Marrakech, the first few days

We arrived in Marrakech Thursday night around 7, after a 7 hour train ride and 2 hour flight, and promptly got ripped off by a taxi driver (we paid 200 dirham, when standard daytime fare to the airport is 50-60). It wouldn't have been so bad, had we arrived at our hotel. However, he dropped us off at the edge of the medina, claiming that taxis couldn't drive through the square and the market. He insisted we would find it easily, if we just headed straight straight straight until Cafe France and then took a left. My words and my photos cannot possibly suffice to describe the chaos that is Jemma el fna. It's lively and colorful and crowded with tourists, Moroccans, vendors, restaurants, rentboys, etc. Luckily for Liza and I, the Moroccans were incredibly nice to us, and after asking four men for directions, a shopkeeper enlisted his younger brother to take us to the hostel.

Liza and I were ecstatic to finally find the hostel, and although we were starving when we arrived, we were too overwhelmed to leave the room for an hour and we sat on the bed and took pictures and make video documentaries and ate Nutella and thought about how this vacation was shaping up to be Puerto Viejo Part II (city in Costa Rica where we got all our stuff stolen). Finally we got up the courage to leave the room, and headed out to the main square, noting a million landmarks along the way so we could find our way back. On the main square there is a huge area that fills with food vendors at night, and after observing a bunch of displays of the same food, we let one boy sell us on his cuisine. Every vendor has a large team working there: cooks, waiters, men who assemble the food, and boys who try to attract people to eat there. We saw some great acts by the Moroccan boys, including one who talked about Grey's Anatomy (he won us over) and another who sang "I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream" once he discovered we were American (his vendor did not sell ice cream, for the record).

Back to that first night. Liza and I were sitting alone in awe of everything around us. Liza was wearing her hijab to prevent her red hair from drawing too much attention. There were two Moroccan boys seated next to us, and they were clearly talking about us for several minutes before they started talking to us. They only spoke French and Arabic, and the tiniest bit of English and Spanish, so poor Liza was pretty left out of the conversation. My buddy told me all about Morocco and his travels and his home in Casablanca and how he'd like to be a film-maker some day. He showed me pictures of film sets he'd visited (too bad I hadn't seen, and often never heard of the movies). We did manage to relate a bit about Brad Peet. Finally he told me his mother made the world's best couscous, and invited us to his house in Casablanca to try it anytime. Apparently his house is our house and we are always welcome. Then he asked to take us on a walk around the square. We begged off, insisting that our male friends were arriving soon at the hostel, and we had to get back. Sketchy encounter number one with overzealous Moroccan men completed.

We returned to the hostel to await Dan and Kyle and by 2 a.m. when neither had arrived we went to sleep. Dan was excepted aroudn 11 or 12, and Kyle around 3. With no cell phones or ways to contact each other, we were pretty nervous about their arrival. That night one of us woke up every half-hour, only to keep discovering that the boys weren’t there. When we woke up at 9:30 the next morning, there was still no sign of the boys. We headed to an internet café, where I had an email from Kyle saying he arrived at 5 and the hostel owners wouldn’t let him in the room and he wandered around all night but he’d come back to the hostel later, and if nothing else, he’d meet Becky at the airport and find us with her at the second hostel. We replied and headed immediately back to the hostel, hoping to find him there. To our surprise and relief, we returned to find Dan sitting on the bed, and Kyle walked in 5 minutes later. Yay for Middkids finding each other in Morocco. We spent the rest of Friday wandering around the Medina (old section) getting our bearings until we met up with Becky at the second hostel.