Marrakech Meandering

Dear Blog Readers – I am in Marrakech for four days enjoying a much needed break.  My husband Gustavo is here for a conference so I have had time to meander about on my own.

I am entranced by this city, one gets swept up in the throbbing intensity and exotic romance.  As I walked through the souk I had a fanciful notion of being Katherine in “The English Patient” making her way through the bazaar in Cairo, an outsider surrounded by bright colors, noises and unusual smells and a moving mass of people calmly bumping, pushing, going somewhere.

I am not here as a journalist so what I am getting is impressions and what taxi drivers, street vendors and hotel concierges tell me in casual conversations.  Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with a young king, 49-year-old Mohammed VI. As one Moroccan named Cherif explained to me,  Morocco – due to some open-minded thinking Mohammed VI- has managed to avoid the upheavals of the Arab Spring in nearby Tunisia and Egypt.  He said that the King has allowed for freedom of speech, released prisoners, given people the right to demonstrate and has given more rights to women.  As a result,  the country appears to be tranquil and safe and a popular tourist destination, a place for film-makers and jet-setters.

There is a sense of welcome,  hospitality and humorous tolerance towards foreigners.  I’ve been particularly interested in the women, many of whom wear traditional dress.  They are cordial and friendly and seem happy having their pictures taken and exchange a few words in French of English.  Many have young children.

The center of all action in Marrakech is the teeming Jemaa-el-Fna Square which in the evening is what I would describe as an equivalent to Boston’s Fanueil Hall-Quincy Market.

The edge of the square is a multi-ring circus — there are snake charmers, eager to show off their cobras for a few cents, story-tellers who get a growing crowd over the course of the evening as they weave their tale.  I’ve read they leave the listeners in suspense at the end of the evening and save the rest for the next night. Ah, the lost art of storytelling is still alive and well in Marrakech.  Homer would be pleased to hear it.   There are men with monkeys dressed in fancy clothing, and traditional dancers with noisy Moroccan castanets and acrobats.

At dusk tourists climb the stairs to the top of the Cafes around the square and sip mint tea while staring down into the chaos below and enjoying the sunset over the snow-capped Atlas mountains in the distance.  Waiters serve delicious hot tea packed with mint leaves.

Throughout the piazza women sit on small stools and provide Henna tattoos.  I noticed lots of Moroccan women and girls getting them. I was tempted to do it myself but a friend warned me of black henna allergy so I had planned to avoid it.  But as I neared a group of young Moroccan woman to photograph the hands of a young girl, a beautiful  henna tattoo artist named Miriam — tall and slim with a white head scarf with black polka-dots– grabbed my hand and began to ask me all sorts of questions.  She practically put me into a trance and before I knew it, she was henna-ing away on my hand explaining with each squiggle, “this will give you good luck with your family, this will make your sex life very good with your husband, this will bring  you luck with all of your children…”  and on and on and the squiggles were going down my hand and around my fingers.  She totally took me for a ride, but she was such a smooth and efficient saleswoman, she deserved the money.

Food stalls line the center of the square, serving up steaming bowls of snails, traditional soups, lentils and beans.  Vendors call out cheerfully to passers-by, inviting them into their stand.  “Signora, lei e’ troppo magra, deve mangiare” (Lady, you are too skinny, you better get something to eat”) one cheerful vendor told me when I mentioned I was visiting from Italy.  I wanted to respond “certainly I don’t have the figure to make a good Moroccan belly dancer”, but I held my tongue. (More on belly dancers in another post).  I passed that food stall again later and the same man jokingly called out, “Lady from Italy, you are still too skinny, you really need to sit down and eat.”  The Moroccan way seems to be gentle and playful, teasing and in good humor.

Vendors with piles of oranges sell fresh squeezed orange juice for just 40 cents.  In two hours wandering around one evening in the intense dry heat, I found I had to stop twice for fresh orange juice.  There are other carts with large canvas bags filled with almonds, walnuts, apricots, prunes and every imaginable dried fruit.

Down in the square I found the stands selling the mint used in the tea.  My Grandmother, Virginia Pinney, always loved fresh mint in her ice tea and I had to go buy some to remind me of her.  I bought a big bunch for 10 cents which the vendor carefully wrapped up in brown paper for me.  Ah, the smell is heavenly and if I closed my eyes it brought me back to her screened-in back porch in Washington, D.C., sipping ice tea on a hot, humid summer’s day.

Many vendors with rolling carts wander the square offering a selection of traditional Moroccan sweets in a small box. For three euros I got to pluck out an assortment of cookies and sweets made from chocolate, almonds, figs, pistachios and I am not sure what else (but I ate them all).  I stuck my box in the basket I had bought for 5 euros together with the mint leaves.

Around the edges of the square are men selling all sorts of spices and remedies for everything from a bad luck curse to infertility.  I was particularly interested in one man who had a pile of teeth in front of him and seemed to be offering his services to pull out ones aching teeth.  Perhaps his toothless smile was supposed to be an advertisement for his success, but I steered clear.

I couldn’t resist buying a couple of bottles of Argan oil which I am told is great for dry skin and hair.  I had heard of Argan before because my hair-dresser in Rome has been pushing some expensive Argan hair product on me.   Apparently the Argan nuts with rough shells are grown on Argan trees that can only be found  in Western Morocco, they are collected by Berber women who feed them to their goats and the rough shell gets removed in the goats’ digestive tracks. Once the nut has been in one end and out of the other of the goat, they are nice and smooth and ready to be pressed and made into a precious oil to be used in cosmetics.  The nuts are apparently also used in salads but I prefer to use it on my skin and hair.  Somehow that whole goat business turns me off the eating.  A few years ago UNESCO declared the area where the trees grow a “biosphere reserve” and apparently the new trend of Argan oil for cosmetic purposes is giving an economic boost to the Berber women.

From the intensity of the Jemma el Fna Square I had to slip away and back into time entering the La Mamounia Hotel.  The Mamounia was the favorite hotel of Winston Churchill and according to my guidebook he stayed there with Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 and told him that it was the loveliest spot in the whole world.  He may have been right. The gardens were filled with roses, olive trees and orange trees.

Another stop, far from the chaos was the Majorelle Gardens, a spectacular garden designed by French artist Jacques Majorelle in the 1930s and restored by French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.  The garden has a bamboo forest, cactuses from every corner of the globe, pink, white and yellow bougainvilleas, interspersed with tiled walkways and beautiful blue wooden passageways.  In the garden I snapped this photo of the beautiful Moroccan woman dressed in violet.

MORE ON MARRAKECH TO COME SOON – Marocco’s Mini-Monarch, From Snakes, to Monkeys, Camels and Storks – the Animals of Marrakech