Seeing the King! (Posted a tad late)

When our program went to see the king (a while ago, I just forgot to write about it), it was quite the experience. First of all, there were thousands and thousands of people gathered in Centreville near the parliament building just to catch a glimpse of him, even though he would only be visible for a total of about 3 minutes. I couldn’t see perfectly, but he was coming from the mosque down the street and riding in some sort of roofless vehicle (maybe a carriage) which is pretty bold but also doable because there are no guns here like there are in America.

Anyways, he was wearing a bright yellow jilebba (a man dress, for you uncultured Americans) and sunglasses, which was quite the look. He rode down the road, waving at people, and the crowd went pretty crazy. People were trying to climb palm trees and sit on each other’s shoulders, and undercover cops were pulling them down quickly. Then the king went inside the parliament building and to the second-floor balcony, where he waved again before going inside to deliver his speech. That was kinda it, but the crowd didn’t disperse much because they wanted to see him reappear in about 30 minutes when the speech was over before he headed back to one of his many palaces. That’s right, he has 16 palaces in Morocco (which is not a huge country) and he hasn’t even BEEN to one. Crazy. I have some commentary on this that I will not make here because it’s REALLY not good to say anything against the king (of course, king, malik sir, if you’re reading this or one of your little servant dudes is, I think you’re great! And has anyone ever told you, yellow is your color?)

As a couple other Americans and I started to head out to our weekly meeting at Amideast, Otmane got caught up with one of the kids from the other program so we waited around a bit. And it’s when you’re a female staying in one place in a public area that you’re targeted. Always. There was a creepy pair of guys approaching quickly and yelling things at us in various languages so we moved, grabbed Jeremy, hid behind a column, everything. But they kept hanging around and staring at us, looking like they were about to lunge, so we finally went inside a nearby women’s clothing store.

There was a nice woman running it, so we explained to her that there were men bothering us and she immediately jumped in. She went outside and yelled at them to go away (they were lurking right outside the store) and they left for a bit but then returned, so she literally chased them away and then told us not to worry because there were police everywhere since the king was nearby. And that was that. Women protecting women!