Robyn’s Nest

This week I have been the lucky recipient of blog hate mail. I’ve been labelled a “snob or worse” and a “complete bitch” because of my bad experience in Morocco. Excuse me for having an opinion.

My personal view - that Moroccan men have a long way to go in the wooing-the-ladies stakes - apparently justified a personal attack on me, my appearance and my drinking habits. No, to be fair I am an alcoholic so she did get that right.

A separate blog comment, less personal than the first, implied I should wear more appropriate clothing on holiday to avoid men looking down my top. Hmmm. I think a long dress and sleeves, as suggested, a little uncomfortable by the poolside but my buddies and I certainly respected the Morrocan  culture when we stepped outside the hotel. We were hardly topless! But I don’t want to be drawn into a tit-for-tat argument on the subject.

Anyway, I’m not going to defend my opinion of Morocco and Moroccan men. My blog entry (read it here) and followed by another (read it here) was based on an experience me and my “muffin top” friends had last December and I’m sticking to it. If that makes me snobby or bitchy then I will have to live with it.

The first of my blog hate mailers responded in a very childish way. It’s completely fair for her to disagree with my views and opinions and I would have published the comment had the writer taken the time to say why they opposed the content of my blog entry. Instead, I was subjected to immature ramblings attacking my personality and my appearance. Good job I’m thick skinned!

My blog entries are my opinions based on my personal experience and I don’t expect everyone to share them. And if you don’t share my views, feel free to comment intelligently and without resorting to bad language.

This whole saga reminds me of a newspaper columnist I used to read. I hated her passionately because she really got my back up - but that was they key to her success. A good columnist provokes reaction and Deanna Delamotta (that was her name, brilliant isn’t it?!) did just that. Her columns were talked about by readers and not forgotten. So maybe I should bring out my snobby, bitchy side more often in order to get more hits?

To be honest, I wanted to spend my Christmas holiday in Agadir lying in the sunshine and reading books. I took a walk along the beach and tossed a volleyball around a couple of times and that was enough for me.

But my two buddies and I felt a bit guilty and thought we should indulge in a bit of culture while in Morocco. So, at 6am we boarded a coach to the city of Marrakech, arriving four hours later relieved we were still alive. The coach driver thought he was behind the wheel of a Porsche.

We were dumped outside a huge mosque and told we had 15 minutes to take photos before we were whisked off to the old city of Marrakech and left with a guide who was quite keen that one of my friends needed a husband and should swap the journey home for a lifetime of couscous and camels. She politely declined.

Anyway, the guide clearly didn’t know what to do with us and after a short tour around a palace of some sort we entered the souk - a maze of stalls and small passages where the chances of being run over by a motorbike were pretty high. There were 10 of us altogether - seven English and three French - and we all avoided eye contact with the stallholders wanting to offer us “good price” and the man carrying a goat carcus in our general direction. Raw meat and fish stalls loomed on every corner and although the stench was almost unbearable, it was sad to see so much poverty and a life far removed from ours in Blighty.

We emerged unscathed from the souk into Marrakech Square, which was kinda like an outdoor circus. Men charmed snakes by playing music, then charged money to drape them around your neck, and an old fella found great amusement pulling two hedgehogs and a guinea pig out of his duffell bag and watching them run straight back into it. Your guess is as good as mine.

Now, I hate the dentist over here, but dental work in Morocco is a real toothache. A miserable looking chappy (the dentist presumably) sat at an outdoor stall (I say stall, but really it was a table) which was covered in dentures and individual teeth. Gross. I guess you picked the teeth you wanted, popped them into the denture with a bit of superglue, and chewed your way through another day. Eek!

Anyway, following lunch and chit-chat with our travelling companions - who were all equally as unimpressed with Morocco as we were - we headed home on the coach. The driver must have been as desperate as us to get home because he overtook at every opportunity, slammed his brakes on at frequent intervals and had a couple of very near misses. I had no idea whiplash was included in the price of our trip.

At 8.30pm we arrived at the hotel feeling disappointed at what was supposed to be a cultural visit. Yes, we saw the poverty of Marrakech’s old city and glimpsed a couple of historic buildings, but we got the sense we’d ben ripped off. We were dumped in the city, followed a “guide” around for a couple of hours and then left to do our own thing in a city which was very intimidating and without so much as a map to navigate our way back to the meeting point.

I can tick Marrakech off my “to visit” list now with the knowledge that it’s not the destination for a romantic weekend, more a reminder of how basic the lifestyle can be in Morocco. They haven’t grasped tourism fully yet, but could probably send visitors home with a better impression of the place than the one we left with.

Christmas in Morocco. Well, what can I say? When people ask how it was, I usually say “interesting” or “different”. It wasn’t the holiday we were expecting, put it that way. We thought we’d be sunbathing by day and partying by night. We did sunbathe, but there were no parties, no dancing and, amazingly, no hangovers - I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol while I was out there.

