Morocco Part 2

8/9

Today we left Casablanca to take the train to Marrakesh. Part of our group of friends had left early that morning to tour the Hassan II Mosque as they had not done so the day before, so they got to the train station half an hour or so before we did. This turned out to be very lucky, because there was a huge line at the train station, and by the time our friends had reached the front of the line, there were no more 1st class tickets left and the line behind them was a good half hour wait. Normally, 1st class wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but on trains in Morocco, only 1st class is air conditioned. When it’s over 100 degrees and you’re wearing long pants and ¾ length sleeves, air conditioning (and an actual reserved seat…2nd class doesn’t have reserved seats so you risk standing outside a compartment for three hours) becomes well worth the extra fifty dirham. But, we didn’t have that choice, so we got the true Moroccan experience of riding the train without AC.

When we arrived at the station, our friends had already bought us tickets, and we grabbed a few snacks for the three hour ride to Marrakesh. Once on the train, we had to split up our group to find seats in the compartments, but we all found seats, so it was ok. There were two Moroccans in our compartment who were (I assume) fasting for Ramadan, so we all tried to be as sneaky and unobtrusive as possible while taking sips of water and bites of chocolate wafer cookies and cheese and onion chips (which did not smell sneaky at all). I felt bad, but it was a three hour train ride right during lunch time and I hadn’t eaten breakfast.

For most of the ride, I looked out the window. I was in Africa, and I felt like it. The landscape was covered in acacia trees and scrubby bushes and desert-like burnt dirt, exactly what you expect non-Sahara Africa to look like. It hit everyone in our compartment about the same time (except the Moroccans of course) and we all just looked at each other and smiled. We were here.

We had to ask the people in our compartment which stop was Marrakesh, because the stops didn’t have clear signs announcing the cities, and there were no announcements on the train. But we found it nonetheless, and the Marrakesh train station is really nice. It was very well air conditioned (a priority through this entire trip for me) and full of stores and fast-food restaurants, some of which were, mercifully, open. Unfortunately the open restaurant we chose was McDonalds. The menu was similar to that of the US, except it was less extensive and many items had different names, although the names were still in English. My favorite of these was a new name for a certain chicken sandwich: chicken mythic. I had the chicken nuggets, and to my surprise, the nutrition facts were on the actual container, including the calories and fat I was about to eat. The people I was with through this was horrible, but I love it. I hope this is in place in the US when I get back…but I doubt it will be. I might have to order something at a McDonald’s in the US just to check.  On that note, a friend who stayed in our riad with us saw a McDonald’s next to an obesity clinic in Casablanca, but didn’t get a picture! That would have been an immediate facebook update for me.

Fed and watered (or soda-ed), we left the train station and were immediately bombarded by taxi drivers. After much haggling that made be very glad to have an Arabic speaker and a few French speakers in our group, we found two taxis who would take us to our riad. We had the address of the riad, but we really had no idea where it was. We had booked the riad (big house in the city of Marrakesh, some were villas outside the city but we wanted one within walking distance of the center) online and had seen lots of pictures of the inside, but didn’t know what to expect from the area around the house. So with that undertone of anxiety and excitement, I threw my luggage in the trunk slid into the taxi with my friends. Within five minutes, we were almost T-boned by a bus on a roundabout, had come way to close to hitting pedestrians and motorcyclists, and our taxi driver was in a fight with the taxi driver from the other half of our group. I tried not to think that this argument was about the location of our riad, but I’m pretty sure it was. The paved streets in the new area of Marrakesh (New Town) were devoid of lane dividers, but I doubt the drivers would have respected lane divisions even if they had been there. Honestly, it takes a lot of skill to be able to drive in Morocco, especially Marrakesh, and I’m glad I will never have to do it. Once we entered the Medina (the old part of Marrakesh, where the souks and the main square and marketplace and basically everything you want to see are), the streets completely changed. They were paed with cobblestones or dirt with muddy and rocky areas, and were much narrower. Sidewalks disappeared, and donkey or horse-drawn carts, motorcycles and a few cars shared the road indiscriminately with pedestrians and street vendors selling their wares (blenders, clothes, tub-o-ware, fruit, dates, touristy stuff) on blankets and tables lining the buildings. The buildings were mostly three to five stories tall, built with brick walls covered over with plaster and painted a reddish brown that blended into the dirt in the streets.

The whole ride through the Medina, everyone in our taxi was holding on to each other for dear life as we careened through alleys packed with people, motorcycles and animals, our taxi driver honking incessantly to part the sea of bodies. Then our taxi stopped in a small square, just in the middle of the road, which frustrated the motorcyclists around us. He got out of the taxi and, confused, we followed. He handed us our bags, pointed down a narrow alley, and motioned us to follow him. We looked at each other and around at the dirt streets and walls with plaster crumbling off, shrugged, and followed him down the alley. After a five or so minute walk through an alley, down another busy street (which was fun with our bags) and down another alley, he stopped at a wooden door in the wall and knocked. The door opened, and we went inside our riad.

