Goodbye Madrid. I will miss you. Iberia actually let me on the plane this time so I landed in Casablanca, Morocco with a full day ahead of me before my next international flight. I found my luggage and cleared customs only to discover that despite my previous guide's assurance, there was no one waiting for me there. What to do? Hmm. I had time. I decided to wait. A half an hour went by and still no one. The longer I waited, the more I felt like a mark...a woman alone, traveling with lots of luggage. Several strangers approached me asking me in French and Arabic, then finally a rough approximation of English. Did I need a hotel? Did I need a taxi? Yes, but who to trust? Trust the internet. I found a place to plug in, then googled a list of hotels and somehow managed to book myself a room at the Hotel Atlas.
After a short cab ride, I found myself in the same hotel I had stopped in at the beginning of my journey, but this time with no guide and no group to navigate the language barriers. I did manage to get my room though. From then on my Casablanca stay began to deteriorate. It took me over an hour to get a towel from house keeping and the staff at the front desk and the housekeeper were rude to me. When I asked for a second towel to dry my hair the lady told me no. Who does that? She had a cart full of clean towels and I could only have 1. Why? Did she think I was going to steal it? I've never been to a hotel with a towel quota. I decided to just let it go though...not a big deal. Then I went down the store in the hotel lobby and tried to buy a souvenire for a friend and again experienced more rudeness. I mean was it me? Was there something about my behavior soliciting this response. I felt like I was pretty polite and doing my best to make do with my little miniscule French.
After a nap and some TV in English I decided to have a late lunch. Rather than spend hella on a cab into the city only to be lost and frustrated I decided to stay and eat at the hotel. The waitstaff was very slow, and when I say slow I mean glacially slow...to the point where I wondered if this was some kind of permanent pergatory that I might never escape from. Once I finally left I stopped by the reception desk to ask for a wake up call and they were beyond rude...dismissive, curt, served others before me, at one point completely ignored me. I felt diminished. But still managed to silence the inner bitch really wanting to come out.
A bit later I was reviewing my finances online and discovered they charged me twice for the same room. And so we had to have another uncomfortable interaction. Lots of eye rolling on both sides. They did refund my money (though I checked today and those fuckers re-charged me for the room...now I will have to contest the charge.
Needless to say when the next day arrived I was very ready to get the hell out of Morocco. So I got all my stuff together and headed down to the lobby where the rude receptionists directed me to the airport shuttle. By the way, at no point during my time lugging my big ass suitcase, my backpack, and my other bag did a single bellhop lift a finger to assist me. Nor did the shuttle guy. In fact, he took one look at me and told me that he would take me in a half an hour...but I needed to go then. Then he looked at my ticket and saw I was leaving from Terminal 3 and said he wouldn't take me there. He told me I needed to take a cab. With only 30 dirham left in my pocket, I knew I didn't have enough cah for that and so I did the thing I'd been really trying not to do. I became the ugly American. I got indignant, entitled, and obnoxious..."What do you mean you're not gonna take me to the airport? This is an airport shuttle right? I'm not asking you to take me anywhere outside of the airport so I don't understand what the fuck your problem is. Your whole job is take me to the airport!" Of course his English was about as good as my French, but I'm pretty sure my tone and facial FU were translating pretty clearly. I was just getting worked up when some white Moroccan lady came up behind me and told him she needed to go to the airport too and suddenly everything was cool and the shuttle was leaving right away. After he dropped her off at her terminal, he picked up another passenger then took me exactly where I need to go...for which I was grateful, but I couldn't help feeling kind of pissed. Why did we have to go through all of that?
Once at the airport I went through 6 security check points, waited behind a family of 8 FOREVER to get boarding passes, and somehow managed to get on the plane only having to cuss out one more person in the process...this really rude lady at one of the airport shops who insisted on helping every single white person in the store before me. REALLY?! So I'm finally on the plane and saying a few thank you Gods and please forgive me for being such an asshole today when...well nothing happened, the worst kind of nothing. The plane didn't move. We sat on the tarmack and then we sat somemore and then we sat even longer. Every once in a while there would be an announcement in French, Arabic, and English saying "sorry for the delay" but at no point in time was there any kind of explanation of what the hell was going on. And then after about two hours, (again with no explanation) they just opened the door and people started getting off the plane. I don't think I've ever had that happen before. It was very disconcerting. We were shuttled from the airplane back to the airport where after another 30 minutes they finally announced that they would be re-boarding our flight at 6pm. It was 2:30pm. The flight was supposed to leave at 12:30pm.
