Marrakesh & Chilling in Essaouira

This past weekend was Eid ul-Fitr, a celebration for the end of Ramadan. Eid is as important in the Muslim world as Christmas is in the Christian world; family comes to visit, the fast is broken, and feasts are held. Because Eid fell on a Monday, there was no class on Monday or Tuesday, giving us a four-day weekend. We couldn’t let such a long weekend go to waste, so we decided to go somewhere far. My friend Laura and I organized a five-day trip to the south of Morocco. We were a group of nine—four guys and five girls. On Friday we left after our classes for a seven-hour train ride from Meknes to Marrakesh. We had a compartment to ourselves, making us feel like we were on the Hogwarts Express. (Unfortunately they didn’t have any chocolate frogs or every flavored beans.) We arrived at about 11 pm in Marrakesh, in what is possibly the nicest train station I’ve ever seen. From there we took taxis to the main plaza in Marrakesh, the Djemaa el-Fna. The Djemaa el-Fna is an enourmous plaza full of snake charmers, performing monkeys, acrobats, peddlers selling traditional medicines, henna tattoo artists, and lots of enormous food stalls selling everything from snails to roasted chickens to fresh squeezed orange juice.

The Djemaa el-Fna has been offering these same attractions for over a thousand years. Today locals frequent the square as much as tourists. Just off the main square are the souks where you can find everything from shoes, scarves and jewelry to hand-carved furniture, enormous rugs and pirated DVDs.

Our first night in Marrakesh we were planning on staying at a hotel where you could supposedly sleep on a mattress on the roof for 30 DH a person (about 4 dollars). However, while we were looking for that hotel, we found another one that had a giant tent on the roof that was used as a lounge with eight couches and a mattress. We decided to rent that instead of the mattresses. It was the same price, and perfect for the nine of us. That night we had dinner in the plaza at one of the food stalls and then wandered into the souks.

Marrakesh is very interesting and exciting, but it gets grinding and very tiring. It’s a huge tourist destination, with fat retired European couples piling on and off enormous tour buses all day long. As a result, many of the Moroccans that work in and around the plaza are very pushy and forceful, always telling you to buy this, look at this hotel, eat at this restaurant, do this, do that, etc. Plus you always have to be on your guard because many shop-owners try to rip off tourists who don’t know what items are worth. For example, that first night at dinner, the cooks kept bringing us food that we didn’t order and then expected us to pay for it, plus they charged us at prices much higher than what was listed on the menu. However, since everything is cheaper in Morocco, getting ripped off means paying the equivalent of twelve dollars for something that should have cost four. I didn’t realize it until after we had paid, but the price of that meal was negotiable.

The next afternoon, we took a three-hour bus ride to Essaouira, a small port city on the Atlantic coast. Essaouira is everything that Marrakesh isn’t. It was small, it was quiet, it was laid back, and the only tourists were young backpackers like ourselves.

We were only planning to spend one night in Essaouira, but we all loved it so much that we ended up staying two more nights. Essaouira is a beautiful whitewashed town with lots of little restaurants and riads. It gained fame as a hippy haven in the sixties and seventies, and can boast that Jimi Hendrix came to stay there in the early seventies. Legend has it that his song “Castles Made of Sand” was inspired by a visit to the ruins of an ancient kasbah (fortress) found just two miles south of Essaouira. But despite the legend’s romantic allure, it probably isn’t true because “Castles Made of Sand” was released before Jimi Hendrix visited the city. Today Essaouira is full of young backpackers. Our first night there we met Lorenz, a 22-year-old Belgian college student who speaks amazing English as well as French, Dutch and German. He was traveling alone through Morocco on a five-week journey and we ended up hanging out with him most of our time in Essaouira. That first night, we rented an apartment in the central medina for 400 DH per night. It had two double beds, a large sofa, and its own bathroom with a shower. It was meant to sleep four, but we were able to fit nine. Three of us slept on the couches and three people slept in each double bed. It was cozy, but a lot more fun than being split up into two separate rooms. It was a pretty nice apartment and it only came out to 45 DH a person per night, or about 6 dollars. (The exchange rate is a little less than 8 DH to 1 USD.)

