Same River Twice

On our flight here two months ago we’d planned on jotting down our preconceptions about Morocco so that we could later compare them to the realities we experienced. Instead of writing them down we slept. Too bad. Now we can’t remember what we thought then, and two months here has changed the way we look at the place so it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Our views change each day, just as a fountain beside a mosque that we once noticed for its beautiful tile work has new meaning now that it also signals a shortcut home.

We hopped in a cab the other day to head out to Gueliz, and there’s something immediately familiar about the driver. As soon as he opens his mouth, we look at each other and realize, this is the same cabbie who’d spoken to us a month ago about leaving Morocco with his fiancée to live in the States (see our post “Two Conversations”).
We’ve thought a lot about this fellow since and his quest for verite. While we almost always travel with our camera, we kick ourselves when we realize we’ve forgotten it at home. We ask the man how he is and what his plans are with his fiancée. “No, no,” he says and quickly changes the subject. Instead of the financee, he’s intent on revisiting the sad story of his ex-wife. Shortly after they married, he bought her a house, which she then promptly kicked him out of, taking up with a much younger man. All of the hopeful talk of his new love and the potential move to the States has vanished.

We near the grocery store and his depressing tirade about his ex-wife continues (as we’d experienced a month ago, his cab slows proportionate to his story intensifying; this is a man who still treats his cab like a psychiatrist’s couch). He smiles a little smugly as he says, “But there is a God.” In his eyes, God will have different plans for his ex-wife than for him. He turns to look over his shoulder and demands of us, “Vous etes croyants?” You believe? “Ah… well, yes,” we say, as we approach one of the few verboten topics here with mounting trepidation. Satisfied with our white lie of a response, (surely we must believe in something – the redemptive power of cheese, perhaps, if not God) we breathe a sigh of relief.


He’s not finished with us yet, though. “So what religion,” he asks. “Catholic?” The stuttering begins: “Uh, no, not exactly. Christian, though.” He’s obviously waiting for more and we’re drawing blanks. So many thousands of miles from the white steeples of New England, and we can’t think of the differences between Episcopals and Universalists, nor even their names. What to say? “Protestant!” we blurt out, and await his response. He nods his acceptance, not pressing us for a denomination or any theological details. Yeah, that’s it, say the heathens to one another, we’re Protestants. “Et vous etes croyants,” he says again with satisfaction, and points his finger skyward: “There is a God.” With all the cultural differences we’ve tried to navigate, none present a chasm quite like religion. And it’s certainly not a topic we’re likely to resolve with our cab driver.

PS. For all you fashionistas out there, might I recommend coming to Marrakech to study haute couture at Ecole Top Alfa Mode? Think about it. Seriously.

Ouarzazate

In the midst of all the house shenanigans, I take an impromtu trip down to Ouarzazate, and leave Caitlin to fend for herself in Marrakech. Ouarzazate is an old French garrison town, the gateway to the Moroccan desert, and the film center of Morocco. My trip was too brief to see much beyond the string of high-end hotels and the studios, but we’ll be back to explore when the summer heat wanes.

From Marrakech, Ouarzazate is a 4-5 hour bus drive over the Atlas Mountains. There’s no air conditioning on the bus, and the locals and tourists packing it raise the temperature significantly above the 105-degree swelter outside. The trip is a terrifying rollercoaster ride up and down a narrow switchback road with stops every hour or so for the driver to get out and smoke a cigarette.

The town boasts two film studios, which have hosted countless American productions from Lawrence of Arabia through Kingdom of Heaven. I’d been introduced to a few film crew people and one of them invited me down.

Omar works as a transportation captain and location manager, and as he explains the lay of the land to me at a local café, a friend of his bounds up, grinning. The lanky man with the long brown hair of a hippy tells Omar that as he was buying eggs a director came up to him and hired him to be the double for Jesus in an movie that’s about to start shooting. The local Berber population, generally much more clean-shaven than their Arab neighbors to the north, has taken to growing out their beards to get work as extras in the films here where the local terrain (and population) often doubles for Iraq or Afghanistan.

Asha Dir

We’ve been getting by just fine on French. It’s spoken pretty much everywhere, and whenever Moroccans see a foreign face, they start speaking in French. Since French is not our native tongue we feel quite pleased with ourselves for using it, as though we’re speaking the language of the locals, but of course, we’re not. It’s a rather sad, if obvious, realization that all our struggle to be understood is still marking us as foreigners. While we’ve wanted to learn some Moroccan Arabic, we’ve mastered little beyond counting to six.

The local equivalent of the general store is a place to get bottled water, fresh eggs and milk, or a bar of soap. The father and son (quite cute despite the blurred photo) on our corner are quite sweet and are responsible for teaching us the bulk of our Arabic vocabulary. We like them even more for treating us fairly and not overcharging us, and for serving us in order. One thing we’ve found is that Morocco is a country of line cutters. So far we haven’t found an exception to this stereotype, though I’m sure one exists. Whether at the bank or the grocery story or the bathroom, we’re cut in line like we don’t even exist - this cutting accepted by both the cutter and the cashier alike. Obviously, we find this a little frustrating. (OK, fine, perhaps more than a little frustrating – you can imagine the steam coming from our ears!) The man who runs the general store on our corner of Rue Riad El Arrous is the exception to this, and from the first day, has refused to let others cut in front of us – earning our loyalty in the process. His technique is to take the cutters money and set it aside while he fills our order: this way the cutter can’t take his money to the next stand to make his purchase. We’ve gotten friendly enough that he offered me a cup of tea as I headed home tonight with a couple bottles of water, and made the requisite joke about being careful about drinking too much “Moroccan whiskey,” as the tea is known. It’s a little hard to know how to interpret the joke, when the person delivering it acts as though the tea really can make one drunk.

