sidebar: levels of Moroccan hospitality

More ways to laugh and cringe at hospitality:

Level 1 Hospitality (code green): The most common form, found in Berber rug shops and given by complete strangers. This usually involves tea and/or pastries. It includes the phenomenon of food and drink sharing on public transportation. This is the most basic form of hospitality known to Moroccans, as basic and reflexive as a midwestern American's habit of smiling to and greeting strangers.

Level 2 Hospitality (code blue): Like marijuana, the "gateway drug," this pecking behavior can wear down a receiver's defenses and open the door to higher, more extreme levels of hospitality. It specifically involves the paying for of things such as meals, drinks, and taxi rides. It is difficult to control without a firm grasp of  Arabic, and with the male-dominated society, a woman is helplessly overruled by a man's insistence on paying. The best method for countering this level of hospitality is to slyly beat the host to the check, most easily on a supposed trip to the bathroom.

Level 3 Hospitality (code yellow): Exhibited between even cursory acquaintances, this usually involves lunch at a family's house. This includes the full mint tea ceremony upon completion of the meal. Helping the hostess with the cleanup is difficult to impossible.

Level 4 Hospitality (code orange): Dinner or lunch followed by dinner. It usually goes on late into the night, includes traditional music on the television, and is often accompanied by a polite offer to sleep over (usually turned down).

Level 5 Hospitality (code red): A true hostage-taking experience, this is hospitality gone cancerous. The host (notice an intimate relationship between "host" and "hostage") usually means well, desiring to drown immerse the recipient in his/her hospitality. Sadly, the affection is poorly placed, and the recipient is put on the defensive, overdosing on the hospitality. Meals don't taste as good because of the emotional charge, and ease and comfort is replaced by great anxiety. The only way out is a firm, almost rude insistence on an end to the proceedings.