The next day we met Alvaro, a 32-year-old Spaniard who had cycled all the way to Essaouira from Madrid on his road bike. It was his first solo trip and it had taken him 19 days to get to Essaouira. He spoke very good English and turned out to be a graphic designer for a Spanish newspaper. We invited Lorenz and him to join us for dinner that night. That Sunday afternoon, a group of four or five of us decided to go play soccer on the beach. We ran into Lorenz as we were on our way to buy a cheap soccer ball for 20 DH. As we were walking down the beach two little 8-year-old Moroccan boys started chasing us trying to catch our soccer ball, so we invited them to play with us. After playing for a few minutes, another Moroccan boy of about 17 joined us, as did a Spaniard in his early twenties who was coincidentally also named Alvaro. After an hour we were all exhausted and went swimming.

Afterwards a few of us decided to go walking a few miles down the beach to the sand dunes and the half-covered kasbah that supposedly inspired Jimi Hendrix. In the face of the Atlantic’s harsh winds, the ruins are slowly disappearing under the surrounding sand dunes, making it a very cool sight to see. There was no one else there but a few goats and us. Our last full day, I went windsurfing for a bit. I hadn’t been windsurfing in over 2 years, but I picked it back up faster than I expected and did all right. That night we ate with Lorenz and Alvaro at a fancy European restaurant overlooking the ocean.

Unfortunately it was dark so you could only hear the crashing of the waves, but the food was amazing. I split a swordfish dish and goat tajine with caramelized figs and walnuts with one of my friends. That night, like most nights, we ended it smoking hookah in our apartment with the nine of us plus Lorenz. On Tuesday morning, we left on a bus for Marrakesh at 6 am.

On Tuesday, four of us returned to Meknes by train to avoid missing Wednesday classes, but five of us, including me, stayed another night. We stayed in an inexpensive hotel about a two-minute walk from the Djemaa el-Fna. That night we wandered through the souks some more and each bought a few items. Afterwards we had dinner in a café overlooking the Djemaa el-Fna, which was full of what must have been somewhere between ten to twenty thousand people. The following day we left for Meknes by train around 1pm, concluding one of the best trips of my life.

Visiting the Old City

Visiting the medina is like entering a different world. It feels unreal. As you walk through the narrow alleys of the old markets, you’re first confronted by precariously stacked piles of fresh fruits and vegetables. And when I say fresh, I mean fresh. Morocco doesn’t have the resources for refrigerator trucks and chemical fertilizers. So when you buy produce here, its from the surrounding countryside and most likely picked within the last 24 hours. During Ramadan, you can also find all sorts of sweets that are used to break the fast at sundown. They are deep fried and drenched with sugar and honey. These sweets are constantly covered with bees, wasps and flies as they buzz around. These sweets taste something along the lines of baklava and are amazing. 

As you wander a little deeper into the market, there are mounds of Moroccan spices, sold by increments of 100 grams where you can find turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, and lots of other spices I couldn’t name. As you wander into the furthest depths of the market, you can smell the meat before you can see it. You’re confronted by large carcasses hanging on meat hooks. To avoid hitting a carcass you have to weave around as you carefully step down the narrow aisles. Here you can find live chickens and rabbits that butchers kill and de-feather right in front of you. Other stalls have cow feet for sale along with goat heads, livers, kidneys, intestines, stomachs, etc. On one counter you can see a cow head with the tongue lolled out at it stares into nothingness. The smell is overpowering as the blood mixes with the mud on the floor and squishes under your shoes. I could hardly stomach being in that meat market for two minutes. In America, we never really think about where our meat comes from. We buy it in a neat little sterilized shrink-wrap package and that’s all we see and all we know. It’s easy to eat meat when you don’t have to hear the squawking, see the blood and smell the death. Although I’m still not a vegetarian, since that day I’ve started eating meat in much smaller quantities.

  

When you leave the food stalls and head into the clothing souk, you can see the clash of the old and new like night and day. First you see one stall selling traditional burkas and djellabas while the stall next door is selling Armani jeans and designer shirts. In the middle of the street is a little stand selling cell phones while another shop owner is selling traditional Berber medicines and miracle cures. The Moroccan people are as divided as their stores. Most of the older men and women wear the traditional Moroccan burkas and djellabas while nearly everyone under the age of 30 dresses in traditional western clothing of jeans and t-shirts. However no one really wears shorts and women dress much more conservatively. I saw a mother and daughter that I thought illustrated the differences in generations perfectly. The mother was wearing a long djellaba and scarf that covered everything except her hands while on her arm was a 13-year-old girl wearing jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt similar to those worn by any young American girl.