We explained our queue-cutting frustration to Hamoud who acknowledged the problem as universal, and said that while cutting happens more to foreigners, it happens quite frequently to Moroccans as well. He taught us a phrase to use when we fear getting cut. “Asha dir? Anna lewel!” “What are you doing? I was here first!” So now in addition to asking for four bottles of water, we can stop the line cutters dead in their tracks with our one line of truly local lingo.

First Day

The first thing anyone tells you when you’re doing construction in Morocco is that you need to be at the worksite every day to oversee the project. A lot of foreigners buy houses while on vacation, give marching orders to a contractor, and return months later to find things not quite as they’d envisioned. One of the reasons we felt we could take on Dar Noury is that we’re not going anywhere; we’re planning on spending each day at the house.

Today was our first day of construction, yet we didn’t venture to the house till after 7PM. Lazy, naïve wimps, you say? Well, we had our reasons, which we’ll get to shortly.

We aren’t ashamed to admit this project would be completely beyond us if it weren’t for Hamoud, whom we’ve hired to act as a sort of informal general contractor. He will, in turn, find us a labor foreman, plumber, electrician, plasterers, a woodworker, and all the construction supplies, not to mention help combing the flea markets for vintage sinks and appliances and furniture. By hiring subs to execute specific elements of the renovation, and especially by procuring all of the necessary materials- from copper tubing to cement – ourselves, we’ll be saving a lot of money. It’s commonly understood that if a regular GC sources these people and materials, he’ll charge a wopping premium. Instead, we get a shopping list from the various foremen, and off we go with Hamoud to hunt down the best possible prices.



Although we’ve based all our estimates for the renovation on Hamoud’s off-hand guesses, we’re anxious to keep as close to them as possible. So, we’re excited when he introduces us to the general contractor who did all the work on Riad Andrea, the house Hamoud manages, because the quality of the work seems up to par, and the project obviously went well enough that Hamoud is happy to hire him again. We take the man through Dar Noury pointing to where we want to install a tub, where we’d like to add doorways, where we need new tile work, etc. He takes this all in without writing down a thing and goes away to do an estimate. The next morning, he delivers a price quote that is exactly double what Hamoud had estimated. This is far beyond the realm of aggressive bargaining, and I smile and thank him for his time and let Hamoud show him the door. I’m rather upset, but Hamoud smiles and tells me that the man is “just fishing,” that he sees a foreigner and is angling for a payday. The next day, just as Hamoud had anticipated, the fellow returns and says that he miscalculated the work. His new price has dropped a remarkable 43%, but that still leaves it 15% more than we want and he seems unwilling to budge. We pencil the new number into our spreadsheet and go about meeting with electricians while we wait for the construction permit to come from our new government friends.




The day before the permit is to arrive, Hamoud bounds up to us, eager to share some good news. “I found a new man,” he says, “who will do the work for your price.” I’m dubious, so I ask for more details. Hamoud’s government friend took a liking to us, and recommended a man who’d done work on his own house. Hamoud met the man, and took him to Dar Noury without us. He went through the house and itemized room by room each project. Our jaws dropped as he remembered everything – there was not a single detail he’d forgotten. “And the tiles on the stairs, “ he says, pointing a finger at me in mild accusation, “you’d forgotten about the stairs.” In fact, he’d added several other small- and medium-sized projects to the list and the man had agreed to them all. That’s incredible, I say, how did you ever get him to agree to all that for our price? He smiles and shakes his head. “I told him this was my house, that the work was for me and not any Europeans, and so he agreed.” We both burst out laughing; it’s too good to be true. “I’m going to have him sign a contract for that price,” he tells us, “but until he does, you can’t be seen at the house.”

The next day our permit arrives, and today the work began. Hamoud came by several times to give us updates, but we were banned from the site. At 6:30, he came by and told us that the workers were gone for the day and took us over to see the work. “Be careful,” he says as we enter the house, “it looks like a bomb went off.”

Secret Blog Post

The world wide web. It's a big place. And we've already had some funny instances of random far-flung people finding their way to The Baraka Chronicles on their own. Given this fact, and because some things are better shared with a trusted few than left to float in the ether for any old reader, we decided not to post today's blog entry. Instead, if you're a curious reader, send us an email and we'll share an incriminating tale.

So why this sudden bout of concern? Morocco is a complicated, many-layered place and the more we become invested in it, the more we understand how much there is to learn.



A few days ago, Simone took us to visit Riad Farnatchi, one of Marrakech's premiere maison d'hotes, for some design inspiration. The Riad, a marvel, resembles some of the grand palaces that we saw in Fes, with five luxury suites and two commanding courtyards, one with a burbling fountain and green tiled pool. The manager of the Riad, Lynn, is a veteran of the luxury hotel world and having lived in Morocco for six years, understands the mentality of the country. She's full of amusing stories, but also a few cautionary tales. She recounts one in which a journalist friend made a simple misstep and found himself shackled to a Nigerian deportee on a bus headed to the Algerian border. Another involved a scary, midnight run to the police station, confiscated passports, and clients thrown into jail on alarming, trumped up charges. Lucky for them, Lynn's over-the-top client service extended to such circumstances and all was eventually righted. Sure, Paul Bowles stories instill a bit of fear, but those were written half a century ago; these tales are much closer and therefore more resonant.

So, since we don't have Lynn watching our backs, we're practicing a bit of self-censorship.

