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Published: December 19th 2007
Sorry this took so long everyone...yes, we are alive and internet has been a pain, especially when it comes to uploading pictures. We now have our laptop, thanks to Jason's mom hauling it all the way across the Atlantic for her European Christmas visit, so we will try to catch this blog up to date soon. We'll start with Morocco...our first visit to an Islamic country.
We arrived in Morocco via ferry that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. There are these huge passenger boats that take people back and forth between Spain and Morocco all day long. Morocco was a very interesting experience and it started the minute we hit the border crossing. While all the Moroccan folk were packed in like caged animals in the narrow passageways to go through immigration, we were quickly shown the "Westerner line," which consisted of no line at all. While it was nice, it was also quite uncomfortable, because you have to go right by all the other people who are yelling at each other, at immigration, probably at us too, but when you don´t speak Arabic, you just put your head down and get to the other side as fast
as you can.
Before we even had our passports stamped, an "official guide" hit us up about taking us to Tetoun, a nearby town that was having its market day. He had his ID, and we had heard from a number of sources that getting a guide makes all the hecklers leave you alone and makes your experience much easier and nicer. So we went ahead and hired him and took an overpriced taxi to Tetoun. Mustafa, our guide, took us through the medina, or the old part of the city that is inside a walled fortress. The walls are very narrow, and no cars are inside the Medina, only a few mopeds and lots of donkeys and pedestrians. We had this image of exotic foods and spices and goods being peddled in the markets...but it was a lot of the same stuff you´d find anywhere else, including Nokia phones, Coca Cola, and Dolce and Gabbana clothes...the men had a real thing for Dolce and Gabbana! We then went to the tannery that was quite the olfactory experience. Nothing like piles of bloody sheep skins being cured to open up those nasal passages! Everything that is leather, from the
The Fes tanneries
Next time to wear that leather jacket or purse...well, you get the pictureshoes to the pursues, are handmade and very labor intensive, and that is the first time we saw where it starts (short of butchering the animal).
Then came the grand finale...the part we like to call bargaining "for your life." Mustafa claimed it was only one day a month they had this carpet cooperative, where they have these handmade Persian rugs, weaving, bedspreads, etc...our lucky day, he claimed. Suuuuurrreee! It all starts out pleasantly enough. They sit you down in a room full of carpet, give you the de la menthe, an addictive mint tea and start telling you all about how these carpets are made, the women who make them, blah, blah, blah. Then they start rolling out carpet after carpet. After they´ve unrolled about 100 carpets, as the guest you are REQUIRED to select the ones you "might like to consider, no obligation." So you pick a few, and then and only then do they tell you the "fixed" price they refuse to tell you until you´ve passed a good hour there. When we found out that the carpets were a minimum $450 to $2000, we about choked, which we knew we would do and politely said
we couldn´t afford them. Then they went into a long tirade about how this was an investment for our home, and to Jason he said it was investment "for your wife, for your life." Hmmm....could this be a double meaning? Long story shortened, we eventually walked away with a pretty but entirely unneeded bedspread "for our life" They simply would not let us leave, and more and more men kept appearing until we just wanted to get the heck out of there. So we got a BIG lesson in negotiating Arab style...build repoire, spend lots of time and effort until the prospective feels guilty for not buying or physically tired from being there for such a long time, and then hit them up with an exaggerated price and don´t ever take no for an answer. If the prospect says no, then they say they are offended and that the prospect must counteroffer (in other words, buy!).
From there, we got on a bus to Fes. Halfway through the bus ride, the bus stopped by a ditch on the side of the road, and the helpers got off the bus and started tossing this lady´s plastic bundles filled with clothes
and goods into the ditch. She was screaming up a storm, but they just kept tossing away her stuff, and then tried to cover the bundles with tree branches and left her by the side of the road. Who knows what happened, we couldn´t understand a word, but it was very strange! A few miles up the road, the bus was stopped by the national police and the driver was thoroughly questioned, but we´re not sure if the two incidents were connected or not.
Night time and nearly two hours late: we arrive in Fes, one of three imperial cities in Morocco. A taxi driver named Abdul takes us to our hotel. He asks if he can come back and talk to us about tours, and he comes back the next day. There isn´t anywhere to talk at our hotel, so we go to a "peaceful" cafe to discuss hiring him as a guide to go to the Sahara desert. Keep in mind, this is a Islamic country where drinking, smoking are not supposed to be permitted and conservative dress is the rule (not that we haven´t witnessed religious hypocrisy in our own country, though). Nonetheless, we were pretty
shocked when we entered a smoke filled bar, with people drinking beer, smoking hookahs, women dressing rather provocatively! Well, our potential guide also seemed rather suddenly distracted...perhaps it was the woman hitting on him, we thought. No, Jason thought the behavior was really odd and started to be on the lookout for anything odd. Well, when the woman left, our potential guide rather calmly explains that he doesn´t remember her name or face, but she remembers him, and she wanted "Moroccan cocaine." He then pulls a little baggy out of his sleeve, and then several times, snorts its contents! Needless to say, we didn´t hire him (can you imagine relying on this guy for a guide and then having him tweaked out of his mind and seeing mirages in the desert?! Yikes!), and got back to our hotel as quickly as possible. But it made for quite a memory!
This is getting way too long, but Fes itself was a unique experience. The old city and the medina are huge...over 40,000 streets and 9,000 dead ends. We had a great guide that took us around and showed us the mosques, we went into an ancient madrasa (secondary school) built
in 800 A.D. that was just beautiful with all the plaster work, cedar wood ceilings and frescos, and saw a variety of merchants and goods from leather slippers, to carpets, to formal clothing and spices. The food was delicious (tajine, couscous, lamb and chicken kabobs and the addictive mint tea). We also had ample time to wander the streets and yes, we got lost a lot, but you could always get where you needed to go. It takes some getting used to seeing women dressed in robes and headscarves, and in a few cases, burkas, and it was often hard to tell if the exuberant talking was merely a conversation or an argument, but after a couple of days it wasn´t quite so strange. The calls to prayer started at 5:30 am, and occurred several times, and it sounds just like the movies. The Arabic language is very different from any language we´d heard before, so the only words we can remember is Shukran (thank you) and la (no). And yet, for all the differences, there were many similarities. Kids played just like anywhere else, and the shop owners worked from dawn til dusk to earn a living, and taxi
drivers take you the long, detour route to ring up the fare. And in fairness to the kind people we did encounter, there were several that nicely helped us figure out how to get around, warned us of places to avoid and reminded us when our pockets looked a little too tempting for potential pickpocketers. After work, all the people came out, and they gathered and socialized and laughed. All in all, it was interesting, something that we are still digesting, but we are glad that we went and got a taste of Islamic culture for ourselves rather than rely on a media portrayal.
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