Marrakech!

This place is crazy. It helps that our hotel room has a balcony overlooking the busiest street in the busiest part of town. Time in our room was always accompanied by the sounds of horse drawn carriages, scooters, donkey carts, cars, buses and people chattering along the streets below. Crossing the street through this medley of traffic is pretty confusing. You basically wade into the flow, and vehicles either slow down, stop, or swerve around you. Scary at first, but surprisingly effective, and we’ve not seen one person hit yet!


Mint tea to go.

Mosques are ever-present here. Most of the buildings are low (one or two stories), so the massive minarets tower over everything else. They’re beautiful, and they make great landmarks for navigation. Five times a day, loudspeakers broadcast the call to prayer. In a city with tons of mosques, this leads to overlapping, competing calls going on for several minutes. We got used to this over time, but the 4:30 a.m. call caught us pretty off-guard. Somehow we slept through it the first couple nights, and it took us a while after that to figure out that it was normal! Now if it does wake us up, we go straight back to sleep.

Door to a house in Marrakech, with the hand of Fatima.

We’re one block from the Djemaa el-Fna, the central square of the old town, and a really amazing place. During the day it’s a big open square, with stalls selling dried fruits and nuts, fresh squeezed orange juice, shoe polishers, and people scattered around the central pavement area selling various trinkets, doing henna art, dealing hashish, or anything else to try to make a few dirham.

A small square in Marrakech's medina (old town), in the middle of the souqs.

At night, Djemaa el-Fna fills with people, and it takes on an entirely new persona. Approaching the square feels like walking into another world – it’s daunting and mysterious, with a magical air. There are no lights in the square itself, so all you see is a sea of heads stretching out for about a hundred yards (literally thousands of people). They’re backlit by the bare white bulbs of the hundred or so food stalls, all seen through a haze of smoke given off by the grills.

The food is amazing, and so varied. So much so, that we’re dedicating a separate post to it. The waiters and cooks do double-duty as touts, trying to pull in people from the constant stream walking by. Some are persistent, some funny. Any eye contact is sure to result in some kind of exchange. Initially we tried to ignore the advances, but soon realized a brief discussion was more pleasant and they seemed to feel better about it (even if we didn’t eat from their stall). We had one long chat with a kid who related some of the bits he’d learned – sayings to appeal to Brits, Americans, Australians, French, and Spanish – even a short little piece in Welsh. Another guy recited some 30 seconds of Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech. Many of these guys speak four or five languages. And yes, it’s all guys. Women are not as publicly visible as the men, but can be seen as cooks in the food stalls, selling cookies or doing henna art.

Scattered around the square itself are dozens of little circles of people (from 10 to 100 or more), clustered around various performers. Snake-charmers, story-tellers (we couldn’t understand a word), groups playing different kinds of music, dancers, acrobats…

The outside of a spice and dye shop...

And the inside.

Beyond all this are the narrow streets leading into the souqs, a huge maze of shops, markets, small squares, and confusion. If you don’t get lost in the souqs, you haven’t experienced them. They go on for, well, we’re not really sure how far. They seem endless, and at times inescapable. You can’t navigate by streets, and it’s tough to maintain a sense of direction. How the locals find their way around is beyond us. But you get the feeling you could buy anything, absolutely anything, within the depths. Many of the shops are given over to souvenirs, carpets, lanterns, shoes, spices, and sweets. Then there are the furniture shops (beautiful), leatherworks, apothecaries, dye shops. We stumbled into one area that was just chickens, and another with odd animals for sale as pets. Not wanting to carry more stuff, we bought almost nothing, but we sure were tempted.

One of many entrances to the souqs.

This may be overwhelming to read, and as we re-read it, it’s even overwhelming for us. As it should be, it’s very Marrakech!

Amber taking a much-needed break from the mayhem.