Marrakech, Morocco – Marvelous! 18, 19, & 20 November 2012 – Part 1
I don’t even know where to start! The past two days have been awesome!
First, I really don’t know how to truly describe the
experience of walking through the Medina.
The perimeter is 18 kilometers, so the interior is pretty
extensive. To walk to the “taxi stop”
from our Riad is an experience of winding alleyways, lots of residences and
small shops, and various motorbikes, bicycles, and people. Once we pass that point we are inundated with
the challenged of weaving between cars, people, donkey carts, motorbikes,
bicycles, and vendors….and “two lanes” of traffic. Some streets are moderate size, some are
downright tiny and we have all had our fair share of “close calls” – I have
decided that young boys are the worst bicycle drivers are those are the only
ones that have either clipped me (yes, I have the bruise to prove it) or have
come close to taking me out. If you look
at a shop for too long you make a “friend,” merchants often try to call out to
get our attention, I tend to look upwards and while glancing down to keep an
eye on what I may step in and avoid looking side to side. Wearing sunglasses also helps. If we pause for even a few seconds to discuss
where we are going or hesitate about where to turn, people flock to us to try
to offer us their opinion or where we should go or provide us with
directions. We actually found it to be
not uncommon for someone to step in and tell us we were going the wrong way
fairly convincingly and aggressively while trying to point us down a different
alley (while in fact, we did have the right way). Walking around is chaotic, takes skill, and
is an assault of all of your senses (from smells, to sounds, to what we see,
you name it!), but it is also incredibly fascinating and exciting!
On our first evening in Marrakech we set out to explore and
walked through many of the Souks (shopping areas) – really nearly everywhere
has shops, but there are certainly streets that are full of goods and are often
themed – like touristy items, garments, metalwares, jewelry, etc. Several streets often lead to a square like
spokes on a wagon week, and ultimately if you wander far enough you can reach
the main square – Djeema al Fna which is a large square full of various shops –
some of the garden and plant variety, rows of juice vendors (who sell delicious
citrus juices made on the spot with bottled water), dried fruit stands, and
then more meal oriented stands that cook things like sausages, meats, snails,
etc. Towards one end of the square there
are various performers – including snake charmers with cobras and rattlesnakes,
men walking with leashed monkeys, and other ethnically dressed performers
hoping to pose for photographs. It is an
amazingly busy square, lined with more shops and cafes – many with terraces
that serve as an escape from the hustle and bustle. I made a mental note the
first night that I would love to be a people watcher at sunset and put my
camera to good use (which we did!)
Later on that evening we also went to a restaurant called
Dar Zellij which was a bit of a splurge, but already we were realizing that
there was street food and very nice restaurant food and very little in
between. This restaurant was another
situation in which the exterior facade looked like nothing, but once we crossed
the threshold there was an amazing interior that revealed a beautiful several
hundred year old Riad that had been turned into a restaurant. This restaurant had a set multi-course menu,
so there were only a few simple either or choices to be made when trying to
order. The first course was Moroccan
salad – which was an array of cooked, seasoned vegetables – many of which were
almost pureed. For the three of us they
brought about ten or twelve different plates full of differently seasoned
cauliflower, spinach, red pepper, carrot, eggplant, zucchini, pumpkin, and a
number of others – it was absolutely delicious!
We had fun passing around the plates and trying all of the many
flavors. A crowd favorite? Cauliflower, spinach, and pumpkin were probably
my top three - all very uniquely seasoned. The next course was pastilles – which are
pastry cakes with various components.
Mine was a chicken pastille which was almost like a croquette – it had a
crunchy exterior and a softer interior and was minced chicken, pastry, almond,
honey – very unique, but tasty! Daniel
had a vegetable one that had an entirely different taste to it.
The next course was our main meal which came with a dish of
couscous and veggies for all of us to share and then our entrées – mine was a
beef shank tagine/tajine, which is beef cooked in a terracotta pot-like
container that makes it very tender and Daniel and Chris each got pigeon
pie. Yes. Not kidding, they ate pigeon – but had to
pick the poor birdies bones out of the dish as they ate. Daniel laughingly said he basically had an
entire ribcage in his pie. Yikes.
Next up was a round of dessert which was an orange flavored
cream with more pastry like pieces – it was perfectly light and tasty. We also enjoyed some other cookies and tea or
coffee and practically rolled home we were so stuffed. After so many days of weird eating schedules
it was nice to finally feel full.
(I had trouble loading photos, so they are in multiple albums - the first is just parts of our Riad, the other is more of our adventure that day - the rest are in a much larger album to be featured under Day 2)
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