December 13th-15th--I got off the train at the Marrakech train station at just a little after noon. And so, yes, even if there's nothing by that name anymore, I took the Marrakesh Express and I can probably die happy now. (Just to be clear, "Marrakesh" is the English spelling and "Marrakech" the French and therefore national spelling.)
The Moroccan dirham is stronger than both the Czech crown and the Russian ruble, interestingly enough. Currently, 11 dirhams equals one euro, and 7 dirhams equals one dollar. However, on the street, the easier to calculate ratio of 10 to 1 for the euro is used pretty universally by cab drivers and shopkeepers.
I took a cab to the city center for 40 dirhams and stepped out into the Djemma-el-Fna, the main square of the Medina, or old town. This square is one of the main attractions of Marrakech, and it's difficult to grasp at first. It's enormous and chaotic and colorful and dusty. And hot. I had been shedding layers on the train as the day moved on and we approached Marrakech, and it was easily 75 degrees F, a dry heat like the southwest US. In fact, the climate and environment is extremely similar, even to the nearby Atlas mountains which get up to Rocky Mountain heights. On the train, Magid told me that you can drive three hours from Marrakech and be skiing in the mountains, traveling the desert, or swimming in the ocean.
The Djemma-el-Fna
I had to walk around a bit to find my riad, or hotel, and I was immediately set upon by all kinds of people asking me if I needed to be guided somewhere, if I had a place to stay, if I wanted a henna tattoo, and come into my shop, come here, my friend! That's the general character of the place anyway, but the fact that I'm white was clearly the main motivator. I also got offered more drugs than get imported into the US every year. Seriously, like every other shop owner offered me hash when I said I didn't want to buy a scarf. I guess maybe it's the beard... Marrakech has become a big tourist town, and the white people have all the money and are the easy marks. Being able to speak French helped a lot, as I was at least able to respond to them in one of their own languages, but it was a lot to get used to at first.
The center of the riad
At the riad, I finally took a shower to wash off all my travel grime and set out to wander around in the souks, or shops. There are only a few different types of souks in terms of what they sell, so the competition is one of personality and timing, rather than of goods and prices.
This picture is for my new look, but also to show how low the door to my room was. I hit my head on that thing at least twelve times.
After a few minutes, a kid a few years younger than me came by and perfunctorily asked for a smoke before telling me he would take me to the tannery. I realized that there was going to be some kind of squeeze, but I followed, because I was interested in seeing the tannery. The kid's name was Youanis, and he led me up and down and around the narrow streets for about 10 minutes before we came to the tannery.
A man at the entrance gave me a bunch of mint leaves to hold to my nose as we went through, because the stink is pretty overpowering if you're not used to it. The guy said it would be 50 dirhams for the whole tour, which sounded fine to me.
At the end of the tour I was shuttled into the tannery souk adjacent, where I was given a sales pitch. I did end up buying something, as I was planning on doing all my Christmas shopping in Morocco, and did an OK job of haggling, though not great by any means. I got the price down 50%, but I managed to get better over the two days I was there, getting things for about 20% of the first asking price. The truth is, of course, that I have no idea if that's even good, and if I got robbed blind.
After I left the souk, the tour guide demanded 100 dirhams for the tour. I laughed and gave him the 50 he had asked for previously. Youanis led me back to the square and asked for 50 more. He was kind of pushy, which irritated me, and I gave him 20, which sort of satisfied him.
This was the point where I started to really dislike the culture of the market and souks. It teaches you to ignore almost everyone, and it's often difficult to get people to accept no for an answer. They'll even pull you by the arm sometimes. The number of times I had to fend people of exhausted and annoyed me. I was seeing a lot of interesting stuff, but I wasn't feeling comfortable or relaxed at any point--of course, that was kind of the point of the trip.
I went out into the main square and did the snake thing, too. If you can see in the one picture, the guy was literally holding a cobra in my face. I don't really understand how any of that works, how they calm them and tame them so much.