I Feel Lucky

Over lunch with Simone, we tell her about our meeting with the assaulted child prostitute and the NGO we’ve recently been introduced to. She nods and says that Morocco can inspire deep thoughts, even in the shallowest person. She wonders aloud: “By what crazy fluke was I lucky enough to have been born where I was? Why is one person given a life of prostitution and suffering and another one of fortune and opportunity?”

Last night, we glimpsed another definition of “lucky,” one that further illuminated its relative nature. We were talking with Hamoud about the bombings in Lebanon and the United States’ complicated ties with Israel and the Arab world. Here in Morocco, the U.S. is considered both an ally and a friend. Despite this relationship and the U.S.’s tepid reaction to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, both houses of the Moroccan congress joined the King and publicly denounced the bombings and the failure of world leaders to put pressure on Israel to stop.

This is the official stance. On the streets, reactions are a bit grayer. If people dislike American foreign policy, it is not a sentiment that’s shared in public. Moroccans rely on American business and tourism. The only comment we’ve heard about the situation came from a tile manufacturer who had praise for Bush’s strength, if not his reasoning ability. He shrugged and said that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. For him, that was a given, and the question of what to do about it intractable. He certainly wasn’t complaining to us about how our President was handling the situation.

Images of bombings and their bloody aftermath flicker across the evening news and we catch a few minutes of BBC with Hamoud. After watching the devastation, Hamoud tells us how lucky he feels to have been born in a peaceful, calm country, not one of war and constant strife. Hamoud is himself a sort of microcosm of Morocco, an Arab Muslim rooted in the culture of his homeland who has, at the same time, made himself a friend and trusted ally of Westerners. Lucky indeed.

No Good Deed

No good deed goes unpunished, nor perhaps a mere good intention.

Cut to the second “meeting” we’ve attended on behalf of the children’s prostitution charity mentioned in an earlier post. We received a call last night from one of the coordinators instructing us to be at a fancy new sports facility that’s been constructed at Bab El Khemis – not far from the flea market – at 10 a.m., presumably to get our marching orders for the upcoming summer activities project with the program’s child-victims. Great, we thought, we’ll go early and have a peak around the market and then spend an hour or so hatching plans with our fellow volunteers.

Well, it turns out helping out might be more challenging than we thought. We arrive at the spiffy sports facility – all groomed lawns, giant tiled pool, theater and computer outbuildings, encouraging tri-lingual signs pointing towards tennis and handball courts, the indoor gym and infirmary. It’s all so, well, not third world. The center looks like it could be right out of Orange County, the philanthropic project of some retired tennis star.

Our gang is hanging out outside one of the admin buildings, awkwardly making introductions; clearly none of us exactly sure what’s going on and what we’re meant to be doing. Finally, after standing about for 15 minutes in the blazing sun, we’re ushered into the building where rows of 50 folding chairs are neatly lined up in a bare, very former Protectorate-looking conference room where someone’s fiddling with audio-video equipment. The meeting is starting to look very official, we think, and are quickly proven right as in walk a group of government guys in weekend wear – pleated slacks, golf shirts, polished lace-ups with cigarettes dangling from their mustachioed lips. For the next hour and a half, we’re treated to a full-on Power Point presentation (oh, haven’t we come all this way in some part just to avoid Power Point?) about the new facility, its aspirations (both for Marrakech’s youth and for the country’s tourism), program schedule, and on and on. No mention of the children’s prostitution charity, whose only tie to the center is that the summer activities program will be housed here, it seems, no words from the charity’s director, no info about what we’re doing here. Not to mention, the presentation is in heavily-accented French and Arabic, of which we’re able to get about every 4th word. We do like the amiable face and dramatic gesticulations (think Parisian street mime), of the center’s director, a middle-aged man who’d won us over earlier by complimenting our floppy straw hats (“chicest and cheapest”). At one point in the presentation, though, he points a puffy finger at me and suggests that perhaps I could teach tennis lessons. What??

Every now and again, between bouts of feeling like we might pass out from the heat and from the struggle to concentrate on a foreign and unintelligible tongue, we jab one another and smile at the hilarity of the predicament.

When the session comes to an abrupt halt and the crowd files out into the sun-drenched courtyard again, we approach Nico, hoping for some explanation. “I’m afraid we missed a lot of what was going on in there,” we say. “Go talk to Emanuel,” she responds, waving us off. “He speaks English.” Emanuel, who works for the center, not her charity, is surrounded by a big group of people. We wait for a while, but when it’s clear he’s going to be engaged for some time, we throw in the towel and wander back to the gate to find some water and a cab.

A charity’s success is not just a product of a do-gooder and his or her worthy vision; to be successful, a charity needs a leader who can marshal and inspire volunteers, making efficient use of able, willing hands. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case with this very deserving organization. We’re still eager to help out, but it makes us wonder what the statute is on wasted time and a fuzzy game plan.

At Night

COOKING LESSON
We’ve finally ventured into Moroccan cooking. While we happily buy our vegetables in the souk (3 kilos of assorted vegetables for just over a dollar), we’ve yet to brave its butchers. We’ve already described the carcasses that hang from hooks in the open-air stalls. Great, bloody mounds of flesh, with flies buzzing about and the sweet, heavy scent of blood hanging in the air. Tonight it’s gotten late, and we don’t feel like taking a taxi out to the grocery store in Gueliz, so we decide to get some lamb in the souk and attempt a traditional tajine dinner, named for the terra cotta pot in which the meal is cooked. We pick a vendor at random from among the half-dozen lining the main street, and tell him we want to make a tajine. He chops off a chunk of meat, and when he generously offers to throw in a couple cubic inches of fat for free, we don’t have the heart to tell him “no, thank you.” Back at the house, we start spreading our ingredients over the counter when Hamoud and his wife Hint show up.

