My mother saw poverty and ignorance, noise and dirt. She felt sympathy for the people, but the weight of it was too much to bear. Morocco made her feel helpless, even trapped, because she put herself in the skin of the Moroccans themselves. Gilles on the other hand experienced Morocco as a kind of playground of the imagination, a place whose dysfunctionality leaves it free to improvise. The haphazard combinations of tradition and modernity defy all logic. In Morocco the impossible is bound to happen. He responded with innocence and childish egoism, and a solidarity that was only skin deep. Viktor's reaction was the strangest, because it was hardly a reaction at all. He seemed unsurprised and unimpressed, commenting or questioning only rarely. Perhaps this was the most honest reaction, because after all, Morocco is ordinary in its own terms. Why should one be surprised by the call to prayer, or exclaim with wonder at a djelleba?