Our "friend" comes back from his prayers and downs his soup in two big slurps from the bowl, while we pick away at it. Like all Moroccan men we tourists meet, he’s charming and educated and savvy and interesting, but what he really wants is for us to re-plan our vacation around his cousin the car rental dealer, his sister the rug merchant, and his brother-in-law the spice dealer. He’s trying to captivate P, so I play the annoying friend, who has business acquaintances she has to meet from Casablanca at exactly the same time he is proposing to meet us the following night. We *agree* to meet him at this same café tomorrow at 5:30pm, and I make a mental note to be nowhere near here at that time. He’s actually a very nice and well-educated man--he’s simply a product of his culture of opportunity. While we eat our soup, he explains Ramadan to us--he will be the first of many to take advantage of the time of year to expound upon the Muslims’ time of expiation. He explains at length about how going without food and water (and this is a surprise--I didn’t realize water was on the list), cigarettes, and gambling (how about those guys in the medina today? Guess they weren’t Muslims) strengthens the man and makes him holier in God’s eye. Everyone who talks about Ramadan with us is impassioned about it, and they all say the same things, implying it’s a horrible sacrifice and a terrible hardship, but as we’ll see, it can seem more like a brilliant hypocrisy.
We manage to peel ourselves away from the fellow at the bar who wants to commandeer our next four days and with our trusty non-map we venture into the souk again.
We return to the hotel and decide to dine there in the restaurant. It’s very hush-hush and elegant, but we convince a waiter who understands that we want to eat lightly.
There’s an American woman dining not far from us in the company of a nattily dressed European man and a younger woman who might be the woman’s daughter. The older woman has a Virginia Hunt Country Volvo station wagon look about her--turtleneck and blazer and thick straight blonde hair, a good scarf, and large but simple gold jewelry. The daughter says little, but as their dinner progresses and more wine bottles are brought to the table, the older woman gets more and more animated, the head tosses become more frequent, and the goo-goo eyes more blatant. Over dessert and coffee she starts to smoke his cigarettes. P and I definitely sense we’ve got an international jet-set gigolo situation here, perhaps even a ménage à trois in the making. Imagine our surprise when we find out later that evening that we’ve just seen the American Ambassadress to Morocco and the hotel owner dining together!