The Road to Morocco

Thursday, March 6
We started off with an early 4AM start for our trip to Morocco. From Casablanca we followed Kareem’s instructions and found our way by train to Rabat, the capital. We had expected Morocco to be desert like and were surprised to see green fields with an abundance of wildflowers on the trip to Rabat.

Kareem had arrived a few minutes earlier from Oujda and met us as we arrived. It was great to see him!
A resident of this country for just eighteen months, Kareem seems to have embraced its people and culture. He is fluent in the language, knows the infrastructure, moving seemingly seamlessly throughout the country. He is able to use his genetic charm to his best advantage as he chats with people & barters his way through the day. He is charming, inquisitive & thoughtful of the people he encounters. It was a pleasure to observe him in his newly adopted country. The kid we have known and loved for so long seems to be truly in his element doing something he really enjoys. What an honor to spend time observing him & seeing this country he has such strong feelings for, from his perspective.

After checking into our hotel Kareem led us on a walk to the Medina, the old walled city with its myriad of stalls selling everything from clothes to carcasses to individual hooves hanging in the front of the butcher’s stall to vendors selling baked goods and just cooked hot garbanzo beans. There is a massive cemetery extending down the slope at the end of which is the Atlantic. We walked around a bit, took a taxi back to our hotel and called it a day after stopping for a light dinner at a local place where the personnel knew Kareem.

Friday morning we took a 4 hour bus ride to a place called Chefcaouen, a mountain town of 45,000 northeast of Rabat. The city’s name can also be spelled Chefchaouen. It is an incredibly beautiful step back into a much earlier time. The medina (old city) consists of plaster buildings going up the mountain side, however they are painted blue rather than the expected white plaster. The blue comes from the city’s large Jewish population and the city is also known for its distinctive blue doors. We walked though the alleys to get to our hotel. Kareem had booked the hotel taking into account our requirements of a western style toilet (in lieu of the local “turk”, a hole in the floor) and a shower in the room. The hotel, Dar Terrae, is owned by an Italian guy and access is simply a door in one of the alleys. It has 7-8 small rooms located on 3 floors, all opening to a courtyard in the middle. There are no other windows in the rooms other than on the courtyard as the only outside wall the hotel has is at the front door. The place was like walking into Disneyland, blue plaster walls with typical Moroccan doors and portals framed in yellow. The room was tiny at best, with a brick semi-circle serving as the bathroom and a brick fireplace. Truly unique, there cannot be another hotel like this.

Kareem led us down toward the old city square. The city consists of many narrow alleys, not large enough for cars. The alleys are lined with very small shops again selling anything. They sell the usual tourist trinkets, tajines (a ceramic cooking and eating dish with a ceramic top), wool, sacks of different brightly colored pigment, sacks of beans, rice and ginger root, foods, leather and rugs to name a few of things sold in the tiny stalls. Some of the stalls are workshops where men use looms to make woolen goods, some are barber shops. The alleys are full of brightly colored blankets, purses and other goods put out by the shop keepers. All on a backdrop of the blue doors and blue plaster walls. Hatman was the name on the outside of a very small shop (called the small shop) that may hold as many as 2 customers interested in woolen products. Hatman sits in the back corner of the shop knitting caps, leggings and gloves. We walk past hatman’s shop every time we go to and from the shop. Kareem stopped at hatman to see what he had in the way of knit caps and struck up a conversation with him in Arabic. Hatman’s English wasn’t bad. He wanted to know where we were from, to make sure we were happy (an often repeated question from many vendors) and let us know he had a democratic price. Democratic prices were mentioned by several vendors in Chefchaouen and Tangier. We’re not sure democratic pricing is. Hatman assured us he was happy, which he undoubtedly was. He lit a fresh incense stick as one walked into the shop to disguise the smoke from the locally grown products. He had an interesting outlook on the sale of a cap to Kareem, that being that one cap equals one tajine (dinner) to him.

