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.