Chris and Paula’s World

Chris and I arrived in Marrakesh yesterday evening. We took a train from the airport in Cassablanca, and what an experience that was! The train ride was just over three hours and they could not have packed more people on the train! We both stood in the aisle with our bags - Chris for the whole trip and me for about 1.5 hours (until a nice man gave me his seat). People here are obviously very used to it - we were the only ones who didn’t bring sandwiches though I was offered some by a sweet woman that I met on board. This woman and I kind of communicated through face and hand gestures for the whole trip and I eventually ended up sharing my seat with her — squished in, but they seem to have different ideas about personal space here! Once in town, we had no problem finding good accomodation. We are staying at Hotel Touloussaine for 190 Dhiram (about 26 Cdn), a great change from accomodation in the UK and Amsterdam. People here are extremely friendly… on several occasions people (older men usually) have stopped us and said hello, shaking our hands.

We took our first trip into Djema el Fna the main medina this morning. What an amazing place, a real feast for the eyes and nose. Our first purchase was two glasses of fresh squeezed OJ which cost 3 Dhiram, or 41 cents each! I would say it is pretty well an impossibility to get out of there without spending money - it really is shopping paradise. The people are SO helpful that they make it extre,ely difficult to get out without spending money. You think that you are ok with an excuse like “no thank you, I don’t like the colour”, or “it doesn’t fit”, or even “I don’t like it”, but if any of those is the case, the shopkeeper will either take you by the arm to another stall where there are other colours, more sizes etc., or ask you to wait while he runs to his brothers’ stall down the way to bring back another selection! In a carpet store, the owner took us up to the rooftop (saying “its free, we are your Morrocan friends here”) we took some photos, then he took us inside and showed us the men making a beautiful blanket on a loom, and downstairs to the showroom to show us some samples. He told us all about the history etc, where all of the colours come from, shared a couple of glasses of tea with us… not surprisingly, 1.5 hours later we emerged with a carpet. Yes, we are suckers, but the carpet is small and beautiful (Kilim) and we will always remember buying it. I also was given a beautiful orange scarf by the shopkeeper - the second gift after purchase for me today. We also bought a pair of leather thong sandals for Chris, a very sweet pair of pink leather slippers for my niece Katelyn, and 2 jelabs (long sleeved shirts) — jelabs bought from the brother of the shoe guy.

The spice stalls were gorgeous and smelled amazing. The chicken stalls were a sight to behold - no smell as the poor chickens await their fate in cages behind the shopkeeper — talk about fresh! We didn’t try any of the food in the market this morning but plan to return tonight when the food vendors come out in droves at dusk. Something I did try was my first squat toilet — happily not as bad as I thought it would be, however still not eagerly anticipating my next venture.

At the moment we are in the “Cyber Park” - Public gardens that are sponsored by Ericcson, Maroc Telecom, etc. In the center of the park is a very cool internet cafe, possibly the most techy internet cafe that we’ve been in so far.

Pretty cool so far!

P

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Morocco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.