-As a woman, don’t make eye contact with men you don’t know… to them it means that you want them to talk to you. It is culturally inappropriate for a man to talk to a woman he doesn’t know, but they do anyways and often want more than just to talk.
-Don’t go out with your hair wet- that symbolizes that you are cleansing yourself from just having sexual relations the previous night.
-Don’t jingle your keys while in the street- that means you want someone to come to your house with you.
-If you go to a restaurant it is likely that they do not have a lot of the things on the menu.
-Don’t start bargaining, unless you really intend to buy what you are bargaining for.
-If you are making any transaction at the bank, you will need a passport or some kind of ID.
-If you have dark skin, many people will think you are Moroccan and try to speak to you in Arabic. If you are white and look American, they will try to speak to you in English. If you look Asian, they will pretend they can speak Chinese and make up Chinese sounding words.
-Don’t go out past about 8:30 unless you are with a man or in a car- people will think you are looking for ‘trouble.’
-Beef is one of the most expensive meats… it is probably better to buy chicken or tuna, unless you want to treat yourself. Pork is banned, unless you go to special stores, like the one that in Arabic means ‘forbidden.’
-Alcohol is prohibited by the Qur’an, but it is still sold in the stores.
-When the call to prayer happens, people do not get out their prayer mats and kneel on the floor and begin praying- they just keep going about their business as usual.
-The showers are just a big tub, with a faucet and a hand-held shower head. There are no curtains, so if you hold the shower head in the wrong direction, you’ll get the whole bathroom wet. The same is true if you were to shake out your wet hair the way the people in commercials do sometimes.
-The weather here is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. There is no snow, but there is also no heating in the buildings, and the buildings often get colder than outdoors.
-Things tend to be relatively inexpensive here, compared to American standards, unless you go to the fancy places.
-Each bill is a different color- like in Canada, which makes them easier to distinguish =)
-The traffic in Fez is fairly crazy, but not quite as bad as in New York or Colombia. However, if you’re a pedestrian, you really need to watch out sometimes. However, I’ve heard that the traffic in bigger cities of Morocco is more like New York city… a little more intense. Oh, and there aren’t really any distinguished lanes… people often drive in the middle of a couple lanes and make that their own lane, or the taxis will stop in the middle of a street and expect everyone else to just drive around them.
-Morocco is a lot like a mix between the Middle East and Southern Europe, but placed in Africa- it’s kind of got a mixed up identity, just like me. =)
-This isn’t about Morocco, but a new trend lately has been that of couch-surfing, where you put a profile of yourself up on the web and you can have couch-surfers stay with you, or you can be a couch-surfer and stay with someone else. In an ideal world, where creepsters didn’t exist, I think this would be fun, but I’d be quite wary about trying it.
So... how many of these did you learn through experience and how many were warnings from others?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post - highly enjoyable & interesting.
probably about half from experience and half from warnings... were you thinking of any in specific?
ReplyDeleteall of them - but these are the stories I hope to hear at Christmas :)
ReplyDeletewell, that's specific...
ReplyDelete