And now to the desert

Again I won't be blogging for the next 4 days because I will be in the desert.
As a parting note, this is a picture of shebekiya, which is fried dough soaked in honey with sesame seeds sprinkled on top. It's absurdly good and costs a dollar a pound.

This is what a Moroccan couscous meal looks like

Everyone eats out of the same dish. You either eat with a spoon or with bread (using the bread to grab the food) or both. Some people eat couscous by rolling it up into a little ball but I've never seen that happen and I think it's considered uncouth or rural or those are kind of the same thing. You eat meat with your hands, or if you're using a spoon, you sort of hold down with the spoon and tear off a chunk with your hands.

The best couscous meal I've had is still the only one our host mom in Fes made. I wish I knew exactly how she did it. I will never be able to replicate that deliciousness. I am pretty sure that one of the keys was adding raisins (which I think had been cooked with cinnamon) but I am also sure she had other keys.

Maybe I'll just keep on talking about infinity forever

As a follow-up to this post, where I talked about the Islamic idea of infinity as embodied in architecture, here are a few pictures of the inside of a (no-longer used) mosque in Meknes. 

The second image is just zoomed in on the Arabic writing, which is the same throughout the entire mosque (100% of Arabic writing in this mosque is the expression "God is good," or something similar, I'm not entirely sure how it's translated. Laura, do you know? It seems like it says "Dear God" or "God is dear" or "God is good," I'm not sure which...)

But the whole infinity thing is pretty apparent.

Views from high places

I mentioned that this last weekend I went to Chefchaouen to go on a hike. It was really beautiful and pictures don't capture the beauty, but here are a few anyway.

This last one is of the city itself; all the houses are blue and white. It's really cool. Apparently it's entirely coincidence; people started building their houses in blue, and then people liked the way it looked so everyone built their house blue. So now the whole city is blue; people paint their doors blue, the walls, etc.

Churro

Spanish churro, dipped in chocolate, is an amazing food.

Thirty years after it became legal to be a non-Catholic in Spain...

Spain is full of reminders of both the Spanish Inquisition and the presence of Muslism everywhere.

If there's one thing I know...

It's that this bab (gate, door, etc) is in some way distinctly Andalusian/Maghrebi (Moroccan/West African). Those aren't quite the same thing but are really similar because of all the interaction the two regions had. I think it has something to do with the curved top and possibly the Arabic writing above it.

(This post is funny only to me because we've looked at lots of babs and been told how they're similar architecturally, but I've really never understood it. Instead I just sort of nod and smile and people think I know what I'm talking about). 

Alhambra in Granda

One of the things we did in Spain was to visit Alhambra which is an old Islamic palace in Granda, and an awesome example of Islamic architecture. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It was cool to see right after Catholic cathedrals; Islam is much more strict on iconography, so Islam doesn't decorate things with scenes from the Bible like Catholic cathedrals, but instead with Arabic writing and geometric symbols. Islam is also really into the idea of infinity (God is everywhere, etc). You got a good idea of this at Alhambra.

Those are three different areas of the palace, and any writing you see is saying "God is most high" over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It says this phrase everywhere at Alhambra! (There are other things said as well, including parts that aren't the same thing repeated over and over, but this phrase is really really prominent). 

It's interesting to compare it to Catholic art although I'm not sure if I have anything intelligent to say about it. All I'll say is that seeing the same praise of God written a million times wherever you go gives you a sense of awe different from the sense of awe you get from high ceilings and elaborate depictions of Biblical characters, but I'm not sure how exactly it's different. 

My itinerary, and why blogging has been slow

Last weekend I was in Spain from Thursday through Sunday. I had a ton of things to say about it but didn't really have time to blog as much as I wanted. Then this past Thursday (2 days ago) I went with friends to Chefchaouen, a mountain town that was the base for this hike we did. It's also just a beautiful town, all the houses are blue and it's really pretty (we're going to explore it a bit more today, once people wake up...). Later today we're taking a bus over to Meknes, another city, where we will meet up with the rest of the group for a formal excursion of various sites of Meknes; we'll see a mausoleum, an old madrasa (Qur'anic school), a museum and a "Sultana's garden". Then we'll head back, and next Thursday (5 days from now) we head out to the desert for another 4-day trip. I have no idea what that trip really entails. Then it's the last week of the quarter until my week on my own, which I haven't planned yet.