When we tell them what we’re up to, they’re excited to help and, quickly go about instructing us on the basics of preparing a tajine. We learn that the plain terracotta tajine is used by the Berbers, while Arabs use the glazed terracotta. We opt for the glazed since it doesn’t absorb liquids and may be easier for our novice effort. Hint tucks an apron into our trousers, and thrusts a cutting board at us. We start slicing eggplant and zucchini, garlic and onion. Before we know it, though, Hint hi-jacks the project (were we that inept?) and we’re left with little to do but watch and stir the tajine as ingredients are added. Still, the result is quite good, and we’re anxious to practice and experiment a bit on our own.


NIGHT STALKER
He stood stock still in the near dark, and I almost didn’t see him as I rounded a corner of the terrace. Hamoud looked up as I approached and motioned for me to stop, and held his hand to his ear, gesturing for me to listen. I stood still in the hot summer night. It was past the final call to prayer. From the balcony, little noise could be heard from the city outside the walls of the riyad, - perhaps just a faint echo of the carnival drums in the Place. Inside the walls, the soft creek of crickets, synonymous with summer, was all I heard. I shrugged, and Hamoud whispered, “There!” I stepped forward, hearing nothing but the crickets, and then Hamound pounced, jutting his foot forward between two potted ferns and squishing something. The cricket’s chirp ceased, and Hamoud bent down and gleefully pulled out the insect’s mangled carcass.

“The noise!” he explained, and only then did I see the can of Raid in his hand. He led me around the riyad and proudly showed me three other crickets he’d killed that night: two by Raid, and the other by foot. Only then did we learn that the “cricket hunt” is a nightly preoccupation of his, this effort to rid the riyad of one of its most charming qualities. We try talking him out of it, but he clearly sees it as his duty to bring peace to the place by slaughtering the crickets. The more we protest, the more he shakes his head; this is something he has to do, and he often enlists his boys to help track down the chirping crickets behind terracotta pots or lurking in a dark corner. Our small consolation is that this seems an unwinable war; the crickets continue to sing each night.

On a Lighter Note. . .

Just as we were finishing off a lovely dinner with friends on the terrace, our cell phone rang and we recognized a Los Angeles number: It was the bank calling us to let us know that the wire transfer had gone through! What a sigh of relief.

Of course, while our bank account in Los Angeles in now completely depleted, the money has yet to arrive in our account in Morocco. We can’t help but wonder where it is. It’s not as though a stagecoach with gold coins was loaded on a ship and is now crossing the Atlantic. At any rate, we’re confident enough it will get here that we’re ready to get started on the renovation.

A few details about the house. Dar Noury, as it is known legally, is named for the first owners of the house, but Noury also means a flash of light, akin to a paparazzi’s flashbulb or perhaps a shooting star. Whatever the exact translation, the prospect of living in a well-lit house is exciting.




It’s in a northern section of the medina called Sidi Ben Slimane, which is nearly a twenty-minute walk to the Place, and so home to more Moroccans than tourists. Ben Slimane was a prophet and the green roof of his tomb is less than a stone’s throw from our terrace-to-be. Marrakech has several nicknames, one of which is the city of Seven Men, so-called for the seven prophets who are buried here. There’s an annual pilgrimage during which people travel from one tomb to the next, and we’re ready to help Ben Slimane throw a party to put the other prophets to shame. Despite asking several people, and looking online, however, I’ve been able to find out very little about Slimane other than the fact he died in 1465 and was a sufi mystic. Perhaps we’ll learn more through osmosis as we settle in.

The house is very small and simple, lacking all the interesting architectural details that were so prevalent in Fes, but it’s classical in layout with rooms on four sides flanking a square courtyard. The courtyard, in fact, takes up so much space that while the rooms are generally over 20 feet long, they’re never wider than 8 feet. The house is nestled into a handful of others, so aside from the hallway we share with an adjoining mosque, there is no exterior wall.




We promise not to let this become a home-makeover blog, but are bowing to requests for a few more shots of the house as we found it. The photo above shows three small rooms up one set of stairs will become a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom. The shot below is a bedroom across the courtyard.

Rose-Colored Glasses

We’ve been in Morocco now for about a month and a half and we’ve started to see this city through clearer, less-tinted eyes. We’ve had the help, of course, of a few exceptional guides.

Our newest is a sprite, a woman with infectious energy and a quick, easy laugh. A peripatetic wanderer, she’s lived all over the world, tugged by love affairs or creative projects or personal exploration to Brazil, New York, India, Europe, and now Morocco. She’s been in Marrakech, living in what she describes as her Barbie-doll house, a wee apartment in the Medina furnished with, well, no furniture, for nearly three years. The place is layered with pillows and rugs and postcards and photos from all over as well as stacks and stacks of bags and shoes of her own ethno-chic designs. Sitting cross-legged on the floor over steaming cups of magenta-colored hibiscus tea, she extols the sitar musicians she’s just heard on a recent trip to Bombay and tells us the sad story of her now-defunct romance with a Moroccan man. A yogi, a masseuse, a fashion designer, a linguist, she’s an indefinable girl. She’s got looks, too – a slight frame, dark brown hair and eyes, olive skin, almond eyes and a prominent nose – that could place her in an array of ethnic backgrounds, which suits, I’m sure, her nomadic ways. She’s the type that scoops you up into her whirlwind of projects and ideas and people, and you’re thrilled with the exciting spin. And, of course, there’s something about an innately positive person delivering up harsh realities that make their sting more painful.

