Marrakech, Morocco

“It’s like opening up a present on Christmas when you were a kid and you have no idea what it is. It’s so exciting!” – Chelsia Castaneda (October 6, 2014)

“It’s like they are the good snowboarders and we are the bad ones. It’s their job not to hit us!” – Chelsia Castaneda (October 6, 2014)

Gibraltar Straight

The first quote does a great job of explaining exactly how we felt upon arriving in Marrakech. It was a city like something we had never seen before and was nothing like we were expecting.

Marrakech is a charming city that feels like nowhere we have ever been. There are worn clay bricks lining the narrow streets, cracked beige stucco adorned on the buildings with patches of old dusty brown bricks peaking through. The streets are barely wide enough to walk four people across, yet they are packed with pedestrians while motorbikes and motorized scooters zip through dodging people left and right. They constantly, but quickly beep their horns; just long enough to warn you they are coming but not so long as to be rude or abrasive. This leads me to the second quote listed above. This was how Chelsia described the relationship between the motorcyclists and the people walking in the streets. If you have ever been snowboarding (or skiing) and have dealt with dodging those slow people on the runs (or if you have been the one in need of dodging) you know what it is like to walk in the medina of Marrakech.

Honestly, we were a little worried about going to Morocco. With the current Ebola scare and ISIS becoming a growing concern, going to a Muslim country in Africa had the dark side of our imaginations going at full speed. We actually almost backed out of going at all the night before we left. We couldn’t be happier that we didn’t.

Another factor that almost deterred us from going was the fact that our trip aligned exactly with the Eid al-Adha (Muslim week of Sacrifice to honor Abraham). We thought that we might be stepping on some toes by going at this time, and that too many things might be closed for it to be worth going. In reality, all it did was make our arrival and first days in the city more memorable.

We flew into Casablanca, then immediately boarded a train to Marrakech. We had to switch trains during our journey and actually missed the stop where we were supposed to switch. Thankfully just about everyone in our train car was extremely helpful in finding where we were supposed to go. One person even walked us to the platform where we needed to wait for the train that took us all the way to Marrakech (luckily the train that went to Marrakech also stopped at that stop).

As you can see, the people are friendly. They are not overly friendly to the point where it feels phony though. We had a pretty easy time blending in since the people in Morocco actually look a lot like Chelsia and me. It didn’t hurt that I intentionally grew my beard out for about a month before going. We were repeatedly asked if we were Arabic or had Arabic roots. We would always say no, but people refused to take no for an answer and kept prying to see if we had something in us that was close to what they were.

The ride on the second train that went all the way to Marrakech was fairly long, and the train was packed due to the combination of people traveling for the holiday and the decreased number of trains due to the holiday. When our train pulled into Marrakech the first thing we noticed was how beautiful the train station was. It provided a great first impression of the city. We had a driver waiting for us at the train station, and he drove us into the medina. The city is broken into two distinct parts; the old city (known as the medina) and the new city, which is more modern but still has a unique flair to it. The medina is behind the old walls of the city. It is the area with the narrow winding streets, which also happened to house our hotel. The narrow winding streets that make the city so unique also make it impossible for a car to drop you off at the front door of your hotel. Our taxi dropped us off about 15 minutes from our actual hotel and we had to walk the rest of the way. Our hotel arranged to have someone meet us at the drop off point and walk us to the front door. I don’t think we could have found our way otherwise given the circumstances.

Marrakech Train Station

We happened to arrive on the night before the main day of the Eid al-Adha ceremony and feast, so the streets were packed with people out celebrating and preparing for the next day's festivities. The main focus of the celebration is Abraham’s sacrifice of the lamb in the place of his son (after he showed his devotion to God through his willingness to sacrifice his child of course). So in honor of that sacrifice, they slaughter lambs of their own. As we were arriving, they were all getting their lambs ready to slaughter. I’m talking about people carting lambs around in makeshift carts, sometimes between two and four animals to a cart. People were walking them on leashes, carrying them in their arms, and riding two people to a motorcycle with a live lamb lying across the bike between the people. I have never seen so much livestock outside of a farm. Again, this city was like nothing we had ever seen before.

We made it through the commotion and into our hotel, which was in what they call a riad. A riad is a typical Moroccan house or palace that doesn’t have any windows facing outside, but has a big interior courtyard or garden in the center. This makes it very unassuming from the outside, which is actually the purpose of not having windows. Despite it’s unassuming exterior, it was beautiful on the inside. Upon arrival we were met with a delicious pot of mint tea (a Moroccan custom), which became our drink of the trip. After tea we were served a delicious three-course Moroccan dinner with chicken cous cous as the star attraction main course. After we were sufficiently stuffed, we were led up to our beautiful suite (the Marrakech Suite), which just so happened to be the nicest and most private room in the place. Score, and a great deal to boot!

