We’re back. Morocco did not produce any pulp, sadly. Some countries just don’t do it. During our drive through Tangier, Assilah, Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, and Fes we did find an abundance of printed matter in several languages, but we saw nothing with illustrated covers that was specifically Moroccan or Arabic in style.
Interestingly, our little remark about hoping North Africa didn’t hit back almost came true when a Marrakech hustler, infuriated when we refused to pay him forty euros (accepted all over Morocco) for “guiding” us to a riad, stripped down to his underwear to show us his many knife fighting scars, then promised that if we saw him again he would kill us. Possibly we provoked this reaction a bit when we told him and his four henchmen that the only way he was getting that much money out of us was if he could take it from us (actually, I’ll drop the collective “we” at this point and say that it was I, PSGP, who did the challenging, and BB was not there).
To make matters worse, I actually took all my money out of my pocket and laid it on the ground—three hundred euros. They did not get the money. I felt proud of backing down this crowd of extortionists, but strangely, when I told PI-1, her reaction was: “Are you crazy? I let you out of my sight for one week and you challenge some thug in an alley to a fistfight?” Darling, it was a knife fight. His promise was to cut me up. What can I say? Shit happens. Anyway, above are a few shots of random Marrakech market stalls where we found no books, but plenty of other amazing items.
