Holidays, pt 3

Okay, here goes (from where I left off, below). Thanks to Clare's digital camera, I also have a few pictures to illustrate:

Our first night in Marrakesh, we wandered around the medina (walled city). Our hostel was pretty much right in the center of the action, with a terrace overlooking the central square, Djemmaa el Fna, which featured snake charmers, henna drawers, and fruit juice stands during the day, and spiced tea, food stalls, and gatherings of people singing and playing music at night. This is the food-stand area.


Just past that, we entered the souks, which are tiny alleyways/ tunnels/ labyrinths, where during the day you can shop for things but at night feel sort of like you are wandering around in someone's basement. So we wandered for a while, got harassed by vendors who wanted us to buy things, and then went to bed.

The next day we met up with Clare, Sara's friend from Leeds, and decided to go to the Ben Yousef Medersa, which is a religious school. It took us a while to get there, since we didn't exactly have an accurate map, and anyway we spent lots of time stopping and looking at things for sale. (There was a lot of fabric and leather. It was also pretty impossible to figure out which place to go to buy things, as they all looked pretty much identical. Some stands, like the ones selling dried fruits, even had the various goods laid out in the same order.) We got there eventually, and it was pretty amazing. It was interesting contrasting it with the Alhambra, in Spain, which is pretty similar architecturally; the main difference was that at the medersa the public spaces were really intricate, but the student's chambers were totally barren and tiny.

We bought a combined admission, so after the medersa (and a pause for mint tea, which was quite refreshing, as it was getting kind of hot) we went to a museum, which was in a restored riad and featured contemporary photography exhibits (quite a contrast), and then an old aquifer. I could imagine how nice it would be to go down there in the middle of the summer heat. On the way back to the hostel, we stopped and grabbed lunch from a streetside stand:
It was offering fish sandwiches, which Clare and Sara tried, but the rest of us, being vegetarian, got eggplant, peppers, and french fries with tomato sauce. These stands were one of the few places that women worked in the medina, though there were often men (presumably their husbands) working with them as well.

After lunch we decided to go to a hammam, a traditional bathhouse. There are some very touristy ones, sort of like spas, but we went to one recommended by the lonely planet for being traditional. We decided to all splurge for the massage option, and it was lucky we did because it meant we got someone to show us how things worked--otherwise we would have been totally lost. Hammams are sort of like large wet saunas/ group showers (like at a gym). You get big buckets that you can fill with water from hot and cold taps, and then you go claim a little area and wash yourself. Often women go with someone else (a sibling or parent) and scrub each other's back and wash each other's hair. Hammams are often used by both sexes, but there are certain times for each (though we did see a few young boys), and as my guidebook said, while there is much modesty between the sexes, there is not much within--everyone in the hammam was down to their underwear or less, and not only did we get a massage, but we also got scrubbed, with traditional black soap and a scrubber that looked sort of like those pocket washcloths but felt like sandpaper. It was very much like being a little kid given a bath, and ended with a bucket of cool water being dumped over my head.

After the hammam I was a little woosy from all of the heat, but we decided to take advantage of the last few hours of daylight to go to the southern part of the medina, which was the old royal area and the Jewish quarter. On our way, we stopped and walked through the gardens of the Koutoubia mosque, which was right in the center of town and a model of mosque architecture.




Brook picked an orange from one of the trees in the garden and it was totally bitter. I guess to dissuade people from picking them (or just because they hadn't been bred for eating). We happened on the Saadien Tombs, which were the burial grounds for the Saadian dynasty which ruled Morocco between 1554 and 1669. The biggest mausoleum, which was reserved for the kings, was pretty impressive:

The area was also inhabited by many, many storks.

Our sense of direction and energy waned after that, so we went back to the hotel, where we helped ourselves to a delicious buffet (I was actually feeling kind of sick after the hammam, so I tried to force myself to eat, to no avail). Then we found an internet cafe (I think it was 5dh, or 50 cents, for half an hour), and ate some gelato (I recovered quickly), and went to bed early so that we could get up early the next day to catch a bus to the coast.

And that is all for now.