Rabat, where the coffee is stronger
Photo credit @Erin Deborah Waks
By Erin Deborah Waks
It’s been 72 hours since I moved to Rabat, the capital of Morocco, and I’m yet to actually write anything about the city – almost unheard of in my book.
From the moment I stepped off the plane, I felt a strange sense of the melange of the place. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s as though everything in the city embodies the sense of cultural overlap that so often permeates my life. Just as Moroccans are often both Arab and French at once, so too do I simultaneously belong to two cultures. Just as they speak darija, Moroccan Arabic, interspersed with notes of francais, so too am I a fan of littering my English with a flair of French or Arabic vocabulary. It’s a culture that reflects the same desire to demonstrate its innate interculturality I feel inside me.
It pains me to say, as my love story with Paris is one for the books, but there’s a far more embracing tone here. In Paris, anything short of fluent, near-native French will be met with a curt response. But here, in the coffee shop where I’m sat, my feeble attempt at 3afk ana bgit kahua espresso was met with a smile and a nod of encouragement. And it’s only day three of me producing the rehearsed speech.
While the francophone language and culture have been a welcome comfort blanket, living in an Arab country for the first time has come with its own culture shocks. The man sat next to me is blowing smoke rings in my face – and while I neither smoke nor welcome the scent while trying to drink my coffee in peace, I do appreciate the realness of it all. To sit in a coffee shop, for me, is to truly be in a city. If smoking inside, stronger coffee and a couple of stares from the men sat nearby is what a Moroccan coffee shop is, then so be it. I welcome it. I live here now.
The streets are busy, you cross the road with your fingers crossed in hope the cars will dodge you. Everything is unfamiliar – the coffee is stronger; the language is harder, and the culture is different. I’m all on my own, with no friends or family to hold my hand through it all.
In a nutshell, it’s everything I love.
