My roommate Keyla and I booked our plane tickets to Marrakech wayyy back in April... and I remember when I told Keely of our plans she said, "Wow, Morocco! That's Africa, dude." Yes, dude. I went to Africa. And it was awesome.
This trip was the first time that I´ve left Spain since being here, and it was so weird to be experiencing culture shock all over again. Seeing all the signs and everything written in French and Arabic took some getting used to, but I did find that the local people spoke more Spanish than they did English, so I actually didn´t speak much English while I was there. Which is fine by me. :)
The first thing on our list to do was to go to the currency exchange booth in the airport to exchange our euros for dirham. The exchange rate is actually pretty simple - 1 euro is approximately 10 dirham, so that made the converting easier on us during our trip. While we were in line to exchange our money, we started chatting with 2 other women from Alicante who were on their way to Marrakech as well, and we actually ran into them a few times in the city, which was fun.
Once we were on the ground in Morocco, we had to go through customs and passport control, which was basically a lot of standing in long lines. Some guys (who were from Morocco originally, but living in Spain) gave us some advice and offered to help us get a taxi into the city, which was really nice because he could explain the directions and such to the cab driver in Arabic, which left things alot simpler than if we had tried to explain things in a mix of English and Spanish.
The cab driver dropped us off right next to the city square, where there is a huge open air market. While crossing the square on the way to the hostel, we saw snake charmers, monkeys, and various other things that are essentially a money trap. Which leads me to explain one thing that Keyla and I quickly learned in Marrakech - there is no such thing as "free." If anyone offers you anything, they expect money from you. Which is fair, in some aspects. I mean, if you walk up to a guy selling bread, it's only polite to buy something if you want to ask him directions. The problem was that people would see us looking at our map and then approach us and offer to guide us to our destination, but they're going to ask you for compensation, which can really drain your cash quickly. So Keyla and I quickly had to learn to say no to people, which can be tricky, because some of them were really persistent and adament about helping us.
While at our hostel we met 2 other guys from Mexico, Rúben and Luis, and we ended up going to see some of the sights with them. On the first night we were there, we just wandered around the central square.
The next morning, we went to the Jardín Marjorelle, which is a beautiful botanical garden. There's also a memorial there for the designer Yves Saint Laurent, who lived in Marrakech for most of his life.
After the gardens, we went wandered through the streets and went into some of the little shops. I found after a while that most of the shops were selling really similar goods - leather purses/backpacks, antiques, tea pots, or clothing. Since I´m not really in the market for any of that stuff, I wasn´t really tempted to buy anything. I did want some sort of souvenir, but so far I hadn´t seen it.
The next day, we went to see one of the palaces. We were looking at it on our map while eating breakfast, but when we compared our map to Luis´, we found that they didn´t really look at all similar. The city is a network of incredibly narrow streets that kind of start and stop out of nowhere, so none of the maps are similar, nor are they very accurate. Luckily, Luis had been to the palace yesterday, so he showed us how to get there on our map. It turned out to be really simple actually. So here are a few pictures of the palace:
While walking back from the palace, this store window caught my eye. It was filled with these glass teacups, handpainted and in every color imaginable. The shop owner saw us looking at the glasses and he invited us in to look around. His name is Selman (not sure on the spelling there) and he told us that his father owned the shop before him and his family makes and paints all of the glasses by hand, and the shop is known throughout Marrakech for the quality of the products there. His shop has even been featured in France´s edition of ELLE magazine - that´s something. However, despite all that good publicity, the shop is struggling to make it. Selman told us that we were his first clients in 2 whole days. We each bought a few teacups - I chose these lovely little blue ones that are hand-blown. I can´t wait to have them in my kitchen at home!
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| Here we are with Selman. He showed us how to wear the scarves like the women here. :) |
We visited other sites around the city, such as the Museum of Marrakech and other buildings. Mostly the trip was a lot of wandering around and finding little shops and outdoor gardens. It was a really fun 3 days. :)
The full album of photos is posted on Facebook. Thanks for reading!
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