The Kasbah is dotted with tiny little tailor’s shops, each of them producing something unique. The Medina is practically pavéd with clothing stores, with dramatic ranges in design, construction, and price point. There is literally something for everyone here.

The atomic units of Moroccan clothing are the caftan, light and flowing, and the djellaba, heavier, usually with a hood, and used here like we use coats. The djellaba also serves to hide whatever decoration the women’s caftans have, so they present modestly when outdoors. Until you hit the high end, almost everything here is variations on those shapes.

With the exception of Western clothes, which are a thing here. But so far as I can tell these are cheap imported or knocked off goods, not made here. There’s so much knocked off designer crap here, you can get Louis Vuitton boxing bags and soccer balls.

In fact, the fashion scene here is so dense, I was forced to break it down so I could make sense of what I was seeing. Obviously, this isn’t a scientific taxonomy, just an attempt to understand the range of clothing on offer here.

Daily Wear

This category is inexpensive day-to-day wear, manufactured rather than hand made. Nothing here drops to the Walmart/Costco level of quality (that’s what the imported Western clothes are for), but the market is similar: just regular folks who need to get dressed to go outside without breaking the bank. But even in this category, everything seems to have at least some small detail that keeps it from being generic. Other than that, these are by the books caftans and djellabas, with very little deviation in shape and construction.

Fashion

Like Western fashion, this is the big, mushy middle, but for different reasons. In the West, this tier ranges all the way from J. Crew to Nordstrom’s designer ready-to-wear. Its defining characteristic is that it’s manufactured, not hand-made. In Marrakech, this tier is comprised of riffs on the traditional caftan and djellaba shapes, but either glammed up or executed at a ridiculously high level of craftsmanship. Everything in this tier is hand-made, and most shops will either alter or make to order, blurring what we consider a distinct line separating couture from ready-to-wear.

This is possible because making clothes is basically just another craft here, like woodworking or ceramics. There are a lot of people directly engaged in making things here, and the economy supports individual makers. As we know from trying to make Bespoke work in St. Louis, that model is almost impossible to pull off in the West.

This grouping shows off the Glammed Up end of the Fashion spectrum. Joan Crawford could have worn any of these.

Here, embroidery, both understated and bold, elevates simple shapes.

Finally for this group, the below is all from one shop, Maison du Caftan. It happens to be literally next door to our apartment, and the window displays were so gorgeous we were frankly intimidated. But when we finally went inside we were blown away.

Everything there is completely handmade, and they do all of the embroidery and embellishment on site. The quality of the work is astonishing, and the prices are surprising. Embellished blouses for about $80 USD, fully constructed jackets about $280. They’ll tailor to fit at no charge, and make from scratch if you want something special. The shapes are largely traditional, but the materials and the workmanship turn them into art.

High Fashion/Streetwear

In Western fashion, couture would define the top tier, but that doesn’t work here, as pretty much everything above the bottom end is hand-made, and often to spec. Instead, I’m using this tier to identify designers who are using the traditional Moroccan caftan and djellaba shapes as jumping off points. There is an enormous amount of creativity and passion in this tier, with a gleeful mixmastering of influences from all over the globe, producing a style that is distinctly Marrakechi. The intersection of tradition and modernism is our sweet spot, and Marrakech’s fashion scene delivers big time.

Here’s some looks from a few different shops from throughout the Souks.

This next batch is all from the same shop, Different. The shop was really big, with at least half a dozen discrete retail spaces. They were doing really interesting work.

Finally, my personal favorite, Funky Cool Medina. This wasn’t exactly next door, like Maison du Caftan, but it was all of two doors down from our apartment, so we passed it constantly. Zakariah, the sales guy, was incredibly friendly, and Fahd, the designer, was incredibly cool. His Instagram is funkyfahd, and is well worth following.

We spent some time chatting with Fahd. I specifically wanted to know how he sourced fabrics. A lot of them are vintage Berber weavings, and a lot are leftover bits he’s scrounged that are good for a couple of garments, at best.

I fell in love with a suit coat and bought it. It looked to both Dorothy and I like a modified Indian silhouette. Just as we were getting ready to figure out which specific shape, we talked to Fahd about the design. Turns out he wasn’t riffing on a specific silhouette. He was just fucking around until he got a shape he liked. The front vents, the shawl collar, and the offset front pocket are all just details he picked because they seemed to work together well, not because he’d set out with a design prompt in mind.

Also, the sleeves were too long, and when we came back an hour later they weren’t. Nonetheless, Dorothy is still doing some alterations. Everything can be made better. If you’re Dorothy.

It feels like Morocco is on a ton of people’s bucket lists, and Marrakech is at the top of the bucket. It’s also easily accessible from Europe, and it’s practically a backyard for the French. Cheap, safe, and culturally comfortable while still being exotic. If I was French, god forbid, I’d certainly vacation in Marrakech.

That all makes it super crowded and intense here. The crowds in the souks are frequently claustrophobic, shoulder to shoulder and barely moving. Except to let one of the ubiquitous and inappropriate scooters squeeze through a space that only logically accommodates pedestrians. And the aggressive merchants are such an established fact that when we read about other places, like Fes and now Essaouira, the locals all say, “No, no, no, it’s not like Marrakech. We don’t try to close a sale by assault.”

As it turns out, Essaouira was the perfect antidote to Marrakech’s jangle. Marrakech is a wonderful experience, but if we were doing it again we’d spend more time in Essaouira and less in Marrakech.

Essaouira is a classic port city with lovely beaches and the laid back vibe of most beach communities. It’s a little funky, a little loose, like Ocean Beach in San Diego by way of North Africa. The salt tang in the air when we got off the bus was both refreshing and nostalgic.

