Get that monkey off my back!

I was supposed to write about our Marrakesh experience before Eug posted the Essaouira one.  But I was lucky enough to come across this book that I had wanted to read in my stolen ebook reader “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson, so I devoted most of my time reading it before we left Essaouira.  Very good book if you like mystery novels and dark secrets.

As Eug mentioned earlier, I finally broke, so we stayed at this pretty decent five star hotel in Marrakesh.  It was huge but empty, there was only one tour group that we came across the first night and a few other couples.  It looked like it used to be grand maybe 30 years ago.  But as long as we could stay away from the medina, it suited me just fine.  We even had the pleasure of washing our dirty laundry in the bathtub of our hotel room, which is probably bigger than the size of the Shang apartment.  It also has a large balcony which served a very important purpose for Eug later.

If you haven’t heard of Fez, Rabat, or Essaouira before reading our blog, no worries, because we haven’t either.  But I’m sure most of you have heard of Marrakesh.  It seems to be DEE place to visit in Morocco.  First the hippies and spiritual seekers came.  It was made famous by visits from the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin.  Then the Europeans came to build private riads or B&B’s.  The city doubled in size and invested US$2 billion in tourism in 2007.  This is the popular city we have today.

We visited the usual stuff here: the medersa, mosque, tomb, museum, and of course, the medina!  What makes this medina unique is the big square in the front called Djemaa El-Fna.  This is the most entertaining square we’ve ever seen.  The picture above doesn’t really do it justice.  There are snake-charmers (yes, with their real pet cobras hissing right before you!), local story tellers who are constantly surrounded by herds of locals, gnaoua musicians, tarot card readers, henna artists, beggars, and monkey handlers.  When you finally make your way through these entertainers, you get to about fifty food stalls and orange juice stands.  The OJ is amazing.  For about fifty cents Canadian, you can get a full glass of fresh OJ.  The food stands serve pretty decent food too.  They have the usual tajine, couscous, kebobs, soup, and different kinds of tea.  They also have some wild stuff like snail soup and goat head (the brain, the meat, and some unidentifiable parts).  We had an ok couscous meal from the square earlier already, so we thought we’d try a Marrakesh delicacy – tangia.  It’s basically lamb slow-cooked all day in ashes.  But even before we got to the tangia stand, I was aggressively grabbed by a henna artist who almost pulled my arm out when I said no to her.  We were then approached by numerous women beggars who were carrying their babies.  And Eug was grabbed by every single food stand guy, who kept their hands on his arm and shoulder while trying to find out why he spoke such good English even though we were from China (we definitely need to work on his accent before Egypt).  The final straw was the monkey handler.  He asked Eug to pet the monkey and when Eug politely declined and started to walk away, he ordered the monkey to jump onto Eug’s back and suggested we take a picture.  When I realized Eug was no longer walking next to me, I turned around and saw a monkey sitting comfortably on his back (whaaa?!).  And Eug was trying to get the monkey off his back, he looked pissed.  Poor guy, if it was me, I would’ve screamed for sure.  After that, Eug finally broke too!  He couldn’t take it anymore.  We left the square, bought a shawarma, went back to our quiet 5* hotel, sat on the large comfortable balcony and devoured our shawarma dinner in peace.