  

As two of my roommates and I were wandering through the alleyways of goods. A friendly 30-year-old Moroccan man started talking to us in fairly good English. It turned out he had attended the local university in Meknes where he had studied some English. (But remember, you must take whatever a Moroccan tells you with a grain of salt because they are known to “fancify” the truth.) He told us he wanted to introduce us to his father and started leading us through the narrow alleys of the medina. Within a few minutes we were completely lost and had to depend completely on our guide. We had long ago left the crowded markets and were now walking through the narrow and empty alleys of the residential area. Eventually we ended up at his father’s shop in the artisan section of the medina. His father spoke very good English and displayed his work, showing us how he made each item. He specialized in handcrafting iron objects inlaid with silver thread, one of the crafts that Meknes is renowned for. 

Surprisingly, when we decided to leave he didn’t pressure us to buy anything. His son then led us to his own little shop near the main plaza El-Hedim where he pressured us to buy some jewelry. When we said we weren’t interested he demanded some money for showing us around. That’s when we decided to head back and catch a petit taxi. Moroccans are known for their friendliness and hospitality, however in tourist areas, Moroccans have a tendency to be very good at pressuring you and making you feel guilty for not buying their goods. After a few weeks, you just get used to the way business is done here and no longer get so flustered by persistent shopkeepers.

My First Night in Morocco

I’ve been in Morocco for a little over a week now. We arrived last Thursday night around sundown and saw our apartment for the first time. It’s an enormous two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment on the 8^th floor of a 9-story building. Each bedroom has its own balcony from which we have an unobstructed view of the Medina (old city) across the river. Right across the street is city hall and the Plaza de l’Independence, a large plaza with fountains, grass and trees. We have a huge kitchen with granite countertops, however there is no dishwasher, oven or microwave. Because it is uncommon to find gas lines in Moroccan buildings, two small propane tanks fuel our water heater and stove. We also have a little TV with cable, however only a few channels are in English or French. The living room is huge; about 500 sq ft. The apartment floor is tile throughout. I have photos of the apartment on Flickr that you can check out. We also have a Moroccan lady who comes 6 days a week to cook and clean. She arrives around 10 or 11 am and cooks until about 4 pm every day except Sunday. We have home-cooked lunch and dinner nearly every day. On top of all that we have access to the roof, which has a beautiful 360 degree view, with the Medina visible on one side, and the Ville Nouvelle (new city) on the other side. We’re one of the tallest buildings around so we have a fairly unobstructed view of everything. I doubt there’s another building in all of Meknes with as amazing of a view as the one we have.

 

We arrived right in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam, during which every good Muslim must fast from sunrise to sundown. (However exceptions are made for pregnant women and those who are traveling.) Muslims don’t even drink water despite the beating sun and 95 degree heat. Non-Muslims are not expected to fast, but restaurants and cafes are closed throughout the day and eating or drinking in public is extremely rude. That first night, after looking around our apartment in awe, we ate the home-cooked meal awaiting us on the table. It was a Moroccan stew of beef and green beans with a salad of lettuce, cucumbers and bell peppers on the side. A few minutes after we sat down, we heard an enormous explosion. We rushed to the window and saw a pillar of smoke rising from what looked like a drab green military truck on the other side of the plaza, a few hundred yards away from our building. The first idea that flew to my head was a car bomb. Any American who had just arrived in an Arab country would be finicky and jump to the conclusion of terrorism. We later found out that because it was the holy month of Ramadan, the city fired a cannon at sundown (around 6:45pm) when it was okay to eat, and again at 2 am, to announce that there were only 2 hours left to eat before fasting must start again. It’s been going off twice a day for a week now and it still makes me jump every time I hear it.

Traveling from Spain to Morocco

We left for Morocco at 5:30 am. The trip would take 15 hours, with a 3-hour bus ride to the Mediterranean, a 2-hour ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar and an 8-hour bus ride from Tangier to Meknes (the other 2 hours were spent stopping for breakfast and waiting for the ferry). After getting accustomed to the Spanish lifestyle of staying out late and sleeping in late, getting up early was next to impossible. I slept terribly that night, and when I woke up I felt tired and sick. Before getting on the bus I vomited into a trashcan and then climbed into the bus for our ride to the ferry. Luckily we stopped for breakfast after an hour of driving. After stopping I felt a little better and was all right until we got to the ferry. Once on the ferry I felt even more miserable than before and after another hour of swaying on the ferry, I vomited a few times and then felt perfectly fine. I enjoyed the last hour to Tangier and could see both Europe and Africa at the same time. (I believe the two continents are about 8 miles apart when the strait is narrowest.)