The first night we met her, over dinner at a local café, she proceeded to order the house salad, but without cheese (“I’ve got a cold, love, and cheese is bad for a cold,” she explains with an exaggerated sniffle), extra croutons (“Honey, you know how much I love your croutons,” she croons), and additional veggies (“Piles of lettuce,” she mimes, stretching her elegant arms into an enormous O, “and whatever other veggies you can find, just loads and loads”). The sharp-tongued waitress, a friend, is both annoyed and indulgent. It’s the kind of clichéd “When Harry Met Sally” scene that would normally have driven us mad, especially when she follows with a request to turn off the ceiling fan and turn down the air conditioning (“Not good for my cold!”), but we find ourselves smiling at her guileless demands. She’s not trying to be difficult or rude, and she’s not putting on a princess act, she’s just asking for what she wants.

After dinner, instead of jumping in a cab home, she encourages us to walk with her back to the Medina. She points out a local market that has “the best avocados – oh, I love avocados!” and other personal landmarks like the house where she teaches yoga. Rather than sticking to main streets, she steps off into a sparsely lit park from whose shadowy depths we can hear the laughter of a gang of young men. For us, alarm bells go off. Let’s just say we’d never have ventured into this park on our own at night. We scoot along the garden’s paths, amidst the night-blooming jasmine, blinded every so often by flood lights set into the cobbled path. She, who is all of 90 pounds, marches ahead unafraid, babbling on about this and that and making us feel safe and confident in her presence.

And then the conversation shifts as she delivers a zinger, as if prompted by our unease in the shadowy park: “Prostitution is a rampant problem in Morocco, you know. Fathers sell daughters and even their wives. Because of the poverty,as long as it brings in money, they don’t care.” In our stunned silence, she continues. “A friend of mine, a European who is studying in Marrakech, decided he’d get some first-hand proof of the problem. One night he walked from Guilez to the Place, a distance of less than a mile, asking women for their numbers. [Evidently, this is the way prostitutes are propositioned in Morroco, as the trade is a bit more opportunistic than proactive.] In one night, he got forty numbers.” She laughs, an accidental release, and then apologizes, “I can’t believe I’m laughing . . . it’s so tragic.”

We part for the night and hardly have the chance to digest what we’ve heard before her words come violently to life. The next day, she introduces us to a friend, a Swiss-French woman, who is running an NGO devoted to the problems of child prostitution and pornography in Morocco. We are unwittingly taken to a meeting with her team of staff and volunteers and de facto signed up to help. Nico, the organization’s director, is aflutter when we arrive. She’s just come from court, where she’s participating in a trial against a big-time pornographer and molester. At the same time, she’s got comps for stickers and posters that she wants the NGO’s lawyer to sign off on, and she’s trying to find a safe house for a girl that’s been attacked and needs shelter.

As Nico is explaining in gory detail what happened to the girl, in she walks with one of Nico’s trusted peer-liaisons. She’s a stunning sixteen-year-old, who smiles demurely at us, revealing a Muriel Hemingway gap between her front teeth, as she walks in and slinks into a chair. She speaks no French, so sits quietly as Nico describes how the girl has come to have a fiery, welted, crescent-shaped slash that runs from her forehead to her chin. Until just days ago, she was a prostitute – until, that is, she either refused to work or talked back to her pimp, eliciting the angry attack. The knife’s blade has carved an indelible mark into the girl’s face, a mark, explains Nico, that’s recognized in the community. Anyone who sees her will know that she was both a prostitute and one that stepped out of line. Her mark is, of course, a warning to others as well. The girl, whose hand self-consciously flutters to her face from time to time to cover her gash, has filed a formal complaint against the fellow who knifed her and is now in grave danger. During our meeting, Nico hops up and down from her chair, taking calls and pleading with people to take the girl in.

Although Nico comes off as haughty and condescending, the type who looks us up and down and up and down when we meet as if we’re auditioning for a runway modeling gig, we can’t help being drawn into her cause, especially after seeing one of her charges first-hand and then hearing about equally appalling cases: Children being fed to animals. Five-year-olds taken out of school to sell trinkets in the Place. Lives steered towards tragic dead ends. And these examples represent just the tip of the iceberg.

Nico feels that for any long-term changes to happen, Morocco’s tourism trade must be reformed, of which sex tourism represents a bewilderingly large segment. “The fuck flight, that’s what they call the Friday flight from Frankfurt to Marrakech,” she says. “It’s cheaper and quicker than going Bangkok. Sex tourism in Morocco is big business and it’s only getting bigger.” For an economy like Morocco’s that relies on tourism and the four “S’s” – sun, sea, sand and sex – eliminating the vital sex component will be a long, hard struggle.

Depressing only begins to describe the situation as we come face-to-face with one of the perverse realities of our new home. Why is it that if we’re not destroying our environment, we’re ruining our future through the mistreatment of children? It’s inescapable and a lot to bear. But with our indefatigable guide and Nico and her NGO, maybe there’s an opportunity for us to help in a small way.

As we leave the meeting, I feel a powerful sense of being swept into something – a place, a situation, people’s lives. The moment demands both laughter and tears. Walking lightly alongside us, our new friend heads straight for the orange juice stands in the Place. As we lean against the cart and take giant, fortifying gulps of the sweet juice she laughs mischievously, “I guess you’re in now, like it or not.” I guess we are.

Oubliez mon Visage

It was inevitable. And it’s happened.





