Wandering Through the Between: Marrakesh Day 2: A burst of tourist “productivity,” a lesson learned and some stunning craftsmanship

May 13 (Monday)
12km from Chefchaouen, Morocco

It’s Monday, but I’m writing about Day 2 in Marrakesh, which was last Thursday. I may be writing about Morocco well after next week when I get back home to DC. So you’ll have to deal with a time-delayed narrative, and splurges of posting when Internet is available (it doesn’t exist everywhere!).

Day 2 in Marrakesh we got a slow start. We’ve been trying to vacation “leisurely” – which is to say restfully. Which is actually quite hard to do. I’m still trying to figure it out. At our Thursday night Benedictine group at my church we talk about how difficult it is to let ourselves rest, and that we actually have to learn how to rest. I think the same is true of vacationing and travel. You have to figure out a way to do it without grinding yourself into the dirt, to do it restfully and well: to recognize limits, to take time to check in with yourself to make sure your vacation is giving more energy than it is taking. I think this philosophy of tourism could be a whole post. The Tourist Guilt of Not Seeing Everything (you can’t!). See a few things, be in a place, have some tea, look around, think and then write and have a conversation about it. Part of this philosophy probably includes this blog, which is a writing and a sharing and a conversation (now and in the future).

But after our leisurely start we threw it into high gear. Around 11 AM when we finally leave the riad and head out into the manic chaos of Marrakesh, Dave and Saumya and I are a trio on a mission: see the Saadian Tombs (down the street from the riad, but that probably won’t make finding it any easier), buy our train tickets so we’ll have them in hand when we leave on Friday, and then get some lunch, and venture deep into the souqs, find the Ali ben Youssef Medersa, the Musee de Marrakech. Previous days we had tried to accomplish one thing (kasbah, Chellah, etc.) So this shows you the scale of our ambition, which as Lady McB calls “vaulting” and “[o’erleaping] itself” (if I remember the Scottish Play correctly).

First, the Saadian Tombs, which are one of Marrakesh’s highlights in the guidebooks. It’s a mausoleum on steroids, with the Saadian Sultan who commissioned them importing the marble from Italy and gilding the whole thing in gold. The tombs held the Sultan, three of his sons, dozens of his wives, and the rest of his children. Three princes got the good spots, with the 170 wives and advisors getting more anonymous garden plots. The architecture and intricacy of stonework and mosaic work is some of the most stunning I think we’ve seen so far. Photos! (click for bigger!)

The small raised ridges and the tiled rectangles you see in the foreground left indicate tombs.

Impressive mosaic (zellij) work, Saadian Tombs, Marrakesh.

This is the main chamber (in a kind of eerie green light), with the Sultan’s three sons buried here (I think – we didn’t hire a guide but got the general idea). Chamber of the Three Niches.

Pick your jaw up off the floor.

Ceiling in the Chamber of Three Niches.

Having checked off Tourist Site Number 1, we blazed on to the train station, negotiated a fair price for a cab (20 dirham total for all three of us – see 100 dirham per person, which we got on our first day). Cab back to the square and we grabbed a quick and tasty lunch in the Hotel Foucauld restaurant. Headed back north through the Djemma (now somewhat more tame during the daylight hours) and into the winding, meandering, perplexing souqs, which on Google maps appear as a plate of spaghetti where none of the noodles touch but they all happily dead-end. Noodles that also have no names or if they do, no one knows what they are. "Herr Kafka, this is your cue.” Lonely Planet cheerfully reminds us part of the point is to get lost. Brace thyself, mortal. We take a deep breath and dive in.

Souqs. Daylight, and at a pretty wide expanse. People on bicycles and mopeds seem to think they can whiz through the crowds, honking and shouting as they go. Everything is always for sale, as always. The stalls start to blur together after a while, and tourist trinket after tourist trinket becomes one oddly amorphous multicolored image.

Market stalls in the souqs of Marrakech.