The Medina

Like most of Morocco’s cities, the heart of Essaouira is the Medina. We stayed right in the Medina, a few steps from the primary shopping street for fruits, vegetables, olives, bread, and the like. Way more convenient than our location in Marrakech, whose Medina doesn’t have much space for low-margin foodstuffs.

The streets of the Medina in Essaouira are much broader and more gracious than those of Marrakech or Fes. There are also way fewer people, and no scooters to speak of. I think we saw three scooters in four days. The pace is slower and the overall feeling is chill and relaxed.

Shopping & Crafts

Even though Essaouira’s Medina is way smaller than Marakech’s, all of the various handicrafts seem to be represented. There’s a higher percentage of woodworking here, which I suspect is because they’re closer to the source of the traditional Thuja (pronounced twee-ah) wood than Marrakech. But other than that, there’s ceramics, glass, weaving, jewelry, clothing… Just less of it. Which is fine. Do I need 1,000 shops selling nearly identical babouches (leather slippers), or will ten do? Ten will do. And is very likely an improvement over 1,000.

Even better, as promised, merchants are practically a different species from Marrakech’s vendors. We went into one shop and Dorothy was admiring jewelry. Next thing you know, the shopkeeper had brought out private stock that wasn’t on display, pulling out Berber necklaces and bracelets, each one more spectacular than the previous. We explained that we weren’t buying jewelry, just looking, and he kept right on going. When we finally got up to leave, he thanked us for coming into his store.

On the other hand, we had a Marrakechi shop owner chase after us as we left, after he’d quoted us a patently absurd price for a shawl, yelling “Give me your price. I need money. I need money!”

We didn’t buy much in Essaiuira, because we live in the Medina in Marrakech and shopping is practically all there is to do. But we bought a lovely pottery bowl made in Safi, just up the coast, and a Thuja bowl. They were bargains compared to the prices in Marrakech and Fez, about a quarter of the going rate. We were bathed in regret that we hadn’t done most of our shopping in Essaouira.

The other thing we bought was a small hand-turned wooden container. We ran across this tiny little shop, just slightly wider than its doorway. On the outside hung a little display with the various bowls and containers on offer, and on the inside was an adorable little elfin man covered in sawdust, making love to a lathe.

After we picked one out to purchase, he insisted on showing us how he made them, which involved me climbing into his workspace past him and Dorothy watching from the front. He explained how he’d made all his tools, how many years he’d been lathing wood (40 years), and his various other pursuits (shoemaker, machinist, loving husband of decades – we met his wife, too), all while taking a plug of Thuja wood and turning it into art while we watched.

Because Marrakech has jaded me, I was certain he was only having us watch him make one so he could sell us this special piece when it was completed, special price just for us, his new friends. But he didn’t. He just wanted to share his joy in creation.

Fine. I’m an asshole.

And truthfully, we totally shared his joy. It was like watching a skilled magician at work, conjuring art from a chunk of wood.

The graceful, beautiful piece we bought from our new friend. It’s about 3″ tall.

Hammam Life

Hammams are traditional Moroccan baths, but that’s ungilding the lily. It starts with a sauna, to open the pores and relax the mind and body. The steam room has heated benches, and after a relaxing ten minutes or so, you lay down on the heated stone bench to get a thorough soaping and washing, front and back. Wearing, it must be noted, a pair of utterly ridiculous disposable panties. After rinsing comes exfoliation, a head to toe scrubbing with a mitt and some mildly abrasive substance. Another rinse, then the application of some kind of tiny black seeds for another round of more intense exfoliation. Then more washing and rinsing, more steam, and finally a shower, back washing provided, to finish up. The whole process takes about 45 minutes.

Dorothy can’t hammam, because her skin is too delicate for the intense exfoliation. So we went to a spa, with me opting for a hammam and a short massage and Dorothy getting the long massage. Massages are great. Wonderful. Super relaxing and, dare I say it, helpful. To one’s health and all.

But I will take a hammam over a massage in a heartbeat, no second thoughts, every single time.

Dude, someone bathed me. I was given a bath. It was luxurious and silly and amazing. It felt like every kind of wrong and right all rolled up into one big ball of Sweet Jesus. I’m hooked.

Turkish baths are a flavor of hammam, but it’s not clear what the differences are. Maybe just the names. I can assure you, when we hit Istanbul I’ll be doing extended research, and I’ll also be reporting from Tunis. For the children. You’re lucky to have me.

There are no pictures for this part of the post, and you’re welcome.

The Port

Essaouira is a working port, and the waterfront shows it. There’s an active seafood market right where the fishing boats dock, with a wide array of fresh ocean things that either swim or crawl. The restaurants that ring the docks sell by the pound and grill to order.

Unsurprisingly, gulls outnumber cats in Essaouira. And they don’t appear to sleep. They shrieked all night long. Thankfully, we learned to sleep through ambulances when we lived in Manhattan.

Beaches

A little cold in February, but the beaches in Essaouira are plenty swimmable in the warm months. There are long beaches on both sides of the point, and beautiful rocks and tide pools where the battlement stands watch.

We would absolutely love to return and spend some quality time during the swimming season. If we make it back to Morocco, that’s certainly how we’ll do it.

Though it’s not as old, there’s a certain amount of that effect in both Oaxaca and Guanajuato, in the sense that buildings don’t get torn down, they get repaired. But the residue of age there is largely Colonial, not indigenous, and it’s hard to get excited about restored European hoohah.

In Morocco, on the other hand, you’re constantly engaged with a civilization that is both ancient and vibrant, with the ancient part of that equation doing the heavy lifting. The sheer amount of time that Marrakech has been occupied has led to an explosion of beauty. Everywhere you turn you’re assaulted by beauty, from the riot of crafts on display in the Medina’s souks to the palatial interiors of buildings whose street faces are nothing-to-see-here modest. Over that stretch of time, if something can be decorated, it has been.

