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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Jerez 2019 - anyone going? (Jan. 11 2019 19:26:05)
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I went to Tangier in the 1970s a couple of times. I didn't find it particularly congenial, but I did have a couple of adventures, one rather baroque.
I had the feeling the whole time that everybody was lying to me about something important. I understood at the time that this may have been as much due to my own cultural attitudes as it was to the actions of the Tangerines, but my feelings of mistrust were strong.
Just crossing the Strait of Gibraltar from Tarifa had plunged me into a very unfamiliar culture. The food and clothing were exotic, the old part of the city was architecturally Mediterranean, but utterly strange in both spoken and body language, people approached me in a manner that I took as indicating a con..
In fact a man approached me as I was out for a walk early one evening. He proposed to take me on a tour of night clubs. He was a good deal shorter and thinner than I, and walked with a slight limp. I decided to take the risk, but not to get into a confined space with him, nor to stick around if any of his friends showed up. It turned out that no plot materialized. We just toured some clubs at my expense. His story was plausible, if unverifiable. He said he had worked at a hotel in Spain, got into a traffic accident, returned to Morocco to avoid legal consequences, and couldn't find work in Tangier. The dancing girls at the night clubs didn't particularly interest me, nor did I seem to interest them very much.
The more unexpected adventure was worth the whole trip, but too long to repeat here.
The following was not an adventure, just a routine annoyance: Checking out of the Hotel Rif on a Sunday, the desk clerk refused my American Express card, without making a phone call or referring to a list of invalid cards. I pointed to the American Express sign on the wall above his head, and insisted he take it. He said he had none of the paper forms required in those days to record transactions.
When I had taken out my wallet to produce the card, it was possible the clerk might have seen I had British pounds and French francs. There was a lively black market in currencies. If he demanded European notes at the official rate and sold them on the black market, he could profit pretty well, even if he paid the bill in dirhams.
I pointed at the sign once again, and said, "If you won't take my card, you won't get paid." We were alone at the desk, there was no visible security guard, and a taxi was waiting for me at the door. I turned to walk out. Suddenly he found the paper forms. He filled in the amount by hand. When I signed the paper, I added the notation "Moroccan dirhams" to the number.
"Why did you do that?" he asked.
"So that you would not cheat me."
He responded in silence, but with tears in his eyes. Thinking it over in the taxi as we drove to the seaport, I speculated that he may have felt no particular injury having his scam detected, rather he may have been frustrated by his inability to respond physically to the insult.
RNJ
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