Riads-in-Need

House hunting begins in earnest today. Hammoud and several friends, who seem to be legitimate agents – or as legitimate as they get in Marrakech’s very fluid real estate world – take us on a lightening quick tour of about eight riads which are for sale. They range in price and decrepitude from $70-100K and from gutted hovels with caved in walls to one appealing place that has a nice open floorplan, though it’s been ticky-tacked out in bargain-basement tiles, and the like. Almost all of the places we see have a central courtyard around which are situated three to four salons/bedrooms; the second floor is a mezzanine level, overlooking the courtyard with same number of rooms and general layout as the first. The third level is usually an unfinished terrace, which could be converted to an upper-level kitchen, outdoor dining room and/or bedrooms.

Samuel is salivating at the possibility of fixing up one of these riads-in-need, but I’m still a bit dubious about the Medina. I love its energy during the day, but at night, I can’t imagine walking around, or even walking from a taxi drop-off to our house, with much comfort. At night, the street-alleys men, and only men, skulk about in the dark, narrow passages, which really are as creepy after a week as I found them our first day. It’s odd to have had our hearts set on living in an area and then to confront the reality that it just might not be feasible. At the same time that I don’t want to get us into a situation where Samuel feels responsible for ferrying me to and from the house on all outings, I don’t want to downplay the unease that I feel in the Medina at night. We’ll see how things go.

After house hunting and a brief post-mortem with Hammoud during which he explains how flexible the price on the one riad we like might be and the costs involved in making he cursory upgrades we anticipate, we join up with Natalie and Sophie for drinks and dinner at a posh spot called Pasha. Natalie is a Parisian friend of our friends Romain and Fanny, who live in LA, but are both from France. Natalie is working here in Morocco for a small architecture firm, which specializes in high-end residential projects as well as hotels, etc. She’s only been here for about 3 months, but she seems very informed and almost a local compared to us. We passed a jolly evening, though Samuel and I struggled increasingly with our French as the night wore on and our fatigue grew. We’re still not in top form after last night’s unfortunate events.