Oh my, it feels good to be back out in the world. Three months in the US was too much. It was full, but other than our daughter Ruby’s wedding what it was full of was surgeries and recoveries. It needed to be over.

Our first year was pretty much all Mexico, except for our month in Cuba. We chose Mexico specifically because we were so comfortable there. It was a way to get our feet wet in the nomadic lifestyle, kicking the tires (tricky with wet feet) and making sure we were prepared to drop ourselves into the truly unknown.

Which is why we’ve started Year Two in Morocco. We arrived in Marrakech on December 11th and will be here for three full months, without any plans for where we go next. Our first year was pretty scripted, because it was anchored by Ruby’s wedding and our trip to Cuba (which had to coincide with our friend Jen’s presence). Everything else had to fit in-between, and those constraints forced the year to be planned out.

Part of the problem with that was the lack of spontaneity. We didn’t like feeling like we were on a track, even a track comprised entirely of our own choices. Another part was that those plans got upended by Dorothy’s two hip replacements, and the logistics scramble was expensive. The odds of some other plan-fucking event seem high, arguing for flexibility. And for Year Two we’d be traveling to multiple countries, making climate and political disasters a risk for long-term planning. Who knows where it will be safe to travel nine months from now? As we start winding down from Marrakech, we’ll look at the map and decide where to go next, and try to keep that cadence going forward as much as possible.

Up until now, we haven’t been particularly thorough world travelers (which is probably why this adventure seemed so compelling). Mexico, Guatemala, and some India. I’ve done Hong Kong, England, and Scotland for work, without Dorothy. Canada, technically, but I’m not sure it counts as foreign travel. So we don’t really have a lot of context for Morocco. Specifically, we don’t have a lot of context for a place this old.

One way that the age shows is in how welcoming it is to visitors. Marrakech has been a crossroads and commercial center for centuries, attracting travelers and traders from all over the world. Tolerance for differences runs deep in its DNA. This is our first visit to a Muslim country, and while there are obviously oppressive Muslim regimes, this is certainly not one of them. For starters, in an excess of fellowship, alcohol is available here., And even obvious violations of local norms, like dressing immodestly, are met with an eyebrow, not a pitchfork. We’re doing our best to follow the rules and not be assholes. I miss my shorts. And scorn the pasty white legs of those few tourists clueless enough to have missed the memo.

Age also manifests in the local craft traditions. They are still making things here the way they’ve been made for centuries. Weaving, leather, ceramics, wood, and metal are still produced by hand using traditional materials and methods. There’s plenty of manufactured tourist schlock, but there’s also a healthy artistic dialogue between modernism and tradition, resulting in some truly breathtaking work. That particular combination of modern sensibilities applied to traditional designs and methods is a sweet spot for us, as we found in Oaxaca, and we’re delighted to be marinating in it here.

The souks of the Medina and the shops in the Kashbah have changed little over the years. The winding alleys of the souks are right where they’ve always been, if repaved over time, and the shops are still full of merchants aggressively hawking their wares in multiple languages. The shops in the Kasbah are still full of artisans and craftspeople showing their goods in the front and making them in the back. There’s a timelessness and continuity to the landscape here that you can feel as it wraps itself around you and pulls you back into history.

Colonization

The French occupation, unsurprisingly, still echoes here. Our experience in post-colonial environments has been Mexico, Cuba, and India, all places where the colonists left a substantial architectural footprint behind. Colonization in those contexts was not only about what they took out, but also what they put in: churches (and all the pleasures of forced conversion), civic buildings, housing, street design…

Marrakech shows none of that. It has the same shape now that its had for almost 1,000 years, at least the Old City of the Medina and the Kasbah. The New City, Gueliz, was built by the French, but for some reason they didn’t feel like destroying the existing city in the process. Even the traditional convert-the-savages strategy was half-hearted and quickly dropped (it actually became official French policy to oppose the Catholic church’s attempts to steal Moroccan’s souls).

