19. New Year's in Marrakech

Let's jump into my Delorean and go back in time a few weeks. Just after our Christmas in Recloses Megan's parents came to visit. There's this guy named Hamid, an old family friend of the McMullans. He lives in Algeria but was in Morocco for the holidays. He wanted to see us, though, so he flew us to Marrakech for a few days.

The flight to Marrakech was pretty sardiney. The four of us (me, Megan, and Megan's parents Mike and Monica) sat about 3/4 of the way back in the middle aisle of an aging 747. But say what you will about Royal Air Maroc with their anitquated fleet whose seats still have ash trays (not that you can smoke but it says how recently it was remodeled) and seatbacks don't have touchscreens, they fed us. And sure, maybe the beef and rice dish was a little bland, and the roll was a bit dry, and the dessert was too sweet for me, but the vegetable thing with eggplant and olives was pretty tasty and HOLY CRAP they fed every person on the plane an entire meal for free! When I asked for a Coke they gave me the whole can. Well, it was a Diet Coke because they'd given all the regular Cokes away already. And did we have to pay to check baggage? No, we did not. Go Royal Air Maroc.

It turns out this was merely a hint of the hospitality we yet had in store for us in this our first ever trip to Marrakech, or Morocco, or Africa.

Once we had landed, gone through customs, and found our luggage (which blessedly showed up with us) we were preparing to figure out how to get a taxi and tell it how to get us to our riad, when we found a man holding a sign that said, “The McMullan family.” This was Jamal, a friend of Hamid's who happened to own a car rental and real estate service. Jamal spoke Arabic and French, so Megan stepped up and brought her superpower to bear. Time and again she saved the three of us, building bridges our monolinguality could not otherwise span.

The journey to the riad was chaotic. The roads teemed with vehicles of all number of wheels and hooves, swerving about each other in a dance I couldn't pay much attention to without constantly jamming my foot on the brake that the back seat kept failing to have.  We walked from where we parked to the riad down high-walled alleys, surrounded by people selling and buying things arranged on blankets and in stalls, the low roar of animals and people interacting, and the smells of all of those things in close proximity.

Jamal led us down one final alley to a nondescript door set into a high wall. We knocked and the way was made open. We passed into the riad.

It was like the contrast between that moment in the Wizard of Oz or in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder). You know the moment I'm talking about. The clatter of cars and people hawking wares and the smells of produce and old fish and smoke and dog poo suddenly transformed into a tranquil courtyard lined with ferns and couches, little by the rippling light of a small pool. It was quiet and calm and delightful.

We did not go swimming, though I did lounge
 on cushions and eat sumptuous morsels.

Hamid met us there. He's been friends with the McMullans since Megan was in high school and he stayed with them for a year as part of an international volunteer teaching program. I first met him in 2008 when he came through Reno as part of the UN delegation monitoring the elections. He is friendly, quick with a joke, and seems to have friends everywhere whom he has known for years.

After dumping our luggage in our rooms we reconvened back in the courtyard for wine and mint tea. You should never turn down mint tea when it is offered; it's one of those considered-rude things to do. Hamid and the McMullans caught up a bit and then it was on to dinner. We stopped briefly so Hamid could show us a big square. In the day, he said, it is merely filled with people (people meaning fortune tellers, snake charmers, henna-dyers, and fruit stands), but at night it fills with restaurants and musicians. Every day at dusk folks come and erect small buildings out of wood and plastic and stuff-- dozens of small, two- or three-table restaurants complete with kitchen and staff-- all of which fade away before dawn. As you walk towards them you pass through pools of firelight where circles of men play musical instruments and women sit in chairs calling out to tell your fortune.

Moments after this picture was taken the guy with the tambourine hopped up
 and expected me to pay him for the picture I took. I played dumb.

As we left the circle of light from one of these, I hung back a bit to take a picture. A man in wizard's robes materialized out of the darkness beside me.

“Tell me,” he said in thickly accented English, “Do you smoke...hash?”