Which has led me to reassess the way I even think about beauty. Morocco has forced me, forced me, I tell you, to create an entirely new metric: ABQ. Ambient Beauty Quotient. It operates on a scale of 1 to Far-Out-Man. OK, fine. 10. 1-10. You’re so square.

I’m sure it will be eclipsed as we travel more of the world, but the ABQ in Morocco seems sky-high. Close your eyes, spin around and open them. You’ll be looking at something beautiful. In my post on Guanajuato, I imagine neutron bombing both Guanajuato and Oaxaca. Guanajuato would be a much more charming post-bomb walk than Oaxaca, and Marrakech is noticeably more beautiful than Guanajuato.

Medersa Ben Youssef

Marrakech is blessed with a surfeit of ridiculously excessive historical buildings. While what follows is all notably blingy in its own regard, let’s start at the top: Medersa Ben Youssef. It sits adjacent to the Ben Youssef Mosque, which was originally built in 1132. The Almohads defeated the Almoravids, who’d built the original, in 1147, and the Almohad caliph promptly determined that the mosque was 6 degrees off true to Mecca. So it obviously needed to be destroyed and rebuilt pointing the right way. It was completely refurbished in 1563 by the Saadian dynasty. Which was also when the Medersa was built, construction completing in 1565. So, a relative newcomer to the Marrakech scene.

No expense was spared, and the school became the largest medersa in the Maghreb, able to house and educate upwards of 800 students. While it closed as a working medersa in 1960, it was completely refurbished to its previous glory in 1982.

The Medersa Ben Youssef features all of the beats you expect from Moroccan building design: carved wood, hand cut mosaic tile, intricately carved and painted plaster, colored glass, etched stone, tiled fountains… You’ll see all of these in many of the buildings below, but the Ben Youssef is, in my opinion, the highest expression of these various art forms. If you’re only in Marrakech for a short visit, skip the others and head to the Medersa Ben Youssef. It’s much of what makes the historic buildings here so amazing, condensed into a single site.

El Badi Palace

This is more an architectural ruin than an example of artisanal Moroccan design, but that just makes it interesting in a different way. Commissioned by the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur in 1578, the palace was worked on until his death in 1603. After which, apparently, no one gave a shit. Over the years its marble cladding was looted to be reused on new buildings the current sultan actually cared about. Because they were about him. Not that other guy. With the ruined palace. Loser.

Le Jardin Secret

The Secret Garden has a lovely vibe, due to the extensive gardens and fountain system. We also visited the famous YSL Jardin Majorelle, which was super fucking crowded. I think it’s one of a few sites that’s a tourist requirement. If you’re here for three days, you’re visiting Jemaa el Fna and the Jardin Majorelle. You and everyone else.

Although the gardens themselves are beautiful, the adjacent YSL museum left Dorothy cold. Looking at his sketches felt like work to her. “Great, another useless designer who could only be bothered drawing the front of a garment. Thanks a lot.”

Curiously, one of the lasting impacts of Jardin Majorelle is the intense blue the original creator of the garden, Jacques Majorelle, painted many of the walls. This color became known as Majorelle Blue. Despite it being lifted directly by Majorelle from Berber design. Thank goodness that kind of appropriation isn’t common. Or it would really sting.

Can you imagine visiting a Berber village and exclaiming, on seeing a traditional burnoose, “Oh, look! Majorelle Blue.” Eh, I’m sure that’s never happened.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a cactus in a Majorelle Blue planter. Just to prove we were there.

But we were talking about Le Jardin Secret. Which has two distinct things going for it. The first is that it’s a beautiful, peaceful garden hidden away right in the Medina, so it’s something of an oasis. We’ve seen long lines to get in, but the day we were there, for whatever reason, it was lightly attended, adding to the chill vibe. It’s the kind of place you could just sit for hours and absorb.

The gardens were originally a site of one of the Saadian Empire’s palaces, which was first built in the late 1500s. It fell into decline, along with the Saadians, and was rebuilt in the mid 1800s. It was occupied until 1934, when it again fell into disrepair. The palace and gardens were only restored and opened to the public in 2016.

But what a restoration it was! The gardens and buildings are beautiful, blah blah blah. Not to discount it, but the ABQ is so high here, it’s easy to become a little visually exhausted. It’s like those massive retrospectives at the Met, where at some point you’re just, “Fuck. Another room full of Monets. Jesus, my feet are sore. And I think my eyes have died.”

For me, and proof of what a geek I am, the true beauty of the restoration was… the plumbing! The 18xx rebuild included a tour de force of Arabic water engineering, funneling water from the Atlas Mountains into a complex underground system feeding fountains and water courses throughout the two distinct gardens (one a traditional Islamic garden, the other exotics). This was accomplished entirely through gravity and water pressure, not a pump to be found anywhere.

This system had, of course, collapsed, and was completely rebuilt in the 2016 renovation, functioning today as it did originally. There is signage throughout the grounds, highlighting the mechanics and distribution paths for the water works. While the resulting fountains and gardens are drop dead gorgeous, the engineering that created that effect is its own kind of beauty.

Here’s one of the main distribution points within the gardens. Water is forced up by pressure though the tube in the back right, which then overflows into the other tubes, distributing water throughout the rest of the garden.

And here’s the official video from Le Jardin Secret, explaining the entire system. Breathtaking.

La Mamounia Hotel

La Mamounia sits right at the edge, but is still technically part of, the Old City. It opened in 1929 on the grounds of… an old palace. Didn’t see that coming. A mashup of Art Deco and traditional Moroccan design, La Mamounia was intended from inception to be a world class hotel, and it’s still considered one of the best hotels in the world.

