Marrakech and Me - Part 1

I recognize that what I'm about to try to do is impossible. My trip to Marrakech was the single most indescribable event of my life, so by the very nature of the medium I'm using, I'm set to fail. I'll try though, because I've had at least 15 people ask me how the trip was, and I'm sort of sick of saying the same thing over and over.

Marrakech was amazing. That's a good place to start. It was also more foreign to me than any place I've ever been. One of my professors said that his trip to Marrakech was the first time he really recognized that he was really far from home. I'd agree.

Hopping off a four-hour flight and into the passenger seat of a cab, the driver of which holds a sign bearing your name, is disconcerting. It's far more disconcerting when you don't share a common language. (Ok, I took a year of French, but I can barely ask where the bathroom is, let alone make chit chat.) I was fortunate that Judd--the friend I was meeting in Marrakech--had booked a car to bring me; there was no way I'd be able to ask a cabbie myself. The drive was predictably silent between us, but my driver called out to his many friends in that strange Moroccan mix of French and Arabic, of which I understood none.

Once we reached the hotel (see left), I tipped the driver and checked in, using a halting combination of French and English. They told me the room would be ready at 12 (it was then 10:05am) so I decided to wait right outside until then, or until Judd showed up. After about 5 minutes, a man walked up to me and told me that my room was ready, so I followed him into a different building, and he spent about 15 minutes showing me all the empty rooms in his hotel, trying to get me to buy one. I was tired and in culture shock, so I didn't realize that the hotel he was showing me was in fact a different one than I had just checked in to. When he asked me to book a room, things became more clear and I excused myself. This sort of marketing, I'm told, is very common in Morocco. I did have an interesting conversation with him, though, in which I found out he'd worked previously at the Hilton in McLean, VA, very near where I live. Small world.

I went back outside, and after a few minutes, Judd showed up. He remarked that it was odd to turn down a random street in Morocco and have a close friend standing there. I'd agree. We got him checked in, and went to wander around Marrakech. Cue culture shock. The next few hours were sort of a blur, and it took me at least 3 hours before I was forming coherent statements again. When I first walked out onto the main square (see right), there were tons of people begging and hawking tourist services. Snake charmers and fresh juice venders abounded. A man walked up to me and shoved a monkey onto my shoulder, telling me in halting English to take a picture and pay him. I politely declined, and attempted to extricate the primate from my shoulder, to no avail. This guy was serious about having me take a snapshot and (especially) pay him. Have you ever tried to look annoyed and argue with a monkey on your shoulder? It was kind of novel, I guess, but didn't help my culture shock in the slightest.

We wandered off the square through tiny, windy streets brimming with small shops selling jeweled daggers, robes, arabesque lamps, hookahs, carved wooden boxes and figurines, pastries, fresh squeezed juices, handwoven rugs and scarves, locally-made leather shoes, fresh coconut cookies (very tasty), and all manner of goods you want to buy as a tourist. Motorbikes whizzed by inches from my foot down the narrow, crowded, twisting alleys, and I instantly became disoriented. If Judd hadn't been there, I'd probably still be wandering the streets.

Judd, a Modern Middle-Eastern Studies (MMES) major at Yale, filled me in on some of the background of the city. Most interesting was that much of the city's shops had evolved to conform to people's grand notions of the middle east (he called this the "Orientalist Fantasy"), despite the fact that it was a West African city, not in the Middle East at all. This explained all the snake-charmers and monkey-photographers. Judd also gave me a hat to wear that supposedly would help me blend in with the locals. Though, given that I have blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, I think this tactic was unsuccessful. Check out my hat--and how American I look--on the left.

Everyone in Marrakech tries to be your tour guide, because you'd be obliged to pay them at the end of the tour. This sounds kind of cynical, but it's the reality; often you have to just ignore people who're vying for your attention, lest you spend all your money paying people to show you to places on your map. We did follow one guy, though, who offered us a behind-the-scenes look at a tannery. Trudging nervously about a mile down a derelict, impoverished street in Marrakech, we eventually reached the entrance to the tannery--an open square filled with pools--where our guide handed us fistfuls of fresh mint leaves to sniff, telling us that the odor of the tannery would be unpleasant. He was right. 'The entire experience is fairly grisly,' I thought, stepping over camel entrails. I'm glad I saw it, but the tannery was kind of gross.

We stopped for lunch at a nice place--entirely outdoors, something you can only do in a desert country--where I got my first taste of traditional  Moroccan cuisine. I had a pastille, which was like a sopapia or a beignet filled with chicken and veggies. It was pretty good, but the sweetness got cloying after a while. We spent the afternoon visiting museums made from converted Koranic schools or palaces, which were architecturally interesting but otherwise lackluster. An interesting point is that since Moroccans eat pigeons as an appetizer, they're not a heavy presence on the street. Instead, cats seemed to have taken up residence, as you can see from the picture on the right, which was taken inside a converted palace.

It was around this time that I first tried Moroccan mint tea, one of my new favorite things in the world. It's essentially super-sweetened black or green tea, in which has been dumped massive amounts of fresh mint. It's like southern sweet tea, but warm and super minty. It's refreshing, and delicious, and if anyone wants to make me some, I'd not object. Judd and I stopped at a café on the main square for a pre-dinner cuppa, and I fell instantly in love.

Dinner was a nice affair. We took a taxi out to the suburbs of the new city (Marrkech has a new and old district; we were staying in the old) to an upscale Moroccan restaurant. I had Casablanca, a pretty good Moroccan beer that was reminiscent of Modelo Especial, and a chicken tajine. A tajine is a conical cookware piece that you use to steam meats and veggies in an oven or in the fire, and it's the most traditional type of Moroccan cooking. Mine was chicken with steamed pumpkin on top, and it was delicious. We also had a platter of olives which were tremendous. Pictured left: more pictures from the palace converted into a museum, because I don't have any pictures of food.

After dinner, we wandered around the new city, and found a shopping mall, where I had my first experience with ordering gelato in French. Eventually, the vender navigated around my atrocious accent and procured a scoop of strawberry for me. It tasted incredible in the heat. The new city is incredibly westernized; Judd tried to pop into the TGI Fridays for a brownie sundae, but I told him that if he went in I'd kill him. Talk about an exotic buzzkill.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering the main square, perusing the stalls and watching the performers. Marrakech really picks up after sundown, probably because it's so hot during the day. After a bit of wandering, we turned in to the hotel for the night, and prepared for next next day, which I'll describe in the next post.