Mint Tea and Kind Strangers

Morocco was pretty bizarre.  Over the course of a few days, we drank mint tea in the kitchen of a closed restaurant to wait out the rain, passed a random camel and a policeman with a monkey on the way to the ferry station, enjoyed breakfast with a Moroccan real estate agent from New York at a hostel he’d arranged for us, watched a snake charmer, and realized that we never would’ve made it anywhere if Moroccans hadn’t been the kindest people in the world.  I wish I could sit down with you all and tell you about it, but I can’t, so here’s at least some of my experience.

Five of us went—me, Megan, Kimberly, Lee, and Casey—and we fit a lot into a long weekend.  On Friday we stayed in Tarifa, a pretty little Spanish town just 35 minutes away from Morocco by ferry.  Then we spent Saturday in Tangier, Sunday in Meknes, Monday in Fes, and all of Tuesday making the hellishly long journey back to Granada.  There’s so much to write about that I don’t know where to begin, but I guess I’ll start with our trip to Meknes.  In Tangier we were with a guide the whole time, and for some reason this made me feel kind of distanced from the city.  We didn’t have to worry about anything (except for the price of the guide—after spending more time in Morocco, we realized we’d been pretty hardcore gypped); the guide picked us up at the ferry station, showed us where to eat lunch, and, at the end of the tour, we were dropped off at the train station.  But as soon as we were on our way to Meknes, things got a lot more difficult.  I expected that we would struggle a little bit with the trains since no one I was traveling with speaks any French or Arabic—the two official languages of Morocco—but I thought that we would be able to understand enough French to figure out when and where to switch trains or get off.  Unfortunately, in Morocco, train stops aren’t announced and there are very few signs, so we realized pretty quickly that we were going to have a hard time.  We ended up making it to Meknes fine.  We met a ton of really friendly people on the train, and by the end half the people in our train car were guiding us to our final destination.

Making it to our hostel ended up being a lot harder.  All we had was an address, but I figured this would be enough—we could give it to the taxi driver, and he would drop us off outside the door.  Now that I’ve explored Morocco’s medinas, though, I realize that this was a flawed assumption.  The medinas are markets, and, since we were visiting some of Morocco’s larger cities, they were huge.  More importantly, the majority of the streets are too narrow or rough for cars, so this meant that our taxi driver dropped us off late at night in the middle of Meknes’ old medina, without a map and—since Meknes is further south than Tangier—with less chance of finding someone who spoke English or Spanish. 

This was the only part of the trip where I felt kind of worried.  It became clear pretty quickly that there was no way we were going to find our hostel on our own, and, having been warned about Morocco, I was hesitant to ask for directions.  We were pretty desperate, though, and as it turned out, everyone on the streets was as friendly as the people on the train.  Probably about four or five people gave us directions (although unfortunately we couldn’t understand much of anything), and finally a guy ended up taking us to our hostel.  This sort of friendliness continued throughout the trip.  Everywhere we went, people helped us find our way, even though I’m sure we seemed kind of idiotic.  At one point—and this, to me, was the epitome of the kindness we encountered—we were once again trying to take a taxi to a hostel, and our driver didn’t know how to get there.  If he’d let us out we would’ve been pretty screwed, but instead some random stranger on the street who realized we were lost ran in front of the taxi for awhile to lead us to our destination.  Even though it was pouring rain.  I keep thinking about how we treat people who don’t speak English in the United States, and I’m coming to believe that we all need to spend some time in Morocco to learn how to act.  If someone came up to me on the street and starting talking to me in a language I didn’t understand, I would almost certainly say sorry and walk away.  Nobody blew us off like that in Morocco, though, and instead almost everyone we asked for help went out of their way to provide it. 

A guy we met on the train to Fes, Amin, was particularly friendly.  We started talking to him about our hostels, and he said that we were overpaying and that he could find us a better place.  So, he called a friend, made a reservation for us, arranged for someone to pick us up at the taxi stop, and then came to our hostel the next morning with some “soup of the beans,” apparently a traditional Moroccan breakfast.  It’s true that he was probably in part being friendly and in part just trying to get more business for his friend, but even so we ended up paying half of what we were initially going to pay.  Furthermore, since Fes turned out to be the most confusing city of all, I’m pretty sure we never would’ve found our original hostel. 

The streets were so narrow!

The medina in Fes.  We managed to sort of navigate the medina in Meknes,
but here in Fes it would've been completely impossible without our guide. 

The tannery in Fes.

People’s kindness is probably the aspect of the trip that will stick with me the longest, but another interesting part of my experience was being a girl in Morocco.  There are no women at all on the streets at night, and even during the day, it’s hard to find a restaurant or café with women.  We ended up eating mostly at tourist places, since everywhere else seemed to be unofficially guys-only.  Initially, we had planned on going to Morocco with just three girls—me, Megan, and Kimberly—and looking back on it, I think that would’ve been a bad idea.  The Moroccan men aren’t as bad as we’d all been led to believe, but we did have at least once instance where a couple men followed us through the medina for quite awhile and wouldn't leave us alone.  I think it would’ve been a lot harder to shake them if we hadn’t had the guys along, and it definitely would’ve been more disconcerting.

So far in Spain, I've been blown away by the sites we've seen--the cathedrals, the Mezquita in Córdoba, the Alhambra, and lots of others.  Morocco, though, was more about experiencing a different culture rather than siteseeing.  We spent our days wandering through ancient medinas, and, at least once we got out of Tangier, we encountered very few other tourists.  There’s lots more to tell, but that’s going to have to be all for now.  I miss and love you all!