I'm going to do this (really, really long but hopefully entertaining) post in reverse order because the segues make a little more sense that way, I think. My thoughts are a little muddled due to the fact that I'm getting used to American germs again via influenza, but I'm pretty sure this thought is more or less solid. Pretty sure.
Well, my Morocco adventure has officially concluded, which means this is the last official post on this blog, as far as I know. I am now safely back in the States, and have been for a week and a half. It's still weird; I'm experiencing some reverse culture shock, and no doubt I will for a while. The thing that has impressed me the most about the West in general, but mostly America, is the amount of stuff people have. Costco and Wal-Mart are freaking huge. People actually use all that stuff? Really?
Interestingly--and this is not something I admit easily--the culture shock has been a lot worse coming back than it was going to Morocco. I expected a developing country when I went to Morocco, and that was of course what I got. Aside from that basic concept, I tried not to have too many ideas about how Morocco would be.
Coming back to something familiar is completely different. You get this picture in your head of how things are "supposed" to be, and when they aren't how you remember, it's frankly quite unsettling. In the time in which I was away, I got a concept embedded in my head of how "home" was. That concept was created by a different me, one that hadn't been exposed to the things to which I have now been exposed. Sometimes I feel like I'm a little out of phase with my surroundings. Morocco initially had an aura of unreality about it; home has an aura of terrible reality. In one way, it's as if I never left home, but in another, it's as if I left forever. It'll take awhile to reconcile everything in my own mind. Perhaps then I'll be able to talk more coherently about my experiences as a whole. For now, suffice it to say that Morocco was great, and home is great too, but nothing is perfect and you can't expect it to be unless you want to be disappointed.
Okay, now for a lighter topic. Marrakech! Or Marrakesh, as the Firefox spellchecker wants me to spell it. Clearly it doesn't know Morocco was a French colony for a long time and thus the transliterations are/should be French, in my highly subjective and non-scholarly opinion.
Anyway. Marrakech (I will persist with my spelling in spite of Firefox's best efforts) is a beautiful city, provided you can put up with a constant barrage of humanity and two-wheeled vehicles. Motorcycles, variants on motorcycles, and bicycles are a very popular mode of transportation in Marrakech. This is especially true in the old medina, in which the streets are so narrow and windy that most cars can't fit.
There is something for everyone in Marrakech, except perhaps peace and quiet. Marrakech is most emphatically not a place to go for a relaxing weekend. The riad (large house, formerly a family house but now a bed and breakfast of sorts) in which I stayed was beautiful and quite peaceful, but was the only place which felt that way.
Allow me to illustrate.
You wake up from a peaceful sleep in the lovely riad and take a nice, hot shower. After a leisurely breakfast, you get your camera and any other necessary personal effects from your room and venture out into the street.
The moment you set foot in the street, you immediately have to pull it back to avoid getting it run over by a speeding motorcyclist. You give him a dirty look, but there's nothing else you can do, since he's already skidded rather alarmingly around a corner. Shrugging it off as an atypical incident, you start on your way deeper in to the medina.
As soon as you hit the main "street," which is a river of humanity, an armada of motorcycles zips by, again narrowly missing your toes. You wonder how they can go so fast without hitting something or someone, and you regret wearing sandals. You're still close enough to the riad that you could go back and change, but your friends are already plunging into the crowd, so you follow.
After a few minutes' walk--or, more accurately, wade--you arrive at the Djema'a al-Fnaa, which is the main square in the medina. It literally means Gathering of the Dead, since it was the place in which public executions were held in a bygone age. Now it's a massive expanse of asphalt, upon which hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors have set up their stalls and are now hawking their wares.
If the street was a river of humanity, this is the Pacific Ocean. There are all kinds of wares, mostly targeted at tourists, who make up the majority of the population in the square. Your ears pick up an interesting pastiche of languages--the typical Arabic and French, of course, but also English of several varieties, German, Spanish, and perhaps even some Russian and Italian. The square is truly a melting pot.
Immediately following your entrance to the square, you are quite literally accosted by people trying to sell you things you don't need. Shopkeepers try to physically pull you into their shops. You find that speaking Spanish to these vendors gets you less attention than speaking English.
In the middle of the square, you see something interesting, so you whip out your camera to take a picture.
Big mistake.