Moroccans, we’ve been told, are verbal combatants. Rarely do disputes come to fisticuffs; instead, disgruntled parties invoke the verbal equivalent of the poisoned pen – the xx tongue? We see altercations in the street all the time and the etiquette is quite charming actually. As voices are raised to a terrifying pitch between two men, a crowd invariably gathers to see what all the ruckus is for. The unwritten code is that someone from the crowd will step in to separate the angry parties should things escalate beyond insults. As we described before, the streets of the medina are very narrow, so when a fight breaks out and a crowd of 20 or so gathers, you can imagine the traffic jam it causes. Just last week, though, we witnessed a fight of similar proportions, however, two men on the outskirts of the scuffle were politely making a path through the sputtering crowd for two elderly, veiled women. They took almost no notice of the commotion - the epithets being hurled, the angry gesticulating – as they walked past with just the briefest of nods to the crossing guards who’d cleared the way for them.

Another quick backgrounder before we get to “the inevitable”: We’ve told you about simsars and agence immobillieres, the Moroccan equivalent of real estate agents. Well, unlike in the States, here it’s customary to play the field a bit with agents. The reason is that Morocco doesn’t have an MLS or any collective listing service, so each agent has his or her own properties. So, the concept of a “buyer’s broker” just doesn’t exist here. Nor are there seller’s brokers. Basically, the buyer’s broker gets the full 5% commission; 2.5% paid each by the buyer and the seller. Therefore, the best way to ensure that you’re really seeing all that there is on the market is to work with a number of different simsars. In the 50 or so houses that we saw in Fes and Marrakech, we had only three cases of being taken to see the same place by separate simsars.

So, in addition to working with several simsars that Hamoud arranged for us, we sought out a couple more on our own, including a two-person team Ab’dila and Hajib. We found them through a sweet-faced souk seller named Moulay after several rounds of mint tea (see Mint Tea entry). He worked us very smoothly – casual, concerned inquiries about our house hunting, fatherly advice, and so on. I’m sure that hooking foreigners up with his simsar acquaintances is a great side business for this guy and we were happy to be taken in. At the very least, we’ll get to see more places.

Ab’dila and Hajib, over the course of a total of five hours on two separate days show us some ten places. Given the late stage in our hunt, we were very specific about what it is we want and articulated this to them at the beginning. The first two rental places they show us are okay, but after that it’s a quick downhill slide. I think they trudged us around to see everything they knew about, including vile studio apartments with Turkish toilets when we’d been very clear that for a rental we wanted three bedrooms and a Western bath. Our less-than-enthusiastic responses to the latter rentals meet with off-hand shrugs by A&H. At the end of day two, when we’ve determined we aren’t going to find anything with this pair, we call it quits and agree to call one another should a good place come on the market or should we have a change of heart about anything we’ve seen. Fine, done. Not so. Before parting Ab’dila tries to get us to pay him for the “keys” to the homes we’d seen. He claims that he and Hajib have to give small tips to the homeowners to unlock their places. Total shit, we say, and refuse to pay. (When we tell Hamoud about this later, he affirms that this is a prime example of “Marrakech, Anarkech,” and that key tips are not done. After all, the owners want their homes to be shown, especially to eager foreigners.)

Now, like in the States, a simsar gets paid a commission upon the close of a purchase (2.5%) or a rental (one-month’s rent). Regardless, it’s a pretty hefty sum, and for the most part these guys are closing deals within a day or two, unlike the months that a buyer’s broker might spend with a client back home. Despite this, and in order to keep the simsar working hard on one’s behalf, occasionally a petit cadeau (i.e., $$) is offered to keep them incentivized. We’d intended to give A&H a token thank you, despite neither having found us anything, nor really having listened to what it was we were after.

Cut to a week later. [Note: We’ve received news about Dar Noury and have been mired in paperwork and banking mishigas for days.] We’re walking through the souk one night on the way to the Place for our bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice for tomorrow’s breakfast when we here, “Hello, my friends.” It’s the friendly souk seller, wanting to check in on our search, etcetera. We exchange pleasantries for a bit and tell him about Dar Noury. Just as we’re leaving, Ab’dila pulls up on his bicycle, his saffron babouches gleaming in the fading early evening light. “So,” says Moulay. “I hear you never paid Ab’dila and Hajib for all of their work.”

“Yes, we’ve been meaning to give them a petit cadeau,” we say with a hint of chagrin (cut us some slack, we’ve been busy), handing over a healthy sum to Ab’dila with a warm shokran or “thank you.”

“That’s not enough,” Ab’dila says with disdain, gesturing for more bills. Moulay jumps to his defense (and his own, seeing as he surely gets a cut!), saying we should pay more for the two days’ work.

At this, Samuel explodes. He grabs the bills back from Abdila’s hand and says, “When I give a gift, I expect a thank you, not to be told it’s not enough. If you don’t like my gift, I’ll just take it back.”

A shouting match ensues. We argue that A&H had worked – and not very well, mind you – with us for only five hours and that they stood to gain a lot of money had they showed us a place we’d liked. The fact that it hadn’t worked out is just the cost of doing business as a simsar. And don’t even get us started on the lowly crap we’d been dragged through.

In the hot Marrakech summer, nightfall brings the souk to life, so our dispute is high drama in a well-trafficked spot. Arms flail. Voices rise, rise, rise. Stares and sneers get nastier. Our foursome paces and stomps in a mounting huff. A small crowd closes in around us. Their alliances to our dueling sides are palpable and add extra electricity to the air. Ab’dila and Moulay are a manipulative tag team, entreating us as friends one minute and bellowing about their poor treatment the next. It’s pure comedy. And if it weren’t for the fact that the Medina – a place we soon hope to call home – is a small “village” in which we hope not to harbor enemies, this might be fun. It’s certainly sport, that’s for sure.