“Um...” I was here with my in-laws, and this guy was offering me drugs? I glanced over to see if they saw this. No; everyone was still walking away. Wait. Was hash legal here? Maybe I should...no! I was here with my in-laws!

The wizard was still waiting. “Ah...no? I mean, je n'ai pas l'argent...” He was speaking English to me, why was I telling him I didn't have any money in French?

“I give you very good price. Very quality.” He said, his hands disappearing into the sleeves of his wizard robes. His eyes were midnight whirlpools.

“No, thank you.” My family was almost lost in the gloom and other groups. “I...I have to go. But thank you, anyway!” And I ran off.

It turns out hash is not legal in Morocco. And that guy was wearing a djellaba. He wasn't a wizard. He was just a drug dealer. Oh well.

The next morning we met in the courtyard for breakfast, which consisted of various breads from croissants to crumpet-ey things with honey and marmalade and currant jam, with dates and raisins in little bowls. I had several cups of coffee, which I rarely drink, so I was soon pretty twitchy.

Silly me. I thought it was just Megan that needed
 coffee before she could  do much of anything.

Eventually we'd eaten our fill and Mohammad, a brother of Jamal's, arrived to lead us around the souks in the Medina. The Medina is the central part of Marrakech, also known as the old city. Its limits are the walls that used to keep out roving bands of marauders that would try to plunder the city of its wealth. A souk is a market. Mohammad said he'd be taking us on a tour through different parts, taking us to the different areas where people making similar kinds of things set up shop near each other, like lamp-makers near other lamp-makers, leather bags near leather bags, etc.

You got Lamptown, that's on Third, Light Me Up, that's on Third;
 there's  House of Lamps on Third, and Shine a Light on Me,
 that's on...hey, they're all on Third, in the Lamp Complex!
 Oh yeah, the Lamp District.

We set out and Mohammad took us on a winding path through a labyrinth of alleys. Every building was at least three stories high, and the streets between narrow and often covered over with poles and woven strips of...things, so it was this labyrinth of twists and turns, alternating light and shadow.  At first I tried to remember our path, looking behind us at each turn to keep track of our backtrail, but it quickly became impossible.

Megan thought we were underground, but it was just roofing.

"Okay, a right and then a left, two rights, under that one arch
 that said 'Romans go home', and then..." 

Foolishly, we neglected to bring pebbles, string, or even breadcrumbs to mark our path. 

This guy was no help at all.

Also no help.

This appears to be the garment district.

Students or a roaming band of 'tweens.

And here, my loves, is where I must abandon an attempt at coherence or chronologicity. Over the course of the day my sensory buffer filled and overflowed. All I can give you is flashes of input. That and pictures.

I thought Parisian motorcyclists were crazy, but here they take it further. Anywhere a motorcycle will physically fit, it goes. They scream down crowded alleys, somehow avoiding the throngs of people. They weave through traffic like they were playing a video game; lanes, pedestrians, oncoming cars: none of that matters.

We wandered into a carpet factory. On the top floor, a couple women worked laboriously on a room-sized loom, placing each strand.

They put Monica to work.

 Downstairs, men sat around drinking tea, waiting for people like us to stumble in. Somehow we wound up in the large central indoor courtyard, reclining on couches and drinking tea ourselves, as younger men ran back and forth between the courtyard and back rooms, bringing out carpet after carpet and unrolling it on the ground before us. The pile of carpets grew deeper and richer as we continued not to buy one, and I worried about whether the insult in not purchasing one (the cheapest were well over a hundred euros) grew greater with the depth of the piles.

In the souks the stores are the size of closets and most of the space is filled with raw materials: stacks of wood, sheets of metal, piles of cloth, hunks of meat. In one stall an old man sat surrounded by cones of powdered spices in reds and yellows and browns. We had been told it was impolite not to ask permission before taking pictures, so I gestured with my camera and “Je pourrais prendre votre photo?” He replied by rubbing his index finger and thumb together: if you pay me. I didn't; I didn't have any local currency and didn't know whether offering him euros would be stupid and didn't know how many I should give him anyway. I learned that the thing to do was to take pictures surreptitiously or look dumb if they approach with their hands out.