About fifty people descend on you, yelling in various languages. You freeze, instantly realizing your mistake. Everything is for sale here, including photos. It doesn't matter if the person wanting the money is standing behind you when you take the picture; you still have to pay. You rapidly stow your camera in your pocket and flee into the relative safety of the crowds, muttering "no, gracias" as necessary. No picture is worth dealing with that many people. Perhaps when it's dark and you're less visible you can take a photo.
Having had enough of the medina for a while, you leave for the newer parts of the city.
Later that night, you come back to the Djema'a al-Fnaa and manage to snap this photo before plunging back into the throngs...
Somehow, through a little sleight of hand and disabling your camera's flash, you also manage to snap this...
...and then you immediately have to move away.
You smell an interesting smell wafting toward you from a block of vendors, so you and your group wander into the block. The vendors are food vendors, and they cook the food right in front of you. You've already had dinner, so you have to say no to all of them, which gets increasingly difficult as you get closer to the edge of the block. When you finally break free of their clutches, they shout "f*** you, man!" at your back and promptly turn to snare their next victim.
Somehow you manage to get through the near-psychopathic souvenir vendors to the much more sparsely-populated caravanserai. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the hubbub of the square. The polite gentleman tending to a small textile shop tells you that it's a principle of the caravanserai that no one will push you to buy anything, a principle you greatly appreciate. The man tells you it's because the caravanserai is where the caravans used to come to be refreshed, and the vendors there all want to keep the tradition of peacefulness.
Eventually you make your way back to the riad, exhausted from a long day.
The above is a dramatization of actual events.
There is actually one place a person can go for a little R&R in Marrakech. For some reason--probably the flu--the name is escaping me at the moment, but I do know that it's a place for sharifs, or descendents of the Prophet's family, to be buried. I also have pictures.
The axe blade-shaped things everywhere are tombs.
I think that's all I have to say now. There may be another unofficial post here sometime, and there will certainly be more posts if I go somewhere else soon, but for the foreseeable future, this is the end. I've enjoyed blogging--factual blogging, that is--more than I thought I would. I actually don't really know how many people read this; hopefully someone got some entertainment and perhaps even usable information out of it.
Well, that's the end, I guess. Morocco is officially a closed chapter of my life, at least for now. Until next time, my friends...
Well, my Morocco adventure has officially concluded, which means this is the last official post on this blog, as far as I know. I am now safely back in the States, and have been for a week and a half. It's still weird; I'm experiencing some reverse culture shock, and no doubt I will for a while. The thing that has impressed me the most about the West in general, but mostly America, is the amount of stuff people have. Costco and Wal-Mart are freaking huge. People actually use all that stuff? Really?
Interestingly--and this is not something I admit easily--the culture shock has been a lot worse coming back than it was going to Morocco. I expected a developing country when I went to Morocco, and that was of course what I got. Aside from that basic concept, I tried not to have too many ideas about how Morocco would be.
Coming back to something familiar is completely different. You get this picture in your head of how things are "supposed" to be, and when they aren't how you remember, it's frankly quite unsettling. In the time in which I was away, I got a concept embedded in my head of how "home" was. That concept was created by a different me, one that hadn't been exposed to the things to which I have now been exposed. Sometimes I feel like I'm a little out of phase with my surroundings. Morocco initially had an aura of unreality about it; home has an aura of terrible reality. In one way, it's as if I never left home, but in another, it's as if I left forever. It'll take awhile to reconcile everything in my own mind. Perhaps then I'll be able to talk more coherently about my experiences as a whole. For now, suffice it to say that Morocco was great, and home is great too, but nothing is perfect and you can't expect it to be unless you want to be disappointed.
Okay, now for a lighter topic. Marrakech! Or Marrakesh, as the Firefox spellchecker wants me to spell it. Clearly it doesn't know Morocco was a French colony for a long time and thus the transliterations are/should be French, in my highly subjective and non-scholarly opinion.
Anyway. Marrakech (I will persist with my spelling in spite of Firefox's best efforts) is a beautiful city, provided you can put up with a constant barrage of humanity and two-wheeled vehicles. Motorcycles, variants on motorcycles, and bicycles are a very popular mode of transportation in Marrakech. This is especially true in the old medina, in which the streets are so narrow and windy that most cars can't fit.
