are pointing to other holy places. Anyway, that was the only place of which I took any pictures, because up until the last day in Morocco I didn’t have my camera with me because we were told we’d have to get permission to take pictures of everything and I didn’t want to be charged a Euro or something to take pictures. Turns out I would’ve been OK after all and wouldn’t have been charged a Euro, but I was with people who took lots of photos, so hopefully I can bum some off of them.

On a completely unrelated note, drivers in Casablanca and Morocco are crazy. Crossing the road is literally life-threatening, as is taking a ride in a cab (which I did frequently). Oh, and I don’t know why they bother drawing lanes on the roads. Nobody stays in them. I also don’t know why they have crosswalks, since no one uses them. Also, you have to barter for everything, and they know tourists have no idea what they’re doing, so I was ripped off a lot, especially by cab drivers. Speaking of cab drivers, my first (and probably best) experience in Morocco was a cab ride to the train station to buy tickets, followed by a cab tour of the city. Our driver was really friendly (almost everyone was, especially if you were either going to be paying them or already had, although there were some people in the souks who were really friendly toward us even when we said we weren’t buying anything) but INSANE. At one point he got out a guidebook and was flipping through it to show us pictures of Casablanca while driving, and other times he’d turn and talk to us instead of watching the road at all for substantial amounts of time. It was definitely a cultural experience. Our cab driver also got this random group of Asian tourists to take a picture of us (me, the girls I was in the cab with, and the driver) on their cameras (so we’ll never even see the picture) and when we saw a random girl who he thought was Indian he yelled “Look! India !” and pointed enthusiastically from one of the girls I was with (who was obviously of Indian heritage) and the random stranger, to which the stranger replied “Um, I’m from South Africa .” He also kept saying that once nighttime fell (it was Ramadan at the time) that he would drink, smoke, eat, and “Be a king!” He also got this restaurant to pretty much open just for us (although other people came a bit later) before sundown even though it was Ramadan. It was a good restaurant, too, although kind of pricey.

As for what I actually did in Morocco ? Not much, honestly. I spent two days in Marrakech, which pretty much conforms to all the stereotypes of a Middle Eastern city I think Westerners have of them – snake charmers, huge marketplaces, music performances, etc. Except we didn’t get very close to any of the above because we didn’t want to have monkeys thrown on us and then charged 5 Euros for it, which is what happened to some other SAS kids. Some kids apparently got peed on by monkeys, which is hilarious and disgusting, and some others got bit, which is not good. One of the people I was with almost had a snake put on him, but he avoided that because we all knew we’d get charged an outrageous amount of money for it. Anyway, the souk (marketplace) in Marrakech was really neat. I didn’t buy anything there, but just walking around was really something else. There were all sorts of crafts for sale, and you knew they were handmade by Moroccans, so that was really awesome. There were also all sorts of spices and natural healing things for sale, and those stalls smelled amazing – I wish I could have packaged the smell as a souvenir or a present for someone. Oh, and apparently the Moroccans use charcoal, indigo, and what looked like a sort of clay as make-up. I thought it was super neat that they still use natural products like that as cosmetics.

Marrakech was even cooler at night, though. The group I was with sat at a restaurant with a view of the central square (Jamaa el Fna, if I’ve got the spelling right) right before sundown, so we watched the sun fall and the marketplace slowly fill up with more and more people. That day was also the end of Ramadan, so it may have been even livelier than usual. Regardless, it was a really cool sight, and even though I didn’t get any pictures of it, I bought a postcard of pretty much the exact same view I saw, so one of you lucky people will get to see that at some point. I also took a picture of the postcard, so I guess I can post that.

Oh, I’ve somehow neglected to mention the hostel I stayed at in Marrakech. It was down a really shady alley, so the first time my group and I went there, we were starting to doubt its legitimacy. But when we got inside, all doubts were extinguished. I don’t know how to describe it other than it was awesome. The entire place was very Arabic in style, with abstract designs and tiling that looked like something from the Alhambra palaces, but obviously on a much smaller scale. The staff was really, really sweet, too. The men gave us a map of the city and explained to us how to get everywhere and made us some delicious mint tea, and in the morning the women took pictures with us and tied our head scarves properly for us (since we had no idea what we were doing) and wrote our names out in Arabic (which appears to use a phonetic alphabet). They also made a breakfast of crepes, bread, coffee, and tea (not free of charge, but I hardly think 2 Euros is expensive for a home-cooked meal). The crepes were really interesting because they definitely weren’t French crepes – they were much thicker and chewier, but they tasted great with jam and butter. One of the women also taught me how to make the Moroccan mint tea, which I greatly appreciated because that stuff is good and I want to make some when I get back home. According to her (if I’m remembering correctly), you take however many teaspoons of Chinese green tea you want (I think it was around 3-5 for a full teapot), add in hot water and something like 5 to 7 sugar cubes (it is very sweet), some fresh mint, mix it all together, and then put this all together in the awesome traditional teapot and put it on the stove for a few minutes before serving it.

