Morocco Part One

Overcast skies, cloaked men shuffling down narrow alleyways, exotic spices, unfamiliar and foreign odors, fearful chickens, reluctant goats, and beckoning vendors – the sights, smells, and sounds of my very first impressions.

Since returning to Spain, I’ve been asked by quite a few people about my trip to Morocco. Honestly, at first, and maybe even still, I haven’t quite sorted out everything that I saw there. Broadly speaking, I would describe it as a crazy, diverse experience. We witnessed a spectrum, from the beautiful to the decrepid, from the prosperous to the destitute, from the encouraging to the depressing. It was an enlightening and exciting but draining experience. By the end, most of us had our fill, and were ready to “go back home to Spain.” Many admitted they had a newfound appreciation for life there.

To each person that has asked me about Morocco, I have urged them to go if they can, if for no other reason than it is dramatically different from anything they will experience in Europe. It’s a whole world apart, though it’s very close geographically. For all the monuments, museums, and historical districts across Europe, Morocco offered a social and cultural education of a different sort; one that is less tangible but I think equally important. Also, it was pretty awesome to visit Africa, thus knocking out two continents in around a month after having never even come close to leaving North America.

This was our hotel – a surprisingly clean and classy one. The wake-up calls in the morning were interesting. I would pick up the phone, confused about where I was to begin with to the sound of a man telling me the time in a mix of Arabic, Spanish, and English. Both nights, I had some pretty wild dreams which I want to attribute to the hallucinogens in Moroccan food. The food was actually not that bad. We had mostly steamed vegetables, potatoes, couscous, various meats, and bread. The spices weren’t as intense as I thought they would be.

Myself and our tour guide for the first city we visited, Tetuan. His name was Abdul-something-or-other that I didn’t quite catch. He preferred that we call him Michael Douglass. This worked just fine for us.

Right off the bat, we were led through a series of bustling marketplaces. There were two other men that assisted Michael Douglass in keeping the group together, and handling any altercations with locals, which fortunately did not happen.

It was captivating to be immersed in such an exotic atmosphere. It was during this portion of the walk that I drew my first impressions described above.

As one would imagine, the standards for handling of foods, particularly meats was a little shocking. Shortly after taking this picture, I watched a man kill a chicken with his hands and hand it to a customer. Not exactly how they do it over at the local Stop & Shop, but tis' the richness of cultural experience.
Moroccans use those bags of pigment for everything from paint to clothing dye, and the white chalk-like chunks on the right are used to make whitewash. It's an abundant natural resource in the region, and thus they paint almost all of their buildings white.
Guess what the green bag contains. Well you probably figured it out if you look closely at the picture of the woman washing her hair. If you saw the contents, you wouldn't believe it could be used as shampoo - it was a flaky, crumbly material that you have to boil with a little water to use. Now guess what the bark and roots on the right are used for. Those are the Moroccan equivalent of Oral B. Yes, those are used to brush teeth (you don't want to know how they straighten teeth).

This is a community water tap, probably one of the only ones available in this particular section of the medina (an Arab term for "city") since very few people have running water in their homes. Fittingly, I had a Dave Matthews Band tune by the name of "Don't Drink the Water" stuck in my head all weekend. Frankly, I didn't need a reminder, and rarely found myself tempted as I brought four 1.5 liter bottles of spring water with me in my backpack. The only close call came the first morning, when I still wasn't quite awake. I went into the bathroom, turned on the faucet and almost took a mouthful of water for a quick rinse, but realized at the last moment and slapped myself before I took it. I heard stories of people getting violently ill from simply brushing their teeth with the tap water in hotels...it would have been wiser to invest in some tree bark.

Above is a picture from a presentation of hand-made carpets we went to. The man holding up the rug was one of the heads of the collective. His English was decent, but for some reason he kept saying “please.” For example: “here’s this rug here please, it’s a very good quality please, won’t you consider it please, very good price please.” He taught us the Arabic words for “I like” and “no good,” so for each rug that he held up, we would respond. I don’t believe that anyone was really looking to buy a rug, so most of the responses were “no good,” but if you expressed interest, you were given the rug and told that someone would give you a price after all the rugs had been presented.

Wanting to give my newly learned Arabic a little practice (I forget the words already, so it apparently didn’t sink in) I said “I like” for a beautifully sewn 4 x 6. It would have been a nice hand-made souvenir, but I don’t think I realistically considered lugging it back to Spain and then trying to get it back to the States. Well little did I know what I was getting myself into.

Before I knew it, I was ushered into a side room. It was a long room with a table and a couple cushions on the floor in the back. I was sat down, and cornered by a Moroccan dude that must not have used Crest or Colgate with his tree bark, because his breath was RIPE. He proceeded to put another rug next to my rug, and tried to convince me to buy them as a pair. "You buy more, you buy cheap. Very good price, student price, you have rip in pants, I know you want good price. You buy more; use your plastic fantastic, good price, good price." (I convinced his partner to snap this picture, just so to give readers at home a good visual of how this went down)
So the haggling began. He started by writing a price for my carpet and the carpet I repeatedly told him I was not interested in on a slip of paper. He gave it to me. It read: 650 Euro. I laughed.

He assured me that it was not a joke, and crossed out the 650 and wrote 450. He then handed the paper and pen to me, and told me to write my price. I wrote 30 Euro.

As soon as I handed it to him (chuckling on the inside), I momentarily regretted it, thinking it might be somewhat insulting. When he saw my price, he excused himself to talk to a superior. I don’t know Arabic, but I’m pretty sure they were muttering curses about me due to the fact I was not the easily-duped American they hoped I was.

In the long run, I found out that it wasn’t that insulting, because after some more back and forth, I stood my ground and got him to come down to 50 Euro. He would not stop with the 50 Euro offer. All that I brought on the trip was 50 Euro in cash, thinking things would be cheap (the currency there is the Dirham, and the exchange rate from Dirham to Euros is 11-1) and hell no I wasn't bringing any credit cards. I told him I was not looking to spend all my money, particularly not on a rug to carry around. He came down to 40 Euro, so I paused, because this was really something remarkable. Another kid from our group just paid 50 for a rug half the size of mine – perhaps that was why he wouldn’t come lower before. You can imagine how furious he was when I walked out.

My account makes it sound like I was cool and confident, but such was really not the case. Maybe outwardly I pretended to know what I was doing, but I was sweating and knotted up inside. Even though I didn’t really want to buy, it was still stressful, and those guys can really close a sale, particularly with Americans that are scared, confused, and literally backed into a corner. By the time I left and met the rest of the group at the restaurant (everyone had left long before) I was exhausted.

Through lunch, I still had the shakes from what I just went through, but I felt much better by the time we made our next stop. The next place we visited was Tanger, a highly developed city in comparison to Tetuan located on the coast. Our bus just sort of rolled through the city, and we made our way up a mountain to the north towards the famous lighthouse which marks the end of the Atlantic and the beginning of the Mediterranean Sea. On our way up the mountain, we passed a number of heavily guarded palaces and mansions, occupied mostly by exorbitantly wealthy Muslims, some from Morocco, others owned by Muslims in other countries benefiting from oil and other types of “trade.” One such palace housed members of the Saudi Royal Family.

The area around the lighthouse was gorgeous, as you can well see. We were able to snap some of the most scenic pics perhaps since I have been here, due in part to the picturesque view, but also because we arrived at the perfect time lighting-wise.

(To be continued…)