Our hotel in Marrakech

One interesting part about our Marrakech trip was our hotel owner. We didn't come with reservations (which was silly I suppose) so we just sort of wandered around trying to find a hotel, which wasn't hard because there were a million of them. Eventually we found this cafe hotel restaurant de france, which seemed decent enough -- we got 2 rooms, one was a four-person room (2 beds), the other was a 2-person room (1-bed). we had 6 people, one of whom was a girl (Jackie) so we gave her the 2-person room for herself and the 5 of us split the 4-person room (but one of us never ended up staying there, so it worked out well). it came out to about $5/person/night - cool.

Anyway, as we were buying the room, the owner was explaining the rules, and he mentioned (in arabic) that the doors closed at 1. We were planning on possibly staying out later that, so luckily we picked up on what he was saying and asked to clarify. We said we were thinking of coming back as late as 2 or 3, and would that be OK? He said it was no problem and we could just call a number and someone would let us in.

Fast forward to slightly later in the day, around ~8:00, and we were hanging out in the hotel room and invited other people, who were staying at a different place, over. As they entered our room the hotel manager started yelling at us, pointed at the girls, and said something along the lines of "albinaat tkhrj! mshlbnaat!" which as far as I could tell meant something along the lines of "no girls allowed". A few more seconds of us talking to him led us to be pretty sure that, yes, the problem was that we weren't allowed to have girls and guys in the same room together. This was a bit of a problem for us, because we have female friends and like to spend time with them in areas that aren't really cold (like outside). So we went to the hotel where the other people were staying, and spend a while there.

Fast forward again to slightly later and 4 of the 6 of us who were staying in our hotel headed back home at right around 1AM. The door was locked so we called the number, the owner came down and let us in. He had clearly just woken up. He counted us, asked where the other two were, and we somewhat awkwardly said they were planning on coming in a little bit.

It was clear at this point that there had been a miscommunication. I had thought there would be no problem if we came back late; it was a decent-sized hotel with a pretty fancy restaurant attached to it, so I thought that there was someone whose job it was to stay up and let people in (this was the situation for the place where the other members of our group were staying, so it was a reasonable assumption I think especially since he didn't seem to think it was a problem that we were coming back at 3AM when we first told him).
So at this point it certainly occurred to us that our friends coming back in an hour or so would possibly have to wake him up again to be let in, unless we could let them in, and we weren't sure about that.

Anyway, as soon as we said that, he got very mad, made a big show of locking the door and told us they couldn't come back tonight because he wouldn't wake up again. We wanted to ask if we could let them in ourselves but couldn't figure out how to, and we didn't have much time because he sort of stormed off.

So they slept at the other place.

Anyway, the whole thing made me feel bad because we ended up waking this guy up since we came back late. But the broader point that I'm trying to make is that hotels are way different in Morocco. Or at least this one was. And you definitely get the impression that Islamic values entrench everything about the culture -- no bringing women into hotel rooms, even with the door open, no staying out late, etc. It's sort of oppressive because it means that it's incredibly difficult just to spend time at night with friends, or spend any time with friends of the opposite gender.