MOROCCO
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November 2007 - Tangier, Fes, Rabat, Marrakech, Casablanca
We coordinated this visit to Morocco with friends: American Ben, his Moroccan girlfriend Rabia, French Olivier, and Italian Violetta who lives in Rabat.
We like Morocco. The street sharks of the touristy sites can get annoying, but get away from this scene and the hospitality is genuine, the food is excellent, the crafts are wonderful, and places like the ancient medina in Fes evoke another age, the way things used to be, which is really very cool. Lili and I hope to return to Morocco some day, enshallah (Allah willing). In Morocco, the future is entirely up to Allah.
Travelling with Rabia provided strong examples of the male-dominated Arabian (not necessarily Muslim) sexist apartheid. In Marrakech for example, we had to walk an hour to find a room, not because the hotels were full, but because the hotel managers all accused Rabia of being a prostitute (Lili too). Why else would a local woman hang out with an American guy? Sometimes this verbal abuse was in French, so we understood the vulgar language. Lili finds that when she's in North Africa, in many situations she only feels comfortable wearing a head scarf and loose-fitting clothes. It's good to push certain boundaries to promote positive cultural change, but not when it makes us feel unwelcome (or threatened).
We found the capital, Rabat, to be modern, safe, and friendly, more influenced by Europe than the Moroccan interior, and every generation is better for women than the previous. Elsewhere, women are obliged to wear burqas, they are not allowed to drive cars, or they get arrested for walking hand-in-hand with a boyfriend; some are stoned to death for pre-marital sex or adultery. The USA, while universally despised for its foreign policy, is admired (by women) for being a leader in women's rights.
When I was here in 2001, I went to the Sahara desert on a camel out of M'Hamid. I met a caravan of Algerian traders. We spoke in French and drank "Arab whiskey" (mint tea). One of the guys had a "snow" board for the giant sand dunes. Ski Sahara! That night at camp, another guy produced a bottle of red wine as a gift, a great memory.
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