Finally, the larger picture dawns on us and we capitulate, handing over another big bill. Never one to forfeit the last word, however, Samuel levels a glowering, “Oubliez mon visage!” to Ab’dila and Moulay. Forget my face, forget you even know me. It’s a pretty harsh remark, especially in the convivial souk world, where regulars stop to chat with souk sellers as a matter of course. It draws some hurried apologies, cries of mon ami and conciliatory back patting from our opponents. Evidently, in this war of words, Samuel’s won a game, even if the match has gone to the locals.

Oubliez mon visage. A phrase . . . and a face that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

Quick aside: Fig season has arrived in Morocco. Check out these beauties!

Le Week-Ende

With nothing much to do this weekend but stay cool in temperatures that have topped out at 113 degrees, we drink a lot of Sidi Ali. Local shops will try to push the inferior Ciel water on unsuspecting tourists, but the first time you demand Sidi Ali by name, they smile as if welcoming you to the club.

Here are a few random food shots from the past several days.



Chicken tajine at one of the many cafes that ring the Place. All are decent, none are great, but it’s hard to beat the location.



We’ve mentioned Stall #31 before, but we’ve been back several times. Since there are no napkins, we've taken to getting extra bread, and using that instead.





On Saturday night we join a friend of a friend for a very engaging dinner at Cafe du Livre, which, with it’s air-conditioned library and wi-fi access, has been quite a haven in the heat in addition to a reliably delicious meal.




And of course, back at Riad Andrea, we’ve been beating the heat with pitcher after pitcher of Mojitos.

Thursday Market

We love a good flea market, the haphazard hunt, the eclectic array of treasure and junk. Some of our favorite pieces were scavenged from the flea markets of Paris, New York and L.A. So, you can imagine our excitement when we learned about the Thursday flea market at Bab El Khemis, one of the main gates on the north side of the Medina.

We arrive at mid-day, about three hours too late as any practiced flea marketer will tell you. The sun was high and we squeezed our way thru a crush of people and motorbikes. At first glance, the market looked unpromising. Loads of pirated CDs and DVDs, piles of summer shorts, cell phone chargers, used bicycle tires, perfume past its prime . . . As we pushed our way further into the crowd, we noticed side streets splintering off from the main drag, streets lined with stalls cluttered with all manner of things. We skittered to the left just avoiding being struck by a donkey cart loaded with rugs and ducked into the first stall. Sinks, tubs and toilets. Loads of them of all different varieties – though all old – from fancy marble numbers to charming porcelain basins that looked right out of a Paris apartment. Next stall has rugs and pillows fashioned from rugs. There’s a Frenchwoman haggling with the stall owner. She’s got a servant with a wheelbarrow filled with rugs and she wants the shop to throw in a pillow for free. She has a bamboo fan in her hand that she flicks back and forth as she argues. Within minutes the owner acquiesces and she adds the pillow to her stack. Off she trots with her servant and cart scurrying to catch up. This is a woman who clearly knows her way around the Thursday market; I’m half tempted to chase after and offer to carry her fan if she’ll make me her protégé.






Each little side street offers its themed specialty: one is full of stalls with mid-Century furniture; another boasts carved wooden doors; the next ceramic pots of every size and shape. And Bab El Khemis is more than a flea market; in addition to the stalls there are real workrooms. You can watch as craftsman pound, carve, fire and weld an incredible array of things for the home. We even pass a workroom where a small boy is hammering at recycled rebar; behind him a store room is filled with straightened skeletons of steel. You get the feeling that anything could be made here if you have the imagination to design it and the language skills to convey what you want to an able pair of hands.

We don’t make any purchases, but take a few pictures. We covet a Saarenin-like table and six tulip chairs as well as some carved doors and turned-wood window screens that would make chic headboards. “It’s better they [stall owners] see you a few times before you buy,” explains Hamoud when we return empty handed. “That way you get Marrakchi price, not tourist price.” It seems it won’t be too hard for us to find some suitable junk for Dar Noury.

Patience is a Virtue

Patience may be a virtue, but not one of mine, I’ve always said. Today, the realities of international banking made our heads spin. And while it might be a truism that bureaucracies exist to protect themselves, that doesn’t make it any more fun to experience them first hand. The struggle has been to get our money out of the States and into Morocco so we can buy Dar Noury.

Morocco has two kinds of back accounts: regular dihram accounts (available to locals, and good only for holding dihrams within the country) and convertible dihram accounts which foreigners can open and which can be used to wire money into and out of the country. A few weeks ago we opened an account with Hamoud’s help. That was the easy part. The hard part has been getting money into the account. The only way to put money into a convertible account is by wire transfer, so we’re not allowed to withdraw cash at an ATM and then make a token deposit in dihrams.
The trouble is, our American financial institutions want us to come into the office and sign a few forms to execute the wire transfer. I tried telling them that I just can’t pop over to the branch on Fairfax at the moment, but they weren’t convinced.
We don’t have any experience with international wire transfers prior to 9/11, but considering how easy all electronic banking is in the States at the moment, we can’t help but think that somebody in the Bush administration is worried that we’re trying to transfer our money to Al-Quaeda.

The local bankers are pretty hostile in return. Omar, the English-speaking banker at BMCE, told us he knows that American banks all think, “oh, an African Bank, they don’t know what they’re doing.” But he handles billions of dollars of transfers each year with European and American banks and businesses. Unfortunately, since BMCE does not have a Medallion Signature Guarantee stamp, a specific stamp required by our bank to send funds to his bank, we thought we’d open an account elsewhere. A quick tour of other banks in the Medina found that none of them had such a thing, and a call to the US Consulate in Casablanca confirmed that the stamp does not exist in Morocco.



