Twilight Traffic

The rhythm of the days has changed dramatically. Shops open much later in the morning as people have been up late celebrating during the night. Towards the end of the day, by 5:30 or 6:00, most shops are closing down as people head home to break their fast. As we went out for dinner last night, we made it to the street at 6:40, about 10 minutes after sirens the city over signaled the fast was over. It was a ghost town: shops were closed, and the streets, normally teeming with activity, were silent. We’d been warned about this, but had forgotten, and with twenty minutes till our dinner reservation, our taxi prospects were slim. As we waited in the falling light, a taxi came screaming around the corner and ground to a halt in front of us. The driver, on his way home to dinner, offered to take us where we wanted. But for the eleven Dihram trip, he demanded fifty Dihrams. We sent him on his way; afraid our “principles” might mean a long walk ahead. Would we find another taxi? In moments, we got lucky, and a friendly taxi driver came our way, his house was near our destination. We hopped in and sped across town. With the empty streets the 20-minute cab ride took us just five. Our driver didn’t so much as slow down as we flew through red lights, careened around corners and drove the wrong way down one way streets. We laughed out loud, and the driver told us not to worry; every Moroccan was at home eating harira with family. He dropped us off under a salmon sunset and sped away to a waiting bowl of harira.

Thoughts on Ramadan

It’s really true that people are the eyes through which we see another culture. The problem with blogging, as we’ve found out, is that people tend to find out about it (with mixed feelings), which makes us a bit gun shy.

So there will be no names or photos to accompany this post. Suffice it to say that on the second day of Ramadan I met for a coffee with an educated Moroccan fluent in 5 languages. When I say we met for coffee, I should say we met at a café, and as this is Ramadan, I felt awkward already. Cafés are great places for casual meetings, but there’s an expectation that you will, in fact, order some coffee. I ask my companion outright about the protocol. The café in Gueliz is filled with clients sipping afternoon espressos, but these are exclusively foreigners. He waves off my concern, pointing to the waiters around us. “No Moroccans are here during Ramadan. If foreigners like you don’t come here and eat, they’ll have to close the restaurant for a month and they’ll all be out of work.”


He complains about all the hypocrites during Ramadan. In private, behind the Medina’s high walls, people having sex during the day while parents are away, drink water and booze, then put on a veil, go outside and talk about how difficult their fast is. He argues that lots of Moroccans are like sheep, free to wander and eat, but only within very narrow confines. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if behind closed doors he keeps a strict Ramadan himself.

We’ve spoken with several other Moroccans about Ramadan, and for the most part they want to share their excitement for the month-long holiday. Lots of Moroccans ask us if we’re joining them in fasting during Ramadan. The answer is a resounding no, and I confess to being a bit surprised they ask. They couldn’t be more conscious of the fact that we are not Muslims, and they frequently share their thoughts on religion with us. While some seem to hope that we will fast in solidarity, others indicate that we’d be foolish to fast. My café companion tells me that if the King (who is both the ruler of the kingdom, and the religious head of Moroccan Muslims as well) announced that as of tomorrow there would be no Ramadan, most would happily give up the practice.

We’re in the early days of the month, before the cumulative effects of deprivation have begun to take their tole. Who knows what the next few weeks will bring.

Following the Moon

After about a month-long build up, Ramadan has finally arrived. For weeks we’ve been hearing cabbies talk about the upcoming fast with a mixture of excitement and dread, listened to cashiers tease the Ramadan sales and noted our workers taking later and later lunches in preparation of the fast. Now that it’s begun, we can’t really help but want to be swept up in the communal rite. Islam is so pervasive here, it seems only the tourists and expats are left indulging in food, drink, smokes and sex during the daylight hours. There’s a great sense of Moroccans enduring and celebrating something together, and we’re left out like orphans looking through the glowing windows onto another family’s holiday feast. Well, except for the fact that the orphans are feasting, while the family is not, but you get the idea.