But anyway, I've been busy and will be busy all these weekends so it's hard to blog. During the week I'm playing catch-up on homework and stuff. 

Talking with non-native speakers

Moroccans as a whole are really terrible at speaking to non-native speakers in darija. I think that, as an English speaker, I'm used to talking to people who speak poor English and so I know how to talk such that they can understand me; I talk slowly, clearly, and if they don't understand I try a different sentence construct or use different words.
Moroccans rarely do this. A great example of this is the guy next to me on the bus on the way to Chefchaouen. We talked a good bit, all in Arabic, but it was the most painful conversation I've ever had because this poor guy just could not get his point across, but it was mostly his fault.
Example: After about an hour after we had been stopped, he starts saying something to me. At first it's just a blur of words (only a few) so I ask him to repeat. He repeats again in the exact same manner (unhelpful) so I ask him to repeat slowly. He does so (awesome!) and I isolate the 3 words in the sentence. I still don't understand what he's saying, so he starts repeating this one word, "ouzad" (or something, I forget exactly what). This is clearly the most important word in the sentence. I say that I have no idea what "ouzad" means so he repeats it a few times. I still don't get it, so he helps me out by saying it slightly louder and slightly more insistently. He says "ouzad zwiina?" (is ouzad nice?) to which I say "I don't understand the word ouzad". He explains what the word ouzad means by saying "ouzad! ouzad!"
I say I still don't get it and he laughs exasperatingly.
It's been about 2 minutes so far and we've gotten nowhere. I explain again that I just don't understand what the word ouzad means. Then he gets the idea to try and explain the word ouzad. He says,
"ouzad... medinat tanja. madinat rabat. madinat fes. madinat ouzad!"
"medina" means "city" so I immediately understand that "ouzad" is the city that we're stuck in. Awesome! Why did that take two minutes?

I just climbed another mountain!

This one was even more beautiful than the last! I'll put pictures up at some point but it doesn't really matter because the pictures couldn't come close to capturing the beauty.
Also we had a fun adventure getting to Chefchaouen (where I am right now, and where we climbed the mountain). We left at 5:30 PM yesterday evening and were supposed to get here at 10:30. At 9:00 PM the bus stopped. We didn't think much of it until about half an hour later, when we finally asked what was wrong and they said the brakes were broken. They said it would take about an hour for another bus to get here to finish the ride, so we decided to wait (the bus wasn't crowded so we were basically just hanging out, it was fine) instead of paying $10 each for a taxi to take us there (also, the taxis that go that fart are really, really sketchy. Sometimes the doors don't really close all the way and are generally terrifying). An hour and a half later we asked again what the deal was, and they said again that it would take about an hour. Now we talked seriously about getting a taxi, but again decided against it because we figured it actually would probably be an hour (not entirely sure why we thought this) and we were still having a good time. An hour later we asked again and they said it would be about half an hour. We no longer believed them so we started calling taxis. This was really confusing. There was already one guy with his taxi in the area, but he needed to call his friends to have enough taxis to take all of us.
There was a definite communication problem trying to talk to this guy and negotiate a price / not have him call his taxis before we figured out the price, but he spoke French so we brought our two best french-speakers over, who were both women, to facilitate conversation. Then when they came over he said "no French," we think because they were women and he didn't want to talk to them, but I'm not sure about this. Regardless, he didn't speak French after that at all so we had to communicate in Arabic, which ended up working reasonably well. Eventually we got the idea that more taxis were coming and we agreed on a price.
Unfortunately, at this time we started being told pretty insistently that a bus was actually coming and would arrive in 10, 5 minutes. These time estimates were really low so we thought maybe they were actually true, and we didn't want to take taxis if we didn't have to, but we also didn't want to put all of our eggs in the bus basket. We sort of just sat around waiting for something to be decided for us, and then the bus actually arrived probably about 5 minutes before the taxis got there. We gave the taxi driver a hundred dirhams and went on the bus, and I guess in the end he probably didn't give any of it to his friends so we probably really screwed them over... On the other hand maybe he did and they got a great deal. Who knows. The end of the story is we arrived at about 2:30, 4 hours later than we should have.