We went there for dinner and drinks one night when Bruce, Meredith, Liz, and Fred were visiting. It’s one of the very few places in the Old City where you can order a cocktail. Plenty of options in Gueliz, but slim pickings in the Old City. We didn’t go to one of the four official restaurants, but sat in the bar for drinks and a bar menu. An incredible experience, matched by the stratospheric prices for food and drink.

This is actually my favorite shot from our visit. Fred took this as we approached the front door, fully expecting to be tackled by one of the gorillas. We were shocked that we were just permitted to walk past that entourage and right into the hotel without being stopped. Or frisked.

When we got inside the explanation was clear. There was signage for a Russian/Saudi economic conference starting the next day. That was probably the Saudi finance minister being protected by the goons. Living large.

Dorothy and I went back later for the 1-54 Art Fair, which was also showing at a smaller gallery just off Jemaa el Fna, the DaDa. It featured art from all corners of Africa, not just North Africa, and it was stellar. Perhaps because of Dorothy’s influence (or maybe just to curry favor with her), I was drawn to the fiber art.

This is the work of Ghizlane Sahli, a local Marrakech artist.

And this is by Samuel Nnorom, from Nigeria.

Bahia Palace, Dar el Bacha, & Musée de Marrakech

These are buildings in a similar vein as Medersa Ben Youssef, exemplars of traditional Moroccan design. Each is beautiful in its own right, and only stand a notch below Ben Youssef based on priority. If you have a lengthy stay in Marrakech, as we do, go see them all. Not a one disappoints. But if you’re constrained for time, Medersa Ben Youssef is a top-notch greatest hits collection.

Like a lot of the “museums” in Marrakech, these are primarily museums of themselves. There’s the odd display, but mostly they’re just showing off the building itself.

Bahia Palace

Bahia Palace is one of Marrakech’s more modern constructions, having been built in 1859 and monkeyed with until 1900. There’s some beautiful painted wood, which is in pretty good shape, as it’s not, comparatively, that old. Don’t worry, still plenty of foofy carved plaster.

Dar el Bacha

Another noob, Dar el Bacha was built in 1910. Unlike most of the sultan’s palaces over the centuries, Dar el Bacha was built as a pasha’s residence (pashas worked for sultans, but they still got pretty good housing). It’s got all of the usual architectural suspects, but stands out for its hand-cut mosaic tile, and wiggy carved plaster that still has most of its original color.

A Riot Of Tile

A Clown Car Of Plaster

A Cavalcade Of Ceilings

A Welter Of Wood

Musée de Marrakech

Another palace! This one also pretty fresh, having been built in the very beginning of the 20th century. More over the top tile work, and a truly vast courtyard, clearly meant to humble through its sheer square footage. This spot actually had some legit museum displays. Very interesting to see how the historic ceramics patterns are still being made today.

Gueliz

The New City was built by the French starting in 1912, and was the first district in Marrakech built outside the Old City of the Medina and Kasbah. I’m still baffled as to why the French didn’t follow the traditional Colonial playbook and just tear shit down, but they chose to build fresh, and good for them.

Other than not having destroyed the Old City, Gueliz’s primary benefit is that it neatly separates the interesting part of Marrakech from the uninteresting. Not that there aren’t great restaurants and galleries and shops in Gueliz. There are. It’s just that the built environment itself isn’t interesting.

It’s constructed around a traditional European model, with broad boulevards and traffic circles with fountains. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it’s inherently less interesting than the architecture in the Old City, which is a three-dimensional history lesson you can walk through.

But Gueliz’s real sin is something the French are probably proud of. The Old City’s walls, and many of the building exteriors within, are a distinctive pink color (although it’s called the Red City, it’s a Pink City), having been clad in a pink clay common to Marrakech. The French chose to use the same clay, or mimic it with paint, for Gueliz’s buildings, which was surely meant as a sign of respect. And may well have been taken that way at the time.

But the net effect now is one of bland, monolithic uniformity, rendering Gueliz’s landscape a heavy-handed monochrome. I don’t know if these days it’s regulation or custom, but leave it to Europeans to misunderstand something beautiful and fuck it up.

Out And About

A few odds and ends from around Marrakech.

Fondouks

Fondouks are basically caravanserais, inns specifically designed for traveling caravans, and they’re scattered all throughout the Medina. Their footprint is consistent: a central courtyard that served as the camel and horse parking lot, rooms around the courtyard in which goods could be stored and secured, and small rooms around the second floor for sleeping.

Today, many of the fondouks have been restored, as the first one below, as artisan’s marts, with shops occupying the first floor storerooms, the courtyard used for display, and the upper floor rooms as workrooms.

Restaurants

Some of the restaurants are really a lot. This one was entirely woman owned and staffed with a soaring interior and a ridiculous menu.

I think it might have been a different restaurant, but this happened. Whatever this is. A traditional Berber LED dance? Seriously. I have no idea.

And this was just the interior of an otherwise unprepossessing building. Who knows what happens when you go through the door? Although that is kind of our theme.

The exterior of the Kasbah Cafe, right near our first riad in the Kasbah. Just a lovely example of vernacular design.

Weird Street Art

Tucked into a little corner of the Medina, in an alley between two of the souks, is… this.

I’m pretty sure this is a shrine to their current king. Who they seem to legitimately love, and who doesn’t seem like a fuckwit (looking at you, Windsors… although I love your ties). Beyond that, no clue. Nary a why or a who to be found. I guess outsider art is just fine, in service of the monarchy.

But holy fuck, Morocco. It’s not just that they make everything. Although they do. It’s that they’ve been making it the same way for centuries. Once you train your eye to look past the tourist schlock in the souks, the traditions here run deeper than seems possible. Like the indigenous peoples populating Oaxaca, Moroccan arts and crafts are deeply influenced by the various flavors of traditional Berber craftsmanship scattered about the country.

