Café, Anyone?

You can’t really have a bad cup of coffee in Casablanca. We’ve been to several different places since we arrived, and the espresso was amazing everywhere. Traditionally, the coffee house was the ultimate male space, where men got together to smoke, play chess, read the paper, catch up with each other and, I imagine, complain about their womenfolk. In contrast, the ultimate female space was the home, where women threw elaborate parties, listened to music, danced, traded gossip, and enjoyed a good glass of tea. But of course all of this has changed over the last ten to twenty years, and the coffee houses are being firmly and steadily desegregated. The picture above is from a Maarif cafe, which is so popular that it has been turned into a chain. At least it’s a homegrown chain. There are no Starbucks here. Yet.