While it may seem like splitting hairs to the colonized, France never annexed Morocco, as it did with Algeria. It was set up as a protectorate, with Moroccan social and political cultures left intact. Like all colonists, the French interest was extractive, but they seem to have decided in this case that they needn’t conquer to extract. The Sultan was left in charge, Morocco was still its own country in international terms, and the first Resident-General of the Protectorate, Herbert Lyautey, promised to “offend no tradition, change no custom…” It’s a shame he wasn’t in charge of Algeria.

I’m not arguing that the French were the good colonists, unlike the brutal Spanish and British. It still took bloodshed to get them to leave. But their reign was fairly brief (1912 – 1956), and the few remaining artifacts of their presence seem to be the ubiquity of the French language and a pastry-forward cuisine. Comparatively, the other places we’ve been all seem to be suffering a more severe hangover. As post-colonial countries go, Morocco seems positively chipper.

The Apartment

We’re doing something a little different here, splitting our time between two apartments. That’s because for the first part of this trip we’ve been joined by our friends Bruce & Meredith and Liz & Fred (Fred is world renowned – Liz and I are mentioned in Wikipedia, but Fred gets his own page). I’ve been friends with Bruce since high school, and almost that long with Liz. Not everyone gets to have that much history with their friends, and it’s not a thing to be taken for granted.

We got a glitzy three bedroom riad in the Kasbah to share and shacked up dorm style, which couldn’t have been more fun. However, we’d only been here four days when they arrived, which meant we weren’t very well informed hosts. We discovered the city together, but next time we have guests we’ll make sure we’re a little more settled for their arrival. I think it will be a better experience for everyone.

Other than the sheer pleasure of their company, the most interesting thing about their visit was the realization that we’re not on vacation. When you’ve taken the trouble to travel somewhere for a week or two, you want to make each day count. It’s not so much that the pace is frenetic as that it’s driven by a noticeable and justifiable hunger. It wasn’t until we had the comparison that we realized that we don’t have that hunger. What we don’t do today we’ll get to tomorrow. Or not. We may not live in Marrakech, but we’re living here. We’re not vacationing.

My sister spent a year in Egypt as a young adult, and she said that the first sentence she learned in Arabic was “I’m not a tourist. I live here.” No one’s a permanent resident anywhere. For as long as we’re here, here is where we live.

But, the apartment. If I’d closed my eyes before coming here and imagined a riad in Morocco, when I opened them I’d be here. It is beautiful and ridiculous in equal measure.

We had met our next host, Siham, for a market tour, and over lunch I mentioned how very over the top our riad was. She asked to see pictures, and when I pulled them up she said, “Very nice, modest riad.” If this is modest, lavish would probably kill us.

My only complaint is that it’s a little chilly. It’s two floors and a roof deck, with the third floor walls and roof just plastic. At night it thunders cats as they run across the roof, and there’s no insulation, so it’s chilly inside even if the weather’s warm. I’m sure in the hot months, which is most of the year, it’s a godsend. The roof, at least, is reliably fabulous during the day. That’s where we spend many off hours.

We’re here for our first month and then transition into Siham’s one bedroom in the Medina, just off Jemaa el Fna and the souks.

Language

When we were researching Morocco, it seemed that it would be hard to get by with just English. Given that the local Arabic dialect, Darija, is unintelligible to other Arabic speakers, it made more sense to learn French, which we might be able to use elsewhere. Since Dorothy had done the heavy lifting on Spanish for our first year, learning French fell to me.

And hit me on the head on the way down. Meaning absolutely no respect to French speakers everywhere, French has to be the devil’s native tongue. First, they have made up what seems like hundreds of imaginary vowel sounds. They have diphthongs like the Inuit have words for snow. Not only can’t I make those sounds, I also can’t hear them.

Next, they have the most annoying habit of eliding the consonants at the end of words, rendering sentences a run-on of mushy, indistinct vowel sounds and making it impossible to tell when one word stops and another starts. Eh oo ah is a sentence, but so is ehoo ah. Sadly, they are different sentences. And I don’t know what either one means. I think the first one is “May I please have your aunt?”

