Transition

I managed the airport alright, though, the check in process with TUI was bizarre, and I also forgot to remove my water bottles from my back pack, resulting in additional searching and my having to throw away two perfectly new bottles, only to have to buy one three times the price after getting through security.

I was practically the only non-Moroccan on the flight, but by the grace of Allah, I had the full row to myself, an odd abrogation considering that the plane was otherwise filled. I wasn't able to sleep, however, because the pressurization in the plane was off and it was messing with my head. I also have no kind words for Boeing, as the smaller 737-800 that I flew in was also poorly adapted to what seemed to be basic turbulence on a clear day.

Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time we touched down in Morocco. Just like Jordan, also a Monarchy, the Marrakech airport was very nice and new, but mostly empty. An emptiness unbeffiting of its grand size, and probably grand cost, which I imagine was paid for in some part by the Gulf States.

After passing by a traditional Arab squabble that ended up getting quite intense and involving a crowd of bellicose shouting men and police blowing their whistles in the parking lot, I got on a bus, and soon enough was off and heading toward the Riad. I got my fill of camels on the bus ride, and I got my first taste of Moroccan scamminess as soon as a stepped off the bus and a man quite forcefully tried to give me directions to a hotel that I didn't need. I met Alexis and Quentin on the roof, which incidentally also happens to be where our room is located. The Riad is nice enough, but the smells of the street are ever present, and they include but are not limited to; the smell of sewage, gasoline, charred food, and campfires.

We went out into the main square of the medina after dinner, passing by scammers and snake charmers, as young children threw up lighted toys high into the air and watched them float down. Beggars, motor bikes, juice stands, bubbles and balloons are also common fixtures. A brief taste of Morocco for today, but not a bad one per se.

Morocco (Day One): From the Medieval Past to the Medieval Present

This morning, I awoke in Morocco in a way that I have never awoken before; my head was fully pressurized, my nose was plugged, even my eyes seemed to be bulging out of my head. It was unpleasant to say the least, and while I am not sure whether it is the result of walking through the aromatic and dust filled streets of Marrakech or the poorly pressurized Boeing I flew in Yesterday, it was truly bizarre and felt absolutely horrible. I walked out of our room onto the next roof of the riad and took in the early morning air as the call to prayer was just ending, and then I returned to the room, took a cocktail of allergy and decongestant medication, and hoped I could get back to sleep for a bit. But alas, I couldn't.

Around an hour or two later, we all ate breakfast on the roof of the riad, and while it was nothing particularly exotic, it was good, and it conformed to middle eastern expectations when the owners kept bringing us more and more food (more than we could eat).

We spent the majority of the day in the medina, which was an interesting experience to say the least. The thing is, markets, bazaars, and medinas in the Middle East all tend to be generally the same; the medina of Marrakech proved no exception to that trend. Where it did differ quite significantly, at least in my experience (from Palestine and Jordan), was its level of scamminess. Moroccans seem to be genuinely kind and hospitable people, but in the medina, one must always be on guard. The most common scam is that of unsolicited directions, with the normal course of actions generally being aimed at bringing tourists to an isolated area and demanding money from them. The most dreaded destination for a tourist to end up in Marrakech is the Tannerie, where many scammers working together often converge to indimidate tourists into giving them money. Many a time we were told that a road was closed or that what we were presumed to be looking for was in one direction when that was not the case. When standing in the open section of the medina, one is approached at least every thirty seconds or so by someone hocking their wares, which are usually sunglasses or stereotypical African clothes. Then there are the children who are forced to sell roses or beg, as well as many other truly destitute and invalid people who ask for money. It's quite sad, but for one's own sake, they must avoid eye contact at all costs, and avoid stopping in one area for too long. In the context of shopping, this means not making it apparent that you are actually looking at, or are interested in what someone is selling, because once they realize that, they will be relentless in forcing you to buy something that's overpriced and that you don't want or need.