Cairo

For those of you who didn't know there were plans for us to go to Cairo for a week from March 11th to 18th. That has now been cancelled so I have to decide what to do during that time. Any ideas? Major constraints include cost, time, difficulty of getting there (specifically if we're talking West Africa) and if I want to go somewhere crazy, then safety. 

The Great Mosque of Cordoba

Well Spain was awesome so I guess I'll start telling you about cool things. We spent a day in Cordoba and a day in Granada and that was it (lots of travel time).
The most interesting part of Cordoba to me was the Mezquita, which was initially a pagan temple, then converted by the Visigoths to a church, then converted by the Muslims to a mosque, constantly expanded throughout a few hundred years of Muslim rule, and then converted to a cathedral by the Spanish after the Reconquista.
The cathedral is absolutely gigantic. Our tour guide said it could hold about 300,000 people. That seemed high to me, but 100,000 seemed perfectly reasonable. I got lost in there.
One note is that there are sort of two sections, the Muslim/Mosque section, where the underlying architecture is Islamic (but with lots of crosses and stuff everywhere) and the added cathedral section, which the Catholics built from scratch. Anyway, here are a few pictures.

This is from the Catholic part, and I tried (and mostly failed) to capture a sense of how freaking tall the ceilings are. They are much taller than in the Muslim part. This is because of the difference in the purpose of a Church vs a Mosque. A church is moreso a House of God; Jesus is physically present (transubstantiation). Muslims put a lot of emphasis, much more than Catholics, on the idea that God is "One" and everywhere at all times. They anthropomorphize him much less (at another cathedral, we saw a depiction of God standing above Jesus, but we couldn't take pictures there. You would never see this in a mosque). So a mosque is less a house of God and more a community building; it's a place for the community of the believers to meet. People pray there, teach there, organize meetings there, etc -- it has a much more multifaceted role, I think (especially the fact that people would be essentially attending lecture in the same room that they pray -- much more the case in mosques than churches).

Going back to the ceiling, the point is that in the cathedral section, the architecture is designed to impress upon you the weight of God, because he's actually there right now. So you have super-high ceilings and tons of fancy iconography. In the Muslim section, on the other hand, the ceilings are lower because there isn't that motivation.

Mom (or other interested Catholics...?) you can comment on anything about this that you disagree with or whatever.

Just posting that picture to show the level of detail that covered basically every inch of the church. Hard to give an impression of the magnitude of the effort without actually being there.

And that is almost certainly the most interesting picture. It's a crusader killing Muslims! Fun stuff for a church. This was one of the things that made Spain so interesting -- you are surrounded by evidence of the Spanish Inquisition. This was specifically put in here for the Muslims who would come to this church to convert; they needed to be reminded of the power of the Christians over the Muslims. And of course it was just to humiliate them.

Other various items that one sees around the city to remind you of the inquisition are the prevalence of pork in Spanish cuisine (Muslims and Jews can't eat pork, so feeding pork to suspected Jews or Muslims was really common) and tons of clearly Islamic structures that have crosses everywhere around them.

Wait, what?

Does this make sense?

(I'm guessing it does make sense and livre d'or is just what you call a guest book, but I got really confused when I first read this in the lobby of our hotel in Tangier)

This is a bird and that is Spain

I will be going there in two days!
(I'll be in Spain from Thursday through Sunday. Haven't decided if I'm even going to bring my laptop or not)

Tangier was awesome!

I absolutely loved Tangier, although it's hard to explain why. Instead of trying to explain exactly why I liked it so much in one post, I'll probably just try and post a number of smaller things that I did and liked.

