In the Bag

Shopping in Morocco has always meant loads of cheap bin-liner like black plastic shopping bags. once discarded they get everywhere;stuck in trees and shrubs, and blown around in the wind, avoiding them has marred many a good photo. We have been advocating they follow the Welsh and ban them for years.

Well on 6th July they did. This wasn't the British half-hearted ban that can be got round by donating 5p to charity though; it is the true fundamentalist version. There are harsh fines on any shop-keeper supplying a bag and a ban on imports. Shops sell "bags for life" and thick deluxe bags you pay 10p for in Tesco and cost 1 DH (8p) here.  But even better they have banned those silly thin plastic bags you put your produce in to be weighed and which I could never open. When I go to the hanut to buy rice or choose my veg in Marjane I now get paper bags. Clearly we Welsh should now follow their example.

This "back to the 50s" approach could also apply to bottles. Marjane and the major supermarkets have aisle after aisle of 1.5l plastic bottles of branded drinks, but, when you go to the local hanut they still sell some local brands in glass bottles which bear a deposit and can be returned to be re-used. This was the system I remember from my childhood before Coke conquered the world and carbonated drinks were made locally with flavours such as Dandelion and Burdock and Saspirilla and Cream Soda as well as ~Orange and Lemonades. Local kids would earn a few pennies pocket money by going door to door with a crate and collecting bottles that people were too lazy to take back themselves.It was a particularly popular strategy at this time of year ahead of bonfire night as an alternative to "penny for the guy". That way they could hit each house twice. Re-using is always preferable to recycling and perhaps we should return to this too.

Morocco generally is trying to clean up as part of its tourist strategy. Ifrane, unsurprisingly has already achieved international clean town status and they are now working on Marrakech achieving it too.

....plus la meme chose.

The picket line has gone from the Palais Salaam! 

 The staff have been paid and, three cheers, we can eat there again. 

The problem seems to have moved to the Gazelle D'Or. 

This fabulously luxurious hotel is reputed to be the most expensive in Africa. The cheapest room booked last minute in the off season was £500 room only when I looked a couple of years ago. It is the winter haunt of the elite such as Francois Mitterand, Brad Pitt and the late great John Mortimer.

The on-dit is as follows:-

The hotel was sold to a Saudi businessman. He never actually visited being one of those super-elite who live on a yacht the whole time ,presumably to avoid being resident in any country where they may have to pay tax. The running of the hotel was left to a manager. She inflated everybody's wages and all the maintenance costs ,pocketing the difference. When this was discovered she refused to leave until dragged out screaming by the police. 

Taroudant on-dits can tend to exaggeration.News reports suggest that the situation is more complicated, the original purchase being by the father of the current claimant and that the Manager, who had managed for many years, had been given a large interest by him which his estate refuses to acknowledge. The  matter has been been subject to lengthy and complex litigation in the Marrakesh, Agadir and Appeal Courts since 2014.

 Whatever, the upshot is that the staff have not been paid and and there is a union picket line.

 One of the striking  facets of the picket line from a British standpoint is the care to which the union goes to express its loyalty and patriotism with displays of the Moroccan flag and a photo of the King. Not quite UNITE.

http://www.medias24.com/DROIT/154310-Affaire-La-Gazelle-d-Or-Ghita-Bennis-deboutee-en-cassation.html

How does my garden grow?

The thing I always look forward to most on our return is to see how the plants are doing. Despite our friend's personal difficulties he had watered for us and kept the plants alive. Their progress was variable, the fanpalm is clearly not happy and probably needs replacing

but the Bird of Paradise plant relishes its new position in the shade although its new pot seems to be disintegrating.

The sad new succulent which was doing nothing is thriving and in flower

and the baby and grand -baby prickly pears are happy.

The weird star flower plant is coming into bloom

but the great joy is the two rescue cacti which were just sad tall spike with a slight bum at the top

have now branched out properly to almost tree shapes.

Perhaps the best grown but most frustrating however is my Hibiscus hedge. As with any hedge I have ever tried to grow we were not sufficiently harsh on it early on so that it had a bare base and then insufficiently dense branches with holes. We tried to renovate it by giving it a particularly hard prune to encourage denser foliage, thinking we could repeat this winter and end up with a nice dense, holeless 3ft hedge. Well the pruning certainly encouraged growth, it's up to the first floor level!  

 

Very Bad News

We returned to the worst news possible. our friend's wife had died on Tuesday the day of our flight from Manchester. Mariam was German and had met and married our friend when he was an engineering student  there. She had lived here for 20 years or more and changed her name to Mariam to reflect her new religion. About 3 years ago she had cancer which was declared cured but she had increasing difficult with the use of her legs and had had to spend the last couple of years upstairs, barely leaving the house except for medical appointments. For the last 3 months she had been paralysed. She died on Tuesday morning  at home just before the flight her brother had arranged to take her back to Germany for treatment. Presumably her subconcious wanted to die in Morocco.

Mariam and I shared no language and she had long been housebound but I remeber her as a lovely bright kind person. Those of you who know our friend will know he is a lovely man and that she was lucky to have him but those of us who know Mariam also know that he was very lucky to have her.