Scam Number 2!* A friendly Moroccan with pleasant English, accented with a hearty Arabic back-of-the-throat gutterality, lets us know that it’s tannery day in the souqs and this only happens once a week, so we should take advantage and see it! How nice. He lets us go on our way and gives us absurdly simple directions to find it (Go up there! Turn right! And there it is!). He “coincidentally” runs into us again and “happens” to run into his “friend” who “fortuitously” is going in that same direction! Yay! Why, he can just show us the way! No worries! The “friend” passes us to one of the tannery workers in a Larry Bird shirt who happens to speak some simple English. Question mark? He gives us a “tannery gas mask” (a sprig of fresh mint to put over our nostrils to cover up some of the smell of curing animal hides). And shows us the relatively simple curing method they have been using for centuries. Each vat has a substance and a time frame, which I cannot remember exactly, but goes something like this: lime for four days, pigeon shit for two days (he says pigeon shit a number of times and with a kind of conspicuous joy; I suppose I would too if I could say that in my job), flour and water for four days, then in the coloring vats if the leather is to be colored.

Does anyone smell that?

Hey, kids, it’s Larry Bird!

He then leads us from the “Arab Tanneries” to the “Berber Tanneries” which are basically the same concept but bigger and there seems to be more clumps of cow hair tumbleweeding through the noxious rivulets of various unidentifiable curing agents on the ground. He takes us to the “factory” which looks really absolutely just like a trinket shop we’ve seen dozens of, and leads us upstairs to show us how the leather is made. He never actually does, but we do see an old man on a loom, which I guess is a kind of industry? But related to leatherworking – how? We get it, though, by this point. We’ve been led by the nose by these guys to get us to this shop to buy stuff. And we have zero interest, but Saumya is polite and smiling and we make our way to the door.

Once we get outside and around the corner, the shop owner says something to Larry Bird and as we’re walking away, Larry comes back and tells us he wants money. Big time. 100 dirham from each of us. Saumya says that she doesn’t have money, gives him 10 dirham, which he mockingly derides as “for a little boy.” I give him a 50 note and say that’s it. He walks away clearly annoyed.

None of this is told to us upfront (the price, the tour, the shop, etc) and obviously so: if we had known the rules we never would have gotten this far or even agreed at the beginning to the tag-teaming. Clearly other tourists get sucked in as well and either enjoy themselves and think 100 dirham is only $12 in the States and give it over, or feel guilty and give it over reluctantly, feeling they’ve “wasted” this person’s half hour. My bullshit radar went off after we got a “free tour” of the tannery (nothing is free – they will make us pay somehow). But once you’re on that train, it’s hard to get off. It’s a story for the grandkids, though, I guess, of being led around a souq by a trained team of hustlers working together in Marrakech.

We try to find our way out of the souq and are of course totally lost and turned around. Some school kids offer to help – how nice! We know the game, now. They lead us out and similarly insult our tips, saying three dirham is “nothing!” Give me your pen, one says, for school. Which I do. Which I figure may be the first time a Palmer House Hilton Chicago pen arrived in the souqs of Marrakech. That pen has traveled a long way, friends. Take care of it.

Rattled and a little annoyed by the aggressive tourist working-over we’ve gotten so far, we do finally find the Medersa and the Museum we were looking for and take a peek. Photo journey: first the Medersa, which is basically an Islamic school founded in the 14th century under the Merenid Dynasty (it was the largest in north Africa at the time). The center was based around Quranic and legal study for almost 900 students at its height -

The courtyard shows Hispano-Moresque influences in the ornamentation. Zellij (mosaic) walls, cedar windows and carved vines, and Iraqi-style Kufic letters which end in leaves. The small window you see is from a student’s room looking down on the courtyard.

Student windows looking down on courtyard.

Courtyard’s stunning carving work and central pool.

Student quarters, looking down from the second floor to the first.

Student quarters, looking across instead of down from the picture above.

Ornate carved doors and windows in the student’s quarters.

Stunning central courtyard and pool, from ground level.

Me and the mosaics – from the ground floor you can see the five-colored mosaic (zellij) which wrap around the base of the courtyard.

Jaw dropping elaborate ornamentation in the prayer niche on the ground floor, facing the pool and courtyard.

Then we walked next door to the Museum of Marrakech, which had some interesting stuff, but the building was really more spectacular than the actual artifacts it houses. Or at least that’s what I think. It was originally the Mnebhi Palace, but later was converted to a girls school and finally a museum. Photos!

Central courtyard, Musee de Marrakech – ornate zellij (mosaic tilework) and woodwork

Same – central courtyard Musee de Marrakech, with stand alone and wall fountains (on left)

Enormous “lamp” in central courtyard of the Musee. Most lamps are lamp-sized, like maybe two feet across for a big one in someone’s house. This one was about thirty feet across with an incredibly elaborate design.