I didn't take a picture of the old man with the spice, so instead
 I  give you a picture that references an internet meme
 that itself is referencing a scifi book.

Our path took us through a square that opened on to a tannery. I had heard that the smell of a tannery is bad, but dang. It's pee, and offal, and chemicals that make your nose cringe because it knows you don't want that stuff inside you.

We passed across the giant square we had visited the night before. The fortune tellers were still there, as well as women selling henna tattoos. During our stay I saw several ladies sporting them in a wide range of quality. While making our way across this square I saw a pair of cobras beneath an awning, staring around at the passersby somewhat blearily while a pair of old men scanned the throng and fingered sets of reed pipes. I turned to get Megan's attention and realized she was some fifty feet away with a monkey on each arm.

Prends ton putain de singe! 

“How...how did this happen?” I asked as I walked up. The monkeys wore disposable diapers and had chain leashes which led to men wearing identical blue djellabas.

“I don't know. I just looked at them and they leaped into my arms!” The monkeys, meanwhile, were delicately but firmly examining her fingers for shiny things.

We ate lunch on the roof of a building overlooking that square, chicken with lemon and olives in a tajine. We ate with some friends of Hamid's who had just that morning been in a taxi that hurtled through an intersection and plowed into another taxi that was stopped in the middle of the place for some reason. They were fine except for a black eye and a sore shoulder, but they said the passenger of the other taxi had stumbled out of the wrecked car, blood pouring down his face, and piled into another, presumably headed for the hospital with more speed than an ambulance could manage.

It was after lunch, when we dove back into the biomass, that my sensorium hit its limit, overflowed, and rendered me mostly a snapshot-taking zombie until we made it back to the riad.

See? Stupid stuff like this. "Look! It's something
 familiar in a strange language! How crazy!" 

 Also, I think I was dazed from all the smoke. The most pervasive smell I remember from Marrakech, more than the stench of the tannery, more than the dangerous and exciting pungency of that man's spice stall, is smoke. When it wasn't wood smoke, it was charcoal, or cigarettes. And when it wasn't that it was exhaust fumes from the motorcycles and scooters tearing around everywhere, pipes belching blue non-emissions-controlled clouds. Megan, who had just gotten over some sort of cold, was hit particularly hard by all the smoke and on the way back had an alarming coughing fit that lasted...well, it seemed like hours.

Back at the riad we rested for a few hours. This was December 31^st, the last day of 2011, and Hamid had made reservations for us all at another riad across town. Everyone got dressed up but me. I don't know what I had been thinking, but I hadn't brought a lick of dressy clothing; it was all jeans and tshirts and hoodies.

This riad was still within the Medina, however. Apparently the New City- as the part of the city outside the ancient ramparts is called- is as modern in many ways as Paris or Scranton. But in the Medina it was still the 17^th century. Except for the motorcycles.

Rather than actually go through the Medina, it made more sense to take a taxi across town and then back in from another gate. If I thought watching the madness of Marrekshi traffic was unnerving, being part of it about killed me. A four lane street might have six actual lanes of traffic, or eight. Imagine how you drive playing Grand Theft Auto or Super Mario Kart. Now add to that motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians and donkeys pulling carts, all of them in the street going their different speeds and weaving all over the place. I do not see how the streets are not lined with corpses and wreckage.

Our taxi not only didn't have seatbelts, it didn't even have Oh-shit handles. I sat in the backseat and tried to remain casually fetal in case of a wreck. It didn't help remembering Fadil and Reda's story about their accident that morning.

But we arrived unscathed. In this evening's riad, the courtyard-- which had a fountain instead of a pool-- had been filled with tables. Different groups laughed and drank while a gnawa band played. Gnawa is hypnotizing and energizing at the same time.

