How to find an apartment in Morocco:

1. Always start looking during Ramadan when nothing opens until late afternoon and people are grumpy and sleepy due to lack of food

2. Start looking one week after all the other Fulbrighters have taken all the good places

3. Try to find a Simsar (informal real estate agent) who speaks French with a stutter, that makes telephone communication and meeting up in weird places easiest.

4. Get your heart set on the perfect place and negotiate for hours before checking to see if the landlord will ACTUALLY write you a contract

5. Deal exclusively with landlords who have trouble with the law and are afraid of official documentation

6. Be thankful that the tax system here is such that if a landlord ever rents his apartment he is charged taxes for life… this makes people very willing to rent apartments legally

7. Appreciate when Simsars call your phone and hang up after two seconds so that they don’t get charged for the call, and then don’t pick up their phone for 30 minutes afterward when you call back.

8. Revel in the many times that a Simsar tells you he found the perfect place, sets up a showing through imcomprehensible stuttered French, and after long last, shows you just the front door b/c he doesn’t have a key to get inside.

9. Laugh when your Simsar calls the Fulbright commission to demand a bribe for getting you an official lease.

10. Make sure your roommate is violently ill throughout the apartment hunt process and has to search high and low for a café open in Ramadan with a bathroom where she can vomit.

Follow these steps and you should have a perfectly peachy time finding a place to live in Morocco.

Still homeless