"What are you worried about? I have a girlfriend already. She's pretty, she goes to school over there." He gestured vaguely back at the city. "Find other girls. Like those." I pointed at a gaggle of elderly women from a coach tour as Ann and I left the bench and walked further into the shade of the glossy Hassan II mosque, the patterned minaret throwing a long shadow across the courtyard. My stilted French translated everything into odd pronouncements. He looked intently into my face. "Your friend has brown eyes, like my girlfriend. You have blue eyes. I like blue eyes." The Casablancan teenager, still without a name, used the familiar tu. "Have you told your girlfriend this?" "My girlfriend? She's in the trash." We left the mosque an hour later and found him waiting, enthusiasm undimmed. He didn't show any compunction about trying to pick us up in the shadow of Morocco's largest mosque; it seemed to be a common cruising ground for him and his friends. We ignored them the entire walk back to the city center, finally losing them several hours after they started following us. We turned into an overgrown park, headed towards the abandoned French cathedral. Stained glass glinted behind the boarded-over windows as birds darted out of the pseudo-Islamic patterns cut in the white walls. "English! English! Fucky Fucky!" a new voice shouted behind us. We kept trying the entire trip: sunglasses helped, did long skirts? Or did jeans work better because you were more blatantly a tourist? We wore our hair back, always wore button down shirts that covered our arms. We tried completely ignoring the men, then settled on perfecting a curt "Bonjour" or "Bonne nuit" that wasn't as incitingly rude as silence, but didn't invite anything further. I pretended to understand less and less French. Ann started to speak nonsense in German: "So, was dakst du uber des Bankangestellte? Er ist schon, nein?" "Hey," said two boys in Marrakesh as they followed us across Djemaa el Fna square from an orange juice stand. "You spoke English last night." "What do you think of the Bank teller?" Ann said again, in German. "He is cute, no?" An old man sitting in a doorway, dressed in a djellaba, looked up. "Wie geht's?" "Gut!" Ann shouted back, as the boys hurriedly conferred in French on details of our appearance. By the time they'd decided we were indeed the girls they were looking for, we were inside our hotel. That same night two young guys had pulled us into their shop and started tying scarves around our heads, standing behind us and pressing themselves up against us rhythmically. "Ooh, look! Fatima! Gazelle! How many camels? How many camels for your woman? Fatima!" They spun us around so we could admire ourselves in ornate mirrors, western features bizarrely peering out from under elaborately-wrapped scarves dyed tourist-bright colors. "Where are you from?" they asked, as we tried to extricate ourselves from the scarves, the price of which had quadrupled since they'd managed to pull us off the street. "America." "Ah, fish and chips!" "No, that's England," Ann said, as she tried to squirm away. "Ah, chip butty!" "England again," Ann said as we made our getaway. And it was like that every night. Comments of "Belles filles! Belles filles!" followed us up the streets. "You need husband? You need gigolo?" "Hola chicas!" "You are French? English? Belgian? Spanish? Italian? Deutch? Swedish?" Strangely enough, they never guessed American. "Fish and chips! Fish and chips!" "Okie dokie. How now, brown cow?" We left the hotel to forage for food in Rabat, and were followed by a group of three boys, one of whom spoke near-perfect English in a bizarre Brooklyn-Moroccan accent. "I want to shoot the breeze with you! Nothing else, only the breeze!" Ann and I continued in silence, striding along the streets like we knew where we were going. "OK, I have a joke for you. How is Manhattan like pantyhose? Flat Bush!" Ann and I both cracked a smile, as hard as we tried not to. The Brooklyn-Moroccan's friend begged, in English, to be allowed to take us to Meknes in his car, to travel with us. "I like you," he said. "I really, really like you. Why do you want to go to Meknes, anyway? I work in the royal stables. Come to the palace with me and we can ride horses on the beach. The spirits have met from far away for this one brief time. The bodies should follow." We decided to forgo the royal stables and headed for the train station. The conductor arrived to look at our tickets and wearily reeled off a set of instructions. All I could understand was that we had to change trains somewhere, and the conductor exasperatedly delivered us into the hands of our compartment-mates, three young men in business suits, joking with each other over piles of paper and