Morocco # English board

Who of you doesn't wish to leave now to lblad to spend the rest of ramadan in peace ..

For the 1st time i'am feeling nostalgic about doing Ramadan in Labled ............

Please do not tell me its a sign of old age !!

salam Atlas

It's rather a sign of good sense and realism i think...

when did you guys last spend ramadan back home?

for me, i've spend the last week+eid last year in Morocco and it was great but so tiring! first of all, there was the food, lots and lots of food and my whole digestive system was turned upside down because i don't eat a lot here wether it's ramadan or not, in fact, my eating habits do not change except the weekend when i cook something nice and moroccan. But back in Morocco, you can't visit the family and refuse to eat, they'll get offended obviously..
Then there was the sleep, or rather lack of it. People don't sleep until past 2 and 3, and the following day they go to work, that's madness!!! i sleep at 10 here, i can't cope with moroccans

the last ramadan i spent with my family was in 2000 and the last one spent in morocco was in 2001 but i was living alone then ... i always remember having problems with sleep but the atmosphere was great.. what i remember more is the fact that i used to practice sport more the 4 times a week... but at the time i didn't have to cook for myself or do home works .. except when i helped ...

Salam Minimouse

My lastRamadan back home was over 11 years ago ,i must admit i was bored during the day as i kept waking up early.

This year i do not know why i miss a "zawaka" siren also the kaos near laftour & the after laftour ..........
True the why we eat is out of this world but i miss the tagines made on charcoal....

Atlas stop torturing us please a tajine and made on charcoal ...do you want to kill me

i broke my tajine when i moved to my new "accomodation" about 3 weeks ago and i threw it after 3 year of companionship and "3chra" ... i'm a real traitor...

hi atlas,

11 years!!! bloody hell, no wonder you miss going back! however, i'm not sure you'd want to go this year in particular as temperatures are sky high and people are thirsty like mad this ramadan!

the tajine made out of charcoal sounds terrfic! do you do that in the atlas where you're from?

Hicham, don't cry over your tajine, i'm sure they sell them somewhere in Paris (tm)

sure Minnie but for a nomad like me, it's not a good idea to buy heavy things ... and tell me what happens to You ?? Tajine made out of charcoal ???? are you fasting ?? atlas said made ON charcoal ...

Hicham

Sorry mate i was carried away there , in France you should find Tagines in Auchamp or semilar i wondered in one the other day & they had dattes ,spices ..............

Minimouse

Yep 11 years no Ramadan home i did Eaid Al kebir ect but no Ramadan the Tagines in the Atlas are an other story i wont go into now ...i wont be responsible for torturing my friends reading this post !

hahaha, made out of charcoal, God knows where that came from!! yes, i guess i must be fasting! what i'm sure of is that i'm starving and at this moment i wouldn't say no to any kind of tajine even if it was made of cement!!

Lol Minnie,

you are not the only one

what time do you break fast in london ?

Atlas

thank u i know i can get a tajine down here but as i explained i'm a nomad and i might be moving soon, so no heavy stuff ..

Atlas, you're so lucky to be from the atlas, been only once in my life and fell in love with the region, the people, the food...

Hicham, you're a nomad, just like Miloud and Albatoul

Exactly Minnie

it is something i inherited from my forefathers .. you won't trust me if i tell you i lived in 8 cities in morocco and 3 in europe ...

minniemouse


I have being finding time to go back to me roots as i was not born & raised in the Atlas
Once you get there its peace ,calm & tranquility
I love it in the evenings on the roof terrasse no light pollution & as far as the stars no one is counting

Hicham, I've lived in 3 cities in Morocco but spend a couple of years touring the country with friends and also for my job. I've been to some really uncommon places and seen amazing sights and people in Morocco (those were the years when i was still a hippie ) good old times...

atlas, i know what you mean. to be totally disconnected from the mad world, no one disturbing you, just you and yourself

were you born in the UK then?

No no no , born & bread back home but not in the Atlas

Hey There,

My last ramadan in morocco was 17 years ago, but my last visit was 2 months ago.
I usually go in summer, last year i was lucky enough to make Eid el Adha there; it sure was great to spend it with the family, all that food and the celebrations made me want to go back for good hahahahaha.

