We head to Chefchaouen in the hope of things getting easier. Our time in Morocco so far has been, well, trying. The effect of Ramadan greatly intensified the culture shock in Casablanca and Larache: we staggered around famished during the day eating whatever we could get our hands on, only to find at night that the dining-out culture in Moroccan society is very very male dominated. Cafes brim with men leisurely drinking tea throughout the evening; women are barely seen at all in the street after dark.
We’ve heard that Chefchaouen, despite being full of hash-peddlers, is a chilled out tourist-oriented town. We book a hotel run by Spaniards, which in itself puts us at ease: as red-neck as that sounds, it’s comforting to know we will likely share at least a basic cultural frame of reference after flailing about in deep and completely unfamiliar cultural waters so far.
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It wasn’t till we reached the beach that I realised that the taxi driver didn’t speak any French. Goes to show how effective my last minute language cramming had been. He’d nodded at my repetition of “vingt-cinq dirhams”, holding out five coins in his palm which I thought at the time were 5 dirham pieces but now, I realise, were worth 10 dirhams each. We were essentially in the middle of nowhere and the trip had been longer than expected, so we could do little more than to sigh and hand over what the old man demanded.
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The day’s fasting had long finished as we walked through the dark, empty streets of Casablanca. Or so it felt wandering light headed in search of somewhere to eat. In reality, the sun had set barely half an hour ago, people still sat in doorsteps on the street hungrily slurping down the last of their meal.
We’d given up on directionless wandering and were hungrily retracing our steps to a Salon de The that we’d past earlier. My rusty French suggested that they only served breakfast, given the number of pastries on the 2,50 euro set menu displayed in the window. But it was food, and at least there were a few women in there eating too.
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A while ago in Spanish class we got chatting with the teacher about Spanish attitudes towards the Royal Family. Some students remarked on the overwhelmingly positive coverage of the monarchs in gossip rags: the press gushes over them in a way completely foreign to the snarky tabloids in Britain, for example. Our teacher explained that it was in line with Spanish attitudes: that the public loves the royals and just wouldn’t tolerate criticism of them.

More specifically, as it turns out, it’s the police who won’t tolerate criticism – or even mickey-taking – of them. Recently a judge ordered all copies of the weekly satirical magazine El Jueves to be seized by police. The issue featured a tasteful cartoon of the Prince and Princess engaging in an act generally glossed over in fairy tales, with the Prince remarking that, due to a new initiative to pay couples to have children, if the Princess got pregnant, then this would be the closest he’d ever come to actually doing work. Read the rest of this article »

Easter in the south is a curious event. Visiting the small town of Priego I was caught up in elaborate traditions involving spectacular processions, excessive conglomerations of people, and some surprising peculiarities.

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So I tried chorizo the other day. As a vegetarian for the past seven years, this was, shall we say, quite a strange experience. The occasion was my Spanish teacher’s birthday: she brought some chorizo to share with the class, in line with the custom here of giving, rather than receiving, on your birthday. Initially I abstained, but as she told us about the origins of the food I started thinking. And as the rest of the class tried not to spit out their mouthfuls at the teacher’s description of collecting the blood shooting from the pig’s neck, I sadistically reached for a taste.

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You can’t miss the electric billboard on the highway out of Madrid: “110 PEOPLE DIED LAST EASTER”, it says in big yellow letters. The New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority’s road safety campaigns are pretty hard hitting, on the whole. But the Spanish versions go straight to the point. None of these carefully directed TV ads showing horrific injuries, or catchy slogans about bloody idiots; just the big numbers for all drivers to see as they flee the city before one of the country’s biggest holidays.  Certainly got my attention.

Suppose the three wise men were making their journey today?

On this subject, the Christmas markets are in full bloom over here. Read the rest of this article »

Today is the anniversary of the day I was born, and the day former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. He finally kicked the bucket in 1975 – which is quite recently really, and the memory of the dictatorship remains clearly a part of the public consciousness. So each 20^th of November there are big demonstrations all over Spain. What could be better for my birthday than a bit of politics in action, eh?

The “fascists” come out and chant “Long Live Franco”, and the “anti-fascists” come out in force and tell them to sod off and grow up and chant “Long Live Democracy”. Or something like that. (I don’t mean to take the mickey or anything by using the quote marks and term fascist, I am actually quoting the terminology of the young politically-left here).

So how did it all go on Saturday night? Read the rest of this article »

London’s a strange place. I always pictured England as being the home of P’s & Q’s, always thought that English people would all be very polite and well-mannered. But it’s not so. I must look like a dickhead to everyone else because I can’t not say Hello and Thank You to the driver when I get on and off a bus. No-one else does though, and often the drivers themselves won’t even say hi back. Shop assistants too generally lack any courtesy or, indeed, basic service skills. It’d be an interesting experiment to see how long you could stand at a shop counter, ready to hand over your money, while the attendants chat to themselves and ignore you. (I always say Excuse Me and make them come and serve me - rude, I know, to pull them out of their o-so-important discussions about Big Brother). And in this vein, I thought this sign, which appears to be put up at some point within living memory, to be quite humourous.