Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh

The heart of our Morocco adventure was our tour through Meknes, Fez, and Marrakesh. We packed clothes for this 5 day portion of our trip and left our luggage in Casablanca. We stopped at Meknes for a few hours and attempted to do Lonely Planet's walking tour through the souq, but it proved too difficult. After a few hot hours meandering through city, we boarded the train for Fez, just another hour away to the East. We met some Moroccans and chatted with them about various topics pertaining to Morocco's culture. We learned that Moroccans are ethnically Berber or Arab, and learned about what physical traits distinguish them. We also learned that Morocco is becoming more liberal, and one way that this could be observed is the reduction of the number of women wearing the veil. In our train compartment were two young, attractive, Moroccan girls, who spoke little English but like most Moroccans, they were fluent in French and Arabic. We tried converse with them with the help of my trust Arabic / English dictionary; one of them found the Arabic word for 'handsome' and pointed to me. That just about made my trip ;)

The picture to the left is a mosque in the Fez souq; sometimes the souq, which is normally cramped and dirty, can house things of beauty. We followed the same routine in Fez and Marrakesh as we did in Meknes, getting to the cities and spending a few solid hours in the souq. The Fez souq was the oldest and most impressive one. The streets are narrow and winding, with what felt like thousands of stores lined right next to each other. Souqs are divided into areas: one for leather, shoes, clothes, meat, etc. In the Marrakesh souq I nearly gagged in Souq Dajaj, the 'chicken souq'. I witnessed numerous chickens butchered, so the combination of the site and smell was too much for me. Of course shop vendors would try to get us to buy their goods, but I had decided not to buy anything on the trip. My days of buying souvenirs on my travels are probably over. We had one very persistent shop sales man follow us for 5 minutes through the souq in an attempt to get us to buy some worthless trinkets (see first picture above), but the joke was eventually on him when we still showed no interest and he was far away from his store and probably out of his 'territory', possibly angering store owners in the local . During my 11 days in Morocco I witnessed 3 (random) fights, so tempers can run short in Morocco.

Being the furthest south, Marrakesh was the hottest city and clearly had the most tourists. Marrakesh featured an expansive square in front of the souq that housed all sorts of con-artists (snake charmers, monkeys, etc.) and the like. Fortunately, it did also feature numerous food stalls, and some of the best Moroccan food we ate on the trip was in this square.