I think 1999 was the last Ramdan i spent with the fam. Alas, I am waiting for Ramadan 2011, God willing, It will be in the lovely hot August, when the day is long and the open Markets are full with goodies and the hindia is a gogo and the Karmous shaari is so rape it's dripping with honey like guey oraganic liquid and the day is the longest and the Soccer tounaments start early afternoon and the losers lose their control and the older men lose their temper because they can't have their daily puff of Kif or cigarettes and the day is Longggggggggggg I think I said that already and the watch becomes os precious and my mom learns how to count and talks about the prices going up an down; esp Mattischa and the Sabakia and the....!!!!

Nice thread and sorry for being silly like this, but the day is long here, so me what!
On a serious note, ramadan is my favourite month and other than the early hours of the morning, I feel "fine" and it's really soothing to have to question every move that I do during this month. It usually lasts past Ramdan then I tend to get feeble regarding the self-monitoring part....but that's the human part in us and it's always a good reason for ramdan to come bak, among other ones of course!

Have a lovely all of you,
Yani

wow wow , reading your comments made me want to book my ticket and fly to Morocco right now
@ hicham : i broke my tajine too, it is a gift form my mother , she bought it for me from the old medina i carried it in the airoplane with a lot of TLC one week later i dropped the lead on the floor , i didn t throw the base , i put in the garden , i fill it with water and it attracts all kind of birds like a little swimming pool
ramadan is great in Morocco except for one thing , if you need a document from any local authority you won t get it after the Eid , they hardly work , they open at 10 i think and close very early afternoon and everybody seems absent , empty offices everywhere , and if you ask even nicely someone to help you they explode on you , the sentence that seems everybody knows is : it s ramadan
fasting doesn t mean not working and becoming lazy , bad tempered and looking for an argument

Actually, local authorities in morocco are lazy not only in ramadan.. it's not laziness.. it's stupidity
and practices belonging to the 12th century... once i went to bank almaghrib during the summer at 14.30.. and a young miss told me that it's too late and that i had to come back the day after ... 14.30
funny.. if you happen to go any administration in marrakech in the morning you could easily find them sitting arount a tea pot with "khobz" and "ghammess" in "zit l3oud" as if they were "hassada" ...

time means money means economy
in Morocco you go to baladya , no body is there a part from some soldier (what we call in Morocco merda ) god knows why he is standing there the all day some sort of bodyguard to his highness the councellor , very strange people !!!!
they are lik parrots : come back tomorrow ? why not now if you dare ask !!!
they play football with you , until you loose the will to live
the answer which often makes my blood boil is : his highness l9aid isn t here absent , he needs to put his precious signature on your paper wait for him , may be he will honour us with his presence tomorrow
no sense of time , nobody cares , no management , no system , everything manuel written with some strange handwriting like the one of a mosque s imam
i am not sure if they head about something called computers i have never seen one in any of these baladyats ust some old handwriting which causes earache used by some pissed off woman sitting in the corner hating everybody and giving the citizens some bad horrible looks (tm)

lool, no comment risette

my last advice to alll moroccans when you r planning to put your feet in any baladya take with you a big pack of chocolat, you need a lot of sugar in your blood and the realease of the endorphine hormone if you don t want to commit a murder

allah yahdina wsafi

Hey all,
You’re right about Moroccan administrations being lazy in Ramadan and the rest of the year as Hicham pointed out. However, that shouldn’t surprise us as this has always been the case, or rather, this is what we inherited from France and grew up witnessing. What surprised and horrified me though is to find a replica of the administration in Morocco here in London!!! The first time I needed to legalise a paper to send to Morocco (to the horror of my English friends who never heard of stamping or legalising a document) I went to the Moroccan consulate which is right next to Paddington station. The offices look like a house from the outside and if it wasn’t for the red little flag hanging on the roof, I would’ve missed it! I then had to knock and speak on the interphone to someone who asked me why I was here etc. as if I was planning a terrorist attack on those offices. Anyway, to my surprise, an old scruffy man opened the door to me and let me in, I discovered later that he was the chaouech, he had a desk right next to the door and a telephone and that was it, no paper, no pen!! He showed me the way up to the office where I found a queue of men and women with loads of kids and babies, I felt dizzy right away, it was like being in any moukataa back home. The office was tiny so I had to stand outside the door..then it was my turn and this big bloke called me to his desk where he took my papers, went to photocopy them and asked me to pay for the copies. Never mind. Then after 20 min or so, I went up another floor to an office full of women, all in jellabas and scarves, one of them was on the phone, the 2nd one was the only one with access to an old computer and the 3rd one was knitting, isn’t that cute! The office was full of piles and piles of dossiers crammed on desks and inside cupboards. I hadn’t seen such an office since I was 10 when I used to go with my mum to her work!!
Anyway, after they stamped my little paper and I paid a fortune for the stamp, I went up the 3rd and last floor to meet his highness the consul deputy who had a nice wide and aerated office with leather chairs and a small waiting area, he invited me to take a seat and after scanning the paper his staff produced to compare with my original request, signed it and handed it back to me without spotting the mistake in my address
Now how do you expect such people to progress?!

