Back from Morocco

I returned this morning from an eight-day trip to Morocco with my family. It's totally exhausting hauling a toddler and baby in backpacks around the labyrinthine souqs of Fes and Marrakech, but we had a great time.

I'll admit that I never had much desire to visit Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria--mainly because I didn't now anything about them. I knew they are Muslim countries but not Arab. The people speak Arabic, but not real Arabic. The dialect is unintelligible to outsiders, and French is the language of daily business. I knew that life in these countries is heavily influenced by the French colonial experience, and I've never been that interested in France either. Nevertheless, friends told me that Morocco is a great country to visit and I knew that understanding these countries is an important part of my regional education.

I was pleased to discover that I loved Morocco. Because I knew virtually nothing about the country everything was a pleasant surprise.

The geography is stunning and diverse. I was amazed at how green much of the country was--a luxury I no longer take for granted after living in water-scarce Jordan. Most gas stations and rest stops had a garden out back, with soft green grass and playground equipment. My son wakes up early, so to prevent him from waking up other hotel guests I took him each morning to the park. I would order a croissant and a coffee and a cup of banana juice at one of the many cafes, and we would sit in the park and eat our breakfast. The simple luxury of pleasant outdoor spaces is one of my favorite things in Morocco. From Fes we undertook what became a thirteen-hour drive through the Atlas mountains to Marrakech. Along the way we stopped for lunch in the college town of Ifrane, which is as green and beautiful as many college towns in the States.

The culture in Morocco defies description. European, African, and Arab cultures all seem to collide and interact in unexpected ways. Near our beachfront hotel in Casablanca hip young Moroccans in Western clothes hung out in nightclubs and Western restaurants. While walking on the same street in the morning, I came across a Moroccan wedding party in traditional Moroccan clothes dancing and playing drums. I'm not sure if they were beginning their celebration or ending it. It was 5:00am. Wahhabism is on the rise because of extensive Saudi influence, but I'm told that most Moroccans make fun of the "beardies" and that Islam plays a more moderate role in Morocco than in most Arab countries.

In the countryside we came across quaint little towns that look like they were transplanted from Germany or France--except the token church at the town center was replaced with a mosque. In other places I felt like I was driving through the poorest parts of Alabama or southern Georgia. Still other places resembled stereotypical images of African poverty. I mistakenly programmed our GPS to avoid major highways, so we entered Casablanca via back roads framed on either side by vast slums (which were, of course, studded with satellite dishes).

Fes and Marrakech both consisted of old and new regions. The newer parts of each city resembled their European counterparts. In the newer region of Fes, you could visit a different cafe every day for a year. While you drank your coffee you could watch Muslim women in sweatsuits and hijabs jogging, or Westernized youth walking to school. A kilometer away you could enter the gates of the old city and watch history wind back a thousand years. You could spend hours shoving your way through the winding narrow streets of the souq, competing with pushcarts and donkeys laden with crates of Coca Cola. Turn off the main streets--as we did one time--and you will find yourself in a labyrinth of identical alleys and homes populated by staring children. Marrakesh played up its exotic "oriental" side; the snake handlers and trained monkeys made me think of Indiana Jones. When we had our fill of oriental wonders, we slipped inside a modern restaurant to escape the brutal heat and ate banana splits.

I was pleasantly surprised with my language ability. First, it was encouraging when I read billboards and street signs, most of which were written in both Arabic and French. I couldn't read more than a few words of French, but I could read the Arabic almost fluently. The same thing happened with spoken language. It's an encouraging feeling to realize that my Arabic has improved to the point that I can handle it much better than any European language. A highlight of the trip is when a waiter, upon hearing my Arabic accent, asked me, "What is your nationality? Lebanese or Syrian?" It's the first time that someone mistook me for being Arab after I started speaking.

Of course the language has its difficulties as well. The Moroccan dialect is fast, is heavily mixed with French, and is very hard for a foreigner to understand. Although my wife and I could understand enough to survive, we never understood more than ten or twenty percent. On some occasions I had no idea if the other person was speaking French or Arabic. When a parking attendant started talking with me, I stopped him and explained that I do not speak French. "Oui!" he exclaimed (the French word for yes). "I am speaking Arabic!"

I'm spending today recovering from an exhausting week of travel, and trying to catch up on a week's worth of news.