I’ve always been skeptical of people who say things like, “I can’t speak Spanish, but my parents do, so I understand it.” They’re clearly lying, right? Wrong. I finally know what all these pseudo-Hispanophones are getting at, as I recently realized I understand an extraordinary amount of Arabic, though I am barely competent at counting.
By some miracle – probably Allah-related – I occasionally follow interchanges, if not entire conversations, in Arabic. Maybe my newfound auditory proficiency is due to the fact that Moroccan Arabic borrows so much from French, but I’d like to think that it’s because my subconscious sorely misses eavesdropping.
Either way, Arabic is beginning to make sense. (I will surely regret making this statement. An oft-quoted fact by members of my abroad group is that native English speakers can master three Romance languages in the time it takes for them to master Arabic.) Maybe I’ll be able to speak it one day.
Cultural lessons, after the break.
This is just one Moroccan mystery that my fellow abroad students and I are desperately trying to unravel. Here are some other issues that have plagued me, in bullet form:
- The douchette. Yes, this is a real thing, though my French dictionary assures me that a “douchette” is a bar-code scanner. Au contraire. The douchette is a like a bidet, if a bidet were a hose attached to a toilet. As far as I’m concerned, the douchette (as well as the bucket of water that you’ll find in bathrooms where douchettes are lacking) involves far too much hand contact to truly serve a sanitary purpose.
- The public sector. In Rabat, there are almost-daily protests outside parliament, staged by university graduates who cannot find jobs. Except, there are plenty of jobs – in the private sector. They say that, when they enrolled in university, the government promised each and every one of them a position in the public sector. I ask: Why do people who are so well-educated, who have enough initiative and conviction to protest the government (which is pretty daunting here) want public sector jobs, where they’ll sit behind the same desk for the rest of their lives, contributing to the very corruption they’re currently fighting?
- Alcohol. As I previously mentioned, alcohol is prohibited to Muslims, who make up about 99% of Morocco’s population. Still, most supermarkets have an ominously titled “cave d’alcool,” and bars are crowded with locals, enjoying libations and slurring the words to “It’s Raining Men.” In fact, I could make a whole other list of illegal and borderline-illegal things I’ve seen people do here. It’s like the society is built on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (without the gay part).
- Change. As in, money. It’s illegal to take Moroccan dirham out the country. It’s a fairly stable currency, and I can only guess that this law is supposed to keep bills in circulation. Well, it must not be working because no one – restaurants, stores, cab drivers – ever has change. In fact, the best place to break a bill is often the bus, a fact which has made me doubt everything I thought I knew about life.
It’s bewildering to be in the midst of all this ambiguity, so I want to end this post with something we can surely all understand: another great performance from Star Academy.
2 Comments
April 14, 2008 at 11:14 pm
We can learn everything we need to know about life’s lessons from Star Academy.
April 15, 2008 at 4:49 pm
listen, egypt was also all about douchettes. hated it, need TP as i always say.