The only thing I'd had to eat all day were Spanish cookies and pretzels. So I befriended two nice Nigerian gentlemen and a Japanese lady who was very excited to speak to me in Japanese. I was just happy to have people with whom I could communicate period. First we went upstairs to see if we could find some food and more importantly some liquor. As a Morocco is a muslim country, there was barely any wine or beer and certainly no cocktails, so the Nigerians and I made a little pit stop at duty free shop for a bottle of rum. Then we bought some Hawaii soda from a very rude woman who not only handed the Nigerian his change with her left hand (something taboo in Morocco and Nigeria...as that is the hand you wipe your ass with) but she was just in general a heinous bitch. I almost took her picture to put her on the wall of shame. Starving my ass off, I tried to buy a charwarma. I waited to be served for 20 minutes and when it was my turn the people at the restaurant decided they didn't have food. I'm not making this up. "Yeah sorry. Go somewhere else." Then I tried to buy a burger at the place with that heinous bitch from before (I was desperate), which was another long wait, only to discover that they didn't take credit card and I didn't have enough Dirham.
Pissed, hungry, and ready to slap someone, I went back downstairs to discover that Air Moroc was handing out vouchers for food. So we waited in a very long and slowing moving line only to discover that the vouchers only worked for one restaurant up three flights of stairs and on the other side of the airport. Of course they couldn't just tell us that when they handed out the vouchers. We had to go on a scavenger hunt. When we finally got there, there was no place to sit, so we had to split up. My Japanese friend found a seat with some White people from the plane and the Nigerians and I shared a table with some man from I have no idea where. Then we waited. We ordered. We poured ourselves some drinks and we waited some more. After an eternity and a lot of rum I looked around and realized that every White person from the plane, including the ones who had come in after us had been served and were recieving desert and we still hadn't gotten a thing...not even someone to clean off the dirty table. For the third time that day alone, I once again had to bring out the ugly American before we were finally given a plate of dry chicken with rice and french fries...no apology. I really wanted to punch someone. Seriously, the situation really took me there and I found myself tingling with adrenalyn and a great desire to bang someone's head against the wall. Never a good feeling to have in an airport.
After lunch we made our way gradually back to the waiting area. 6:00pm came and went and we were still there going on hour 8 of being stuck in the airport with no information about why or when and if we would ever get to leave. Half the bottle of rum was gone. We ran out of Hawaii and switched to Fanta...not as good. Finally as the sun was setting they loaded us onto a bus to take us to a plane. Yeah! Except the bus only did a loop around the airfield then took us back to another lobby where we went through another full round of security. That's when they decided to confiscate my rum and I lost it. I pulled out the receipt and started yelling at the guy, who of course couldn't understand a word I was saying, so some bilengual Moroccan with a NY Yankees hat came to translate for me...so I'm yelling in English and he's yelling in Arabic and everyone is getting pissed off and I'm calling everyone every kind of asshole and telling them that if they take my bottle they can give me back the 14 euros I spent on it..and of course I fucking opened it. I was stuck in the airport for 9 hours with no information about why...and then I was channeling Spanish because Spanish has the best swear words. You can tell someone things like: I shit on your dead ansestors....sounds kind of weird in English, but in Spanish, it just rolls off the toungue. And then I just turned and walked away...rumless and pissed, both middle fingers in the air to make sure they were clear on how I felt...at which point I was taking to a privacy cubicle where some female security guard felt me up and down and then I figured I better just get on the plane before I went to jail for punching an airport security agent. 8 hours later I arrived in New York, tired, enraged and in the middle of the night. It took another 2 hours to get through customs and the whole time I was thinking I HATE EVERYONE. I HATE EVERYTHING. I'M NEVER TRAVELING AGAIN...which of course is impossible, but that's how I felt.
And I also couldn't help wondering why it was so different to be in Morocco alone as opposed to with the group. The only place I felt uncomfortable in Morocco was this little French town we stopped in on the way to Fez. And ever there, the rudeness didn't seem so personal. I have to wonder is this how all the other dark skinned Africans are treated. It's funny how that works out. On one hand I receive a certain amount of privelege simply by being American. My passport gets me through lines faster and with less bullshit, but then there is still my other identity, my skin color which comes with a whole different set of complications. It would be nice to believe that I just had 2 shitty days and that people were assholes just because they were assholes, but I have to wonder what was really happening and why? More importantly when is this kind of bullshit going to end. I am so tired of all these white people telling me that because Barack Obama is my president that now racism is over, everything is all cool. They can say it as many times as they like, doesn't change the reality. Wish it would.
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