Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

It doesn't matter.  The real question is how did the chicken cross.  An American chicken crossing the road will stop when a car approaches and wait for it to pass.  A Moroccan chicken will, barring an imminent collision, just keep going and assume the car will go behind it.

Marrakech probably has half the stop signs and traffic lights of an American city the same size.  While there are highways that connect the city to others throughout Morocco, there is no highway within Marrakech itself.  So maybe it's because traffic only goes so fast. Maybe it's because the cars are smaller and more manueverable, as are the motorcycles, bicycles and the occasional donkey carts.  I can't say why, but there are distinct cultural assumptions at work that are dead giveaway.

Tis true.  So I can't tell you where said chicken is going, but I can tell you where it's from.

The Big Chicken

I made the kids fried chicken yesterday. I told them they better enjoy it because to get chicken here, I had to go to a LIVE CHICKEN STORE.  I had to tell the guy how many kilos I wanted. He picked a chicken, tied a string around its feet and hung it on a scale to weigh it. Then he  said Bismillah as he cut off its head, doused it in scalding water and put it in an automatic chicken-plucker. (An automatic chicken plucker--who knew?) Then he cut off the head and feet, gutted it, rinsed it off a couple of times and put it in a bag.

I had to take the chicken home, rub the whole thing inside and out with salt and rinse it with water. The salt kills the chicken smell. I'm not sure if that's dead chicken smell or live chicken smell. Better not to dwell on that point. Anyway, I put it in the fridge for a couple of hours while I recovered from the trauma.

When I took it out of the refridgerator, it looked and smelled like supermarket chicken. Hooray!!!!!

So then I fried it.  Yummy.