No, I was not beheaded in Morocco

Uh, where were we? Oh yeah, Thanksgiving in Morocco 34 years ago. After what seemed like hours we approach our guide/host/new white slave master's(?) compound. Dogs start barking and he does a Moroccan yodel. Slowly small lantern lights start to come on in the house. There is much excited conversation in Arabic and eventually a barred door is opened. Dad has brought some foreign guests home at 4:00 AM, that he met on a bus, and now it is tea time. About a dozen girls and women, all veiled, start to set up an elaborate tea set, produced from Allah knows where and platters of sickly sweet sweets, dates and nuts.

 

sickly sweet, sweets

 

Outside, some of the women, I assume because of their age, two or three are his wives and the rest are the various female offspring, start putting brush, twigs and what appeared to be manure in an oven not unlike this one:

 

and START BAKING BREAD.
 

Dad begins to perform an elaborate tea ritual, pouring the steaming sugary mint tea back and forth between two pitchers without spilling a drop. Eventually, he puts the tea in glasses and we drink and toast and smile and the sweets are passed.When he needed more sugar or tea, he would clap his hands and one of the females would bring it without speaking or making eye contact. People, this goes on for hours. I am not a big sweet guy to begin with, but after thirty of these glasses, I am about to go into a diabetic shock. I also have now been up for 24 hours and cannot even remember leaving Spain, which seemed years ago. Blessedly, Dad begins to get drowsy and he suggests that it is time for a smoke.

 

 

We move to another room, where his three sons are. Where they have been and what they have been doing during all this tea time is beyond me. There are several hookahs filled with black tobacco. This is evidently the men's club (excluding the Danish woman in our party). We lay about in our sugar black out/coma and lethargically draw on the hookahs until we are almost horizontal on the benches. As his eyes droop, our host announces it is time for bed (it is like 9:00 AM). Islamic Thanksgiving is over for us. We awake later that afternoon, as the girls bring the bread THAT THEY HAVE BEEN UP ALL NIGHT BAKING, and more tea without the ceremony.

 

Dad is nowhere to be found and his sons explain that he was called away *on business* and he will be back soon. Uh, OK. Soon turns out to be two days, but the hospitality continued, although it seemed that it would suck to be the women doing all of the physical work, including hand milking a herd of goats and making cheese with the milk, while the boys and the people Dad met on the bus lay about. We were kind of worried that we were being fattened up for the slaughter/beheading, as inquiries as to when exactly when Dad would be back were met with vague shrugs.

But he did come back. Like he promised on the bus in what seemed like eons ago. The boys piled us into a battered Mercedes and drove us several hours at ~6000 feet on Atlas mountain trails/fire roady things to the big town of Fes and the medina. Dad just must have had a different view of time. I mean, in retrospect, Good God man, what was the hurry?