It all started off on the wrong note when the first morning the waiter and receptionist tried to fool me about Moroccan coins. My eyes were tired and I could not recognize the small,almost rubbed off numbers on them. The waiter tried to pass off ten dirhams as " This is one Euro". Maybe not even with bad intentions but I felt he was trying to cheat me in a really clumsy way.
Next the receptionist, telling me the silver coin had a higher value than the gold coin which assured me that they are all crooks, in spite of suit and tie. Then he refused to call me a taxi, saying they would be too expensive because he would call a grand taxi and I should get one myself which wasted a lot of my time trying to find one.
Next at Hassan II the men at the door refused to let me see the mosque because I am a woman. They gave me a choice to enter the dark ugly unadorned women's prayer room , or, as I was told later, to " go with the Jews" and pay ten Euro to see the rest of the mosque. Unless I am a Muslim in which case I get to see nothing but that ugly corner. It made me feel I had wasted my air ticket to this country since the purpose of my trip was to photograph islamic architecture. Which I never got to see. Both guides that I hired, in Meknes and in Fez, were only interested in luring me past fruit sellers into carpet shops and Argan oil shops or , worst of all, that dreadful tannery in Fez where the Tanner took me to the top floor to look down on the tannery vats and the whole air was filled with the stench of decomposing blood, like one huge smelling sanitary pad. Hideous. I had to hold my scarf over my nose and mouth and leave in a hurry.
Meanwhile everybody was busy dragging home their sheep or a stubborn ram for butchering it at home the next day because it was Eid al Adha. The killing done, they skinned the sheep and threw the fatty skins on the street corners where they let them rot for three days in the blazing sun until the alleys around it were filled with the sickening sweet smell of corpses. When I left the Riad in Fez, the stench had reached our door 100 meters away and even the scarf wrapped around my face did not help. I was mortified and nauseated having to walk past ithe mountain of stinking empty cadavers rotting on the corner to get a taxi. Never again to be in a barbarian place like this during the Feast of Sacrifice which seems to consist of nothing more than stuffing themselves and their fridge with sheep and mutton and throwing those rotting skins in the way of those who might want to sell them to the tannery, instead of feeding the poor. All the poor seem to get is the garbage if they want it.
It also meant that all the restaurants and cafes were closed for at least three days and I had to live on sandwiches and fast food.
The first open restaurant in Meknes served me chicken tajine with lemon and olives which I could have cooked better.the next restaurant served me an omelet and salad which left me with a three hour stomach ache, spent in bed, wasting the rest of the day which had already been half wasted by the insistent false guide who walked in front of me, emaciated and hunch backed, with a sour expression, with the only goal of getting me to watch the unrequested carpet show at the other end of the souq after a two hour walk through the labyrinthine alleyways filled with fruit sellers, clothes dealers and butchers which left me exhausted and with an aching back as I was still recovering from my flights.
When I arrived in Chefchsouen I unwittingly ordered the ethnic looking scrambled eggs for breakfast, feeling hungry after the stale bread filled with onions, tomatoes and meat scraps I had eaten the days before. But this dish brought back the penetrating sheep smell which I loathed by now, as it consisted of eggs with scraps of meat scraped off the skulls of dead sheep. I sent it back to the kitchen and ordered the perpetually dull continental breakfast instead which always had way too much bread , no fruit, too little salad, and only one kind of jam which was too sweet.
The only thing I really liked was the mint tea.
And that one good tajine I ate at Lala Masoude in Chefchaouen, a traditional restaurant.
The same dish made me sick all night after eating it at Chez Hisham the next day, another bigger restaurant with a roof garden, clean and unsuspicious looking. I was told by someone to avoid large restaurants because " they let the food sit around too long til the meat goes off". Argh. Who knew?
Moroccans don't seem to own many refrigerators. The butchers leave their slabs of meat, quartered cows and bulls with testicles still dangling from it on display, hanging in the hot sun all day. One should think, it is already half spoiled when people buy it.
Those who want their meat " fresh" buy it still alive. I was told that since Eid lasts three days with closed market stalls, people buy live chickens to butcher when needed because they " keep longer". The seller grabs the chicken with both hands, sits it down on the scales and tells the woman its price according to live weight. Never seen anything like this before.
What did I actually like about Morocco?
Mostly the absence of things, greeted with tired relief. Chefchaouen, a wonderful , peaceful, little town all in blue, painted in shades ranging from sky blue to a vibrant ultramarine. The blue surely keeps the madness and violence out of people's minds that exists elsewhere. Chefchaouen does not have young men in its souq that get pulled into fist fights every ten minutes. It does not have many madmen (" only one in ten" according to one hotel manager) . It does have a few men loudly talking to themselves, lamenting while they walk down the street,arms raised in angry gesticulation. Like elsewhere in Morocco. But not too many. The young men seem less cocky and more introverted. Many of the men seem positively humble. Other places have hundreds of little gangs and cliques of young men, everybody acting in exaggerated, swaggering ways as if drunk and intoxicated on their imagined superiority undermined by insecurity.
The women walk around silently, mostly veiled, only following their husbands and minding their small children,though often treating the little ones in rough , cold ways with unnecessary amounts of anger and abuse, it seemed to me. Or they are simply too young to take care of their kids properly. Like the girl in the taxi that ignored her whimpering ,sobbing little son, with a vapid smile on her face, looking straight ahead while the father took care of him, trying to calm him unsuccessfully. I saw one Moroccan woman in the souq who gave me a long intense mischievous grin, as if we were both doing something naughty, whatever it might be, walking around alone.
I saw many men , even young men, whose front teeth had rotted away, leaving only brown stumps, I don't know why. Maybe their mothers had the same habits like some Syrian refugees to stuff their kids with sweets and sugary lemonade all day, have them walk around with bags of junk food in their hand, while neglecting them otherwise and never teaching them to brush their teeth. I really don't know.
Most of the country that I saw seemed to be seized by greed ,aggressiveness, boasting egotism and foolishness, making me feel once again that even though I like to practise islamic prayer, there is no way I would want to join such a community. Moroccans are not an innocent developing nation. They have lost their innocence somehow. Maybe due to French colonialism. Maybe due to being exploited by their own privileged classes.
When I complained to the Riad manager in Meknes that I had not been allowed to see the big mosque he claimed that the Quran forbids women from entering the main part of the mosque. When I demanded he show me where that is written in the Quran, he scrolled through al Baquara and could not find it. Then he said, women are not allowed to recite the Quran in public, women must be silent in the mosque, women actually normally don't/ can't/shouldn't even read the Quran , women are not obliged to go to the mosque at all, it is out of the question that they enter the men's prayer area and between prayers mosques are closed and he would not dream of going to the mosque unless there is prayer time. Moreover I should not have the Muslim app in my phone as one needs to do ablutions before opening the Quran and who knows to what places I might carry my phone. The reason I was allowed to see every Turkish mosque is " because Turks were no Muslims before Erdogan while Moroccans are". In summary , those men at Hassan II were right not to let me see anything.
Which was contradicted by everyone else I talked to. And yet , they don't let you into any islamic building with mozaiq and calligraphy in it unless you pay. Yes, pay for it! Which some men told me was the main reason I could not see Hassan II. Because those men wanted my money. Or they were simply zealots hanging out there with the intention of harassing women and making illegal money off tourists, said one of them. What a strange country.