The square is lined with cafes where you can get a meal or just a cup of coffee or tea. The local cafes almost seem to have a 100% patronage. Women were more prevalent in the tourist cafes that overlooked the Kasbah (fortress) on the square. The tourist cafes are complete with hawkers to draw you into their place. One guy claimed he was from Chicago then switched it to Boston to convince us he had the best café. We ordered some coffees and people watched. There was no shortage of people walking through the square. There were families in western attire, families where the mother wore a veil, other where the women were completely covered head to toe with the exception of their eyes. Many women wore kaftans, most with traditional hijab scarves and some without. Some women looked to me like they were out of the Andes rather than Morocco wearing brightly colored hats, they being wrapped in bright blankets. The men wore western attire, jeans and jelabas, a traditional Arab robe. Many, mostly older men, wore burnooses, a woolen hooded cloak. There was a cluster of the old guys with the burnooses sitting outside the Kasbah talking to each other. It looked like a small group of wizards got together to watch the afternoon together. Some got up and followed the call to prayer from the mosque next door, some stayed. While in the square we walked through the Kasbah which provided great views of the old and new cities, the surrounding mountains and the valley below the new city.
Back to the hotel for the night. Our hotel did not have heat or air conditioning so our host built us a fire. Although there is a chimney leading above the roof, the flue also seems to vent into the bathroom. The better the fire, the more smoke in the bathroom. Well, as the entire room was probably no more than 50sqft so the smoke was throughout.

Saturday morning we retired to the roof of the hotel for an outdoor breakfast brought to us by Fatima. We bid good morning to hatman and headed for the square where the wizards were in their usual place in front of the Kasbah. Kareem took us out of the Medina downhill to the new city with its own city square and park. We went back to the old city and out a gate on the high side of the city leading to the river. There were 2 covered areas below us that were used to wash clothes and rugs in the river. There were many women washing clothes and blankets in the river. The walls above the river were full brightly colored rugs drying in the sun. We stopped again at the tourist café and people watched followed by a very nice dinner at Ali Baba’s.

Sunday we bid goodbye to our hosts in Chefchaouan and took a cab to Tangier, about a 2 hour drive. The scenery was again beautiful, 6,000’ mountains, green fields and lots of wild flowers along the way. Tangier is a major port at the entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar connecting the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Kareem and our driver, Ottman, were involved in conversation most of the drive. It was fascinating to watch Kareem hold the conversation fluently in Arabic. In Tangier, we stayed at the Riad Tanja, a very nicer older hotel in the medina. We walked through the medina to the Mediterranean beach and up to the city square outside the medina. On one side of the square is St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, built in the late 19th century. We walked through the graveyard to the church and were soon met by the caretaker, Mustapha. Mustapha is very proud of his church, opening it up and showing us all around. He showed us the area behind the altar with the wall on which the Koran is written in Arabic in a Christian church and the rope he pulls to ring the church bells (he pulled it once for us and called it a small service). We asked if he would take a picture with us. Mustapha is a very friendly man with a lilting voice. He liked the picture idea, hugged us all and headed off to the cemetery. He returned with a small bouquet of flowers for Nancy for the picture taking session. He is a fascinating man. We wrapped up the day with a very nice and lengthy dinner at our hotel. A bottle of wine and excellent conversation were a nice close to a wonderful trip. It was great to see Kareem and enjoy the long conversations covering world hunger, politics or anything else that came up. Ramzi and Livia would be even prouder of him as they watch him interact with locals.

We saw a lot in Morocco. So we would not forget all that we saw, the three of us made a list of things to write about. Most are covered above, other observations are:
There is not much place in an Arab country for dogs, but cats are everywhere in Morocco. They’re on rooftops, under your feet at the café, saunter in shops and play with things in the alley. They can also on occasion get a bit pungent.
Smoking of tobacco and the locally grown alternative is widespread. Many vendors sell cigarettes individually.
A unique product we saw for sale was the Soft Acrylic Mink Blanket. An acrylic mink sounds interesting.
What looked to be a snail soup was sold by several street vendors. We opted not to try it out.
Most of the beggars are women.
We saw quite a few people on crutches, a lot of them looking like they had been struck by a disease like polio.