I am currently sitting on the rooftop terrace of our riad in Marrakech. Elah left for her
solo adventures in Scotland 20 minutes ago. I have a few hours in Marrakech
before I fly to Madrid, Spain and then on to Lima, Peru to present at a Digital
History conference.
I left off my last blog post on the train to Marrakech.
After those two gentlemen left us, a group of four Moroccan women joined us in
our compartment. As the sun beat down on the train, things began to heat up
quickly without air conditioning. It was truly sweltering, but the engineer
fixed the problem with an hour left on our train ride. During that ride,
the Moroccan women began to speak to each other in French. Interestingly, it
took me nearly an hour to realize that they were actually speaking in French
because the language was so heavily accented with Arabic/Berber undertones.
Instead of aspirating their r’s like the French do, these women rolled them as
one does when speaking Arabic. The lilt, or tonal quality of the language was
also different and sounded more like Arabic than French. For a good hour or so,
I tried to follow along with their conversation. I would only pick up the
occasional phrase or word, though when 3 of the women were speaking (one
actually had a fairly Parisian French accent, so I could understand her just
fine).
Anyway, the trains in Morocco are notoriously late. Our
train was delayed 1 hour, which made things a bit tricky when we tried to find
our hired taxi cab driver. We got settled at the train station and then began
searching for a sign with our names on it. The situation felt eerily similar to
our earlier experience at the airport in Fes. We looked around, we walked
around the building, we peered around the taxi stand area and along the main
street. Not only was there no sign with our names on it, there were no signs
for arriving guests at all! But, this did not surprise us this much after our
experiences in Fes. So, we “got to work” as proactive tourists. I began asking
security guards and the other taxi drivers if they had seen our driver. The
security guard did not and the other taxi drivers tried to get us to go into
town with them. One of them was quite truthful (although we were not sure if he
was trying to take advantage of us at the time), stating that there were two
options to get to our riad. We could
take a 10Dh cab ride to the main square and navigate from there, or we could
take an 150 Dh cab ride around the Medina and to the back side, which would put
us within 5 minutes of our riad. We
declined his offer to take us into the city, and we ventured back into the
station to try to ask for help. We went into a shop and I asked the shopkeeper
if she would be willing to let us borrow her cell phone to call the riad. She spoke French, but didn’t
really seem to trust us. She did, however, call Abdel (the innkeeper) on our
behalf and tell him that we were at the airport. She told us to wait for our
driver at the taxi stand. We still weren’t sure if she actually got in touch
with the right person, so I went back to the taxi stand and asked one of the
drivers for help. I explained that we had hired a driver, that he had not
arrived, and that we were searching for a cell phone to call him. The driver,
after a few moments, offered to call Abdel on our behalf. After a 5-minute
conversation in Arabic, the taxi driver handed the phone to me and I spoke to
Abdel who said we could take this taxi into the city. I handed the phone back
to the driver who then had another 5-minute conversation with Abdel and then we
set off. Once again, Elah and I were not sure if things were actually going to
work out, but we sort of just went with the flow. And, as usual, although
somewhat chaotic, everything did work
out in the end. Abdel met us at the gates of the Medina, we (once again),
followed our innkeeper into the heart of the old city, and found ourselves at
Riad 107 no worse for ware.
This Riad was truly an oasis after an 8-hour long (super
hot) train ride. The building had recently been renovated and felt like a spa –
lit with warm, colorful lanterns and draped with white linens. As custom
dictates, we sat down for a pot of mint tea and introduced ourselves properly
to Abdel. I was actually speaking to him in French because I didn’t realize
that he was Abdel (I thought that he was another worker at the riad).
Eventually, I asked him what his name was and he looked at me kind of oddly and
said, “Abdel!” Oops! Then, we switched to English and everything was a bit
easier.
Elah and I made a reservation to have dinner at the riad on the first night. When we went up
to the rooftop terrace with its beautiful garden, comfortable lounge chairs,
and charming lighting fixtures. I think we both simultaneously breathed a sigh
of relief. I could feel the tension slip away as I put my feet up on a comfy
poof and listened to the birds sing the sun to sleep. Our dinner just added to
already uplifting atmosphere. We enjoyed an eggplant and tomato starter, a beef
and prune tagine, and a fruit tagine for dessert. The food was amazingly
flavorful and some of the best that we had had thus far in Morocco. Things
couldn’t get any better!
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