The showers were certainly something else, though. One of them had the toilet and shower in the same room with no separation between them, and if you weren’t careful the water would spill out into the hallway. There was also no toilet paper, something that happens in a lot of Morocco . In fact in Casablanca there were some little girls on the street trying to sell packets of tissues for a Euro or something because they knew tourists would buy it. And in the train station bathroom in Marrakech, the toilets didn’t have a flush – you dumped a bucket of water down them to flush them.

There were also random hoses in the hallways of the hostel with pots underneath that were not large enough to catch all the water that fell out of the hoses. I also have no idea where the water came from in the first place, but I assume it was from the showers. There was also no lock on our bedroom door, the towels had holes, and I didn’t use any of the blankets for fear of bed bugs. It really made me appreciate the showers and clean bed back at the ship. But really, it was an awesome place. There was also an open roof, so at nighttime the group I was with and I went there to catch the cool evening breeze.

Oh, the trains are also something else. The group I was with decided to save 50 dirham (something around $5 or $5.50) by going second class instead of first class, which meant we were very crowded and a lot of people didn’t get a seat. I got a seat an hour into the train ride to Marrakech, but some people stood the entire 4 hour ride. Ouch. On the way back the train was much less crowded, so I had a seat the whole way, but our window was locked shut for an hour or so, so there was no circulation and our compartment was stifling hot. I don’t think I ever appreciated an open window as much as when someone who worked on the train unlocked it for us.

Other than that, all I really did was hang around Casablanca and its souk with some friends from SAS. I didn’t end up buying anything in Marrakech, but I did get a really cool camel leather cushion and a nicely crafted leather purse (since the one I brought with me to SAS is a bit too conspicuous) in Casablanca , as well as a present for my mother. Jacob, Michaella and I also took a cab to the ritzy part of town one day, which basically meant it had a lot of private beaches and nice café-type places. There was also a movie theater, and I almost regret not seeing some random movie in Arabic with no subtitles.

I guess before I close up I should talk about the food. I actually didn’t have as much authentic Moroccan food as I would have liked (I ended up eating at a few European places and even a McDonald’s once, much to my chagrin), but what I did have was really good. The couscous was great, but some places only serve it on Fridays or Fridays and Saturdays. I haven’t the faintest idea why this is, and I probably should have asked. Anyway, I also had lemon chicken and various kinds of tagine (food cooked in a special kind of dish), most of which contained either lamb or chicken. I also had cooked vegetables, including the best carrots I’ve ever tasted in my life. I don’t know what they were flavored with, but they were awesome. There was also a lot of bread, which went very well with the vegetables. I heard someone else had pigeon, but I didn’t have that particular experience. I did have coke a few times though, and their coke bottles are a lot cooler than ours – they’re glass and have Coca-Cola written in English and in Arabic. I also had a lot of freshly-squeezed orange juice, which is the only kind of orange juice I enjoy.

And I guess that more or less sums it up. Morocco was certainly an interesting place to visit, but I would never, ever visit it again. Nothing was bad about it (that I experienced) other than being ripped off all the time and having people try to sell me things I didn’t want, it was just a place that I wasn’t particularly interested in and still am not. Well, and it was weird when my friends and I were walking back to the ship one night and the only people still out were men. It’s a little hard to want to return to a nation where you’re so obviously an outsider and your gender isn’t really respected. Although I was pleasantly surprised by the young woman in the train who did not have a head covering and was chatting excitedly with a middle-aged man the entire train ride, since it showed that some women don’t constantly cover themselves and some men, at least, clearly aren’t bothered by it. And no one was rude to me or anything – quite the opposite, in fact – but it was just sort of uncomfortable being there, especially because I didn’t feel safe. I was less anxious and on my toes after the first few days, but the first day I was worried about being robbed the entire time.

Actually, my experience was a good one, especially compared to some other people’s. One of my friends was robbed at knifepoint, some people had things thrown at them, and others had people yell lovely things like “Fuck the U.S. !” at them. A few people made fun of the group I was with by loudly yelling things in English at us (they weren’t rude things, but were obviously said to mock us) and my cab driver the first day playfully said that Hindus were crazy when he found out the Indian girl we were with was Hindu and not Muslim, but other than that I didn’t come across any real discrimination or American hate. I was also in Morocco on 9/11 and faced absolutely no problems whatsoever (that was actually the day I talked to the nice lady on the train), and according to the U.S. diplomat who debriefed us before our visit, the whole burning the Qu’ran issue wasn’t even very well-known there.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I had a good experience, but I definitely don’t have plans return to Morocco. Next is Ghana (we dock in Takoradi tomorrow), which I previously never even thought of visiting, but I’m hoping that it’ll be a really awesome experience. At least a lot of people speak English there. I tried to use my French in Morocco , but people opted to speak to me in English instead, which is a little sad since I’ve taken around 5 years of French, but also made things less complicated because I often misunderstood things or couldn’t make myself understood very well in French. As my roommate tells me, the one thing I am very good at is saying “Non merci!” to persistent cab drivers.

Anyway, that's all for Morocco, so I'll write again once I'm back from Ghana!