I did a little more shopping, and then wandered around the main square as night fell. They had set up a huge screen on one side for the film festival, and were showing V for Vendetta for some reason.
The Djemma-el-Fna changes dramatically at night. Storytellers, acrobats, and musicians take over one side, drawing big circles of people. On the other side a huge food stall area gets set up, with the men calling out to everyone to come to their particular place. Again, the food is all essentially the same and priced the same, so everything depends on the personality of the guys working at each place.
I wandered through for a bit, then settled on one place for no particular reason. I met a British couple at the table who had been skiing in the mountains during the day, and we compared notes on Marrakech. They agreed with many of my observations, but were more accustomed to them after five days.
Something that threw me was that after I had finished a plate of food, women and children would come up with plastic bags and ask for the scraps. I gave them what I could, but with a weird sense of shame because they were so businesslike about dumping my chicken bones into their bags.
At the same time, that dinner was when my opinion of Morocco started to change. The guys at my place were funny and relaxed and always in friendly competition with the guys across the way who had less people eating. While I still had issues with the personal space stuff and the open deceit and culture of the marketplace, I started to have a better sense of humor about it. The trick was always to remain calm and have some perspective of just what was going on. I don't think that the culture in the marketplace will ever be my culture, but I was able to accept it more.
After dinner I went back to the riad, tired and overwhelmed but excited to do more on Friday.
Friday morning I went up onto the riad's terrace and met Kihei, a guy my age from New Mexico doing a 9-month trip around the world by himself. I was duly impressed. We both had plans to see a famous garden north of the Medina, so we went together. He's an architecture and urban planning student, and we went by the big mosque, the Koutoubia, on our way.
Getting into the new part of town was the perfect thing to do. It's still very much Morocco, but somehow more real, with more modern concerns and rhythms as opposed to the time warp of much of the Medina.
We stopped at a cafe and sat behind an older French woman and her young Moroccan escort. Probably not a bad vacation, I suppose.
The Jardins Majorelle, named for and founded by a French painter, were gorgeous. The painted blues and yellow contrasted sharply with the color palette of the rest of the city, and there were plants from all over the world.
After the gardens, we returned to the Medina and walked into the new Cyber Park on the edge, a spacious and beautiful park with free internet posts all over the place. Probably the most modern and progressive city feature I saw on the whole trip, interestingly enough. Kihei stayed there for a while and I moved back into the market to do more shopping and get up on top of our riad to watch the sunset.
Up against the wall of the Medina
My FIFTH witnessed car crash!
The Koutoubia
The sunset happened at around 5:30, right at the same time as the evening call to prayer. It had startled me the night before, and this time I was ready to record it, because it didn't sound anything like I expected. It was pretty amazing to watch the sun go down and hear the speakers around the city start calling out, growing in volume until the speaker closest to my riad blared out. Just press play below and look at this picture to get a sense of the atmosphere--it gets better after 30 seconds or so.
After the call to prayer, I played some guitar on the terrace as I waited for Kihei to come back. After one song, I heard applause from somewhere. I stood up and saw a young Moroccan girl hanging up laundry on the other side of the wall on her part of the roof. She asked if she could listen, and so she sat on the wall for a while while I played.
Kihei came back and we went out so I could finish shopping and meet up with some people he had met the night before. I was looking for some mint tea to bring home, and when I asked someone he led us around the streets for a while before coming to an herbalists' souk with four guys inside. I was a little nervous given some of the stories I had heard from Paul Newman and my friend Ade, especially when they started to close the door, but everything turned out alright. I know that sometimes tourists have gotten into situations where they are forced to buy large amounts of drugs, or just robbed when they think they are shopping, etc.
After the herbalist, we met up with the people Kihei knew and hung out for a while until going to dinner in the square again. I went to the same place I had gone the night before, and convinced them to give me a discount for returning with a friend.
Afterwards, we ate snails in a broth at a booth off to the side. While we were there, a film crew came by, filming a cute blond British woman in makeup being shown around Marrakech and reacting over-cutely to everything. They came to our snail booth, and we ended up getting interviewed about our Marrakech experience. I'm sure we sounded like idiots.
