I left myself a whopping twenty hours between my return from travel and the arrival of my parents. Their arrival came with much jetlag and another trip, to Morocco.
I explained to my father that Morocco is Third-World Lite. The fact that he was going at all was a vast change from when three years ago, he nearly forbade me from going because the locals might see my Jew horns and cast me into the farthest deathly reaches of the medina where I’d never be found again. But, as it turns out, the Moroccans are pretty down with the Jews and the reason that all but 3,000 left in 1948 was for economic reasons above all else.
Our trip was beautiful, but more of a smorgasbord, a tasting of several different sites and cities. Our first day was in Casablanca, a mostly industrial city that now has the third largest mosque in the world. Inside it can house 25,000 people, and during Ramadan, the whole complex hosts about 105,000. We went to Meknes, where we didn’t see much, Volubilis, which is an enormous Roman ruins, and Rabat, the capital since the French came and has remained so even now that they’re gone, all in the same afternoon and probably ate a tajine every two hours. We stayed in a beautiful hotel, a converted French villa with peacocks and free Internet. The following day we raced to Fez, where we shopped until the boys dropped.The beauty of Morocco is truly in the details. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, people are constantly yelling at each other in a very unfamiliar language that contains occasional spikes of the more familiar French. But, the architecture is beautiful, detailed carved plasterwork and unending mosaics. The people are kind, even if they’re trying to swindle you. My father and I met a man on the street that invited us into his house for tea. It turned out later that he had given us a fake name and was just trying to take us to a certain place to shop so he could get a commission, but the gesture was also kind and we enjoyed it. Apparently, if “Mohammed” does this again though, he could get fired from his real job, teaching math at a local school.
Our last night, we saw the world’s most touristy show. We started as the only people in the restaurant, but it filled fast when several tour buses arrived. But, “what’s one more tajine, when I know there’s a belly dancer on the way?” Wrong. The tajine was good; the belly dancer was definitely past childbearing age and was wearing a lime-green polyester getup that hugged her hams in a most uncomfortable way to watch. Not the kind of half naked Muslim girl you want shaking her groove thing while you’re eating dinner. I never had so much fun being an ugly American as at that dinner.
