Morocco is like the original hippy colony. Hippies but with thousands of years of tradition and culture and religion.Everything is done in accordance with tradition and culture; slowly, rehearsed daily, without questioning why or how.
This always boggles me, mono-cultures. Having come from a multi-cultural city in the most multi-cultural state in the melting pot of cultures, I never experienced this before: there is one way to do it, and we all say it’s the best way! Italy is like this in many ways: cooking, eating, recipe wars going back centuries which are still being argued right now at a trattoria near you. It’s refreshing to a certain extent, especially regarding cuisine.
Morocco takes tradition further than just discussing culinary elements and etiquette; they take if as far as the bathroom. Some daily traditions are easy – Greetings (Salaam), response (Alikum Salaam), sitting on mats (without showing something you shouldn’t), tea drinking (right hand, slurp and blow loudly), tea pouring (this is a whole article in itself), haggling (this is best done on rainy days or with a local man if possible), who to touch and when (or not!); then comes the food: tagimes, cous cous, harira, harisa, sfouf, petilla, all of which are possible, in due time, to find even here in Rome. The ritual of the hammam (which means bathroom in Arabic) however, is a completely different stratosphere and takes far more time studying older experts than I’d like to admit. I guess this is one of those things that cannot be exported or reconstructed, no matter where you are (unless you happen to have one of these lovely hammams in the privacy of your own home) – perhaps this is what the hippies felt like?
