Marrakesh - The First 5 Hours

For Spring Break we decide to visit Morocco.  We choose the city of Marrakech (also spelled Marrakesh), but I can't quite remember why we chose it.  Easiest flight, I think.  Anyway, it's the 4th largest city in Morocco after Casablanca, Fes, and Tangier (thank you, Wikipedia) and I should have brushed up on my French before our trip but I was too busy trying to learn Spanish to remember to do that.

We land at the airport and, due to confusion about the time change, we have to wait a while for our taxi driver, arranged by the hotel, to arrive. This presents the perfect opportunity to practice my junior high/high school French while I walk around asking men with signs if they are from the Riad Dar Jaguar and also does anyone have the correct time.  Our Monsieur finally arrives and we speak our broken French to him as he drives us towards our hotel.  Well, not quite a hotel, but I'll get to that in a minute.

We have booked our first two nights in the Riad Dar Jaguar.  It is situated in the medina (the area within the old city walls) and taxis are not allowed in the medina at night so Monsieur can only take us as far as the edge of a large square (a famous one, apparently) called Jemaa el-Fnaa.  But there's really no way for Monsieur to communicate to us that this is the plan (and I didn't read my email closely) so we are a bit surprised when he stops the car in what is, effectively, the middle of traffic.   And not just any old traffic.  This is traffic filled with cars, buses, bikes, pedestrians, motor-scooters, horse-drawn carriages, donkeys, carts, and donkeys with carts, but it lacks lights, lines, crosswalks, or a sufficient number of signs.  It is, in essence, a game of Frogger when you try to cross the street in Marrakesh.  If you would like to see what I am talking about, here is a video I took one afternoon while we looked for a crosswalk.  When we saw this old man pushing a wheel chair across a busy street, followed by a father and his daughter crossing and dodging buses and horses, we figured out how to properly cross a street in Marrakech - just start walking.

  

Once we figure out that we are indeed supposed to get out of this taxi that has stopped in the middle of traffic, we grab the kids, hug the sides of the car, and hustle back towards the trunk to retrieve our luggage only to find a man loading our luggage into a wheelbarrow.

"Hola.  I mean, Bonjour.  I mean, Salaam."  The four of us (Monsieur Taxi Driver, Michael, me, and Monsieur Wheelbarrow), attempt our best international communication and determine that we will now follow Monsieur Wheelbarrow to our next destination.  Hopefully the next destination is the Riad Dar Jaguar, but we are open to another hand-off.

We are guided through the Jemaa el-Fnaa.  Monsieur walks quickly and we try to keep up as we dodge all of the activity in the square and try to focus and keep our kids focused on keeping up with this man.  We are dazzled by acrobats, snake charmers, men with monkeys, vendor carts selling spices and oranges and juice and olives, women painting henna, musicians, I could go on and on.  And then, just as we are reaching sensory overload, Marrakesh steps it up a notch.  We enter the souks, a labyrinth of narrow and winding streets with merchant stalls on both sides bursting at their seams selling everything under the sun.  Down the middle of these alleys are pedestrians, motorbikes, carts, and donkeys, all walking both ways.  I was only able to get a quick video of us walking through the square (see below) because once we hit the souks I was quite sure I was going to get hit or swallowed whole.

We arrive safely at the Riad Dar Jaguar.  A riad, we learn, is a "traditional Moroccan palace" with rooms that circle an open courtyard with a fountain.  These days, many people have bought up old riads and turned them into guest houses - small hotels, bed & breakfast-like.  A dar, on the other hand, is simply a house.  As the name would suggest, it seems we are staying in something that is a cross between a riad and a dar.  It is beautiful and cozy but our rooms are on the first level and homes in Morocco are designed to keep the first floors nice and cool during all the many hot months.  We, true to form, have booked our stay during the only cold and rainy week that Morocco will see all year.  So our rooms are beautiful but freezing and we try not to blow fuses turning space heaters up as high as they will go.

Riad Dar Jaguar has dinner waiting for us when we arrive.  It is the sweetest food we have ever tasted.  Pumpkin soup, chicken and vegetable tagine with couscous, and poached pears for dessert.  We are smitten.  And we are all exhausted and ready for bed.  Willa asks if "that freakin' fountain is going to make that noise all night." And then we crash.