One particularly interesting moment came when we enteredOthe grounds of one of the two main palaces in the city. As we attempted to determine what had happened to raise the price of admission 700% from last year, especially when the main pieces of art in the palace appeared to have been removed, I noticed a sign stating that "Illegal Guiding is a Crime" and that "Guiding is a Regulated Job". This makes good enough sense when one considers what goes on in the medina, but it struck me that in Morocco there are laws regulating tour guiding, while a stroll through the medina or any street evinces the application of no laws whatsoever, and appears a scene from medieval times, with the only differences being the presence of modern technology.

I was particularly struck by the condition of animals. It's not that I wasn't expecting it, like I said, it's the middle east and it's all generally the same in this respect. But it just seems fundamentally backward that country would have laws regulating the tour guiding industry and no laws regulating animal welfare. When I was riding the bus from the airport yesterday, I noticed how hectic the streets are with respect to traffic, and as my bus went flying past a carriage being pulled by horses, honking his horn repeatedly for no discernable reason, while two people on a Vespa passed dangerously close between the bus and the horses, I thought about how scared and stressed the horses must be. Today I saw many more things along those same lines, whether horribly mutilated stray cats with eye infections so bad they couldnt see, or donkeys foaming at the mouth because of how hard they were being worked. Now, I'm not under any illusions about how horses have lived in human societies in the past, and as a tourist gimmick, I understand why horse-drawn carriages are being driven through the streets of Marrakech, but still. In truth, the biggest obstacle to making the conditions for the horses more humane is that the reason they ride in the roadway is because there are no sidewalks. This, in addition to the sign about the tour guiding underscored for me what I think is one of the major reasons Morocco is still the way it is today, and that is the fundamentally reactionary nature of Arab regimes when it comes to legislating social issues. The tour guiding issue became a question of law because it was a significant enough problem, but standardizing sidewalks, or creating actual crosswalks simply isn't.

On a cultural and societal level, Morocco is quite a secular country. Two particularly interesting things I learned, however, are that non-Muslims are prohibited, under all circumstances, from entering any mosque in Morocco. Moroccans also cannot legally stay in the same hotels as Westerners, and all Muslims wishing to rent a shared chamber must provide a marriage certificate if they wish to cohabitate with the other sex. The former probably also contributed to my lack of admiration for Morocco, as the Grand Mosque in Paris is a much more beautiful representation of North African Islamic architecture and is simply a grander feat of construction, and there are no prohibitions whatsoever on non-Muslims entering it. In that sense, I already saw everything I needed to see of Islamic Morocco in Paris.

My time in the medina was not an amazing experience for the aforementioned similarity and scaminess, but it also has to do with the nature of the medina itself. It's not that it offends my western sensibilities to see raw meat hanging out in the open with flies all over it, and it's not even the culture of the sellers, so much as it is the general banality of it. Going down one street one might smell oriental spices and good cooking, going down another they might smell sewage fish and horseshit, down another still where the smell of gasoline overpowers everything else. It's just not romantically exotic in a way it may have once been. It also doesn't help that one cannot go down a single narrow way in the medina without a motorcycle or motor bike buzzing past them in the cramped area, spewing gasoline smoke in their face as it goes on its way.

The hectic, aromatic, and exhausting effects of wandering the medina, or wandering any part of the city for that matter, makes getting a shower in the morning thoroughly impractical, so after dinner I showered.

The thing about Marrakech is that you shouldn't expect to come here and not experience the stench of sewage, urine, horseshit, butane, cooking charcoal, and many other aromas that are not exactly the most pleasant to endure, and one should also expect them to be accompanied by smoke, dust, and a whole variety of fowl miasmas.

I am not exactly enchanted with Morocco thus far, and while it probably has largely to do with the horrible blister on my foot that has now enveloped in between two of my toes, the honest truth is that Marrakech is a bit of a disappointment. That said, I did expect to travel to Morocco at some point, so I'm not bitter about it whatsoever. It is quite a contrast from the relative ease of France though.