We finished the night playing guitar up on the terrace with a (I'm going to spell this wrong) chicha, or hookah between us. Amazing time. At around 1 AM, I went down to pack.
I decided to keep the guitar after all. However, this posed a bit of a problem because of all the stuff I had bought in Morocco. I could only check one bag with the airline, and have only one carry-on. But then I had an idea. I took the strings off the guitar and pushed as many of my clothes inside as I could--underwear, long underwear, a t-shirt, a hat, etc. This gave me enough room to fit everything in my bag.
And then I was ready to go back to Dublin to catch my return flight home.
The Moroccan dirham is stronger than both the Czech crown and the Russian ruble, interestingly enough. Currently, 11 dirhams equals one euro, and 7 dirhams equals one dollar. However, on the street, the easier to calculate ratio of 10 to 1 for the euro is used pretty universally by cab drivers and shopkeepers.
I took a cab to the city center for 40 dirhams and stepped out into the Djemma-el-Fna, the main square of the Medina, or old town. This square is one of the main attractions of Marrakech, and it's difficult to grasp at first. It's enormous and chaotic and colorful and dusty. And hot. I had been shedding layers on the train as the day moved on and we approached Marrakech, and it was easily 75 degrees F, a dry heat like the southwest US. In fact, the climate and environment is extremely similar, even to the nearby Atlas mountains which get up to Rocky Mountain heights. On the train, Magid told me that you can drive three hours from Marrakech and be skiing in the mountains, traveling the desert, or swimming in the ocean.
The Djemma-el-Fna
The center of the riadAt the riad, I finally took a shower to wash off all my travel grime and set out to wander around in the souks, or shops. There are only a few different types of souks in terms of what they sell, so the competition is one of personality and timing, rather than of goods and prices.
This picture is for my new look, but also to show how low the door to my room was. I hit my head on that thing at least twelve times.
After a few minutes, a kid a few years younger than me came by and perfunctorily asked for a smoke before telling me he would take me to the tannery. I realized that there was going to be some kind of squeeze, but I followed, because I was interested in seeing the tannery. The kid's name was Youanis, and he led me up and down and around the narrow streets for about 10 minutes before we came to the tannery.
A man at the entrance gave me a bunch of mint leaves to hold to my nose as we went through, because the stink is pretty overpowering if you're not used to it. The guy said it would be 50 dirhams for the whole tour, which sounded fine to me.
At the end of the tour I was shuttled into the tannery souk adjacent, where I was given a sales pitch. I did end up buying something, as I was planning on doing all my Christmas shopping in Morocco, and did an OK job of haggling, though not great by any means. I got the price down 50%, but I managed to get better over the two days I was there, getting things for about 20% of the first asking price. The truth is, of course, that I have no idea if that's even good, and if I got robbed blind.
After I left the souk, the tour guide demanded 100 dirhams for the tour. I laughed and gave him the 50 he had asked for previously. Youanis led me back to the square and asked for 50 more. He was kind of pushy, which irritated me, and I gave him 20, which sort of satisfied him.
This was the point where I started to really dislike the culture of the market and souks. It teaches you to ignore almost everyone, and it's often difficult to get people to accept no for an answer. They'll even pull you by the arm sometimes. The number of times I had to fend people of exhausted and annoyed me. I was seeing a lot of interesting stuff, but I wasn't feeling comfortable or relaxed at any point--of course, that was kind of the point of the trip.
I went out into the main square and did the snake thing, too. If you can see in the one picture, the guy was literally holding a cobra in my face. I don't really understand how any of that works, how they calm them and tame them so much.
I did a little more shopping, and then wandered around the main square as night fell. They had set up a huge screen on one side for the film festival, and were showing V for Vendetta for some reason.
The Djemma-el-Fna changes dramatically at night. Storytellers, acrobats, and musicians take over one side, drawing big circles of people. On the other side a huge food stall area gets set up, with the men calling out to everyone to come to their particular place. Again, the food is all essentially the same and priced the same, so everything depends on the personality of the guys working at each place.
