2/21/12

We had breakfast at the Dar Taliba and then started our journey to Marrakech. It was a long ride , and I don’t remember anything in particular besides sleeping I guess. We passed “Moroccan Hollywood”- where a lot of Western films are taped. Josh bartered his watch for a dagger… weird, but funny. We got to Marrakech and it was very refreshing. It looked different than any other city that we had been to so far. It was definitely more modern and had a lot of western influence. Later we found out that there was a Club Med right by the medina. We dropped our bags off in our hotel (not bad, but not as nice as the two previous ones that we stayed in). Then we had lunch in the hotel. There was a pretty big salad selection, and BOMB French fries (I had two helpings--- I had to). I then went back upstairs and showered. After our shower we explored a little bit.

Our hotel was not close to the medina so we had to walk a lot. The Marrakech medina is different than any other one we had seen thus far. There is a huge square in the middle with different little pop-up shops (mostly food) and also the animals are in the square. We were warned that the animal keepers sometimes throw the animals on you when you pay them any attention, so I made sure to very seriously ignore them. We got some grapefruit juice and just walked around the medina. People kept leaving and going back to the hotel, but I was interested in staying out as late as I could. Finally I got a little antsy, but neither of the two people I was with wanted to go back yet. We ended up on a street that reminded me a lot of South Beach—I loved it, but a lot of the restaurants had people on the sidewalk trying to get you to come in, so that got kind of annoying. We decided to go into a café. I got a tea and my friends got a delicious banana milkshake/smoothie that I helped them finish. My friend Sydney was in Morocco with her family two years ago, and her tourguide was from Marrakech, so she called him to see if she could meet up with him during the two days that we were there. He called back when wew were at the café and offered to pick us up and bring us back to the hotel (GREAT because we were going to take a taxi otherwise). Hesham is his name, and he was very nice. He encouraged us to speak in Arabic in the car to him, so we did. He really loved it & invited us over for lunch the next day. We agreed and were dropped off at the hotel.

Dinner was weird in Marrakech because instead of having it at the hotel, we were given a 50 dirham (~6 dollars, but goes way farther than 6 USD) food stamp kind of thing that could only be used at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, or the grocery store. We opted for the grocery store option and went across the street to the grocery store. It was fun to see a Moroccan grocery store, but it did not have a lot of the things that I wanted for dinner- a Jefferson or Cromer’s roast chicken in particular. I got tired of the grocery store VERY quickly and just let my friends pick out dinner for us. We ate it on my queen bed in the hotel. We got challah bread (with sugar on top, not salt), three types of cheeses, salt & vin potato chips, bubbly water, a DC for me, chocolate milks, and yogurt. It was a great (but very unhealthy) dinner. THIS WAS OUR DINNER After dinner we met up with some friends and decided to go out on the town as they say.

We went to a place called “African Chic” and it was weird, but fun. Very crowded (especially for a Tuesday) there was live music and they played a lot of songs that we knew- my favorite was “Stand by Me”. “African Chic” hosted a weird group of people and we kind of kept to ourselves, and just sat at our table or danced on the dance floor. We took a petit taxi home, and I finally found a website to stream tv (thanks Sarah) so I fell asleep to an episode of SNL.