After arriving in Tangier we stopped in an enormous supermarket to buy some food for lunch. The supermarkets are very similar to those in America, however I don’t think most Moroccans go to supermarkets for day-to-day shopping because supermarkets are more expensive and the food is not as fresh. After that we got on the program’s 40-passenger bus. It’s an old bus from the eighties with fake grass for carpeting and no bathroom or air conditioner, but its nonetheless quite comfortable. From Tangier we traveled to Meknes, stopping once for a bathroom stop and once because the police pulled us over for speeding. There aren’t really any driving rules in Morocco and if there are no one follows them. However I guess there is the occasional speed trap. Our bus driver was a maniac behind the wheel, passing cars on narrow roads and blind corners

From watching the bus driver and other cars on the road, I got a sense of how differently Moroccans (and probably most Arab countries) approach driving. Despite driving aggressively, they aren’t rude. They use their horns to communicate rather than as a way to express anger. Americans invest their egos in their driving and take it personally if they get cut off or someone tries to pass them on a blind corner. Moroccans, on the other hand, go with the flow and adjust to the other drivers, but they don’t take things personally and anger is rarely involved. In the city, cars cut each other off all the time and weave in and out of lanes as they please. I would think that this causes a lot of angry drivers and accidents, but surprisingly I haven’t seen much of either. Even though most cars are 20 or 30 years old with hundreds of thousands of miles on them, very few have any body damage, dents or bent fenders.

Granada, Spain

After spending a week in Madrid with some family friends, I took a 5-hour bus ride down to Granada to meet my study abroad group. Granada is a city in southern Spain that was home to Christians, Muslims and Jews for nearly eight centuries and much of this heritage can still be seen in its architecture and city layout. The Alhambra is a beautiful fortress overlooking the city and it was the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula before falling to the Christians in 1492. While in Granada, I realized that it’s a perfect jumping off point before traveling to Morocco because it serves as a transition between life in the United States and Morocco. During the 3 days in Granada our group was able to accustom ourselves to the time difference, get to know our fellow American students, and get used to being in a foreign country with different languages, foods and customs. While at the same time Spain is still very similar to America in that it is a modern western country with similar clothing, religious practices and attitudes toward women.

My study abroad group consists of 23 students: 15 girls and 8 boys. During my time in Granada, we toured the city in the mornings as a group, had a few orientation meetings in the afternoons and experienced Spanish nightlife in the evenings. On the first day our group toured the old city of Granada, which is full of winding medieval streets and alleyways. After lunch I took a siesta and then for dinner a bunch of us went barhopping for tapas. In Spain if you order a round of drinks, the bar also gives you a few tapas, which are essentially complimentary appetizers. If you order 2 or 3 rounds of drinks at a few different bars, you’re full before you know it. On the second day our group toured the Alhambra, the most famous landmark of the city. It’s an old Muslim fortress that has a beautiful view of Granada and showcases traditional Muslim architecture. That night our entire group went to a discotheque until around 3am. On the third day our group visited the cathedral in Granada. After the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in 1492, they began construction of the cathedral. After Ferdinand and Isabella died, they were buried in cathedral, where they rest today.

Why Choose Morocco?

While most college students studying abroad go to countries like England, France and Spain, I chose a country that few Americans can even locate on a map. In fact, if they know what continent it's on then they're already ahead of the game. (Just so you know, Morocco is on the northwestern tip of Africa, just south of Spain.)

I chose Morocco because I wanted to study in a country that would provide stark contrasts to the western view of life and hopefully challenge my perspective of the world. And in the brief time I've been here so far, I've realized how living in the richest country of the world provides a completely different way of looking at the world compared to that of a much poorer country.

Introduction

Since I’ve left to study in Morocco, people have been asking me how my trip has been so far and what I’ve been up to. Instead of responding to each individual e-mail, I figured a blog would be a more efficient way to share my experiences, thoughts and photos. So this is my online journal. Enjoy!