Subtour 1: Right around Casablanca 0172 Phosphate Capital (Mor 021—revisit)
This Global Music Project totally changed my life. It started out just as an odd hobby to occupy my weekends and afternoons—I found it more fulfilling then playing in coffeehouses and bars… Then it took me on an exciting one month adventure to the other side of the world…
But now it’s taken me to an entire new level. It’s given me the courage to break free from an eight year rut of trudging back and forth to the same monotonous
And how did my Music Project lead me to this? Well, by embracing this project, I sort of took control of the reins of my life, determining that I was no longer going to wait around for opportunities to come to me—I was just going to go out there and do what I wanted to do and live the life that I wanted to live.
So the natural next step was to come and live in the place I want to live… I’d never wanted to live in
And now that’s changed… Here’s how it happened…
The Big Move
We loaded all our belongings that we hadn’t sold or given away into a couple of oversized hockey bags and were barely able to cram them into a small SUV that I rented for a one way trip to JFK airport in New York City… My landlord was kind enough to return my rent deposit on the spot… everything was taken care of and we were off…
I had to leave a couple of my treasures behind… My desktop computer, my keyboard, my amplifier and my travel guitar… Small sacrifices to make…
We enjoyed one last all you can eat buffet in
At the airport, we met up with a Moroccan family heading home for a visit.
We reached the airport and headed to
Protests like this were almost unheard of years ago—the riot police would have arrived within minutes to disperse the crowd… Now it seems the government is allowing people to have a voice… But what is that going to lead to?
The taxi driver explains…
It suddenly hits me… We’re a long, long ways from Mechanicsburg… And we’ve burned all my bridges behind us…
We stay in Hotel Central—a popular backpacker hotel in the Old Medina. It’s clean and our room has a balcony overlooking a little plaza and gets a nice breeze. Just outside the door are smoky alleys where long bearded fellows sell 20 cent sardine sandwiches and gnarly looking fellows cram into dingy teashops…
Yep, this is the same old medina where I stayed last February. A place where fights can break out at any moment and bottles and rocks start to fly… A place where the police are never seen…
But as I learned last February, folks here respect outsiders. As long as you stay clear when a fight is going on, you should be OK. It’s much more likely that people will harass you or rob you in the medinas of Fes, Marrakech or Tanger than in the Old Medina of
Besides, this is the beginning of a Life of Adventure isn’t it?
Settling in
After getting some rest, I head out on my first challenge: finding an apartment to rent. Years back, when I was just looking for a cheap, 400 Dh room, it was a simple matter of walking down the street and asking passerbys if they knew of someone who had a room to rent. Usually I’d find a place within minutes and paid no more than a 10 Dh tip to whoever helped me…
But now I’m looking to rent full sized apartment. I’ve got money to spend, and people know it--that makes me fair game…
I’m about to enter the dark underworld of the Moroccan real estate business…
I know basically the area where I want to live, so I just walk up and down the streets asking people. Many of these apartment buildings have a “Aases” security guard/maintenance man… a couple of these guys offer to help me out for a 4000 Dh “tip”—which I find a bit disconcerting…
No luck… I’m told that this is the summer time and a lot of Moroccans living abroad are eager to rent apartments for the summer, thus driving the prices up… And then you’ve got Saudi tourists, loaded with cash, looking for apartments as well to do you-know-what… So it seems that any of these “simsars” (apartment finders) prowling the streets are convinced that they can make a lot of money really fast…
Next day I figure I’ll go to an actual rental agency—figuring, if the guys got an actual office, he’s going to be honest right?
The guy just ended up giving us a tour of the worst dumps in the area insisting that they were “all there was available” for what I was willing to pay…
The guy told me he actually had a green card and had worked in the
Suddenly it became painfully clear the cruel reality of how the economy works here in
I’m not saying that all rich people in
SUVs—something you’d never see here a years ago, are the new status symbol here… Yes, there is money to be made in
I paid an unavoidable “tip” to my dirty real estate agent, and got away as fast as I could…
Next day, I figured I had no choice but to deal with the unofficial street “simsars”… I found one and made it very clear how much I could pay and how much of a commission I would give him…
He seemed like decent chap, but soon he was joined by a friend and then a third… then, when we’d go to an apartment, the “aases” insisted he’d need his cut too…
My simsar explained how this worked: “since we hardly ever make any money, whenever we do earn a commission we’ve got to share it with all our friends…”
It’s starting to feel like I’m going to have to pay everybody in
Finally, when I’m about to give up for the day, I see one last fellow who I assume is an “aases” in front of an apartment building. It turns out he’s the friend of an apartment owner who is about to leave to
And so begins my adventures in
So we start to get settled in…
Hopefully in a few days, I’ll feel stabilized enough to head out there and start exploring the country…
My first Moroccan Mini-trip
12 days after arriving in
This time, I’m using a map. And for a very good reason. Since I’m going to be here in
So I head out to the main bus terminal to hop on whatever bus is heading out next.
“Khouribga! Khouribga!” I hear the call. So Khouribga it will be…
It's a dry, brown mining town about 2 hours southeast of
I will hasten to say that I did see a lot of Khouribgans WITHOUT brown teeth...
My first destination was to visit the sprawling "souk el hedd" (Sunday market) that I'd seen on my ride into town. I knew I was heading in the right direction because I passed endless flatbed horsecarts carrying ladies home from market--apparently a major form of transportation in Khouribga. I did manage to take a very discreet picture of one of these...
Highlights of the souk el hedd included the picturesque butcher section (though not as varied as, say, China) the "scrap" section where you can buy a screw, a twisted piece of plastic or a widowed shoe, the mountains and mountains of beautiful watermelons and the huge piles of used clothes brought down from Italy by Khouribgan emigrants.
Next I toured through the middle class rather boring neighborhoods of large, three to four story freshly painted homes and wide boulevards. I suspect many of these homes belong to families of Khouribgans who have emigrated to
...Then back into town--took my clip next to a couple of decorative railroad cars that symbolize Khouribga's phosphate industry... Found a little plaza to parkbench at--unfortunately I ended up with a couple of glue sniffers as an audience--and that kind of drove away any potential respectable audience--so I cut that session short...
...Then through a neighborhood of large French-style villas with gardens--actually built by the French back when they ran the phosphate mines... Then a little French-style park...
I decided on a new rule of thumb for parkbenching in
So I pulled out my guitar there in the park... sure enough, soon a respectable schoolteacher stopped by--we had a great conversation as he told me of his adventures teaching in a village high in the mountains above Marrakesh. He said that he and his wife even climbed
Quite satisfied with my experience and exploration of Khouribga, I headed out to discover a
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