The Consulate, however, wants to help and offers to stamp any form we might have. So, by 10 a.m., we’re off with Hamoud in a rental car for the three-hour drive to Casablanca to visit the Consulate. As we enter through glass doors four inches thick, we can’t help but remember that Casablanca was the target of Al-Quaeda bombings just three years ago, and one of those targets was the Spanish Consulate around the corner.

We get the fanciest embossed stamp possible from the Consul of the United States of America. We fax it to our bank and then call to see if it’s acceptable. While I’m on hold with the bank, Hamoud goes out, scours the neighborhood, finds a mosque for his afternoon prayer, and returns before I’ve gotten through to a live operator. When I get someone on the line, they tell me they’ll happily accept the Consul’s stamp, but only to wire funds to a U.S. bank. Did I hear that right, I ask. Yes: they now refuse to wire funds to any foreign bank, something they’d agreed to for the past three days.




By 5 PM, and feeling defeated, we pile in the car for the long drive home, where I smash my head against the windshield in frustration. We didn’t see any of Casablanca, but we’d love to return. Our lunch at a café was blessed with cool breezes that felt 30 degrees cooler than Marrakech. Casablanca is the butt of so many jokes that we feel a bit sorry for it; surely it can’t be that bad. We tend to think that it might be like Los Angeles, which maintains its reputation as a city of airheads despite having more Nobel laureates than any other city in the world.


Anyway, tomorrow is a new day, and with it the challenge of finding a creative way to get money into Morocco.

Can You Take the Heat

The heat today in Marrakech is rather epic – bellicose, taunting, spiteful. A sorceress strangling us in her miserable clutch. A she-devil sucking the air from our lungs. “Be afraid,” she whispers, and we are.

How often does one pause to contemplate if a pair of sunglasses could actually melt to one’s cheek bones. Or if it’s possible for the skin to bubble and blister even beneath one’s clothes?

One hundred and seven degrees doesn’t sound that hot, but coupled with a dry wind and a paucity of shade, the effect is scorching. Heat mirages? Oh, yeah. Given that Marrakech is a city that boasts a lot of pavement, we’ve got the Bellagio fountain burbling up at us every 100 meters. Imagine what it’s like for the much-maligned mules! This is a day for laying-low, for long siestas in an air-conditioned room, or barring that a darkened lower-floor salon. At least it promises to cool to 91 degrees by midnight.

We knew that yesterday’s house-buying giddiness would fade as the reality of the work ahead of us dawned; we just didn’t expect it to combust in a dusty poof so soon. But today, instead of hiding from the heat’s wrath, we hurtled headlong into the fiery day to deal with the financial mishigas of yesterday’s rash act. Bank to internet café to teleboutique to bank to internet café to teleboutique we went. Oh, how we wanted to curl up on the marble floor of Societe Generale for a few hours of reprieve. No, no, onwards.

We’d scoffed when others warned about the heat of the Moroccan summer, especially inland in Marrakech. Wouldn’t you rather wait to go in the fall, they asked? We’re from LA we grumbled, we know from heat. Our comeuppance, it seems, is coming to a boil.

Dar Noury

To spoil the punchline, we bought a house today.

OK, let’s back up. The rental houses we looked at here in Marrakech ranged from grim to grimmer. The one exception cost 2000 Euros a month, not counting realtor fees. So, Hamoud made another offer on what we’d been calling Mosque House, and this time the owner accepts.


We go through a little panic as we try to decide how to proceed. We speak with Nathalie, and she brings a structural engineer to look over the place; his approval helps us breath easier. Hamoud brings us a general contractor whom he’d worked with before to give us estimates on all the projects we want to undertake. We’re pointing to a wall we want to knock a hole in when M’hammed, our Muezzin-Immobiliere gets a phone call from a clearly frustrated owner. He’d agreed to our low-ball offer three days ago, and hadn’t heard back.

In seconds we’re piling into Hamoud’s car and driving across town to meet the man, who lives in Casablanca and happens to be passing through Marrakech on his way to the seaside resort of Agadir for the weekend. We sputter to a stop in Hamound’s rattle-trap of a Renault to see Ahmed unfurl himself from the back of a shiny black BMW X5. A luxury SUV in the States, this is literally the first X5 we’ve seen in Morocco where a Honda Accord is considered luxe. Ahmed is very charming and tells us how he runs a large business in Casablanca distributing Botox and Brita water filters throughout Morocco. His business is growing, and he needs the cash tied up in the house to finance it. Our fears that by purchasing an old house in the medina we would be sending a family reluctantly out to live in the Nouvelle Ville vanish as we learn that he bought the place a year ago to be his Marrakech party house but never had the time to fix it up. After a 10-minute chat we shake hands and drive off; it seems we’ve committed to buying the house. As he’s got his weekend in Agadir ahead of him, and needs to collect the papers for the house in Casablanca, we agree to meet Monday morning to sign the Commitment to Buy document at the Notary’s office.





This morning we sit nervously at a café, waiting for the owner to arrive before heading into the bustling office. Three hours, many signatures, and $150 well-spent dollars for a translator later, we all “shake full hands” on the house who’s real name, it turns out is Dar Noury. We’d been told by the translator to wait to shake until all of the papers had been signed so we could do so with “full hands” – ours full of a house and the former owner’s full with money.



Ahmed, it turns out is very gracious, and offers not only to turn over the keys to the house immediately so that we can begin work, rather than waiting for the money to clear the banks, but he also invites us to stay with him in Casablanca and promises to show us the town. As the Botox King of Morocco speeds back up to Casa, we stumble out into the 110-degree heat, giddy about Dar Noury, but savvy enough to know we’re about to become slaves to her.