A Lazy Oriental Day

One of the critiques Edward Said offered of the West in his critically acclaimed Orientalism was that European art of the Middle East in the late Victorian Era was dominated by a cultural stereotype that saw the Arab as lazy and indolent, almost always picturing the men laying around doing nothing. While there may be more truth to this stereotype than Said cared to admit, the lazy Arab orientalist stereotype is very much how we spent our day today.

We woke late, and after we got ready and intended to go out, we spent an hour lounging in the main room of the Riad surfing the internet. We then took a bus to the new city or Marrakech, which is much more westernized and developed. We ate Thai food, and aside from someone throwing dirty water off their balcony on the people eating next to us (who did not have the benefit of having an umbrella like we did), it was good.

We then sat at a coffee shop for about two hours - again, to use the internet - and then we decided to take the bus back to the Riad. We then spent a couple hours in our room using the internet, as Alexis planned the remaining portion of the Spain portion of the trip on her laptop. Before turning in, however, we had to stop by a pharmacy in the bain hope of getting something to fix Alexis' eyes, which have gotten progressively worse and more aggravated and bloodshot.

We ate dinner late and we just went to a stall a little down the street from the hotel. Alexis wanted to go there to get eggplant, and so we did. The cook/host was incredibly kind, and didn't over charge us, but much to my chagrin, the Bœuf skewers I ordered turned out to be Bœuf liver, contrasted with every other piece being replaced on the skewer by fat. Alexis was also disappointed to realize that the eggplant had been sitting the case probably all day, and it had at one point been next to the fish, giving it a fishy taste. It occurs to me that when I told him bœuf, which he understood as he responded in French, his natural assumption was bœuf liver. That's what they eat here.

Thankfully the spicy Harissa sauce was enough to augment the odd texture and strange taste of liver, and while it is no substitute, it goes a little way in placating my craving for Franks Hot Sauce.

Tomorrow, I am told, we will be taking a seven hour train ride to Meknès, which, despite being a ride we would have had to taken anyway to get to Fes, was apparently selected solely on the basis of my desire to see the Roman/Berber ruins of Volubilis, which Alexis and Quentin, oversaturated of Roman ruins after traveling in the levant for nearly two months, have no interest in seeing. I hope to make it worth their while by serving as a tour guide and giving some semblance of an explanation for the site.

I should also like to say that I am aware that my entries for Morocco are notably lacking in pictures, and there is a reason for this. Taking any pictures in the Medina is a risky proposition because you may be asked for money for presumably taking pictures of someone's wares. Hopefully Meknès and Fes prove more picturesque.

The Marrakech Express

No, not the Crosby, Stills & Nash song, and no, not the actual railroad either. Today may have been the strangest 4th of July I've ever had. To start, I think this is the only 4th I've spent outside the country. It's also the only 4th that I've spent sitting on a train for six hours traversing the vast expanse of Morocco, at least so far.

We left the station at 11:50am from Marrakech to Fes, and we got off the train a few stops before Fes in Meknès. Apparently the city has had mixed reviews from online commenters and western tourists, but I am glad to say that it did not disappoint. During the train ride, I was sitting next to a young Moroccan girl who eventually introduced herself to me and struck up a conversation. After laughing at some of my French pronunciations, she told me that she preferred to converse in English. Her English was quite good, though there were some things I had the say in French for her to understand.

Her name was Ikram, and it just so happened that she was a 22 year old university student, just like me. In her first year of her masters degree, she is majoring in business management and attends university in the city of Kenitra, just outside of Meknès. I think I did most of the talking, but we were sharing photos from our phones; she was very interested in seeing pictures of the United States, and especially proud to show me pictures of her home city, Saffi, and show me pictures of all the other cities in Morocco she's visited. She is also learning Korean, and a huge fan of anime. Small world or ubiquitous global popular culture?

