The Forests of Morocco

They have trees in Morocco! Trees! I decided I needed to write a book called "Maybe I'm Not As Smart As I Thought" and fill it up with all the misconceptions I've had and things I've learned. Surely I'm not the only one who never placed trees among the various things they might associate with Morocco. I imagine most lists of association would be similar to mine and revolve around words like dry, desert, and mountain. It is telling how reductive preconceptions tend to be (Although the United States is the "land of milk and honey" in certain circles even it suffers from reductive preconceptions that revolve around words like cowboy, imperialistic, and infidel).

As a part of a tour group Morgane and I were able to see a large portion of the country very easily. We spent three days in Marrakesh, two days in Fez, one in Meknes and one day seeing both Casablanca and Rabat. The trade-off for this was a lack of "freedom" and has resulted in a desire to return to Morocco to see it again on our own terms.

It would be too difficult for me to give give a summary of everything we did or saw while in Morocco. Instead I'm going to try and highlight a few things that might serve to highlight the "personality" of Morocco.
First is the oranges. You can't really go anywhere without seeing orange trees in Morocco. For those who watch (or watched) the Simpsons there is an episode where Homer drifts off into a daydream about "the land of chocolate." He prances around taking bites out of chocolate trees, buildings, etc until he is roused from the daydream. I love oranges so Morocco seemed like a magical land of oranges. Unfortunately I wasn't able to prance around the country plucking oranges as I pleased. They look good but are apparently too acidic to eat. It would have been a hellish tease had edible oranges not been purchasable everywhere we went.
Morocco, like every other nation in the world, has a deep passion for soccer so I naturally saw games going on everywhere we went at all times and in all sorts of odd places. For the most part this was expected. What wasn't was the massive amounts of jogging I saw. People of all walks of life were always out jogging, stretching, and doing calisthenics.
Casablanca and Rabat were vastly different from the rest of the nation. They were much more "western" in their make-up, with modern buildings and a "progressive" population. Casablanca was very cosmopolitan. It reminded me of Miami a bit (the positive vision of it and not the negative one that people like my brother hold). The rest of the nation, although quite tolerant and "progressive," existed in more traditional ways. Although Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknes were all large cities in terms of population, they all lacked the trappings one usually associates with large cities. They existed largely without high-rise buildings. The amount of construction and the artist renderings accompanying them seems like this dichotomy between Rabat and the rest of the nation will vanish soon enough. Perhaps it is an inevitable transformation. An older couple on the tour (Frank and Charlotte were my names for them) had visited Morocco thirty years ago and were visiting for the first time since then commented on how much the country had changed. In particular they mentioned that Marrakesh was still largely the old city. None of the hotels surrounding the Medina were there yet. Change seems like it's harder to deal with when it doesn't occur in front of you. You can adapt with it as it happens when you are in the midst of it.
Morocco is a bi-lingual nation. Most Moroccan conversations are carried in colloquial Arabic but everyone also speaks French. As a result there are a few language quirks that aren't found in "normal" French. "Elle" is the third person female word in French (she, her, etc). Moroccans have largely replaced the word and instead use "gazelle" to refer to women (I suppose you can draw your own conclusions on how the language reflects the patriarchal nature of the society). The other language quirk that I noticed was a preponderance for the informal form of speech instead of the formal. Most French speakers use the formal "vous" with strangers, customers, etc while it was very common for the Moroccans to scrap this and use the informal "tu" instead (example: s'il te plait instead of s'il vous plait for "please"). Perhaps it is unfair but in my mind I linked this to the post-colonial relationship. Since Morocco is so heavily reliant on tourism (largest portion of which is French) the people buck the "vous" in an attempt to reassert their equality with those that were once "above" them. Conversely it could also be construed as a indication of the friendliness of Moroccan society.
Morocco is still a poor nation (15-20% below the poverty line I think) so the last thing I want to mention is a little unfair due to the humor I found in it. We spent quite a few hours in a tour bus while we were there so I was able to see a lot of different places along the way. At one point we were driving along and I noticed that there was construction going on to create a larger highway (from two lanes to four). To keep cars from veering out of their lane and into the construction area, small orange cones had been placed intermittently along the way. Naturally the builders realized this wouldn't be enough to "deter" cars so they added 10-12 large rocks between each cone to help keep out unwanted cars. I must admit that seeing sharp grapefruit size rocks along the road side made laugh. I can't imagine the lesson learned by a car that accidentally floated a bit too far to the right.

And that is Morocco.