and I thought Egypt was bad! (originally published July 8, 2008)

The police corruption in Morocco is ridiculous. We got stopped 3 times by the police blatantly asking for very large bribes to not give us tickets and saw the same happen to plenty of other people. It was crazy. The first time my dad didn't really get what the guy wanted so he explained in perfectly plain terms. Either you can pay me 400 dirhams here or I'll take your license and you can pay 700 dirhams at the government office to pick it up. My dad managed to talk his way out of giving one of the guys anything and bargained with the other two to bribes of only 200 dirhams (~27 dollars). One of the times it wasn't actually the officer who stopped us who was getting the money. It was his supervisor sitting in the car on the side of the road; the officer sent my dad over to the supervisor for bargaining.

Other general observations about Morocco:
There are beggars in Morocco. Lots of them. It's hard to walk 10 feet without being approached by them and if you give them any acknowledgment at all they keep on you like a fly. I've been to plenty of other places with beggars but not like there. It's really rather sad. It kind of makes sense that there are more beggars there than Egypt considering that, in general, people appear to be in the same economic state there as here but things there are considerably more expensive.

Things in Morocco are way more expensive than you'd think. Food (even cheap Moroccan food) costs about what it would in the United States. Gas costs about the equivalent of six US dollars a gallon. Bread costs about 10 times what it does in Egypt. Basically the only cheap things are movies. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but pirated movies are everywhere. They are sold for the equivalent of about 65 cents, much cheaper than even renting a movie in the United States.

I think I said this before but I don't mind saying it again. It's really refreshing to see how women are treated here. They dress as they want and aren't really harassed on the streets. They do everything men do. I saw a female garbage cleaner, a female taxi driver, plenty of females on motorcycles, female passport control people...all sorts of jobs women can't really take in Egypt.

The cars (including the taxis) are remarkably not bumped and scratched here (also true of Jordan and Tunisia). It was just odd to see after being in Cairo for so long. When I got back to Cairo I was actually kind of shocked to see how banged up all the cars are.

Mobile phone minutes in Morocco as well as Tunisia are significantly more expensive than minutes in Egypt, a fact visibly noticeable in the streets. I saw very few people in both countries using their cell phones and by very few I mean two or three a day. It was truly amazing. As my mom pointed out, mobiles would be a good way for the Egyptian government to tax the rich. Nobody really needs a mobile but people here talk on them incessantly...it couldn't hurt to tax the minutes a little bit and using the taxes to help the less well-off portions of society.

Almost of the hotels we stayed at in Morocco had switches for the lights in the hallways. When you go out, you press the switch and after 10 or 15 minutes it turns off again. Many of the hotels had master switches in the rooms by the doors so that as you're leaving you can turn off all the electricity to your room. Many hotels in Egypt and Tunisia have it so that you have to insert your key card in a little slot by the door to make the electricity work in your room. All of those are great ideas to help save energy, none of which I have ever seen being used in the United States. I read on this trip the book Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert. Although Part I of the book is ridiculously boring, chock-full of scientific facts presented in a most un-appealing matter, Part II was marvelously eye-opening. Kolbert writes a lot about the real facts of global warming and what people can and desperately need to do to stop it. She also talks about the international efforts that have been made to try to avert climate change and I was truly astonished by how uncooperative the United States has been in the whole process. I recommend reading it (and skipping Part I).
Posted by ayah at 4:53 PM