 |
| Mike getting to know a local in Chefchaouen |
But after nearly two weeks there, we can proudly say we now know a couple of words in Arabic:
*Salaam Alaikum- a greeting meaning something like 'peace', and if someone says it to you the reply is the reverse, Alaikum Salaam: We often used the shortened version, Salaam, as a greeting when we walked into shops or in the smaller towns and when we did we were often rewarded with a big smile from the shopkeepers.
*Shukran- thank you. This one we used a lot, especially with the magic word no (La) in front of it to become 'La Shukran'. Being able to say 'no thankyou' in Arabic was like the magic word for a foreigner to know- a polite but firm la shukaran stopped a persistent seller following you down the street for 100m trying to show you something. We definitely noticed the difference in Marrakech when the 5 of us from our tour would be able to walk down the street and simply say 'La' and get on our way again without stopping. Only once did this not work so well: we were with our tour friends and Annabelle on our last day in Marrakech and had just arrived in the main square. Straight away a local hustler came up to us saying 'guide, you need guide' and so we immediately replied with 'la shukran'. Apparently the guy didn't like us using Arabic and he got a bit angered and said 'you don't even know my language, you don't know what you are saying'. The only other guy on the tour, an Aussie named Greg, replied in his broad country accent 'oh yeah we do buddy, and we don't need your help mate'. So apart from that one guy, everyone else seemed to appreciate our limited attempt at using Arabic.
Apart from our attempts at using their language, the Moroccan people had an uncanny ability to pick exactly where you were from the moment you opened your mouth. We learnt that the Moroccan education system places a big emphasis on language and all kids at have been to school speak at least 3 languages- Arabic or Berber will be their first language (depending on which part they are from), then they learn French, then English, German and then if that's not enough, some will learn Spanish or Italian. As a result of being able to understand pretty much every tourist walking down the street, the shopkeepers have gotten really good at telling accents as well and so they always used the same phrases as we walked along: 'fish and chips' if the thought we were English, or if we told them we were Australian they'd all shout the same response- 'KANGAROO!'
In the more touristy places, they'd go for calling every female that walked past the name of a celebrity (as a form of flattery so we would buy their stuff??), and so quite often if us girls were walking along they'd call out 'hey Britney Spears' to try and capture our attention... Surprisingly that didn't work too well. Up North in Chefchouan however the people weren't too good at making calls to us as we walked down the street and we weren't going to make it easy for them (because by that time, we had heard the kangaroo far too often):
Man on street: "Where you from- Madrid?"
Us: "No".
Man on street: "Valencia?"
Us: "No".
Man on street: "Switzerland?"
Us: *laughing* "Way off".
However in Fes, answering the people on the street was a sure fire way to get them following you, hassling and pointing you to every one of their uncle's/cousins/friends shops. Here the best bet was to ignore the touts completely, which made for some fun times as we were walking along. If Annabelle and I lagged behind a little without Mike we immediately noticed the attention, with people calling out 'hey lady', and when we didn't respond they'd take the guilt approach and say 'what, you too good to talk to us'. Mike had a habit of attracting attention as well but for a different reason. The hustlers took one look at Mike and thought they had struck the perfect opportunity:
Hustler: ''You want to get higher than the moon?''
*No response from Mike*
Hustler: ''Ah come on, you don't smoke?''
*Mike keeps walking on*
Hustler: ''What about opium?''
(Yeah, cos that's what we really meant when we didn't respond).
And if it wasn't that, it would be the same word they kept calling out as soon as they saw him: 'heeeeeeey rasta!'. Some of the Moroccans thought they were being pretty tricky and rhyming the word rasta with something when they saw him coming: 'rasta faster', or in the case of restaurant owners trying to show a menu, 'rasta pasta?'. At one point a guy actually came running out after Mike, just so he could have his chance to call out a big welcoming 'rasta' as Mike went past. In the words of Mike, 'I'm definitely shaving my head if I ever go back to Morocco'.
Outside of the busy cities of Marrakech and Fes though, you could really notice the difference in the people though and the way they interacted with us as foreigners. Shop keepers in the fishing town of Essaouira joked around with us and when he found out some of up our group lived in the UK, he said with a laugh 'my prices are cheaper than Primark!'.
And when we slept in the Berber camp in the Sahara Desert for 3 nights, we got to know the guys that worked there. They were Berbers, meaning the traditional groups (kind of like the indigenous people of Morocco) who speak with their own language and have their own traits- like wearing pointy cloaks all the time. On our final night it was just the 5 of us and our tour guide in the camp, having a few drinks and playing cards. We invited two of them to play with us (which turned out to be a big mistake because they were amazing at cards- at one point we were convinced they were rigging the deck because they kept winning the game even though it was the first time they played it).
We offered them a bit of the vodka we were drinking and two drinks later they were giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls, and about then we realised they probably didn't drink vodka all that often. The game we were playing with them was called Presidents and Assholes, and so they took great pleasure in teaching us the word for asshole in Arabic- something that sounded like tookobaizuc- and then repeating the word at the person that lost each time. After learning that word we felt confident we had the right ammunition to fend off any touts we encountered in the rest of our trip, but luckily we never had the need. So here's a picture of Mike with his Berber friends:
No comments:
Post a Comment