I’m hard pressed to articulate what they don’t make here. Ceramics, in all shapes and sizes, with specifically regional variations. Leather bags and leather shoes. Worked brass lamps. Rugs in an astonishing range of styles. Felting. Textiles. Raffia and palm woven and braided into unexpected and unlikely shapes. Wood working and turning.

Cigars. I don’t think they make cigars.

But that’s about it.

I obviously lack the experience and knowledge to offer up a disquisition on the intricacies of the history or design motifs of the local crafts. All I can do is stand in awe of both the depth and breadth of the accomplishments on display here, and offer a view into some of the things that stood out to us. Enjoy.

Rug Merchant 101

There must be a school they all go to, because the rug merchant who picked our pockets in the Medina was the spiritual twin of the gentleman who guided us in Mumbai. The process was a little more aggressive here, as befits the cultural differences, but the steps were the same.

It starts with a potlatch of rugs being rolled out. The maestro calls the shots and the underlings fetch and display the rugs. El Capitan is watching like a hawk for any positive sign, a nod, pointing, murmuring to one another, and guides the pulling of stock to zero in on our taste, like a carbon-based search engine continually refining its results.

All of this is done with patter as smooth as butter. No pressure, no need to buy, just tell me what you like. Have some fun, enjoy our Moroccan sweet tea, look at all our amazing rugs, each more beautiful than the one before.

Until, inevitably, it has been narrowed down to a specific rug.

This is a particularly fine example of a flat weave Saharan kilim-style rug.

Next came, predictably, Morocco’s favorite blood sport. Negotiating!. We started at 12,000 dirhams, or $1,200 USD. Not happening. So he started coming down. He offered $900. He told us that he had never done this before, and dropped to half price, $600. Dorothy and I put heads together. She loved it, and wasn’t wrong, but I suggested waiting and taking a visit to a Berber weaving village, where we could purchase from a maker.

Our new best friend became impatient, and resorted to the tried and true Moroccan bargaining technique (which was our first real exposure to it, since we were just about a week into our visit): “Tell me your price, my friend. If I like it, I sell to you. If I don’t like it, we shake hands and part as friends.”

I suggested we lowball him. If it worked, fine. If not, the desert beckoned. I threw out $400. Dorothy was convinced it wouldn’t work, but, like a trooper, she gave it a shot.

We are now the proud owner/operators of a beautiful Saharan kilim.

Jewelry

Most of the jewelry in the souks is pretty crappy and derivative, but we’ve found several shops that specialize in beautiful antique and modern Berber pieces. We met Abdullah in one, whose voice will be with us forever.

In the year and a half we’ve been doing this, this is the first time I’ve actually taken notes. I just had to capture his speech accurately. Here’s a few gems.

Abdullah: “You have good taste, madam.” Nef: “Uh oh, good taste costs money.” Abdullah: “Is that my fault?”

Abdullah, after Nef demurred once again at a too-expensive piece: “You have expensive taste and flat wallet.”

Nef had picked two pieces, and made the mistake of suggesting to Abdullah a wee discount. He pulled out a calculator and said, “Forgive me, I did not know madam would be inquiring about price. Had I known, I’d have started here.” He entered a number roughly twice the price he’d quoted her. “But don’t worry, we end up here.” And took 25% off on the calculator.

Dorothy picked out a lovely silver Berber bracelet from Figuig, an oasis village right on the Algerian border.

Wood Turning

We saw this gentleman on one of the souk’s side streets, and once we’d seen him we saw these rigs everywhere. When Bruce and I found it, the rig was unmanned. It was obviously a lathe, but we couldn’t figure out how it was operated.

Once we saw it at work, we realized that imagining how it worked was actually impossible. Under the heading of any-technology-sufficiently-advanced-is-indistinguishable-from-magic, I give you the Moroccan Hand Lathe.

And here it is…

Local Artisans

The Kasbah is much more residential than the Medina, with goods and services geared to locals rather than tourists. So every little fractal chunk of neighborhood has a produce market, a weaver, a caftan store, an herbalist…

Here’s our local caftan store. We walked past it every morning and afternoon, and always exchanged friendly Salaams with the owner.

And here are Meredith and Dorothy modeling their purchases.

Right around the corner from the caftan store, right on the edge of the produce market, was our local weaver, purveyors of shawls, blankets, jackets, and the like.

They really do weave them right on site.

Another nearby weaver (not our weaver, but geographically close) also did shawls, but specialized in bed throws.

Here’s our weaver at work:

Of course, we bought the most beautiful bed throw.

Leather

Morocco is a prodigious producer of leather goods of all kinds. Dorothy is eyeing a new purse at some point, but the shoes have been amazing. Shoes also come in fabrics and felt, but there is lots and lots of leather.

What jumped out at this store was the intaglio, where the pattern is created by hand cutting the dyed leather, exposing the raw leather underneath.

The leather was supple and the shoes fit beautifully. This is what Dorothy picked up:

These were from an entirely different shop, but what a great display.

A Big, Big Shop

You have to move through the souk like a shark if you don’t want to be a meal, but Nef and Dorothy stopped to admire a plaid coat in a little shop. That led to the owner telling us that he had many, many more examples in his big, big shop. Just around the corner and upstairs. We followed him, because what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing, as it turned out. He’d told the truth. He had a big, big shop in a small, small space.

Nef, of course, bought a coat. Well, she bought fabric in a coat-shaped package. It was agreed that it was a sensible purchase only if Dorothy completely dismantled it for parts and made an almost entirely new coat from its bits.

Brass Work

Other than shoes, the most common shops in the Souk may well be the brass lighting shops. They are legion, and even the commercially made stuff looks amazing all lit up. But there are plenty of makers doing remarkable work by hand, once you can spot them. Here’s just one shop.

Mosaic Tile

We got lost looking for the entrance to the Bahia Palace, and wound up in an industrial neighborhood, where we stumbled into a shop that made tile mosaics.

