The Plains of Africa

after i recovered from the food poisoning I went to go pick up the pictures I had dropped off the day before. The guy had told me to come back the next day so I did, i thought i was too late, but the place wasn't even open. Some guy told me they'd be open at 3pm, I looked at my watch and told him it was 3pm, but his watch said 2.

This was upsetting to me for a number of reasons, but it highlights a very serious problem in Morocco: nobody knows what time it is. To be more like the western world and gain an hour of daylight productivity and conserve electricity, they are on daylight savings time. This system usually works fine in Canada, except for all the discussions about whether or not we are being cheated out of an hour of sleep, and if so at which end of daylight savings, but in Morocco, it is a nightmare. This is because nobody outside of Rabat and central Casablanca understands how it works and even most bank clocks are set wrong. When my flight was coming in to Al-Masir airport in Agadir the pilot said something very strange about being unsure of what time it was because the airport was reporting a different time than the airline due to confusion over daylight savings (horrifyingly, the non-assigned seating discount airline with no meals was correct and the international airport/transit hub for southern morocco was mistaken). Why do they do daylight savings? Nothing seems to get done here anyways and this just makes it worse.

Anyways, I decided that the photo developing guy's watch must also not be set for daylight savings so I went for a walk for an hour. Chefchaouen is a beautiful city in a spectacular mountain range with fantastic views down into the valley and of the peaks across, so, after a delicious coffee at a cliff side cafe, I decided to get up as high as I could on the road for the best possible view. It was just a beautiful walk. I was standing on a kind of view point on the edge of a windy hillside road, admiring the city and the mountains, when these kids came up to me. The kids here are usually pretty friendly but shy of foreign people so we both said "hola" and I thought that was that, but then he stood right up infront of me and said, "STYLO! STYLO! ONE DIRHAM!" and I was like, what the hell, get away from me you filthy urchin, because the kid was on his way home from school and dressed nicely, which means his family was probably doing better than I currently am. His friends then came up to me and started grabbing at my hands and trying to force them into my pockets so I would give them all the money they were obviously full of (kids here think tourists are like pinatas full of money) but they were dissapointed when the bulge in my pocket was a $2 disposable camera (because it meant i was too poor for digital) and they started demanding my watch. You're not supposed to give these kids anything because it encourages begging, harassing tourists, and staying out of school, but I wanted to get ride of them so bad I almost gave them my last dirham - the only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that this would only give them a taste for meat.

The first kid then pulled a dead fucking bird out of his pocket (just like in Dumb and Dumber) and started trying to show it to me. I was kind of scared he was going to throw it at me or something but i was able to make him put it back in his pocket by saying bird in french and have him correct me because it was apparently a male bird. He then started grabbing at my pockets and at my hands with his filthy dead-bird-hands until they finally decided I was more trouble than it was worth. They left me standing infront of an amazing view with my freshly-diseased hands clasped firmly behind my back. I then went and washed them for 5 minutes at a carwash.

When I returned to the photo place it was open but the guy said one hour. I had a nap and came back, and the guy was ignoring me so these locals kids could print gay-ass pictures of them hanging out in fields or posing with their hair all sissied-up. He finally got me my pictures, and I was pretty happy with them, except for the big finger prints he put on two of them from touching them before they dried, but whatever, it was a pretty good price.

Also, one thing I have noticed is that, as much as Moroccan dudes love to harass tourist women and stare at them and generally make them feel like the filthy whores all non-muslims really are, a few moroccan girls have been giving me The Eye (not the evil one, I bought a blanket with a design specifically to prevent that). Likely it is because they do not think that I look like someone who hits women (the fools)and could get them out of this country, but it also suggests that moroccan men are not so irresistable as they themselves believe.