We spent about an hour at the American Legation Museum and it was awesome. Morocco was the first country to officially recognize the U.S. as a country, and we got to see the first official recognition of the U.S.! Cool stuff. After taking this picture I was told I couldn't take any more pictures (but he didn't make me delete this one), but we also saw an original George Washington letter to the Sultan of Morocco. He (Washington) had really nice handwriting. Also, we saw a hilarious letter from some Department of State employee who was responsible for telling the Moroccans that George Washington could not accept a gift of two lions. It was a 3 or 4 page letter detailing to his boss how hard he tried to tell the Moroccans that the President could not accept a gift of lions. Then his Moroccan counterpart wanted to give the lions to Congress, but again he said no. Then his Moroccan counterpart asked him who founded the government, to which the guy said "The People," so the Moroccan said, "Well let us give the Sultans [i.e. the people] of America this gift," so I guess they just let these two lions loose on the streets. I was sort of unclear on how the story actually ended, but this guy detailing his plight was hilarious.

Then at the end we talked to the director, an American, with whom we had a nice conversation.

The horizontal shower

http://www.archello.com/en/product/horizontal-shower

In other news, Moroccan showers are the worst. In general bathrooms are very small and so when you take a shower the whole bathroom gets soaked. Luckily this isn't really the case in our house, where the bathroom is big enough and is mostly just a shower room. But the thing is, I've been to enough bathrooms to know that shower curtains would make a really big difference in keeping bathrooms from not getting soaked, but they're just not a thing here. It's so odd. 

Going to Tangier this weekend, Insha'Allah!

So I might not blog much. Also, one problem with Morocco is that lots of things that aren't good for you are really cheap, so I've been eating chocolate for the last hour. 

When the king comes...

All of last week, we noticed a subtle change around Bab Chellah, which is on the way some of us go to/from school -- there seemed to be more police, and there was also some construction going on. It turns out the king was planning on coming to celebrate a holiday, the birth of the prophet Muhammad (not commonly celebrated in the Islamic world because you don't want to worship Muhammad too much or it makes him out to be a Jesus-like God figure, which he explicitly is not). On the day of the holiday, we learned that the king was coming at 7:00 to Bab Chellah, but unfortunately we already had plans.

Some people in our group, however, did see him and said it was amazing (they were about 10ft from the king! Pretty cool). According to them, the whole thing was oddly emotional given that they have no actual connection to the king; but just being around all of these people who are in love with him and who were screaming for him caused them to get caught up in the emotional fervor. Or something. 

Anyway; the whole thing got me thinking. They paved an entire street for the king's coming. Does this always happen? Anytime he goes anywhere, they pave the streets for him? Aside from being hilarious (instead of a red carpet wherever you go, they literally pave the streets for you) I also wonder if the king has serious problems seeing what Morocco is actually like. I doubt it, but it's possible that he thinks that Morocco is in better infrastructural shape than it actually is.

By the way, what I was doing instead was watching Carnage, which was in English. I had wanted to see what Moroccan theaters were like for a long time but didn't want to sit through a movie in French or Arabic, which I would be unable to understand. I was worried this would be dubbed over in French and so still be a waste of money, but it was subtitled in French instead, so that was awesome. Also, the movie is hilarious. As for Moroccan theaters, they're like American but smaller (there was one screen/room), they don't sell popcorn/candy etc, and tickets cost about a dollar.

Languages

For those who don't know, there is a formal arabic (MSA) and a regional dialect for basically everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world. The dialect here is darija and it is one of the farthest removed from MSA. A Moroccan and a Saudian talking to each other would not be able to understand each other. Incidentally, linguists define the difference between languages and dialects as follows: If there is mutual comprehension, then you're speaking two dialects of the same language. If not, then you're speaking two different languages. Obviously the definition of vague, but regardless, I think it's clear that darija is a distinct language from Arabic. One could probably say the same about the Egyptian, Syrian, Saudian dialects as well. The reason they aren't called distinct languages is almost certainly to preserve pan-Arab unity.

One thing that surprised me is how little people know MSA. MSA is essentially the language of the Qur'an as well as of the media and administration, so I assumed that generally people knew it but if you spoke it, you sounded like a pedantic ass. In fact, plenty of people just won't understand you because they don't understand the Qur'an or the media or the elites. Other people will sort of understand but definitely can't speak it. From what I understand, this is vastly different than 20 or 30 years ago when very, very few people understood it at all. So perhaps if I return in ten years, most people will understand MSA.

