“Coffee Culture Confusion”

Rabat – So after booking a rental car (for a lot cheaper than in the U.S.!), I began scouring travel websites and blogs, trying to figure out where I wanted to go. After contemplating some suggestions I’d heard from my classmates and the various interesting-looking attractions highlighted on websites, I pinned the locations on Google Maps and came up with a route.

At this point, I’d already heard several people mention Chefchaouen. The town became a buzzword around the ALIF garden; it seemed everyone wanted to go there and everyone who had been there would highly recommend it.

So I decided to go north. A random travel blog helped me discover Akchour and its “Grandes Cascades” waterfalls and the “Pont de Dieu” rock formation outside this little hamlet in the Rif Mountains. 4-hour drive? 3-hour hike? Count me in!

So after leaving my Fez apartment at 5:00am on Thursday, I proceeded to attempt to navigate the narrow, winding roads that span the hilly countryside north of Fez, which, before sunrise, is a little nerve-wracking.

Large semi trucks seem to enjoy flying precariously around curves, taking up the whole road and leaving their high beam headlights on, which repeatedly caused me to swerve swiftly to one side, almost into the ditch, while being blinded by their bright lights.

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But after a couple hours of continuous driving sequences that would make Americans panic (but which, to Fez taxi drivers, I’d be inclined to believe would just be another day in the life), I arrived at the province of Ouazzane.

There, I paused on a hill to admire the sunrise. As I drove through, I got to see the sleepy town begin to come alive, with shopkeepers opening their doors and delivery carts making their morning rounds.

I stopped in a cafe to get a cup of coffee. It was when I asked for it “à emporter” that I discovered that coffee “to-go” does not seem to be as customary in Morocco as it is in the U.S. This gave me pause (it sometimes amazes me what a deluge of thoughts a simple detail can release).

I see those familiar and incredibly environmentally unfriendly cardboard to-go coffee cups every day at home. It is to the point that when I order a beverage in a coffee shop, more often than not the barista assumes that I would like it to go. Presumably, this happens with the other customers as well.

So why is this coffee-drinking atmosphere so different in these two countries? To me, it seems that Americans are, generally speaking, a more rushed bunch of people than many Moroccans. It made me think about what I have observed in both Fez and my own city in North Carolina in the local coffee shops and cafes.

In Durham, NC, I would venture that at least half (potentially more) of the coffee shop customers are stopping in to get a drink to take with them. We are always moving. As a society, we are virtually expected to be heading somewhere specific and productive when we leave the house. A coffee shop is simply a quick stop along the route.

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Of course there are some people who sit and stay in the shop after ordering their beverage. But even they are different. First of all, most of them are students who are either reading or working on laptops, since free wifi is basically a staple of coffee shops across the country.

And many of them are alone. Even the students who are not alone are acting as though

they are. I’ve even done this! In college I would often study “with my friends.” But thinking about that now, I realize that all I had was another body across from me.

I didn’t usually interact with them more than I had to since I was working on whatever academic task I had gone there to accomplish (group projects and collaborative efforts aside). After the “to go-ers” and the solo students, lastly come the people who are actively engaging with the person or people whom they had come there to meet. But that is often the minority.

This American pseudo-independent culture is in stark contrast to what I frequently observed in Morocco. In the cafes lining many of the main streets in Fez (as well as other cities I visited), both the indoor and outdoor seating areas are filled with people drinking coffee or tea, who are in deep conversation with others at their table, or are casually chatting while people-watching, or are even playing games like chess together (or a different dice-throwing game that I never did figure out, although it intrigued me mainly because there seemed to be a very specific technique to throwing the dice that was used more often by people who then cheered happily after the dice landed).

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This social, loud, and vibrant atmosphere can definitely be witnessed in the evenings at bars in the U.S., but I see it less often during the day at coffee shops. Daytime is go-time for Americans. But in Morocco, perhaps daytime is just as much a time to relax as it is a time to get things done.

I do not profess myself to be any sort of expert on American or Moroccan social cultures; all I can analyze are the situations I have viewed and details I have personally noticed. I also do not think that one of these cultures is necessarily “better” than the other, rather I am simply pointing out the differences.

I find these types of reflections quite fascinating, and while I cannot confidently say that I know why these differences exist as they do, I enjoy observing simply for observation’s sake. However, I would think it could definitely be an interesting aspect of life to ponder. So next time you—as an American, a Moroccan, a European, an Asian, or simply as a fellow human—walk into a coffee shop or cafe, perhaps it would interest you to glance around, take in your surroundings and the people within them, and consider your motivations for walking into that establishment; what is your priority?