Outside of our riad

The next day we went outside to find that all of the lambs that we saw being carted around the night before were now in the slaughter stage. Most had already been killed, and the streets were literally covered in blood. Others were still in the process of being led to slaughter. The locals had already broken out the BBQs and were getting the lamb meat ready to cook over the fire right in the middle of the narrow alleyways and in the little squares littered throughout the city. They started by cooking the heads, and as we walked through the streets of the medina we saw men and children alike sitting on the ground holding severed lamb heads with one hand while pounding the decapitated lambs horns with a machete in the other in what looked like a futile attempt to break them off. As the day went on and the horns were finally pulled off, the heads went into the fire and were cooked until they had a dark char all the way around. As we walked around on our first day, we saw other parts of the lamb going on the grill. I think my favorite other than the head were the legs. By the end of the day all that was left was the blood on the streets, random horns scattered around the city, and piles of lambskins that came up to my waist.

Cooking the heads in small square

I wish we could have gotten better pictures of the whole thing, but when we asked the locals if we could snap some shots of them they asked us not to due to the religious nature of the event.

We spent most of our time in Marrakech just exploring the city as it has a lot to offer. There is an incredibly unique vibe of just walking through the narrow streets that makes you feel like you are in an old movie. There are a host of museums throughout the city and many beautiful mosques to admire. We went to two museums while we were there: Medersa Ben Youssef and the Marrakech Museum. Both were unique in their own way, and the Marrakech Museum in particular had some cool art and artifacts. There are also some great restaurants all throughout the city and food is incredibly affordable. We actually went to a little restaurant near our hotel called Naima twice on our trip. The owner prepared me a special dinner of lamb (not on the menu) when we went back the second time.

Medersa Ben Youssef

Marrakech Museum

Naima Restaurant

At Naima eating the best lamb I have ever had

The two main attractions of the medina are the Jemaa el-Fnaa square and the Marrakech Souk.

The square has lots of pop up carts where you can enjoy a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice (delicious!) during the day and take a look at the snake charmers and monkey handlers. Just don’t take a picture or they might try and charge you around $20 USD for the right to walk away unscathed. There are a ton of cafes and restaurants where you can sit and admire the action in the square from a distance over a cup of coffee, a pot of mint tea, some ice cream, or a Moroccan specialty of orange slices and cinnamon (we did all of the above).

Orange slices with cinnamon, mint tea, and coffee at a cafe on the main square. 

At night the square really comes alive and gets crowded to the point where you can’t take more than a step without running into someone if you aren’t careful. This is when even more vendors come out and sell a whole host of things. We tried some delicious spice tea (it had hints of cinnamon among other things), along with what we thought would be chocolate cake but was actually a strange spice mixture clumped together into a brittle, grainy mass. We shied away from the escargot station and street henna dealers (we went to the Henna Café during the day instead and had a nice lunch and got a safe, natural henna for Chelsia). I took a turn playing a cool game in the square one night where I tried to “fish” a bottle of soda using a ring attached to a long fishing pole. It was basically impossible to do, and I gave up after I saw that someone else completed it but wasn’t given a prize. People will do anything to make money in the square. They set up games, tell stories, and even set up fake boxing matches (we wasted about 10 minutes trying to watch a fight before realizing that there would actually not be any fighting).

Jemaa el-Fnaa at Night

Henna Cafe

This little guy lived on the cafe floor. 

The Marrakech Souk lets out right into the square, but can also be accessed along the narrow alleyways throughout the city. The Souk is an awesome shopping area that has tons of goods produced and sold by locals. The first price they give you when you ask to buy something starts at about three times what it should cost, so haggling is definitely necessary. We only bought one thing in the Souk (one souvenir from all of Morocco for that matter) and it was a beautiful blanket called a Handira for the subject of our next blog post.

This is the Handira we bought in the Souks. It can be used as a blanked, carpet, etc.

Other than exploring the city, there were two big activities we did while in Marrakech.

First we took a dune buggy tour of the desert outside of the city to explore the Berber lands. Chelsia and I took turns driving through the desert and got up to speeds of about 62 kilometers and hour. The sand in the Moroccan desert is beautiful, and ranges in color from a dark brown to an almost pink-reddish color. Highlights of the trip include stopping on a hill to check out the desert landscape and stopping at a Berber house to have some mint tea and Moroccan crepes.

French man on our tour decided he couldn't wait until we found a bathroom. 

At a Berber village on our dune buggy tour. 

My nose got really dirty driving that dune buggy. Can you spot Chels in this picture? 

The other activity we did was a cooking class through Faim d’Espices. We saved this for our last day in Marrakech since it was the number one activity on TripAdvisor. The cooking class was amazing. We cooked beef in the tajine (a traditional Moroccan cooking device) with caramelized oranges and pears. So. Good. They also taught us how to make Moroccan crepes, bread, and salads. We will be implementing these recipes into our cooking rotation once we get back to California and are able to get our hands on a tajine. The whole thing was incredibly well organized and I would recommend it to anyone traveling to Marrakech.

We ate a small dinner on the square that night since we had such a large and wonderful lunch and said goodbye to the beautiful city of Marrakech. The next day we went to the train station and tried out the local McDonald’s, which had some interesting regional items (we do this in every country we go to). We then boarded our train to Casablanca, then hopped on our flight home to Madrid the next morning.

-S (pictures by C)

Random Pictures from our Riad