Until then, I hadn’t been looking at the tiled mosaics very closely. They seemed very regular, almost printed. And many of them are. But on closer inspection, most of the mosaic work is hand done. The two guys working at this mosaic shop were incredibly generous with their time, showing us how the work was actually done.

With ceramic tiles and really big hammer-chisels. It didn’t seem possible.

This is the carver using an incredibly blunt instrument to carve a little heart. Onto which he carved our initials. With the same tool. Without breaking it.

The D sound seems a little problematic, so this souvenir is for Torothy and Mark. Or, perhaps it commemorates our scene names, Time & Materials.

Once the carver has accreted a stash of tiny little mosaic pieces, the other guy gets to work. This demonstration is just on the floor, but in real life they’d lay out a dam in the shape of the finished piece, to hold the mortar. The mosaic pieces are laid out upside down inside the borders, and then the mortar is poured over everything at the end.

This is from a different artist, but you can see how complicated this can get. This is a corner of a much larger piece. As far as we can tell, other than the border, each piece is unique. And even the border has unique pieces. The skill required to get these to fit together is breathtaking. This is a master at work, bending the materials to his will.

They also make intaglio tile, like the shoes. This tile starts out as a stencil.

The stencil is at the bottom, the stenciled tile is in the middle, and the hand-carved finished tile is at the top. Here you can see it being carved out. Talk about a delicate touch. This should not be possible with that tool.

And here’s the finished piece. That is chiseled by hand. Ridiculous.

And here’s a larger piece, from our riad. This is common. It’s hard to grasp the immensity of the knowledge that has passed from master to apprentice over centuries.

And here’s a related thing. Obviously, this is wood and not tile, but the very same pieced mosaic technique is being used here with marquetry. This is neither common nor traditional. It’s a modern approach that we’ve only seen in one shop. If we could ship furniture back, this would 100% be ours.

And this isn’t mosaic tile, it’s tube lined. We saw very little of it, but this piece is magnificent.

Tire Art

This obviously isn’t an age-old tradition, and we only found two shops in the souk that used tires as their base material. But that doesn’t keep it from being pretty cool.

We picked up one of the little frames.

Trim

Given that the souks seem almost exclusively tourist-focussed, there are still plenty of shops that cater to locals. In fact, there are a surprising number of trim stores, selling the ingredients to make things, rather than the things themselves.

Ceramics & Glass

The ceramics in Fes were amazing, but Marrakech features ceramics from all over the country. And probably China, if we were looking closely.

Like everything else, it takes time to dig out the quality from amongst all the quantity. This shop had glazes we didn’t see anywhere else.

There are tea glasses everywhere, as well, but we found one shop with an amazing selection. We’re bringing back four. We also found a swell bottle that had been decorated with Berber metalwork.

Graphics

We’re always on the lookout for modern graphic works. Oaxaca was a positive hotbed, but we haven’t seen much in Morocco. But we did find Wafl Design, which refers to their work as brandalism. How can you not support brandalism?

Music

Music is absolutely one of the most essential crafts produced in Morocco. There are rich traditions across all of the Berber and Tuareg tribes, as well as the modern electric version, known as Desert Blues. We’d have loved to see Bombino or Tinariwen, but we settled for a concert of trance-like (for both performers and audience) Gnawa music at the Musée de la Musique, just a few feet from our apartment. Here’s a snippet.

Musée du Parfum

Go ahead, tell me perfume making isn’t a craft. Take your time…

The Musée du Parfum was a delightful little building tucked down a derb (alley). It had exhibits with the history of perfume making in Morocco, and examples of the ingredients. But the high point, to no one’s surprise, was the shop at the end of the tour. They had a great display of vintage perfume bottles, but they would also mix perfumes to taste from their library of scents and ingredients.

I was certain Dorothy would have something custom made, but she and Nef both fell in love with one of their core blends, called Soir de Marrakech. It was made from lime, amber, vanilla, jasmine, orange blossom, patchouli, musk, and sandalwood, and smelled completely different on each of them.

Plaster

The entire environment here is pavéd with sculpted plaster. You can see some fine examples below, from Ensemble Artisanal, and there are more in the post on the built environment. What we didn’t expect was to find it as a purchasable handicraft. But then we found the one store in the souks that did exactly that.

What we love about this piece is that it not only captures the feeling of the local architecture, but it’s colored with Marrakech’s red clay, which gives the buildings here their distinctive coloration.

Dyed Wool

There’s a ton of natural dyed wool here, which we didn’t need or want. But the display is spectacular.

Salty Snacks

Snacks are absolutely a craft. Get down off of that thing.

Every locale has its peculiarities for both sweet and salty snacks. Oaxaca has its distinctive ice cream, as well as hand fried potato chips sprinkled to order with flavor powders (mmm… adobo…) and bespoke Cheetos, characterized by their subtly flavored powdered cheese. Probably the first time those four words have been uttered in that order.

On the sweet side, Marrakech offers the expected Arabic honey/nut pastries, and the slightly less expected French confections. On the salty side of the street (which is where I live), there have been two local standouts. The first is hard to describe. Imagine (stay with me) that an M&M and a Dorito loved each other very, very much and had a baby. And that chocolate was a recessive gene and wasn’t passed down. Then imagine that you ate the baby. Fistsfull of babies. You animal.

It’s basically a Japanese peanut (Cacahuates Japones), which is really just an M&M without chocolate, coated in a delicately spiced cheese powder, like an artisanal Dorito. But here’s what’s crazy. As ridiculously good as they are, they are only the second best salty snack in Marrakech. What takes the prize? Weirdly, the humble corn nut.

They’re really just corn nuts. The corn is smaller than the bagged crap we get in the US, which must be pumped full of silicone. But they just taste delicious. I can’t put my finger on the flavor, but it’s spiced without being too hot, salty without being overpowering. They are simply perfection.

