Thursday, June 09, 2005

Doing business in Morocco

Yesterday was my first day doing serious business in Morocco. The first adjustment (well the second after the jet lag) is to the working hours. Moroccans tend to start work late (9.30 or 10 am), take a three hour lunch (12-3) and then continue on until 6.30 or 7pm (or like tonight, 11pm)

The next adjustment is the requirement to drink large amounts of sweet mint tea at every meeting. Quite nice, but all that sugar can't be good for you...

The biggest difficulty for monophones such as myself and my American colleagues is that all meetings are conducted in French, so everything takes twice as long, and the chance of misunderstanding is magnified.

Finally, like all countries where labour is cheap, there seems to be endless numbers of 'gophers' hanging around the fringes of every gathering.

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