Souq On This!

Dinner last night consisted of walking through Jama’a el-Fna square through the enormous numbers of food stalls that they set up every night at sunset. There are around 100 and every stall sends out a bunch of men dressed in chef uniforms to track down hungry looking people and get then to eat at their stall. Each menu is in about 16 different languages from Japanese to Portuguese and further, and every single man speaks every single language. It was pretty incredible. The girl I met at my hostel speaks Spanish and Italian as well as English (she’s from Argentina but lives in London) and I speak French and English (the two most useful languages here other than Arabic – by far). I feel very accomplished lapsing from French to English and back again with everyone we meet. Every time we were stopped by another chef they asked where we were from and when I said America every single one said “That’s what I’m talking about!” or “Obama!” accompanied by a thumbs-up. Of course.

Our menu: 2 tomato salads, one filled with hot peppers, the other very light and fresh with just a bit of pepper, a large, thick, pita-type bread as a utensil, a tajine with various squashes, cabbage, chickpeas, and LAMB, an olive salad (which I actually ate some of, shockingly), a salad of rice, cucumber, potatoes, tomatoes, and beets, and delicious Moroccan mint tea, and of course Coke Light. Oh. My. God. So delicious and amazingly fresh. All of our chefs spoke French and English, as well as the other 14 languages, and insisted that we take photos with them wearing their chef hats and “working” i.e. scooping chickpeas onto a little saucer.

Came back to the hostel, got on the internet, and talked with our fellow travelers about Marrakech and how cold our hostel is at night, only to realize that it's because there is no roof, just a courtyard with rooms surrounding it and the ceiling open to the sky. A. Mazing.

Woke up at 11 this morning and prepared myself for a long day of getting supremely lost in the very hot sun, including layers, maps, camera, water bottle, tobacco, and sneakers. Since my 3 hour trip from sketchy CS host's house yesterday with 20 kilos of luggage, my feet are fucking torn up, as will always happen when you add 20 kilos to your weight and walk through a dusty-ass, rocky and very hot city in Africa searching for a place with no street signs or numbers. Sneakers were essential today. I had made plans with my roommates from Argentina and Finland to go exploring the markets north of Jama'a el-Fna square (very near our hostel) for jewelry, leather bags, dyed fabrics, meat, olives, and spices. We met a boy from Australia last night who is also traveling, meeting his family in Paris for Christmas, and speaks fluent French, and he joined us for an afternoon of exploration. First the girls and I had breakfast ('petit dejeuner,' of course) which consisted of mint tea (Moroccan tradition), fresh orange juice, chocolate croissants, and crepes (though a bit rougher than the traditional French) with honey and butter. This all cost us 18 dirham (1 Euro 80), which would have run about 9 Euros in Paris. Excellent.

We drank our tea, fended off a bunch of bees (it was around 80 degrees - ahh!!), and learned a bit of Arabic from our funny waiter. People here are extremely friendly and while most tourists seem to take this cheerful and helpful attitude as a scam to make money, it's actually just people being legitimately interested in where you're from and excited to hear about why you're visiting their country. They like to learn other languages and ask you questions, and once they start saying lewd things it's really easy to just laugh and walk off. I was telling Christian from Australia about how the whole experience of being in a place so outside of your zone of norms is making me feel much more confident about my abilities to figure things out. i.e. I keep thinking about how other girls from the Consortium program would have dealt with Jamal and the entire country. It makes me laugh and it keeps me sane when I feel totally lost and baffled.

We then proceeded to get ourselves lost in the souqs, or markets, in the Northern region of the city. These tiny stone alleyways wind and twist for what seems like ever, and our running joke was the impossibility of giving directions in a place like this: "Yeah, you go under the arched doorway, past the stall full of silver jewelry, then when you see a booth full to the brim of leather bags of every color, take a right. Then you'll see a bunch of tea pots and dinnerware on your left, pass the embroidered tunics and the leather sandals and the old Moroccan men drinking tea and fixing bikes and you're there. If you get to the chicken carcasses hanging from hooks next to the Mosque you've gone too far." The joke is that every single area of the general souqs can be described exactly like this. Over and over again. It's pretty amazing. So, we got extremely lost, decided to find our way to the Musee de Marrakech, near, yes, a mosque and some leather bags. The museum was gorgeous, with an astonishing contemporary art exhibit of collaged scrapbooks and paintings of various parts of the world, from India to the USSR. There were couches all over the place and the descriptions of things and history were all in French and Arabic so we translated for the non-French speakers among us, in the meantime learning a lot about the history of the Kingdom of Morocco.

Then we wound our way back to the square for a mint tea and a bit of a rest at the hostel before heading back out to brave the crowds for dinner at one of the many tents again.

Dinner menu: Lamb tajine (again), lamb couscous, fried shrimp (actually fried, not battered in flour and overcooked), bread, tomato salads, chicken & delicious frites, grilled aubergine, lentil and spice soup, and water. We chose a different stall than last night and shared everything in true Moroccan fashion, eating with our hands and licking our fingers unabashedly.

After dinner we decided to find a bar in this land where it is illegal to drink alcohol within sight of a mosque (i.e. everywhere, though that law is gratefully and largely unenforced). More on the search for beer later.

Bisous!