They come from this remarkable place, or it’s like. There’s an entire Snack Alley. What a ridiculously livable city.

Ensemble Artisanal

I’ve saved the best for last. Or buried the lede, if you prefer. Ensemble Artisanal is a generic term for what amounts to an antique mall: a larger space that hosts and rents spaces to individual businesses. It’s also the name of a specific complex, which is kind of like naming your gas station Gas Station. It can be hard to find on a map.

But the named Ensemble Artisanal is an oasis of calm and beauty right at the edge of the Old and New Cities. On its own, it’s a phenomenal space, all molded plaster, custom hand-cut mosaic tile, and carved wood. The grounds are dotted with shops of varying sizes, about 40 in all, as well as a small café and shaded seating.

It lacks entirely the bustle of the souks, which is lovely. There are shoppers, but nothing like the souk’s crowds. The shops are all rented to makers, so you’re never dealing with merchants. Most of them, it seems, have their workshops on premises. In addition, the roster has been curated to a fare-thee-well. Each shop seems to have the finest examples of its crafts in the city. These are exceptionally high-quality makers.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, everything in the shops is marked with a price and there’s no haggling. That makes the sales process effortless and fun. No one’s playing games and no one has the hard sell. I feel disincented to enter a shop in the souks, or even slow down in front of one. It’s just inviting an interaction I’m not going to enjoy.

But I can browse freely at Ensemble Artisanal, and have entered shops I might not have in the souks. For example, I’m not particularly interested in raffia, but what the hell. We went in and were blown away. We’ve been in every shop there, at this point, over multiple visits, and enjoyed every one.

So. To the shops.

Felting

This was the absolute highlight for me. The wonderful man who made everything here was a complete delight, and his work was astonishing. It was really hard not to buy everything there.

Dorothy picked up a cloche hat and I picked up a pair of slippers. Dorothy bought off the rack, but I had my slippers made to order. I specified the size, shape, and colors, and came back three days later to pick up my treasure, no deposit required.

My only problem was how desperately I loved the slippers, and how shattered I’d be when they finally gave out. So I went back to have another pair made. A backup, so that I could continue to live after my first pair shuffled off. A decision I will never regret.

Brass Work

There were several shops in Ensemble Artisanal that had brass lighting, but this was our favorite. We picked up a wall sconce, and got a look at the workshop in the back. The workmanship was stellar, but the process was hard to believe. So precise, so time consuming.

This is the piece we bought.

Passementerie

Everything in this shop was crafted from thin skeins of fiber, not unlike embroidery floss. They were fashioned into tassels, necklaces, bracelets, and curtain pullbacks.

Carpet

This was a huge space with multiple looms. One of the weavers let Dorothy sit down and help tuft a rug that was in process.

Raffia

A dizzying array of insanely beautiful weaving. Truly unexpected.

We figured that we’d visit other places when my sister, Nef, came to visit. And so we have. Other than the day trips right around Marrakech, Fes looked like the best adventure. It’s a 6 1/2 hour train ride, and we always prefer trains when they’re an option. It’s such a pleasant way to travel. Given the duration, we went from Wednesday to Saturday, which gave us two uninterrupted days to wander the city.

And we’re so glad we did. Fes is beautiful, and we stayed right in the heart of the Medina in Fes el-Bali. The streets of the souks in Fes are intertwined much as in Marrakech, with the addition of altitude. Marrakech is completely flat, but Fes is noticeably more mountainous, adding an extra element to navigating the Medina.

Marrakech, founded in 1070, seems pretty old, but Fes is almost 300 years older. Fes was founded in 789 as Morocco’s first capital. Weirdly, it feels substantially older than Marrakech. You’d think the extra 300 years would be a rounding error, but they matter. Practically our first response to Fes was, “This place feels older than Marrakech.” Our second response was, “How is that possible?”

There’s definitely something about its siting that contributes. Marrakech sits in a plain, with mountains fairly distant, whereas Fes is definitely part of the mountains. The streets rise and fall, and the mountains are right there. It feels more carved-out-of-the-rock than Marrakech, which contributes to the atavistic feeling.

But the elements most contributing to the way that Fes feels truly ancient are the ruins of the fortifications ringing the city. Originally built in 1069, the system includes walls, citadels, and forts, and they rise up around the walled Medina like a ghostly reminder of our insignificance.

Our Apartment

Like our first apartment in Marrakech, we’d be sharing our Fes Airbnb, so we were able to go a little more over the top than is our norm. It was another very silly apartment, whose ostentatious design flourishes masked the fact that it was barely livable. Which I’ve come to think of as the hallmark of Moroccan interior design.

The Medina

Much like Marrakech, Fes is a city of cats.

Crafts

Fes is a hotbed of both leather and ceramics, with designs and patterns specific to the region.

Here’s a store offering a very Fezzish shoe style, supple leather from the local tanneries over-embroidered by hand. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I bought a pair.

The ceramics were even more delicious. We gave serious consideration to just losing our shit and having a crate shipped back, but exercised some unexpected restraint. We wound up with four small plates. And it’s still unclear how we’re going to get them back, since our luggage was full getting here.

This was a Jewish store. Owned by a Jewish man, one of only 22 left in Fes, as he told us repeatedly. In addition to the expected antique store stock, he did have a number of pretty old Jewish artifacts. He also told us that the building had historically been a synagogue, which was lent credence by the lavish ceiling you can see in the second picture.

He had lovely things, but he did the thing that so many of Marrakech’s merchants also do, which was treat the bargaining as a blood sport. He started with a ridiculous price and then demanded that we counteroffer. “You give me your price. I like it, I sell it to you. I don’t like it, I smile and we shake hands.” It’s a script, and we’ve heard it a hundred times at this point. And I am so very, very sick of it.

