taroudant: Snowbirds

Sweetheart thinks this blog "is quite well written", if you ignore the typos of course. Coming from that source it is something similar to a Booker Prize nomination. She goes on to tell me to link it to Facebook so my friends can read it.What she forgets is that we are not of the facebook generation and have no friends. At least at one point we had five friends but one was sweetheart and another two were the same person who unfortunately has since died. No we are snowbirds, and use Skype not facebook to communicate.
I first came across the term "snowbird" in Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee novels to desribe the people, mostly retirees, who escape the snows of Canada or Chicago in Winebagos and set up winter communities in the Arizona deserts, but Morocco has its snowbirds too.
Every year from about the second week in January increasing numbers of campervans gather. In Taroudant they park up in the carpark of the Palais Salaam or round the corner in the road running along by the ramparts. They stay until Easter and then fade into wherever they haled from. The campervans contain couples our age, or slightly older as we retired early. Many are french but there are many dutch and germans as well. They escape the snows of the north to find sun here just as we are doing . There are only a few scandinavian campervans but there are scandinavian snowbirds. They tend to fly in rather than make the long journey by road and stay in flats or cheap hotels.Many restaurants in Agadir display Norwegian and Swedish flags and menus. Snowbirds greet each other in the restaurant terraces and bars using english the lingua franca of travellers and exchanging details of their length of stay (usually 3 months). They invariably sound smug; just the way we feel when we force ouselves to yet another simple meal of bread, cold meats, cheese, patisserie, fruit and, best of all, chillied olives, in the blinding sunshine of the terrace.
But the campervans seem to have a life of their own like some purposeful insects, ants or bees. In the afternoon they will congregate in Marjane car park and this of course means that the Attention Porcine section will be completely empty. They also travel between towns and can get quite adventurous into the Antiatlas and down to the desert but never singly, they are always in convoys at least 2 but sometimes 3 or 4 and stop on roadside verges for no apparent reason but to congregate.
It is a hard life but someone has to live it.