folders. We were all on the wrong train, it turned out, headed to Tangier, and had to get off at Sidi Kacem and change trains. Sidi Kacem, as far as I could tell from the guidebook map one of the men pointed at, was a town of middling size in the middle of nowhere. "You will help us find the right train?" I found myself asking them despairingly. "Of course," they said. Half the passengers on the Tangier train, it seemed, had gotten on by mistake, and at Sidi Kacem people poured off to stake out sitting places under the orange trees. One of the men, Abdelkabir, apologized for not being able to speak English. "No, no, it's not a problem," I said. "It's certainly not like I can speak Berber." "What?" he asked disbelievingly, like he'd heard what I'd said just fine but couldn't process it. "I don't speak Berber," I repeated. He laughed and laughed and laughed. His friends thought it was hilarious as well; not necessarily the idea of a foreign girl, an American tourist, actually knowing Berber, but of even having thought about it, of perceiving it as a lack that I couldn't speak their language. They probably knew Arabic in addition to Berber, and used French for their jobs; yet the prospect of a foreigner knowing or even expressing regret for not knowing their language was utterly absurd to them. "You should come to Er Rachidia," he said, writing down his phone number and address in my notebook. "But if you come to my house, you will not be able to speak with my sister. She doesn't speak French. Only Berber." Two nights later, in Fez, we threw swimsuits, soap and shampoo into plastic bags and set out for the steam baths near the hotel. A teenager spotted the plastic shopping bags and followed us. "You are going to the hammam?" He shouted in English. "I give you Berber massage! Berber massage! What? Why not? You are lesbians?" We paid a few dirhams each and wandered through a series of tiled rooms, stepping over channels cut in the floor for water to drain away. There were grandmothers with their grandchildren, mothers with their daughters, a few teenagers, groups of women friends who sat chatting while they combed the tangles out of their children's hair. In the last room, two fountains in the back wall gushed hot and cold water. We picked up two big rubber tubs and filled them, trying to balance the temperature of the water like the other women. A young girl, long and thin in plain beige underpants, took a particular interest in us. She brought us tub after tub of water, dragging them across the floor behind her. We didn't know how either to properly thank her or get her to stop. All we could do was say "thank you" over and over, using one of the only Arabic words we knew: Shokran, Shokran. Her mother's friends left and she gestured for us to come sit nearer to her. She tried to communicate something that neither Ann nor I could understand. Someone exasperatedly fetched a woman who could speak French and Arabic; when she said the girl just wanted some of our shampoo, I felt incredibly stupid. The girl entreatingly held out a shallow plastic tray and I poured her some Superdrug Apple shampoo. Her mother sniffed it before she lathered it into her daughter's hair. What seemed like hours later, we were limp and overheated with the steam and scalding hot water. The girl finally decided that it was all right to allow us to use cold water. Shokran, we said, and stupid as I felt, all I could think to do was pour her some conditioner. Cleaner than we'd ever been in our lives, our hair dripping wet, we went in search of food. We were followed by a young, greasy-looking guy. "I need a nice girl! Nice girl for relationship! I want to practice my English!" We stopped in front of a café, pretending to read the menu. The owner immediately came out and sat us down; we tried to figure out a vegan meal, realizing we'd just taken refuge in a rotisserie. "You've been to the hammam?" he asked, and I panicked, wondering if he'd been watching us, until I realized that we'd ended up practically across the street from the baths, with our hair visibly soaking. As we picked vegetables out of a chicken tangine, the man at the table next to us poured us mint teas from his pot. He was Tunisian, he said, and had never met an "anglaise" who spoke French. I said we were actually American. "Am I disturbing you?" he asked, serious and intent. "Talking to you, am I bothering you?" "No," I was able to say honestly. He spoke with genuine enthusiasm about how all three of us were foreigners here, how we'd traveled from far away and ended up in the same place on the same night. About how extraordinary that was. Then he gestured towards Ann, pouring us the last of his mint tea. "Tell her. Translate that into English. I want her to understand."