"Well she can dance a cajun rhythm, jump like a Willys in four wheel drive..."

I was going to post a link to a youtube video of gnawa music, but all the ones that give you a sense of it are at least ten minutes long. It's good stuff, though, meandering, entrancing...

Dinner started with harrira, this tomato-based soup with rice and chick peas and subtle spices. I could have a meal with just that and hunks of bread. After the soup came another tajine, but while the one at lunch had been chicken, this one was beef so tender it fell apart as soon as the fork looked at it. Dessert was a flaky pastry with powdered sugar and cinnamon and almond milk and shredded meat. Yep. Chicken, I think. Very traditional, I was told. Dates back to medieval times. Its preparation viewed as a benchmark of a host's skill when entertaining, like, lords and stuff. I just thought it was weird and didn't finish it, because I am an uncultured oaf.

But not so uncultured that I don't like wine, which was had in abundance. Officially it is illegal to sell/drink alcohol within sight of a mosque (read as: anywhere) but unofficially it is okay to sell to tourists, but not to serve it. So all these tables brought their own wine or beer or whatever. We had several bottles of a delicious Moroccan red and a bottle of champagne for after midnight. It's a little confusing that Morocco is essentially a dry country-- unless you're a tourist-- but it's also a wine producer.

By the time dessert was served, the gnawa band was ratcheting things up. The singer was walking among the tables, working them like a Vegas lounge act. A belly dancer showed up and danced with her belly.

Well, I mean, of course I would post a picture of the belly dancer.

 The crowd was getting up and dancing. Megan, overcoming her earlier attack of pollution-induced tuberculosis, leaped to her feet and began twirling and clapping with the others. Some French guy was dipping his hand into the fountain and anointing the crowd. Candles got knocked over. I set a napkin on fire (accidentally. Promise). It was a party.

That's Jamal in the red shirt, dancing next to Megan in the long hair. 

The time came. The countdown happened (in several languages). The riad filled with shouts of “Happy New Year!” “Bonne année!”and “Sana saeeda!” which is, I believe, what the Arabic phrase looks like in roman letters. And then gnawa music gave way to a medley of Michael Jackson hits. Everybody danced. Jamal got Megan's parents up and dancing, a feat I thought impossible. I even wiggled for a bit until that feeling that everyone was watching me and judging me got the better of things and I sat down. I wish I could ignore that feeling; it gets in the way of a good time too often.

There's Jamal and Monica, dancing. The pirate dude is the owner of the restaurant that catered this thing.

When it was time for the evening to come to a close, we said goodbye to Fuad, Fatima, Salima, Hassan, and all the musicians and restaurant workers we had befriended at the party. Jamal arranged our rides home, this time in nicer cars with seatbelts.

The next day, our last in Morocco, we took a trip up into the foothills of the Atlas mountains. We saw people making pottery in a manner that looked like it had been done that way for centuries. We saw women making argan oil, a pricey thing that is apparently only made in this part of the world. Megan rode a camel.

Aaaand up!

Much more convivial than I have been led to believe camels are.

We ate in a cliffside restaurant that looked across a valley at the Atlas mountains, wherein used to live critters like the Atlas bear and Barbary lion, though both are now extinct.

None of us look very good in this picture, so I figured that was more egalitarian
 than the one where only a couple of us look bad.
But, from left: Mike, Monica, Megan, Me, Hamid.

I kept thinking, "And up there's the Pass of Caradhras."

We drove back as evening fell and I tried to take pictures of the sunset through a car window while in motion without anything to steady me. Didn't work.

One day, we'll have cameras that take data directly from our eyes.
 And then we'll find out if the blue I see is the same blue you see.

Back at the riad we finished our packing, for our plane left Marrakech at 6:55 am. This meant we would need to be up and out of the riad by 4:30 or some god-awful time like that. Yecch. And by the time we left Morocco we had had to present our passports to officials no less than seven (7) times.

That was annoying, but worth it.