March 15-16
We took a 3.5 hour train ride from Casablanca to Marrakesh. We had booked a ryad through AirBNB which looked great, but they had stopped responding to our communication regarding a transport from the train station which put us in a sticky situation. But… cool street art as soon as we left the train station:
Note: a ryad (also saw it spelled riad sometimes) is a standard home or guest house in Morocco that has an open air courtyard in the center that the rooms open onto. Think of a Spanish style courtyard.
So we knew the general part of town that we were staying in, the AirBNB name (different than the actual name of the ryad) and not much else to go on when we approached a taxi. Not the best way to negotiate a good price. But that was not our main concern. We have heard stories of people getting completely lost in the Medina and we had no way to contact our host. Our taxi dropped us close and told us to make a left and then a right and then another 6 turns and then it will be right there. Ok… but within seconds of getting out of the cab we had a new friend to help us find our location. There are men who basically find lost tourists and then charge them a fee to take them back to their lodging. Working with very little information from us, he was able to take us to the exact location of our ryad without any trouble. Michael tipped him a few dirham, but the guy quickly let us know that the tip was not NEARLY enough. So Michael had to negotiate with him. These types of negotiations became very common over the next few days. Sometimes we felt like winners. Sometimes we were clearly not.
Trickier at night:
Beautiful doors everywhere:
That first night, after dropping off our bags, we headed to the sports bar in town to try to watch the first day of March Madness. The bar is mostly a futbol bar, so I had reached out in advance to see if they’d play basketball for us. Big success! They told me it was no problem. Unfortunately whoever is in charge of responding to messages didn’t clear it with the people who were going to be working or didn’t have any authority to make this promise. As such, we arrived to the bar and were promptly told there was no way that any of the three TVs were going to play basketball. Cool. It was a pretty long taxi ride to get there, so we stayed and had a few beers while watching futbol.
On our second day in Marrakesh we set out to explore the Medina. But first we had to drop off laundry – which was conveniently next to Jardin Majorelle. Despite a bit of rain, we headed to the garden anyway. The garden is a 2.5 acre botanical garden in town created by a French artist, Paul Sinoir, in the 1930s. In the 1980s, in a state of disrepair, the property was purchased by Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé who restored it. No clue who Pierre is, but Yves Saint-Laurent was a famous fashion designer. The garden is home to the Berber Museum which seemed like a perfect first stop since it was still raining.
Note: this info came from the Jardin Majorelle website. The Berber people are among the original peoples of North Africa. Their history spans 9000 years. They have both a unique language and culture which are both African and Mediterranean. They created kingdoms but also vast territories organized into powerful, democratic, war-mongering, tribal communities. The Berber empires developed inland and were Muslim, but Judaism was also practiced and Sunni Islam majority took on a lot of Berber rituals. The majority of North Africa’s population is believed to be Berber in origin with an estimated 25-30 million still speaking the language. The Berber language is a melting pot of history and culture and has outlived Ancient Greek, Latin, Phoenician, and Egyptian languages. Just recently, the Berber language was recognized as an official language of Morocco and is now taught as a compulsory language in all schools.
The Berbers have a strong link to their land, a sense of community, hospitality, sharing of food and spirituality with influences from Mediterranean, African, Oriental, European and other international cultures.
The museum was really interesting with a few really beautiful exhibits displaying clothes, jewelry, tools and weapons. We couldn’t take pictures in the museum, but here are a few I found on the internet. The one room which displayed jewelry in glass cases was a fairly dark room with mirrors and lights on the ceiling that made the entire room look like it was filled with stars from all sides.
Here is also examples of their clothes and jewelry:
After the museum we spent ten or fifteen minutes exploring the rest of the gardens. It was small, but everything was incredibly colorful! The bright blue reminded me a lot of Casa Azul – Frida Kahlo’s home in Mexico.
There was also a memorial to Yves Saint-Laurent and the other guy:
When I die, all I ask is that any memorials constructed for me are much cooler this one.
After the gardens, we headed into the Medina to grab lunch and see what we could see. We wove through the streets to Jemaa el Fna which is the busiest square in the Medina. One side of this square has the souks and the other side is cafes and hotels with terraces and gardens to sit back, have an espresso and enjoy watching all the commotion.
Indigo apparently keeps the snakes away… not sure if that’s just something they say to tourists. I didn’t see any random snakes slithering around. But maybe that’s because the indigo is doing such a good job.
This is an argan press that makes argan oil. Now you know where all your fancy cosmetics are made… in this guy’s shop.
The main thing happening in Jemaa el Fna: selling. And they are selling everything. Every type of good you can think of and a variety of services that you didn’t know you wanted or needed.