When we arrived in Meknès we exited the station onto a street filled with seafoam green colored taxis, all of whose drivers wanted to charge us exorbitant (and apparently actually illegal) rates to drive us to our airbnb. So we decided to walk instead. An exhausting 45 minutes later, we had arrived at our airbnb. A lovely place, it's style and ornamentation seem almost out of place amongst the drab exteriors of the buildings around it. The inside, however, is even more ornate and tasteful - designed in a traditional Riad fashion - it is covered with geometric molding and Islamic arches, and the arabic script flows across grand lamps and chandeliers as if it were simply art.

Our room is very grand and tastefully designed as well, though I am not sure how I feel about having the seal of the prophet above my bed, the seal of the shahada on the other wall, and a giant painting of what appears to be salladin slaughtering Christian crusaders above the main bed.

Going out for dinner, we were able to get a taste for Meknès as we had to go through the medina to get to the area with restaurants. I had a moroccan version of a hamburger for dinner, and Alexis and Quentin had the Moroccan version of a taco; it will suffice to say that they are not what one would traditionally consider those foods to be, but it was all delicious nonetheless. And, by the grace of God, what at first appeared to be a tube of barbecue sauce next to the ketchup turned out to be a sauce with the consistency of ketchup, maybe a bit more watery, and a taste astonishingly close to that of Franks Hot Sauce, which I have been craving for some time.

After dinner we walked through another part of the medina, and I am happy to say that that the medina in Meknès has all the exotic charm of the medina in Marrakech, with nome of the horrible stuff.

Alexis and Quentin haven't been sold on Volubilis, so it looks like I'll be parting ways with them tomorrow to go visit it by myself, but all is well, and I am excited. Meknès has restored the charm of Morocco that Marrakech so easily sapped away. This is partly due to the fact that Meknès is a more modern city, and that, being in the north, it is also far more secular. However, it also has to do with the general feel of the city, which somehow simultaneously feels like Osaka, Japan, Oakhurst, California, Ramallah and San Francisco.

An Ancient Sickness

Today's destination was Volubilis, but I was destined to make the journey alone, as Alexis and Quentin had no interest in seeing more Roman ruins. We had a pleasant surprise, however, when we sat down for breakfast with the only other two guests in the Riad; two Australians, Siumi and Jimmy. Breakfast started at 9:00am, but we ended up sitting and talking until 12:00pm.

While it wasn't the ideal time to make a journey to Volubilis, Alexis gave me the equivalent of $40 and the assurance that I would have enough money even if I got scammed and was overcharged. I made my way down to the parking lot where the grand taxis gather, and I asked a man in a yellow vest for a grand taxi to Moulay Idris (the pilgrimage town which Volubilis sits \240just outside of. I was told that going to Moulay Idris would result in my spending less money, and that I would then take a dirt cheap taxi from there to Volubilis. With the kindness of an elderly taxi attendant who looked remarkably like Hawkins Cheung, I managed to get seated with a group of four other people headed for Moulay Idris, and we waited for some time trying to gather two more people to take a six person grand taxi. When that couldn't be achieved, we took a four person grand taxi instead.

So there I was, sitting in a grand taxi with an afro-brazilian woman, her Italian husband, and a native moroccan woman in relatively Islamic clothing, and while the Italian only spoke a bit of french and the Brazilian only Portuguese, the Moroccan woman spoke a bit of English, and Portuguese, and apparently was the couple's friend and guide, and through a linguistic game of telephone we all decided to go direct to Volubilis, which was their intended destination. With each jerking turn the driver made his way out of the city, switching periodical between Arab and French news radio, and turning it louder as the wind passing by grew louder. From what I could gather, the subject being discussed on the radio was the Libyan Warlord, Khalifa Haftar.