The reasons for this sedate holiday? Flu did play a big part in my desire for an early night but us trio of girlies needed to keep our wits about us - Moroccon men were lurking everywhere. From the minute we arrived at the airport we got stared at. We felt like a tourist attraction in our own right and the constant attention and hassle we got from sleazy and sweaty men was relentless and exhausting.

A 10 minute walk along the beach, for example, resulted in no less than 12 approaches from men, either wanting to sell us camel rides, bottles of wee (could have been perfume but I wouldn’t bet my life on it) or Moroccan kaftans for 30p, or just wanted to talk to us and look down our tops.

On teh first day we ventured out of the hotel to visit the cashpoint and five taxis stopped to offer us a lift, one of them reversing 100 metres down a main road to do so. We were just trying to cross the road!

So, after my festive experience in Agadir, Moroccan men are definitely off the menu, for the following reasons:

• Their chat up lines include shouting “fish and chips” at English girls as they walk by. I would never dream of shouting “couscous” to a Moroccan geezer - how immature!
• Their eyes bore into you where ever you go. Don’t they know it’s rude to stare?
• In England it is not a compliment to be told you’re worth 300 camels. It is in Morocco apparently.
• I’m not a fan of short men anyway, and most Moroccans are just that.
• A lot of guys could be seen wondering around wearing long gowns with pointy hoods. Say no more.
• Morocco is a very poor country but blokes, and women too for that matter, want tipping for everything. Helping someone reverse out of a tight space, taking a photo of someone’s donkey and cart and passing you a roll of toilet paper all require money to be handed over. Moroccans think English folk are loaded and expect us to throw money at them at every opportunity. Not an attractive quality.
• They get funny when you can’t understand their English. But when they say “don’t you like to be in the shit?”, they’re actually saying “don’t you like to be in the shade?” Amusing.
• They smell. Now I kinda like the whiff of a bloke who’s just worked his socks off on the volleyball court, but Moroccan guys just smell bad. All day long.
• They’ll try anything to convince you to spend time with them. Even the holiday rep tried it on. His persuasions included telling us he used to be manager of the hotel (whopping lie), he was from a very rich family, his friend was an estate agent, we were “very special people” and “he would never damage us”. Hmmm, I was almost tempted. NOT!
• They’re very childlike. When one of the hotel entertainers took a liking to my mate, he was distraught to learn she had a boyfriend back home. (She doesn’t - we thought it was safer to say she did.) He then refused to speak or make eye contact with her for the rest of the holiday. And when we chatted to some French guys at the bar one day, we were accused of having French boyfriends. Look pal, you don’t own us, we can talk to who we like.
• They’re very suspicious of journalists. I wasn’t sure they were going to let me into the country. We had to fill out cards on the plane which some serious looking dudes looked over at passport control. I was asked to write down the name of the newspaper I worked for and he was utterly confused when I said I worked for a university. You don’t have to work for a paper to be a journo you know!
• I could never date a man who drives a donkey and cart. There were a lot of them about.

Maybe I sound a bit snobbish, but Moroccan guys have made a lasting impression on me, and not a good one. They could easily have ruined our holiday because they wouldn’t leave us alone for one minute. I’m sure there are some lovely Moroccan chaps out there, I can only speak from my own personal experience. So, it’s so nice to be back home where I can walk down the street without attracting a single glance.

So, wanna hear the story about the near death coach journey, the Moroccan dentist and a man with two hedgehogs and a guinea pig in his bag? Tune in to tomorrow’s blog entry.

I’m usually pretty good at avoiding the Christmas germs which float around the office every December. But this year I spoke too soon. Literally, the day we broke up from work, and as I was heading home to Shropshire, I started to ache. By the time I got there two hours later I felt like death. And I just got worse.

By Christmas Eve - the day I was to fly out to Morocco - my nose and mouth had merged into one shiny patch of redness, my throat felt like it had been scraped with a fork and I was coughing like a seal on helium. Oh, and every bone in my body ached to the point it hurt the soles of my feet just to walk.

After a sobbing phone call to my mum and some sympathy off Jen and Lisa, my holiday companions, we headed to Boots and cleared the shelves of anything which might ease my suffering. I then packed my suitcase with about as much enthusiasm as a polar bear in hibernation and got through three packs of tissues just on the way to the airport. Festive was not the word to describe how I was feeling.

So, I made it to Morocco but spent the week feeling lifeless and not bothered about doing anything. My tender red nose turned into a mass of dry skin and my lips were so sore it looked like I’d drawn around them with red lip liner. At one point I thought I was going to cough my insides up. Friends and family will know I don’t leave the house without mascara on, but flu even took away my ability to apply make-up. Getting dressed was about as much as I could manage. And that was an effort.

So, this is day 10 since developing the lurgy and, although I still have a bit of a cough, I am almost back to full health. And a little bit smug at losing weight over the Christmas holiday - a combination of flu and Moroccan cuisine! So, what was Morocco like I hear you ask? That’s a whole other blog entry…