A Day without Shopping

Yesterday Fernando and Aydin had their presentation in the morning so I stayed in the hotel, napping, planning the afternoon, reading, etc. waiting until 1 pm when I would go over and meet them at the Palais des Congres.  It was a long morning so at 11:30 I finally decided to take my book and go down and sit by the swimming pool.  I got all arranged in a nice chaise lounge and then checked my watch:  Wait!  it said it was 12:30!!  I had been looking at the time on the laptop which sets itself but has the Marrakesh time an hour behind what it really is.  Needless to say I had to pull myself out of my comfortable chaise lounge and go get ready for the walk over to meet them.  Now I have set the time manually on the laptop.

I was able to eat lunch with Aydin and Fernando at the conference (the woman said "no problem") so we got a free lunch, with the normal dishes: tagines and couscous.  The fish was quite good although it seemed more like tuna or swordfish rather than the salmon they said it was.  The various cooked Moroccan salads were OK but they had some lamb or goat jerky on top of the lentil salad and I ate it without realizing what it was.  I didn't know whether to spit it out (my first inclination) or chew it down.  Since I was a guest, I did the latter.  And I'm still here a day later without any ill effects so I guess it was OK.

Then, since Aydin rented a little car in Casablanca, he wanted to make use of it and we drove over to the Menara which is nearby.  It is a big olive grove fed by a pool which is fed by water brought down from the Atlas Mountains.  Unfortunately it was not much more than that, except for the camel rides out in front, and it was 2:30 pm and awfully sunny and hot.  We jumped back in the car and headed over to the new city to visit the Majorelle Gardens, created by a French painter in the first half of the 20th century, and then rehabilitated by Yves Saint Laurent.  The buildings were painted Frida Kahlo cobalt blue and there were loads of tourists there.  There are many tourists in town, most of them Europeans.  Majorelle had planted a lot of cacti and agaves from the Americas, as well as euphorbias from South Africa and bamboo from east Asia.  In Marrakech you have to water everything or it dies.  I think they get less rain than Fillmore because they had a rubber tree there whose leaves looked like they had never been washed off.  At least the Majorelle Gardens were shadier than the Menara, although they were enclosed in walls and there wasn't much of a breeze.  One needs a lot of breeze with the heat they have here.

After the gardens we wanted to get to the Saadian Tombs on the other side of the Medina but there is a slight problem with driving in Marrakesh.  There are NO street signs.  None at all.  Or at least none in English or French.  So you have no idea what street you are on.  We finally made our way around the Medina (you can tell it's the Medina because it is enclosed by walls) but when we finally arrived at 4:50 pm, we couldn't find a place to park and the tombs closed at 5 pm.  So we decided to skip it and just go look for a place for dinner in Gueliz, the new city.  Aydin's car, a Suzuki, is very tiny so we soon found a parking space.  Unfortunately we didn't realize they had pay stations like in the US where you get a receipt to put on the dashboard and so before we knew it, two guys were putting a boot on Aydin's car!  He ran back and paid a 50 dirham ($6) fine/bribe to them and then got a paid parking receipt (2 dirham an hour).

Now about dinner.  You know that Fernando is trying to be a vegetarian.  But he is also trying to taste all the meats on the six continents that he has now visited.  So he had chameau (camel) tagine for dinner.  It was chewier than beef but much the same.  Aydin had lamb (agneau)  tagine and I had a 7 vegetable couscous (although I only counted 4: eggplant, turnip, carrot and zucchini).  The tagines are really quite good, especially the ones with prunes and almonds, although we haven't tried one with chicken.  I even got myself a little rustic tagine at the market today, but that's another story!