On the other hand, a lot of people think MSA might generally be on its way out and certain colloquials (especially Egyptian) might kind of take over, as mass media begins to be used more in colloquial and also to reach more people. Social medias are all going to be colloquial dominated, but if people from different regions want to communicate with each other, it's a reasonable guess that one colloquial will end up dominating and Egyptian seems poised to take that role (many people can understand it because so many films, TV shows etc come from Egypt -- although maybe economic decline will change this?). But nobody really has any idea what will happen.

Lastly, ~50% of the population speaks a Berber language as a first language (although they almost all speak darija as a second). The population is far, far more ethnically Berber (Amazigh = "noble people") than one might think given the dominance of Arab culture. Recently there has been a bit of an Amazigh identity movement which stems from colonialism. Long story short: During colonialism, the French adopted a number of policies designed to divide the Berbers (Amazigh) and the Arabs in order to prevent a unified opposition. In many ways, this created the concept of an Amazigh identity, which hadn't really existed before. After independence, Arab elites fought to remove this concept of an Amazigh identity, for example by banning Berber from schools, contriving a convoluted history of the Amazigh that said they were from Yemen and lived primitive lives until they saw the light of Islam, claimed that Berber and Arabic were linguistically related (they're not), and jailed people for issuing Amazigh pride publications.
Recently (last ~5 years) this policy has been reversed and now schools can even be taught in Berber languages, and an Amazigh culture movement is growing.

But the point is that in an already fairly interesting linguistic situation where you have everyone speaking darija, MSA and French both used in media/government/among elites (and MSA also practically identical to Qur'anic Arabic), tons of people code-switching between all three languages, and the further complication of international communication, pan-Arab identity, etc, you also have this other element that nobody really likes to talk about which is that most of your population is Amazigh.

Surprisingly amazing

Orange slices powdered with cinnamon.
(You want the oranges to be really sweet, so if they aren't naturally sweet enough you can probably add powdered sugar as well)

On a run

At one moment, a little boy, around 7 years old, started running with me, saying "rriada! rriada! rriada!" incessantly, which as far as I can tell means "sports! sports! sports!" but maybe it means something different in darija or he was saying something slightly different, because although I suppose that sort of makes sense it doesn't make much of it.

During the same run, I passed by someone who said "biSaHa waraHa" which is something that I've only heard after meals and means "To your health" (it's also used after people take showers and after, and apparently during, exercise).

Just interesting to me because of the universal stuff (little kids running after you during runs) and the different stuff (to your health, saying 'sports, sports')

A food update

Eating in Rabat (or at least, with this host family) is different than in Fes. People generally report not-quite-as-good-food, because I think a lot of Fesians are families with moms whose job it is to cook, whereas in Rabat the situation isn't quite the same.
Every day there are 4 meals - breakfast (bread or milwee and jam or honey or butter, a milwee is a little pancake thing - they're really good), lunch (varies -- often a tajine , generally has meat + vegetables + you eat it with bread), then a snack at ~6:30 which is identical to breakfast, and then dinner which can be as simple as spaghetti or sometimes a little more complex and resembling lunch.

There is less side dishes -- in Fes, we often had side dishes of eggplant, prunes, etc which let me have a good vegetable intake. Not so much here, unfortunately. Bread is a huge portion of my calories, and also meat. It's not terribly unusual to eat a meal of potatoes, bread, meat and eggs.

Couscous is definitely a Friday thing.

Insha'Allah

Insha'Allah translates to "God willing" but has a wide variety of meanings across the Islamic world.

In some areas of the world/contexts it just means "Hopefully," as in:
"Are you going to make it to dinner tonight?"
"Insha'Allah"


In some areas of the world it means "No," as in:
"Will we have a break?"
"Insha'Allah!"

In some contexts it means "I don't want to answer this question," as in:
"Mom, can we go get candy today?"
"Insha'Allah!"
(This is the equivalent of an American parent telling their child "Yes" as a way of avoiding the issue and then realizing 4 hours later that, as a result of thoughtless "yes"'s, the child is now owed candy, ice cream, and cookies. Insha'Allah is better! Bet you wish you knew this one when Natalie was a child, right mom?)