I wandered through for a bit, then settled on one place for no particular reason. I met a British couple at the table who had been skiing in the mountains during the day, and we compared notes on Marrakech. They agreed with many of my observations, but were more accustomed to them after five days.
Something that threw me was that after I had finished a plate of food, women and children would come up with plastic bags and ask for the scraps. I gave them what I could, but with a weird sense of shame because they were so businesslike about dumping my chicken bones into their bags.
At the same time, that dinner was when my opinion of Morocco started to change. The guys at my place were funny and relaxed and always in friendly competition with the guys across the way who had less people eating. While I still had issues with the personal space stuff and the open deceit and culture of the marketplace, I started to have a better sense of humor about it. The trick was always to remain calm and have some perspective of just what was going on. I don't think that the culture in the marketplace will ever be my culture, but I was able to accept it more.
After dinner I went back to the riad, tired and overwhelmed but excited to do more on Friday.
Friday morning I went up onto the riad's terrace and met Kihei, a guy my age from New Mexico doing a 9-month trip around the world by himself. I was duly impressed. We both had plans to see a famous garden north of the Medina, so we went together. He's an architecture and urban planning student, and we went by the big mosque, the Koutoubia, on our way.
Getting into the new part of town was the perfect thing to do. It's still very much Morocco, but somehow more real, with more modern concerns and rhythms as opposed to the time warp of much of the Medina.
We stopped at a cafe and sat behind an older French woman and her young Moroccan escort. Probably not a bad vacation, I suppose.
The Jardins Majorelle, named for and founded by a French painter, were gorgeous. The painted blues and yellow contrasted sharply with the color palette of the rest of the city, and there were plants from all over the world.
After the gardens, we returned to the Medina and walked into the new Cyber Park on the edge, a spacious and beautiful park with free internet posts all over the place. Probably the most modern and progressive city feature I saw on the whole trip, interestingly enough. Kihei stayed there for a while and I moved back into the market to do more shopping and get up on top of our riad to watch the sunset.
Up against the wall of the Medina
My FIFTH witnessed car crash!
The Koutoubia
After the call to prayer, I played some guitar on the terrace as I waited for Kihei to come back. After one song, I heard applause from somewhere. I stood up and saw a young Moroccan girl hanging up laundry on the other side of the wall on her part of the roof. She asked if she could listen, and so she sat on the wall for a while while I played.
Kihei came back and we went out so I could finish shopping and meet up with some people he had met the night before. I was looking for some mint tea to bring home, and when I asked someone he led us around the streets for a while before coming to an herbalists' souk with four guys inside. I was a little nervous given some of the stories I had heard from Paul Newman and my friend Ade, especially when they started to close the door, but everything turned out alright. I know that sometimes tourists have gotten into situations where they are forced to buy large amounts of drugs, or just robbed when they think they are shopping, etc.
After the herbalist, we met up with the people Kihei knew and hung out for a while until going to dinner in the square again. I went to the same place I had gone the night before, and convinced them to give me a discount for returning with a friend.
Afterwards, we ate snails in a broth at a booth off to the side. While we were there, a film crew came by, filming a cute blond British woman in makeup being shown around Marrakech and reacting over-cutely to everything. They came to our snail booth, and we ended up getting interviewed about our Marrakech experience. I'm sure we sounded like idiots.
We finished the night playing guitar up on the terrace with a (I'm going to spell this wrong) chicha, or hookah between us. Amazing time. At around 1 AM, I went down to pack.
I decided to keep the guitar after all. However, this posed a bit of a problem because of all the stuff I had bought in Morocco. I could only check one bag with the airline, and have only one carry-on. But then I had an idea. I took the strings off the guitar and pushed as many of my clothes inside as I could--underwear, long underwear, a t-shirt, a hat, etc. This gave me enough room to fit everything in my bag.
And then I was ready to go back to Dublin to catch my return flight home.
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