Many years ago I went to Morocco with some other friends; two of us were from the U.K. and two from California. We were expecting an exotic landscape like nothing we'd seen before. What we saw was partly that and partly strangely familiar. The Brits were much amused (and still are; the subject comes up to this day whenever we reminisce about that trip) by our propensity to point out similarities between, say, the nastier parts of Casablanca and some of the grittier streets in Oakland; the dry landscapes and crazy highways of the countryside versus those found all over Southern California; etc. etc. And doesn't the view from the Atlas Mountains of those farms down there remind you of coming out of the Grapevine into the Central Valley on I-5?
So my friends will probably be particularly tickled to know that, when I was shopping at Costco yesterday, as I walked among the food demo stands with the employees touting the virtues of their tempura-encrusted shrimp and their fine ravioli in alfredo sauce, dodging shopping carts, precariously stuffed shelves of boxes teetering above my head, when I suddenly had to scramble to get out of the way of the heavy machinery driven by a man yelling "Forklift! Forklift!"...
I was immediately transported back to the narrow alleyways of Fez, where men on donkeys warned you to move it or be squished with calls of "Balak! Balak!"
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