Having been given another reason to hate the French (I’ll stop at berets), I did the only reasonable thing and quit. We told ourselves that it would be disrespectful of the Moroccans to arrive and force them to speak in the tongue of their oppressors, so we set off on the Darija journey.

Darija has its own relationship with sounds that don’t occur in English (the number one is pronounced weh’-het but transliterated as wa7d). Also, as a non-Romance language, it has almost no recognizable cognates. It incorporates elements of Standard Arabic, as well as Amazigh (the Berber language), French, and Spanish. Despite that, we haven’t run across a whole lot of cognates. Factoura for receipt, banan for banana. Not a lot else. I order bananas in the market stalls four at a time, because I know the words for banana and four. We will never be without our full allotment of four bananas. But I’m fucked if we need three apples.

The absence of cognates makes learning Darija a matter of brute force memorization, which at our age is, needless to say, effortless. As with the Spanish, Dorothy’s ahead of me, because she studies while I write. And do crosswords. The upside of learning even a little Darija is that we’re the dancing bears of tourists. People absolutely light up when we speak Darija. After, of course, they parse our horrific accents and realize we’re butchering Darija and not French.

The downside of our modest Darija is when someone is able to recognize it and responds in kind. Even if they’re words we know, which they usually aren’t, it takes less time for a signal to go the moon and return than it does for us to parse the sound, attach it to a Darija word, translate it into English, and fumble for an appropriate response out of our paltry vocabulary. “Oh, waiter, invoice please.”

Which is an incredibly roundabout way (even for me) of saying that it doesn’t much matter because there’s a ton of English here. Away from the big city, of course not. In the stalls that make up the street markets here, not so much. But everywhere else, anyone who wants to sell you something has English.

And there is a lot of French. We were afraid Moroccans might have contempt for the French, but it’s hard to tell when they speak. Contempt is, after all, the top note in French. As far as navigating here, learning French would have been the go-to move, if it were possible. But at least the signs are in French as well as Arabic, and it’s pretty easy to read French signs.

We’d have been fine here without any Darija, but we get bonus points for whatever we can mangle into an intelligible sound.

The Neighborhood

It’s dense here. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but whatever it was, it was less thick than what we found. It feels like the urban density of Mumbai funneled through the winding, tiny streets of Guanajuato, although flat instead of hilly. It’s less a sea of humanity than a Class IV rapids of flesh.

There’s the same density in vehicles, with traffic following the Indian model, not so much honoring the rules of the road as the laws of physics: If there’s space, it’s free to whoever gets there first. No matter, even, whether you’re going the same direction as others. Viewed from above, I’m sure you could teach a master class in fluid dynamics.

Crossing the main streets as a pedestrian is heart stopping. We’ve adopted the tried and true method of drafting behind an old woman. Not only does it reduce drag, but, like Moses in a chador, our meat shield parts the steel seas, allowing us to cross safely to the Promised Land: the other side of the street.

Shopping

Grocery shopping here follows a very different pattern than Mexico. We’re used to mercados, buildings with stalls rented to vendors of produce, dry goods, grilled meat, housewares… We’ve found one mercado-style building in Marrakech, but it didn’t seem well attended, and it’s certainly not the norm.

The norm is street markets, with a combination of small storefronts, many of which present on the street itself, and vendors in the street proper, displaying their wares on carts or blankets. These street markets are scattered all throughout the Old City, so that you’re never far from one. We have one about a block away (to the extent that “block” has any meaning here).

The beauty of the hyper-local markets is getting to know the merchants. We have a produce vendor we return to, because he knows us. He says hello when we pass by, and when we stop to shop he helps us with our Darija pronunciation and always tosses a few free tangerines or cherry tomatoes into our bag. He cracked up when Dorothy thanked him for the baksheesh.

We have our favorite olive guy. We bought a shawl at the weaver on our street, and a caftan from the shop around the corner from our riad. There’s a little bakery operating in a space so small it’s hard to see how they fit an oven in. The bread is mind blowing, and always warm. Fluffy round loaves are 10¢ each.