During the day, the main food item sold is actually orange juice. I don’t know why the juice is so good here, but it is. There is also a wide variety of dates and nuts and olives.
One thing to be on the lookout for: henna artists. You wouldn’t think you’d need to be weary of these tiny women, but they are fierce. While taking a moment to pull up an article on my phone that had hints about which food stalls to visit, Michael was put on guard to keep vendors off of us (a task that takes a lot of effort). When a woman approached to sell henna, I was confident that my “maybe we’ll come back later” and “when I have it done I will come to you” and “yes, right here, we know where you will be” had been enough to momentarily satisfy this women, until she grabbed my hand and started drawing. No amount of pulling my arm away or telling her to stop was sufficient. I ended up with a henna tattoo. I think she has me by the pinky here:
Then came the haggling. She wanted 250 dirham – which is roughly 28 bucks for something that I definitely didn’t want. Now I had to negotiate on a service that I had refused in the first place. Ugh. We landed at 150. Still way too much – about 17 bucks. Apparently if you yell “tourist police” at the top of your lungs, they’ll run away and leave you alone. But that’s not really the mood or style we’re going for in our travels. Better off just putting this into a “you know for next time” bucket.
At this point might as well enjoy it – I paid for it. That’s right… glitter for extra good luck:
After this and a bit of wandering we saw the snake charmers. Now this is something that I have no interest in. The idea behind this is that the snakes are mesmerized by music and sort of hyptonotized. From a quick google search, snakes can’t actually hear the music being played but instead keep eye contact with the instrument and the player assuming that they are a threat to the snake. Ok – not too bad yet, but apparently some (not all but, meh, probably most) snake charmers capture wild cobras, remove their fangs and sew their mouths shut. The snakes, no longer able to eat, die of starvation after a few months. So we didn’t know that going into this moment, but we did know that there was some level of abuse to the snakes. We just didn’t know the details. I was happy to walk away knowing there was some mild level of abuse (not knowing how extreme it was). But Michael really need the pictures… that he later had to negotiate a price for:
We’re sorry for supporting the continued abuse of these animals.
After this we had to pop into a cafe for lunch (and to wash that crapola off my hand). The views from the terrace were really beautiful:
Later that night, we returned to the same square for dinner. The mostly open space in the center is replace with dozens of food stalls, each with one or two dudes trying anything and everything to get you to sit down and eat with them. It was a bit overwhelming, but the food was incredible.
After dinner and then a stop at a second stall so Michael could get more meat to eat, we wandered down to the end of the block to see Koutoubia Mosque and Minaret which were just beautiful lit up.
Three things to note from the day:
1. The man cooking our dinner at the food stall spoke four languages. Four. English and Arabic fluently. I didn’t hear him speak French, but everyone here speaks French. As for his Spanish, I heard him speaking with a group of Spanish speaking tourists, encouraging them to come eat his food. He claims his Spanish isn’t that good, but it was conversational and better than mine. Think of all the opportunities a person who speaks four languages would have in the US.
The guy on the right:
2. Marrakesh feels much less conservative than Casablanca. It’s likely because of all the tourists, but the men are more normal interacting with me. Also, even though the women still all have their heads covered, they are doing more things in public: riding bikes, riding motorcycles (with men, with other women, or by themselves), they are vendors, they are conducting business in the market by themselves, and more are eating out in public on their own. Also later in the visit when we get out by the commercial mall, women are out without their heads covered or wearing pants which we did not see in Casablanca. Could be representative of the neighborhoods we visited in both cities, but it’s definitely a feeling that I get walking around.
3. For about half a day Michael and I thought about buying a piece of furniture and shipping it home. We were thinking about a new dresser. The furniture is incredibly beautiful but it costs a lot to ship (obviously). We weren’t able to find a dresser we could agree on, but we found a bookshelf that was incredible. The woodwork was out of this world. So we asked for a price: 65 thousand dirham. That price includes shipping and is roughly $7k USD. Obviously not going to happen. About $900 of that is shipping costs. We went to walk away and the man asked Michael to negotiate. Michael said 20k dirham – which is a little over $2k USD all in. Still more than we want to pay, but so low that we thought it would be the end of the negotiation and we could walk away. Nothing like throwing out an insulting figure in a negotiation. They acted insulted and then proceeded to negotiate with us for another 15 minutes. We got them down all the way to 25k dirham. Read that again – we negotiated more than half off this thing. We still obviously walked away. We didn’t want a bookshelf that expensive! We didn’t even want to be in the negotiation! We thought our first bid would be enough to get out the door. The lessons learned: there is a lot of room to negotiate and don’t throw out a price if you don’t want the item… you might just get it.