Breaking News: Morocco Now Officially Part of Europe

It might make some Swiss people gnaw more holes into their cheese, but I have it on expert authority that Morocco is now -officially- a part of Europe. The U.N. has yet to be informed, but if you listen closely, you can hear the cheers from here as thousands of Moroccans learn that their dream of becoming Europeans has been made official with one fell swipe of a compatriot's credit card at the Portland International Airport.

According to the good folks at Delta Airlines, who today charged my friends $50 -each- for their additional suitcases as they checked in for their 17 hour flight to Casablanca, the Cherifian Kingdom is indisputably considered a European country by them.

Well aware of the new flight restrictions, my friends had double-checked Delta's website over a week ago to confirm the number of luggage they could check in for an international flight. All signs seemed to indicate one bag-- unless you happened to read the fine print of the fine print. My husband, however, found the two lines of small print at the very bottom that indicated that international travelers* are entitled to the more reasonable two bags of luggage**.

So our friends resolutely set off to the airport at 4:30 a.m., confident in their quantity of duffels, only to be told by the lady behind the counter that Morocco is, in fact, considered a part of Europe and that they would therefore be charged additional baggage fees. Wisely, our friends had brought along the print out of Delta's webpage explaining the exception to the baggage rules.

Nevertheless, the Delta staff of Portland is far more educated in world geography than their website content writers. The manager was called over and, after a few moments of tense scrutiny of my friends, their print out, and their tickets, this wise man had his eureka moment when he recalled --surely from some dim memory of high school history class-- that Morocco had once-upon-a-time been a French colony. Thus, it could be considered a part of France (someone please inform President Sarkozy) and therefore Delta was justified in charging my friends for their extra bags. The manager even insisted that this particular exception to geographical boundaries was printed on the Delta webpage. As in so many other ways, Morocco is clearly the exception to the exception to the rule.

Not to be beaten so easily, our normally withdrawn and passive friend politely but firmly informed these two wayward geographers that all such claims to French sovereignty and territoriality were moot as of 1956 and the Moroccan independence, and that the last time he'd checked the map, Morocco was indeed still a part of the African continent. Clearly, Delta operates using a different map, because my friends were still forced to pony up the moolah they'd planned on spending on harira and chebakiyyah in Jemaa El Fna.

During their stopover in New York our friends called to regale us with this seriocomic escapade which adds insult to intelligence to the varied pleasures of air travel: full-body scans, over-salted peanuts, and the surprisingly regular "random" selection of folks of complexions a touch darker than peaches-n-cream***. Incensed, my husband got on the horn on our friends’ behalf and placed a call to Delta; he spent 24 minutes on the phone with the customer service rep as the latter tried in vain to locate the manager's purported fine print of Morocco's inclusion amongst the blessed lands of Europa. Finally, my husband was transferred to an "Website Navigation Specialist" who conceded after only a few more minutes that, indeed, Morocco is a part of Africa.

Thank god my friends had the forethought to print out Delta's webpage, otherwise they might've let themselves be bullied into not only paying the extra charges (which they intend to dispute upon their return Stateside), but worse, into believing what I can only surmise (through past experience with airport personnel) the Delta staff must've thought of them: that they were ignorant immigrants with accented English who couldn't possibly know better than the well-trained people at Delta. The belittlement of immigrants, even unintended, is a common occurrence amongst the so-called professionals of the service, hospitality and travel industries. I wouldn’t be too upset if airport staff received a tenth of cultural-sensitivity training (i.e. “how not to insult the intelligence of people from other backgrounds than yours”) in additional to all that “10 ways to spot a terrorist” coaching I assume they receive.


*Other than to Europe, Australia, Canada, Latin America and Puerto Rico.
**Quite necessary as, like many immigrants returning home, Moroccans tend to visit their families laden with gifts that usually take up 1/2 to 3/4 of the luggage.
***My husband is always randomly selected when he flies; on our last trip we actually made it all the way to the boarding ramp without being selected until an African-American woman asked him to step aside. As she waved the metal detector around his body, he commented that he seemed to get such special treatment a lot, the lady just replied with a smile "it's because you're so handsome" before letting us get on the plane. That must explain it.

Image courtesy Gojko.