Our market alley ends at Rue de la Kasbah, which is full of restaurants and street side storefronts that grill kebabs to order. Bakeries, sweet shops, barber shops, tailors, crafts… The Old City’s entire infrastructure repeats over and over throughout the area, making sure that whatever you need is close at hand.

We’ll have another shopping street when we transition to our second apartment in the Medina, but I’ll miss this one. It already feels like home.

The Souks

The souks, just to the north of Jemaa el Fna, are the primary tourist shopping areas, but it’s also used by locals. There are shops interspersed throughout the alleys that offer supplies that are of no interest to tourists, everything from housewares and cleaning supplies to fabric trim and thread. And there are whole districts in the souks with clothing clearly meant for locals. There hasn’t been a time of day when it hasn’t been packed.

There are also plenty of stores offering high-end merchandise: clothes, ceramics, leather, wood, jewelry, antiques… At first it all looks alike, but after a little while the quality goods really shine through the junk.

Old. Very, Very Old

It’s amazing how much ancient stuff there is to see just strolling around as part of the landscape.

Pastry

I wasn’t kidding about the culture here being pastry obsessed. Moroccan’s clearly feel about pastry the way Mexicans feel about ice cream. There’s ice cream here, too, but the streets are paved with pastry. Thank god it doesn’t rain here.

Pastries include the traditional nut & honey variants you’d expect from this region, but also truly extravagant confections, even at little street corner carts, that seem exceptionally French. It doesn’t excuse all the spongy vowels. Or the berets. Or the colonization. But it’s definitely on the positive side of the ledger.

Cats

Marrakech is definitely a cat city. I’ve seen a handful of dogs, but there are cats everywhere. The city isn’t pavéd like Santorini, but it’s still a lot of cats. There are stores that sell cat food by the ounce, and there are often little pools of cat food littered about. That and plenty of market scraps leave them pretty well-fed.

Jemaa el Fna

Jemaa el Fna has been Marrakech’s main public square for almost 1,000 years. If that doesn’t boggle your mind, you’re unboggleable. It’s been an open market and the main site for public events that entire time.

During the day, the square is primarily filled with fresh juice vendors. You can get orange, grapefruit, pomegranate, and pineapple juices made to order. In the late afternoon a transformation takes place, with a small city of restaurants popping up like mushrooms after a storm. There are musicians, monkeys, vendors, storytellers, snake charmers, and games of skill/chance/scam. There’s even one guy who sets up a little table with dentures, although I’ve tried imagining how that works and can’t. One night we walked through the restaurant stalls to check them out but had to flee almost immediately. The come-ons were aggressive and unrelenting.

Still, there’s a special energy that vibrates through the square that I’ve never felt anywhere else. It’s not just busy. It’s alive.

And here’s a little clip to give you the flavor of life in Jemaa. That horrific keening sound you hear, the one that sounds like a bagpipe losing a street fight, is, believe it or not, the sound of snakes being charmed. Remind me never to ask a snake’s opinion on… anything.

The Earthquake’s Aftermath

Morocco suffered a 6.8 earthquake in September of 2023, centered in the Atlas Mountains about 75 km south of Marrakech. Almost 3,000 people died with another 5,500 injured. There was major damage to some of the towns near the epicenter, with people still living in tents today, some four months later.

That damage extended to Marrakech, which tallied 18 deaths and a fair amount of property damage. I reached out to both our hosts that week to check that they and their families were safe. I was afraid that message would be heard as, “Sorry about all the devastation, just checking to make sure nothing will impede our visit.”

Thankfully, our hosts were all fine, as were their properties. What we heard back was, “Everything’s fine, please don’t cancel.” They were terrified that the earthquake would scare visitors away, just as they’d rebuilt the tourist economy post-lockdown. No worries about us. We were determined to come and spend our hard currency no matter what.

By the time we arrived, about three months after the quake, Marrakech had been largely cleaned up. There’s still some rubble about, and there are Shetland skip loaders, shrinkydinked to fit in the narrow streets and alleys, still hauling debris away. But most of the visible aftereffects are in the temporary bracing that’s keeping compromised buildings from collapsing.