We’ve found quite a few vendors in Marrakech, mostly makers, who either mark prices in their shops or tell you their price, and that’s it. You can buy it or not, but that’s the price. That I can do. The other thing, which is aggressively presented, fundamentally built on information asymmetry, and specifically intended to trick me into overpaying for a product whose value I can’t know… Just no.

I did a poor job getting pictures of the streets of the souk. Our first full day there was Thursday, but I was more interested in soaking it all in than documenting it, which I figured I’d do Friday. Friday is the Muslim sabbath, which isn’t much of a deal in Marrakech. There are noticeably fewer stores open on Friday, but it’s hardly a ghost town. Fes, on the other hand, shuts fucking down on Fridays.

It also rained almost all day Friday, which is not a Marrakech thing. But honestly, I don’t think it was the rain. I think it was all the praying. So, not a lot of prime Medina pictures.

Medersa Bou Inania

LIke Marrakech, Fes has poured its heart and soul into its madersas. The gaudiest example in Fes is the Medersa Bou Inania, built in 1350. So, still a gawky teenager, on the Moroccan calendar.

This is one of those cases where words can’t do the facts justice, so I’m going to let the Madersa speak for itself, testifying to the power of faith and the strength of architecture.

Dar al-Magana

Just outside Medersa Bou Inania is Dar al-Magana, a water clock from the 1300s. In disrepair for generations, there isn’t 100% certainty as to how it operated.

The clock has 12 windows, each with a brass bowl on a platform. Water drained from a reservoir at a measured pace, and every hour a ball dropped into the appropriate brass bowl, ringing the hour.

Here’s someone’s guess as to how it worked, although he claims 24 bowls and I only count 12 supports. But it at least provides a plausible explanation for yet another insane Arabic engineering feat.

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.

Morocco was founded as a state in 788. The current dynasty, the Alawis, have ruled Morocco since 1631. Marrakech was founded in 1070. The walls of the Old City, comprising the Kasbah and the Medina, were erected in 1126. The Kutubiyya Mosque, still standing and active, was built in 1158 (having replaced the original Kutubiyya, built in 1147). The main square, Jemaa el Fna, has been in use since the city’s founding. Marrakech isn’t the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (looking at you, Damascus), but it’s old. It is far and away the oldest place we’ve ever visited, and you can feel that age in so many ways.

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 most obvious way in which Marrakech’s age manifests is in the built environment. Clearly, there aren’t any buildings left over from the city’s founding (except for the beauty on the right), but that doesn’t keep it from feeling that way. The red walls enclosing the Old City may not be purely original, but they’ve been repaired and refurbished over the centuries in the same location and to the same profile. A resident from the founding would recognize them today.

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.

You’d think the narrow streets and alleys of the Old City would preclude motor vehicles, but you’d be disastrously wrong. Where cars can’t squeeze in, the ecological niche has been filled with two-wheeled vehicles: motorcycles, mopeds, and bicycles. They zip through the streets in all directions at once, weaving a complex tapestry of mayhem. I’ve been clipped on the elbow twice and had my foot run over. I feel like I’ve survived the initiation, and am truly a local.

The picture on the left isn’t even that big a deal. It doesn’t get interesting until there are multiple motorbikes going in opposite directions.

Here’s an interesting artifact: the two-door system. The small door is the women’s door, the large door is for men. They not only have different knockers, each knocker makes a distinct sound, so you know who’s at your door. That’s to prevent the accidental mingling of the genders. I suspect that these were the norm historically, but you don’t see them much anymore.

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.

That leaves out the back and the face. Which is fine. It does leave belly and chest, but those, truthfully, are no longer attractive canvases. So… Limbs. Since I want each piece to stand on its own and not just blend into a sleeve, that leaves only a limited number of spots.

To occupy one of those few remaining locales, a tattoo has to check a few boxes. Most importantly to me, the design has to capture something specific about the location. When I look at it, I want it to evoke its origin. It should be rich in terroir.

The tattoo I got in Oaxaca qualified, as it was based on a traditional Oaxacan embroidery motif.

I wanted a tattoo to commemorate our trip to Cuba, but I couldn’t come up with something distinct enough to the locale to justify the real estate. Nothing really site-specific suggested itself for Cuba.

Morocco, on the other hand, was so easy I had the idea before we even got here, and did my research ahead of time. I even found the tattoo parlor, and booked my appointment for our second day there. I wanted to make sure I was fully healed before we had another transition. Plus, I was really excited to get it done, since the idea was so clear. What could be more evocative, more on the nose, than a henna-style tattoo from Marrakech?

In doing the research, I was drawn to designs around the ankle and lower calf, and that was certainly available real estate. I collected images that spoke to me for one reason or another, and went through them all with my design consultant, my daughter Ruby. We discussed what I was drawn to in each of the photos, and she helped me winnow the bolus of images down to a handful that told a fairly coherent story.

After reviewing those images with the tattoo artist, she brought me back this:

Which, justifiably, I loved. It felt like she’d plucked an idea from my head that I hadn’t been able to explicitly articulate. Thanks to Ruby for helping to prune the images to the few that would communicate my intentions so clearly.

Unlike my Oaxacan tattoo, I wasn’t able to capture any good process photos. Alice, my Russian-born artist, was working down at my other end, and I wasn’t really well positioned to see what she was up to. And I certainly wasn’t going to contort myself into pretzel knots in the attempt. Too much needles.

Could. Not. Be. Happier.

Of course, there was nothing about getting a permanent henna-style tattoo that prevented me from getting a real henna tattoo. Because if some is good, more is better. Siham, the host for our second stop in Marrakech, is, among other things, a henna artist. We met her at a craft fair and one of her talented artists had at me.

I feel like I’ve launched our Moroccan adventure on just the right note. I am very appropriately decorated, and ready for whatever comes next.