Morocco- adjusting to the culture

Greetings from the land of beautiful colors and textures, veiled women and generally creepy men. 

If anyone saw Janet posing for this photo they might have stoned us both. We couldn’t help ourselves when we saw these heads on sticks, like stick horses. 

These little girls get a few years of freedom before they too must cloak themselves like their mothers. 

Can you tell that I am having a hard time with my prejudices against a culture that generally oppresses women? 

The women here clearly don’t mind it is their culture but it just feels like they will never experience the freedoms we have as women and that seems so sad and unnecessary in todays world. 

All the pictures we take are on the sly, no one, even the men, want their pictures taken. 

We just have a small camera and sometimes I try and drape a scarf over it, but we stand out so much there isn’t much we can do unnoticed.

 

We use each other as decoys and take the photo behind or just beside one of us whenever we can. Sometimes it works. So we have lots of color, texture, architecture and boat pictures, and a few of the people. There are so many great faces that we just can’t take, bummer. 

I think the hardest part is not understanding a word around us as the common language is French and we are clueless. I think if we could communicate just a little bit it would be much better and the ‘us-them’ barriers would be less. It is such a drag being so cut off from everyone around us because of our lack of language skills. Pointing and smiles work but are limiting when we want to understand what is going on around us. 

We had a couple of good experiences today with 2 different vendors that spoke broken English very well, we were happy to buy whatever product they sold. We now own a little box that will hold toothpicks, an 'antique' Bedouin vial that held mascara to darken above and below their eyes to protect against the desert sun, and some very special almond butter which we will eat tomorrow morning! I think we will adjust but it will take a little work on our part. We are not finding Morocco as welcoming of a culture as South America, India or Thailand but we will persist.