Holiday Diary - Morocco April/May 2024 - Part Three

Tuesday 30th April - Breakfast was served on the roof top. It was served slowly by the hotel owner's wife, who like many such women overtly lacked confidence. This is a trait that it would be easy to be annoyed by, but saying so the men who cause the lack of confidence is not on. We had fresh orange juice, flat bread, a local recipe pancake, a choice of jams and tahini, a hard boiled egg, and served last, coffee with milk. It was filling, I had my man-bag with me in which to put items for lunch. Hard boiled eggs flat bread were the main items squirreled away.

Refreshed from breakfast we had two decisions to make. The first was what to do about the suitcase if Anthony declined to put it into the hold at check in on our return then he was likely to be charged another eighty euros, the second decision was what to do about hiring a a car. With the suitcase I knew what Anthony wanted; either to get through checking in and boarding the plane with his suitcase and not be fined, or get the offending feet and wheels sawn off the suitcase so it would pass. We agreed in the end that he would have my suitcase and I buy a new one for my getting through customs. We set out along market stall alley and looked at suitcases at a distance first, and then close enough to attract the attention of the owner of the hole in the wall/stall. There, as if we could not have predicted it, we got the hard sell fairly fast, where we felt the seller was going to be bored if we did not part with our cash fairly fast. We did not part with our cash at all, though we looked closely at what seemed right. The sticking point that stopped our wallets opening was knowing the right size of suitcase. We left that stall holder saying we would return later. At another stall a very kind young man whipped out his smart phone and looked up Ryanair regulations for the size of suitcases. which we memorised. Then we found another hole in the wall salesman who rented out cars. He seemed like the real deal, so Anthony went ahead and produced his driving license, and passport and I paid a deposit of forty euros. The balance to be paid later the same day.

Both of us went back to the hotel room and emptied our suitcases so that he could fill mine and I could go out and get the suitcase we saw and liked after checking it's dimensions. This was where things want wrong. My sense of direction and orientation has never been the best.

Some of the vernacular art photographed
when I was lost. 

 

At first I could not find the suitcase stall/hole in the wall I wanted to go back to, because on my own every stall/hole in the wall looked similar. In the end I found the stall that I had a visual memory of, and handed over 250 dirham, equivalent to twenty five pounds. I got the suitcase. Better oriented I would have haggled to pay 50 dirhams less. Then I bought two litre size bottles of water. and put them in the suitcase, to put it to good use. After that I got confused. could not remember the name of my hotel and walked up and down the length of the alley several times. Eventually I recognised the sign that was my turning and, tired and hot, returned to Anthony who said that I had been gone longer than he expected.

I helped myself to a small slice of humble pie for lunch by admitting to Anthony that I had got lost/disoriented. With the vital decisions made, my new suitcase packed, the balance of the money paid on the car rental paid in euros and the confirmation of when and where to be to collect the car we could go out and explore.

We looked around the stalls of the central market trying to ignore the opportunities to spend money. We could sense the desperation of most of the stallholders, and most of the goods seemed so alike that any distinction seemed like the narcissism of minor difference on the part of the stallholders. We wanted to resist being seen as tourists. Anthony had memories of his mother buying items on her Moroccan holidays in the 1980's that when she brought them home did not compliment their final destination. In spite of this ready made lesson as defence, my eyes alighted on a stall that sold what I guessed were heavy woollen coats with 'ethnic' designs on them. In the end I bought one, Anthony watched and commented to help as the stallholder got different examples of the coats down

and said no to certain colours and designs. It was fairly easy to settle on the right coat. There was a millisecond of doubt as Anthony said 'The price is equivalent to £60' and I had to think. My reply to myself was that 'Grateful Dead T shirts cost £30 in Belfast nowadays and there are far less substantial jackets also for sale in Belfast that are also more than £60'. Discussion over, purchase made, we moved to look at where we might eat that night. We got the right direction for where Anthony thought we should go, but the crowds were too much for us. This led the touts to be more aggressive when they all said 'My restaurant is better than other restaurants'. The best we could do was find the tout with the least amount of aggression in their sales pitch and the best smile. That combination was what helped us look at the menu most objectively. 

That said, Anthony still had in his head a recommended restaurant the name of which he had found online that there were signs for. But the sea of tourists between us and  that  restaurant was too many for us to contemplate making it part before us, so that we could get through to the place. 

Going back to our hotel room, the thing we had to do most was dump the suitcase that had cost Anthony eighty euros in fines. After that we settled into reading more. 'Confessions of a Fallen Angel' is making more sense the further I got into it. It even made sense of the abuse of alcohol and made the problem of the abuse seem lighter than the problems that the alcohol abuse sought to mask. 

In the early evening we returned to the tout with the smile we liked, and the restaurant with the menu that seemed to be the most inspiring. Anthony had the dish he was most looking forward to, well almost. I had a tagine and he got a dish of grated steamed vegetables baked in crispy pastry case. At least the menu said his dish was vegetarian, and we asked the waitress whether the dish was as vegetarian as the menu said it was. But Anthony could tell that there was chicken in it when he was about half way through eating it. By then we were in a bind. The chicken was relatively flavourless and he had eaten too much of it to complain and force them to take it back. And if we had complained vehemently and insisted they get it right then it would have been easier for them to give us a refund and ask us to leave than for them to serve us the right vegetarian pastry dish. At the time I suspected that either the chef did not have the vegetarian dish that day, and did not want to admit that the pastry case dishes were all meaty or the waitress had made the mistake, or lied to the chef of what Anthony's order was when she put the order in, When there are two or three links in the chain of a mistake and you are not witness to any of the transactions that were part of how the mistake was made then it gets harder to attribute cause. I was also reminded of how meat eaters simply don't care and will lie very casually about what they want to serve vegetarians. 'Chicken is not meat really' is an excuse that slips easily out of their mouths. I'd heard my sister say it to make her life around me more convenient for her. Lies about food slip from dissemblers mouths as easily as their poorly disguises for their lack of concern of what they eat actually is and where it might have come from. Carelessness about food and language go together alarmingly well. But to the careless being alarmed by such casual dissembling...   ...well they don't mind being lied to so why should anyone else?

We got out of the restaurant in reasonable humour after Anthony lectured the waitress, and made mildly squirm. If there was any slight revenge it would have been how much smaller the tip we left was than it might have been.

That night I had odd dreams that a yodelling country singer resembling Slim Whitman had just died. I was one of the costumiers going through his stage wardrobe after, only to find a secret compartment where there was women's clothing that was nearly child size-as if as a heterosexual he had a major bondage fetish and had secretively found willing partners to indulge it. The dream was either about fetish wear, or the clothing in the secret compartment reflected the status of women in the lyrics of his songs.   

 If I had to guess where that dream came from it would be the demeanour of the waitress who had to listen to Anthony complain about the chicken in his vegetarian pastry bake.

Please left click here for part four of this diary.