Minnie

your story reminders of the movie "back to the future".. If anyone wants wants to have a look at life in the middle ages, all he/she has to do is to pop in a morccan administration... i have a very "funny" little story .. once back to morocco for vacation , i went to see a friend of mine living near almoukata3a, we went to have a drink at a café in the rez de chaussée of lmoukata3a, we sat in the terrasse and you know what, there was a man smoking hash just close the a bunch of "Mroud".. i was a bit surprised but not .. let's say.. overwhelmingly astonished.. my friend told it's "bimoubarakate solotate"... Legalize it ... a thing you can't do in the greatest democratic countries

hiya MDR
minniemouse i have been through the torture of dealing with moroccan embassy staff in London
have you ever phone them? it is quiet a laugh a woman answered saying: allo shkoun nti wshnou bagha !!!!!
it s like she is answering from her house in Morocco , it is supposed to be an embassy where is the professionalisme ??? unbeleivable
anyway i went there years ago i can t remember why i think for some sort of documenent , what scares me the most ,as soon as i got in this dull coloured building i was surrounded by these scruffy men they look like some marwana dealers with some dirty moustaches which hasn t touch water since the last Eid i still could see the soup on his moustache , i must tell you i have a very weak stomach and i honestly nearly vomitted , with some horrible teeth hygiene , this person supposed to represent our counytry abroad , he doesn t speak any english whatsoever , so ther was two men just pissing about ther not doing anything apart from making the place so stinky each time they talk with their cigarette breath
, one woman sitting behind a desk with a big berrad of tea in front of her sitting next to her an other woman , i know it s ramadan i shoudn t talk about people this way but this is the truth , they were so ugly i have never seen such ugliness in my life , a hair like a broom , i just sat there waiting or someone to ask what i want , next some older woman with jellaba and an other with a litle child
i could feel from a distance the way they were cheking me out from head to toes
i just wonder sometimes : if an investor is interested in investing in our country the first thing he wil do is contacting the embassy ??? where they find these people they look like des tayabats dyal lhammam without any languages or administration skills
it is disgraceul and appalling , one visit was enough for me to scare for life , i will never go there again they make me sick and they suck my energy by their burocracy and lack of respect to moroccan citizen

Quote
rosette1
my last advice to alll moroccans when you r planning to put your feet in any baladya take with you a big pack of chocolat, you need a lot of sugar in your blood and the realease of the endorphine hormone if you don t want to commit a murder

allah yahdina wsafi

the moroccan embasy in holland is also like that, no professionalism (did I spell this right? )at all.

Sometimes I'm ashamed of it...(

Why isn't it possible to take your work seriously? Sometimes people spend half a day waiting on their turn....Unbelievable

Well ,rosette ,Minniemouse & Hicham you said it all

The sad thing i find when dealing with the consulate or admin back home they all start & the high tone "ach 3andak " this phrase drives me crazy ..the openning times are a jocke 10:30 to 12 or 1 !!

London ! well i had a laugh there first of all they were told to put a flag on as they were just hiding there & apparentely they place had a new carpet ect ............an other excuse to suck more £ from Rabat ,you fact that they emply people from back home is an other story same as RAM ,its will make sence & be cheaper to employ locally as we have a Moroccan community ...blah blah No they get the choisen ones to be moved to a country were they have no clue about ect ..........Tourist office an other fiasco they paying the frogs to promote & Market Morocco in England ....

The sad thing is too many Moroccans are boycotting the consulate & ARE NOTE REGESTERING THEIR KIDS WITH THEM !