V.I.P. Only
Finally, the day of the King’s visit is upon us. The neighborhood has been scoured, ready for the arrival of Mohammed VI to pray at the mosque of Sidi Ben Slimane in celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. We’re hoping to catch a royal peek ourselves. With the new uniform coat of paint, our slightly tattered neighborhood now looks a bit like Morocco Disneyworld. Flags fly, banners are draped. But while we’d been thinking this was a great opportunity for the King to pray with some of his subjects, that’s not really on the agenda. Instead, a nearby parking lot is taken over with several large tour buses, out of which pour hundreds of VIPs who have been shipped in to pray with the King on this holy day. They’re all wearing the finest white jellabas, as they walk from the buses to the mosque.
But the storefronts that line our street are all closed in what we’re told is part security measure and part a desire to keep the King on task. Evidently, his entourage worries that on the way to the mosque he’ll stop in at a shop and get embroiled in the woes of the shopkeeper or hand out a taxi license to a hapless fellow, as he’s been known to do. So all the proud buildup for the King’s arrival, and the neighborhood isn’t really a part of it at all.
For our part, we receive a knock on the door from a security team, asking that we limit our movement in and out of the house. So while we hear a brass band playing as the King arrives, we barely poke our heads out the door to nervously snap a blurry shot of the bottleneck of white jellabas as the pass through the metal detectors on their way into the main doors of the mosque.
posted by The Dowe-Sandes at
4:19 AM
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