There is something for everyone in Marrakech, except perhaps peace and quiet. Marrakech is most emphatically not a place to go for a relaxing weekend. The riad (large house, formerly a family house but now a bed and breakfast of sorts) in which I stayed was beautiful and quite peaceful, but was the only place which felt that way.
Allow me to illustrate.
You wake up from a peaceful sleep in the lovely riad and take a nice, hot shower. After a leisurely breakfast, you get your camera and any other necessary personal effects from your room and venture out into the street.
The moment you set foot in the street, you immediately have to pull it back to avoid getting it run over by a speeding motorcyclist. You give him a dirty look, but there's nothing else you can do, since he's already skidded rather alarmingly around a corner. Shrugging it off as an atypical incident, you start on your way deeper in to the medina.
As soon as you hit the main "street," which is a river of humanity, an armada of motorcycles zips by, again narrowly missing your toes. You wonder how they can go so fast without hitting something or someone, and you regret wearing sandals. You're still close enough to the riad that you could go back and change, but your friends are already plunging into the crowd, so you follow.
After a few minutes' walk--or, more accurately, wade--you arrive at the Djema'a al-Fnaa, which is the main square in the medina. It literally means Gathering of the Dead, since it was the place in which public executions were held in a bygone age. Now it's a massive expanse of asphalt, upon which hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors have set up their stalls and are now hawking their wares.
If the street was a river of humanity, this is the Pacific Ocean. There are all kinds of wares, mostly targeted at tourists, who make up the majority of the population in the square. Your ears pick up an interesting pastiche of languages--the typical Arabic and French, of course, but also English of several varieties, German, Spanish, and perhaps even some Russian and Italian. The square is truly a melting pot.
Immediately following your entrance to the square, you are quite literally accosted by people trying to sell you things you don't need. Shopkeepers try to physically pull you into their shops. You find that speaking Spanish to these vendors gets you less attention than speaking English.
In the middle of the square, you see something interesting, so you whip out your camera to take a picture.
Big mistake.
About fifty people descend on you, yelling in various languages. You freeze, instantly realizing your mistake. Everything is for sale here, including photos. It doesn't matter if the person wanting the money is standing behind you when you take the picture; you still have to pay. You rapidly stow your camera in your pocket and flee into the relative safety of the crowds, muttering "no, gracias" as necessary. No picture is worth dealing with that many people. Perhaps when it's dark and you're less visible you can take a photo.
Having had enough of the medina for a while, you leave for the newer parts of the city.
Later that night, you come back to the Djema'a al-Fnaa and manage to snap this photo before plunging back into the throngs...
Somehow, through a little sleight of hand and disabling your camera's flash, you also manage to snap this...
...and then you immediately have to move away.
You smell an interesting smell wafting toward you from a block of vendors, so you and your group wander into the block. The vendors are food vendors, and they cook the food right in front of you. You've already had dinner, so you have to say no to all of them, which gets increasingly difficult as you get closer to the edge of the block. When you finally break free of their clutches, they shout "f*** you, man!" at your back and promptly turn to snare their next victim.
Somehow you manage to get through the near-psychopathic souvenir vendors to the much more sparsely-populated caravanserai. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the hubbub of the square. The polite gentleman tending to a small textile shop tells you that it's a principle of the caravanserai that no one will push you to buy anything, a principle you greatly appreciate. The man tells you it's because the caravanserai is where the caravans used to come to be refreshed, and the vendors there all want to keep the tradition of peacefulness.
Eventually you make your way back to the riad, exhausted from a long day.
The above is a dramatization of actual events.
There is actually one place a person can go for a little R&R in Marrakech. For some reason--probably the flu--the name is escaping me at the moment, but I do know that it's a place for sharifs, or descendents of the Prophet's family, to be buried. I also have pictures.
The axe blade-shaped things everywhere are tombs.
I think that's all I have to say now. There may be another unofficial post here sometime, and there will certainly be more posts if I go somewhere else soon, but for the foreseeable future, this is the end. I've enjoyed blogging--factual blogging, that is--more than I thought I would. I actually don't really know how many people read this; hopefully someone got some entertainment and perhaps even usable information out of it.
Well, that's the end, I guess. Morocco is officially a closed chapter of my life, at least for now. Until next time, my friends...
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