The Customs Incident

On route to Casablanca, I learned two important things: 1. the train system in Morocco is not idiot proof. 2. I am an idiot.

Having recently watched the masterfully made, number two film of all time (according to the American Film Institute) Casablanca, I had high hopes for my weekend trip to the city of the same name. The remote possibility of meeting Humphrey Bogart and becoming his tragic love interest made it just a little bit easier to tear myself out of bed before sunrise, take a freezing cold, scummy shower and stumble the seemingly endless distance to the train station.

The Moroccan train system is both surprisingly nice and unsurprisingly has no concept of punctuality. Apparently, “your train departs at 6” actually means “Your train departs at 7.30 unless you arrive at 5.50, in which case it departed at 5.45.” Time seems to work differently here and I’m the only person annoyed by it.

Anyway, one needlessly complicated and time consuming train ride later, I learned that there are only three reasons to go to Casablanca. They are as follows:

1. Hassan II Mosque. The largest mosque in Africa and third largest in the world. Beautiful architecture, stunningly intricate detail, pictures to follow.

2. Morocco Mall (or as I prefer to call it “Morocco Mole”). The largest shopping mall in Africa. It has everything you could possibly need: designer clothes, groceries, food (Pinkberry!), an Imax movie theater and, for some reason, an aquarium that you can scuba dive in while your friends shop. Consumer paradise.

(The largest nightclub in Africa is also in Morocco, in Marrakech. The diversity of record setting monuments here pretty accurately reflects the often contradictory ideologies that makes the country so interesting (and confusing) to live in.)

3. Customs is holding hostage the care package your mum sent you to remind you that you are loved and to temporarily stave off homesickness, which is a sentiment the Moroccan government apparently firmly disapproves of.

Let me elaborate…According to the Moroccan government, packages with contents that are worth more than $25, contain beauty products, weigh more than an unspecified amount that varies from person to person or not going directly to a member of the Moroccan government are subject to search and seizure by Moroccan customs and will be held in a really creepy warehouse until you pay fines that don’t actually exist or, in the case of beauty products, produce a signed and dated letter of explanation from the Minister of Health. I’m not even making this up. But of course, when your package is seized by customs you’re not informed. In fact, even after calling and emailing pretty much every FedEx employee on both continents, the only thing you’ll gain is a reminder that your package is being held by customs. No solutions. No offers of help. Nothing but frustration.

Which is what truly inspired me to hop on a train to Casa. By that point they had pissed me off enough that I was going to retrieve my package or die trying. Little did I know how close I would come.

The customs area for FedEx is close to the Casa airport, which is close to absolutely nothing else. Fun fact, it’s also in the opposite direction of the sign directing you to it, allowing you to wander around creepy warehouses for a full 45 minutes trying to find it. The next 5 hours involved running between parts of various creepy warehouses, getting 500 million seemingly unrelated documents signed, stamped and dated by people who were all spontaneously on break the moment you got to them. To break up the fun, were brief periods of identifying your package and showing official identification to various people who came and went as they pleased, usually moments before you needed to inexplicably hand them your passport again. Then came my favourite part: justifying everything in the package to a sweaty overweight man who wouldn’t stop fondling the panties that your mum sent you. It was at this point, holding up the things that my mum had so lovingly included in her care package (kraft mac’n’cheese, zinc sunblock, candy corn pumpkins, new sheets, my sneakers…etc. Thanks mum!) and showing them to a man who would not stop touching my underwear and grinning, that I lost it. That was the moment when the constant harassment and frustration and loneliness culminated in the one thing that every strong independent woman hates to do in a country that already thinks she’s an overly emotional dependent wimp. I cried. And everyone looked at me. I was truly mortified and completely incapable of stopping. Which, as it turns out, was the best thing I could have done. All the useless bureaucratic men were ashamed enough of making a poor helpless girl cry that they burst into action and delivered my package to me. Of course, it took another two hours (by which point I was on the verge of tears again), but some people had been waiting for three days, so it was comparably swift.

To help you to better feel my pain, this whole experience happened the day after a bit of a bender involving a spontaneous trip to Rabat to pick up one of the participants in our little disaster, during which the driver of the car was not quite as sober as I would have hoped. We were so shaken by our little brush with death that we proceeded to drink for the next 4 hours. By the time the alarm rang the next morning, we were in too much pain to eat breakfast. So reread the paragraph about customs and, to the experience, add a hangover, borderline starvation and only 3 hours of sleep. Fun, right?

Needless to say, I’ll be avoiding Casa like the plague. That is, until I next have a craving for Pinkberry.

A special shout out to H, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to even get to customs, let alone retrieve the package.

A Walking Lunch

Today I learned that “Hey, want to grab lunch” actually means “Let’s go hiking.” Am I crazy or is there no real link between those things? Needless to say, anticipating a quick walk/drive to a restaurant or food stall for lunch, I dressed appropriately in my only pair of jeans, a t-shirt and flats. Casual lunch clothes. Not hiking clothes. So imagine my surprise when the car left downtown, where most of the food is, and passed the city limits, passed the water park (We have a water park! Who knew?) and after miles of desert, snaked up into the Atlas mountains, to a little (unfortunately well known to the tourist industry) town named Ourika.

Ourika is a “relatively unspoiled” Berber village built on the banks of the Ourika river which, as you can see, is low enough to walk across in the summer, but rises quickly during the rainy winter (in fact, several residents were killed and a few houses were destroyed in Ourika in the same unseasonably heavy rain that flooded my apartment a few weeks ago). So every 100 meters there’s a bridge you can cross to get to the other side, which are generally made of scraps of wood held together by twine. This is by far the most stable bridge we found and it still jiggled too much for my taste.

In all fairness, we did eventually have lunch, at an adorably brightly coloured table along the river. But first we enjoyed fresh mint tea (which must have some kind of addictive property because I cannot get enough of it) and fresh walnuts, with our feet dipped in the sub-zero temperature water of the surprisingly fast moving river. I stalled for as long as I could, racing walnut shells down the river and playing with the increasingly wet and frantic dog, until eventually it could wait no longer. We were to hike to a waterfall, and I was to do it in my work shoes.

Personally, I feel that “hike” isn’t really an appropriate verb to describe what we did, “scramble frantically up enormous, incredibly slippery boulders while being constantly harassed by people selling tourist crap” seems more accurate. However, the scenery was beautiful, the air was clean and it was lovely to be out of the city for a while. It got easier when I made the executive decision to take off my shoes and do the scrambling barefoot. Although it did result in a couple of potentially questionable scraps on the bottom of my feet, it was vastly superior to smashing open my skull slipping off a rock, as I was bound to do with my shoes on. 

Eventually we got to the first waterfall (apparently there are 7, but we’ll visit those another time, when I’m a little more prepared), which was both beautiful and breathtakingly cold (snow melt).While eventually enjoyable, this pretty accurately depicts my feelings about the spontaneous hike, essentially “Why the hell are you doing this to me?”

After a celebratory coke and some unnecessary splashing, I made the executive decision to descend the mountain food-wards, in an attempt that can not exactly be called graceful. Despite a couple of almost fatal slips and some high pitched girly shrieking that seemed to be coming from me, we made it back down to the restaurant in more or less one piece and enjoyed some piping hot tajine and thoroughly addictive tea over a rousing discussion of gender roles (which rendered me nearly catatonic with rage).