Once the driver got out into the countryside, he opened up on the throttle, turning the news radio ever louder. We made our way past olive groves towards Moulay Idris with the driver taking every opportunity to pass slower cars on the two lane road, and judging by his driving, and the fact that I saw two speed limit signs upside down, I concluded that the speed limit in the Moroccan countryside served as more of a recommendation than a rule. In line with the general stereotype of Middle East Time, some drivers inexplicably drive well below the speed limit, even if their cars are capable of going faster.

As we approached Moulay Idris, the news radio in the grand taxi turned to afternoon prayers, leaving me and my fellow passengers to listen to the call to prayer on a radio already turned up quite loud. I guess today's surahs included the radio muzzerain literally repeating Allahu Akbar over and over again in increasingly tone deaf and drawn out durations. Already having awaken with a headache, which was undoubtedly made worse by the five (tiny) cups of (strong) coffee I had at breakfast, the loud singing of Allahu Akbar mixed with the winding country road made me feel a little carsick. Thankfully, however, the car ride soon ended when we arrived to Volubilis.

Before departing from my fellow taxi passengers, I asked the moroccan woman how much I should expect to pay for the taxi back to Meknès, to which she responded unequivocally "no more than 20dh". I thanked her for her incredible kindness in helping me get to Volubilis scam free, and then I went off to the ruins, eschewing the modest museum at the front of the site.

Volubilis is truly an incredible site (and an incredible sight). Having been inhabited since at least the late Atlantic Neolithic period (apx. 5000 ya), the city was founded as a Carthaginian colonial settlement in the 4th Century BC. During the terminal years of the Carthaginian civilization, the city eventually fell to local Berber tribes. It then became the seat of the Kingdom of Maureitania, before being subject to client status by the Romans. The Romans imposed a client king, the son of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and manned the city as a garrison on the far southern fringes of the empire. The Rome maintained control of Volubilis till the mid to late 3rd Century AD, even granting the city's inhabitants the status of citenzhip after they remained loyal to the empire during a Revolt during the reign of the Emperor Caracala.

Eventually, however, Rome was forced to withdraw from the city and simply man the garrison as its control in Morocco was reduced to only the cities of Tingis, Lixus, Volubilis and the road that connected them. During the Third Century Crisis, which saw the seat of government in Rome fall to a series of military coup d'états, Rome lost control of the city and eventually decided against retaking it. Despite this, however, it appears that Roman subjects still inhabited the city and the many villas in the surrounding countryside, as the site contains mosaics that could not have been made prior to the 4th Century. In the end, it appears that an earthquake ended the presence of Romans in the city entirely, as early excavations uncovered toppled bronze statues lying at the base of pedestals, and collapsed houses. The region would be plagued by geological upsets well into the future, and while the city was never completely abandoned, it did lose much of its roman citizenry, and consequently, it's wealth after the earthquake.

Then as now, the region served as a centre for the production of olive oil, making it an important economic (not to mention strategic) installation for the empire, and it was apparently very wealthy at one point, as evidenced by its defining characteristics, the mosaics.

After the Romans left, the city quickly became the prize of local Berber tribes; a status it retained until the arrival of Islam in the early 8th Century. Even still, the Arabs, at that time, were not seeking anything from their subjects other than taxes, and they created a garrison outside the city in much the same way the Romans had. Within a short period of time, however, Islamic hegemony preceded islamization, and by the late 8th Century, the population was probably fully Islamic. It was into that late 8th Century that the figure of Moulay Idris appeared on the scene after having been expelled by the Abbasid Caliphate for contesting his claim. A direct descendent of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima, Idris proved the Islamic savior the largely neglected and heretical city needed. Idris established a kingdom at Volubilis, and brought what was presumably true Islam to the city, and the realm. Idris was the founder of the Idrisid Dynasty, the same Dynasty that rules Morocco to this day, at least that's the claim of the monarchy. Idris is entombed in Moulay Idris in a mosque and tomb that is imperissable for non-Moroccans and non-Muslims to enter. As such the small city on a hill serves as a national pilgrimage site.