And lastly it means literally "If God wills it". From the wiki: 
One's use of Insha Allāh indicates not one's desire to succeed in an endeavor, but rather that the endeavor one embarks on will be within God's will, which might be interpreted as that which is best for Humanity, the Earth, and all of Allah's creation. It indicates one's desire for being in tune with God's plan... It is commonly used by Muslims, but is also common in Christian groups in the Middle East, like the Coptic Orthodox Church... The phrase also acknowledges submission to God, with the speaker putting him or herself into God's hands, and accepting the fact that God sometimes works in unexpected ways.

In the Qu'ran, Muslims are told that they should never say they will do a particular thing in the future without adding "in sha'Allah" to the statement.^[1] ... Surat Al Kahf (18):24: "And never say of anything, 'I shall do such and such thing tomorrow. Except (with the saying): 'If God wills!' And remember your Lord when you forget...'"

In other words, whenever you talk about the future, you have to say "Insha'Allah" because it indicates your desire to submit to God's will, a generally central theme of Islam (which means "submission" and a Muslim is "one who submits")

As an example of its usage, something that's happened to me a few times is I get into a cab, say something like "safarat miSr 3fak?" = "The Egyptian embassy please?" (it's the most well-known place near school, and the 3 is pronounced like you're gagging) and the cab driver responds:
"safarat miSr? Insha'Allah!"

This is a really common occurrence and I still find it funny because I really just want him to say "OK," not "hope so!". But I take what I get I suppose. 

The call to prayer

No matter where you are (even if you're up on a mountain) you can hear the call to prayer 5 times a day. Luckily I'm an incredibly deep sleeper so I rarely hear the dawn one (~6AM), but I have been woken up by it a few times. The call to prayer here is really harsh. It's like the guy is yelling at you; it was the same way in Fes. According to people who have been elsewhere in the Islamic world, this is unique to Morocco.

The exception is the morning call to prayer, which I have heard enough times to reach the conclusion that it is generally really beautiful. Admittedly I've never been more than half-conscious when listening to that call to prayer, so I suppose its beauty could be a figment of my dreams, but other people have agreed with me so I think it's actually just that the powers that be have decided that it's best to coax people out of bed in the morning rather than yelling at them to pray when they're tired and cranky. 

I am disappointed

Saw a Moroccan wearing a University of Michigan jacket today.

The tourism industry in Morocco

In Marrakech, people will throw monkeys at you, expecting your amazed friend to take a picture to capture the hilarity of a monkey running around on your head. Then he'll charge you a lot of money for taking a picture.

People will also offer anything and everything to you for free. The important thing to remember is that they are lying. Whatever they say is free is not free at all. Once, in Marrakech, we all sat down for dinner and were promised free tea. I didn't believe them and never ordered any tea, but some people did and bought it. We continuously asked them if it was free and they said yes (repeatedly). In the end they gave us the tea for free but charged us 5 dirhams for each piece of bread (it turned out to be the exact same price as the tea would have cost)

Sometimes when people rip you off they're really, really obvious about it. They're horrible actors. I asked how much some figs cost (they should be about ~30dirhams/kilo). The guy looked at me, looked at the (white) guy next to me, realized we were foreigners (my accent didn't help) and thought a second before saying "150 dirham" (in french). Generally people don't rip you off too much with food; prices are often posted and are just a flat rate. But I could literally see him thinking "how much can I rip this sucker off," he wasn't good at it at all. And this happens a lot, where people will hesitate to tell you how much it costs, look you over, and then name some really high price.


Lastly there was a restaurant in Fes, the owner of which was hilarious. Whenever we walked by he would come after us and tell us that there was a student discount and we could get this meal for 40DH instead of the sticker price of 70. I am about 99% sure that nobody has ever payed 70DH for this meal, he just tells everyone that there's a student price, even people who are clearly not in school. Also he always tells us we can see Mars from his terrace. "Come eat here to see Mars!" 

More cute pictures of my host family

My host brother 'Omar

My host brother Adam on left,

My host cousin 'Omar on right 

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.