To be honest, at this point we were all (at least I was) a little nervous about how the riad would actually turn out given the adventure of a drive here. It was even better than the pictures online. We stepped inside to a indoor-outdoor courtyard that went through the middle of all three floors of our riad. The ground floor was paved with stone floors and had a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a lounge area and a splash pool. The second floor housed four of the six bedrooms, all of which had queen sized beds and an attached bathroom with giant showers. And I mean giant…you could have a party in those things. The top floor was partially an outdoor rooftop patio with lounge chairs and a few couches. There was also the sixth bedroom (with its own bathroom), a laundry room (seeing this made me way too happy…I can not tell you how much I will appreciate being able to do my own laundry with a washing machine and dryer whenever I want when I go home), and a massage room. Our riad was also staffed: we always had someone at the riad (including a night guard) who would let us in, so we didn’t need keys. We had a chef who made us breakfast every morning (details to come), and the riad offered massages, manicures, pedicures, and hammams (Turkish bath…I almost did this again).  And most importantly, the proprieter of the riad was Ahmed. He was the best: he arranged everything we wanted to do, called us taxis with reasonable rates and AC, suggested places for lunch and dinner, and in general put up with sixteen overexcited American college students for three days. Yes, we left him a well-earned tip in the end. The riad looked very Moroccan: the walls all covered over in white plaster with tile work in certain places and pointed arches in walkways. The walkways to the bathrooms from the bedrooms were hung with curtains, and light curtains separated the lounge and dining areas on the first floor from the entry area and splash pool.

We were pretty tired from our traveling and very excited about our riad, so we decided to just hang out there until going out for dinner. We all picked our rooms and roommates, and then changed into suits and cooled off in the splash pool, which felt fantastic. After cooling off, we laid out in the sun on the rooftop patio for awhile, enjoying the view of the other roofs around us: satellite dishes and potted plants sticking up from plaster-topped flat roofs and rooftop patios.

We started getting hungry before sunset, and we left to walk to the main square in Marrakesh (Djemma el Fna) about 7pm. People were still holding fast now, but many were preparing for the 7:30 break by making soup and getting out bread and dates. Our riad was only a ten-minute walk from the main square, which was incredibly convenient. The souks (markets) were just a little bit further from the main square, so we were in prime shopping location. Not that you needed to go to the souks to do shopping; the entire way from our riad to the main square was lined with little shops. They sold leather slippers (very popular…tons of Moroccans wear the kind with pointed toes), musical instruments, leather goods like wallets, spices, mirrors, cedar boxes, clothes, ceramics, metalwork, hookahs, jewelry, and other goods.

As we had never been there before, we weren’t sure when we would reach the main square. But when the narrow streets became wider and wider and finally opened into a massive open area full of people, women seated on stools painting henna, and stalls selling all kind of foods and products, we knew this was it. First, we found a tasty-looking restaurant and sat down at a table on their rooftop terrace where we had a view of the whole square and the beautiful setting sun. The setting sun also meant that it was time to break fast, so everyone working in the restaurant stopped to eat for about twenty minutes right after we were seated, so we had plenty of time to peruse the menu. Breaking fast was one of my favorite things to see in Marrakesh. Even with the difficulties of being a tourist in Morocco during Ramadan, I’m so glad we were there then because I really got to see first hand an extremely important part of Islam (one of the five pillars) and of Moroccan culture. Like many other restaurants in Morocco, the menu had a mix of Moroccan and French dishes. I had tangine (a very common Moroccan dish, a kind of meat and vegetable stew eaten with bread and served in a ceramic dish with a cone-shaped cover) with lamb, prunes and almonds, and it was very good. For dessert, I had crème brulee…because I could.

After dinner, we went back out into the square…which had come alive. It was completely packed with people, and motorcyclists were zooming everywhere; weaving between herds of people and horse or donkey-drawn carts. Even the occasional car cut through the square, honking its way through the masses. Despite basically being a thoroughfare, the square was simply a giant open area and made no attempt to control the flow of traffic of all kinds. I was incredibly overwhelmed at first. There were street vendors everywhere, and groups of musicians or people trying to sell drums were playing constantly, so a rhythmic, almost trance-inducing beat of drums was always audible below the chatter of passersby, yells of shopkeepers and honks of vehicles. One of the street vendors toward the middle of the square was cooking something in his stall, and a huge plume of smoke or steam billowed out of his cart in a great column and then dispersed twenty-five yards or so into the sky to hang over the whole square. I could hear spinets of people speaking and bargaining in all different languages, mainly Moroccan Arabic, French, English and Spanish.

We walked over to Koutoubia Mosque, which was on the far end of the square. Prayer had just finished, so they were picking up the prayer rugs from outside the mosque. So many people had come to pray during Ramadan that half a football field-sized area was fenced off from the main square to accommodate all the worshippers, most of whom preferred to pray outside the mosque, probably because it’s cooler at night. It was hot, but at night it was pretty pleasant, even in my pants and ¾ length sleeves. Funnily enough, it’s acceptable to be a little less covered at night than during the day, and in the main square I saw some Moroccan women in clothes similar to mine, whereas during the day I had seen only women in the tent-like dress and head covering, some with face veils and a few even wore gloves to cover their hands, so their eyes were literally the only part of their body showing.

I’m getting through the Morocco blogs slowly but surely…blogs on my last three days in Morocco are soon to come!

Love from Marrakesh,
Ginny