Volubilis does not appear to have ever had a large Christian population, though we know that it had some by the recovery of two Christian funeary reliefs. The vast majority of the site's funeary stones, however, date to the 3rd Century and commemorate Roman Pagan Gods. What is also interesting to note, something I find exceedingly intriguing, is that there was, at some point in the third century, a Jewish community in the city. The evidence for this are two stone funeary reliefs, one that describes the entombed as the chief rabbi and leader of the city's Jewish community, and another that is inscribed with Hebrew characters. By the 14th Century the site is believed to have been totally abandoned, and it's ruins were continuously subjected to geologic shocks, looting, and foraging over the subsequent centuries. Despite this, however, the site is still undergoing archeological work, with the last dig having been conducted in 2018, and providing missing details about the earthquake and subsequent Islamic habitation. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the site, however, comes from the writing of British explorers who visited the site in the 1770s, and later in the 1800s. Two separate explorers, upon conversing with the local inhabitants of Moulay Idris and the surrounding farmland, they found that the widespread local folk belief was that the ruins has been built by the ancient Egyptians, and apparently was not remembered to have been founded by Idris despite the status of his tomb and the town's own name. Such a fact attests to the frailty of the past, the fleeting nature of human memory, and the fickle way in which history is recorded and remembered.

After spending about two and a half hours amongst the ruins, I began to make my way back for the museum. As I was walking, however, I began to feel light headed. A sick feeling in my stomach followed as I clambered down the stone path back to the museum. By the time I reached the museum, I felt incredibly nauseous and light headed, and I more or less collapsed on the cool marble floor of the museum underneath the air conditioner. After laying there for around thirty minutes, my face literally pressed against the marble floor, I felt sufficiently better to attempt the journey back. I suspect I had heat poisoning or some form of heat stroke.

Following the advice of my Moroccan friend from earlier, I went to buy a water bottle to break my 100dh bill, so as to have 20 in exact change for the taxi back to Meknès. With the site being in the middle of expansive farmland, I of course ended up paying 10dh for a tiny bottle of water (usually the price of a giant bottle). In any event, I approached the three blue grand taxis with my 20dh bill in hand, interrogatively telling them that the price was 20dh, to which they all responded that it was 90dh. I insisted that this couldn't be right, but the three drivers appear to have formed a cartel, with all of them charging the same price. Seeing as there was literally no one left at the site waiting to take a taxi back to Moulay Idris, and seeing the drivers point to a plaque on a pole that stated the rates, which was indeed 90 for Meknès, I decided it wouldn't be worth it to wait, especially as Alexis had told me that we would be leaving for Fes by bus at 6:00pm. After all, 90dh is literally $9; this for a ride that would cost at least $20 in the US.

I was soon flying down the windy country roads in the front seat of a blue grand taxi, as my driver, while masterfully operating the stick, proved more crazy of a driver than the taxi I took to the site. Speeding up to incredible speeds to pass those inexplicably slow cars and trucks, he drove as if there were only one one-way lane on the road, and I almost shit my pants when a donkey ran into the road and he swerved sharply to avoid it. The rest of the drive was uneventful, save only for the camels I saw on the side of the road, one of which was bending it's neck backwards and using the back of its head to scratch it's back.

I returned to Meknès, and after ordering an algérien sauce mcwrap from McDonald's to go, I made it back to the Riad, where I was shortly joined by Alexis and Quentin, and our two Australian friends. We said goodbye to them and made for the station at 5:50 looking to take the six o'clock bus, as Alexis had informed us that they ran on the hour. Like so much of the information she had gotten about Morocco though, it proved wrong, and we got burned, having to wait two hours at the station until the bus departed at 8:00pm.

Now on the bus to Fes and writing this entry, I also just recalled that I got my geologic souvenir from Morocco, a red fragment that was broken off one of the mosaics.