Tuesday the 13: If it weren’t for the random friendly Australian girl in my hostel dorm, I would never have known that breakfast was included. Every day gets better and better!
Breakfast was a bunch of puffy crunchy dough things with cheese and jam, and of course, the traditional Moroccan fresh squeezed orange juice. Over breakfast, I got to know an Australian named Phil and a Scotsman named Alan and we traded similar tales of woe at being ripped off by the locals.
I felt a lot better after hearing about Alan’s 200 dirham wheelbarrow transport and 70 dirham orange juice (the OJ should cost 2 or 3).
There’s one special tourist-oriented artist’s bazaar in town with all prices marked, no haggling, so we decided to start our day there, just to get an idea of what things were supposed to cost. After a few hours in the bazaar, we felt much better prepared for the souks (markets). On my way home, I got my first fresh-squeezed orange juice (with no ice, as my guide recommended, to lessen the chance of getting OJ thinned with questionable water). A tall glass of fresh orange juice, straight from Moroccan oranges for less than 50 cents. I could get to like this place.
Back at the hostel we rested up with more mint tea and fresh pomegranate. I also got Phil’s recommendation, as a medical doctor, to eat the local yogurt immediately upon arriving in a new location. The theory is that you start building up good bacteria to fight the bad bacteria when they inevitably arrive.
We hit the souks, where I was fully inundated by the sights, sounds, and smells of Marrakesh.
I found the wool souk, where Marrakeshis were busily dying wool bright colors.
Later, I bought a couple lanterns for about $30 total, plus some local pistachio yogurt on doctor’s recommendation. Though seeing as how the yogurt was about room temperature, coming from a street vendor, I’d say there’s a reasonable chance it will cause food poisoning rather than prevent it.
Back at the hostel, I traded souk stories with an Australian girl, who joined me for dinner where I polished off more tangine, my first real Moroccan couscous (delicious), and more yogurt.
I returned to the hostel, where after a few hours I discovered a way around their wireless router’s malfunctioning DHCP, got internet on my laptop and used Skype to call home for 2 cents a minute. Technology is wonderful.
Phil and Alan returned, and after hearing Phil’s stories of the most delicious gyros/doner kebabs in the entire world, I ventured out with him to find them. He was right, best gyros ever. Instead of being drowned in yogurt, they were covered with some mysterious Moroccan spice sauce. Wow.
Phil also introduced me to the local version of macaroons, crunchy coconut cookies sold by the local street urchins for 1 dirham each, if you can bargain them down. Actually, it’s pretty clear that 1 dirham per cookie is still a ridiculous markup, but those are the tourist prices, so that’s that. In fact, while we were buying two coconut cookies from an eight year old girl, a random Marrakesh guy stopped and checked in to make sure the little girl was ripping us off adequately. “Two cookies, two dirham? Ok.” And he was off.
After the cookies we were thirsty, so we got more fresh squeezed OJ. Mmm…
And then we were thirsty, so we got more amazing coconut cookies.
And then I remembered hearing about the hot ginseng tea available in the southern end of the square so we tracked that down… It was warm and spicy and sweet and burned like mad going down. God, it was good. (It also comes with the local version of spice cake, which was not so good and was very similar in taste and consistency to a scoop of a chocolate PowerBar.)