Though we’re a bit curious to know if we’ve got what it takes to fast for four weeks (okay, those who know us know we’d last about a day!), we decided against it after hearing a fellow expat’s story. She runs a chic riad in Marrakech and in deference to her Muslim staff, decided to keep the fast along with them. A few days into it, one of her employees asked her if she was Muslim. When she replied no, the woman persisted by asking why on earth she was keeping the fast. Our acquaintance’s “out of respect” reply elicited a snort from her employee and she explained, “If we weren’t Muslim, none of us would be fasting. You’re crazy.” Enough said. We’re happy to learn from the lessons of others, but it hasn’t staunched our interest in the rituals of Ramadan.

Samuel’s now-favorite pastime is to ask every Muslim how the fast is going. "Having a good fast today?" he inquires with a smile. "First few days not so bad," he says, rubbing his tummy. Of course he's been pretending to keep the fast, too, telling anyone who asks that he's "right there with them." Oh, the travesty!

Since Muslims follow a lunar calendar, Ramadan does not fall on the same dates every year. In fact, the holiday moves ahead each year by roughly two weeks, which means that by 2010, the year Morocco is gunning to have 10 million tourists visit the country, Ramadan will fall squarely in the month of August. No food is tough enough, but no water when temps are 110-degrees and above and you’ve got pesky tourists clogging the streets is downright lethal. We spoke to a taxi driver the other day told us he celebrated his first Ramadan 30 years ago during August and every one since has been a cinch. Boy, in a month, these belt-tightening puns sure are going to seem old.

Oualidia

For all that we’re enjoying the food in Marrakech (and the markets really are great), there are a few culinary holes. When we were in Essaouira, we had plenty of wonderful fish, but in Marrakech it’s been decidedly harder to find. The situation is made worse by the few restaurants that offer fish; all that we’ve tried cook it till it turns to cardboard. So for two people used to eating fish regularly, it’s been a little disappointing. Over a month ago (as we’ve mentioned) we discovered the sushi at Kosy Bar, and that was quite a treat. Since then, we ventured to a French restaurant in Gueliz, Bagatelle. The menu is pretty standard bistro fare, but that includes fantastic escargot. While we both tend to think of escargot as a garlic-butter delivery vehicle, these were the most tender little critters we’ve had. Makes us think we might even be brave enough to venture to one of the snail stalls in the Place. Even more exciting at Bagatelle, however, were the local Moroccan oysters. Oualidia is a town not too far up the coast from Essaouira, and it produces a lot of seafood. The oysters were an incredible sliver of the sea, briny and plump, and we enjoyed them so much we went back two days later for more. Today, beaten down after a series of battles at the house over finish work, we knew just the restorative cure. Again, we braved the raised eyebrows of waiters who don’t think oysters and escargot make a meal, and enjoyed a culinary respite from lamb couscous.


As things settle down with our house, and we start exploring more of the Moroccan countryside, we dream of taking a field trip to Oualidia and spending a weekend eating oysters breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In the meantime, here are a few shots from the Marrakech Museum, including the largest lantern we’ve ever seen. The copper plaques pictured are from the Museum’s restrooms. Can you guess which one is for women and which for men? We couldn’t either and it wasn’t until we saw an older French man wander into the bathroom marked with the plaque on the right (his wife in tow with a video camera, no less!), that we felt relieved.

Ramadan Comes Early

For weeks now, Moroccans have been getting ready for Ramadan. There’s a sort of nervous excitement in the air. We’ve been hearing Ramadan sales at department stores that will put a President’s Day Sale to shame. We’ve heard how life in Morocco changes dramatically during Ramadan, and we’ve been offered plenty of advice on how to get through it. The ninth month of the Islamic calendar (starting September 24th this year) commemorates the Koran being revealed to Mohammed. Like a much more severe version of Lent, during Ramadan Muslims don’t eat, drink (including water), smoke or have sex during daylight. This leads to a lot of feasting at night, and rising to eat breakfast before dawn. We’re expecting to run into a lot of hungry, tired people as the month wears on. (We’ve also heard that airline pilots are exempted from observing Ramadan so that they don’t fall asleep at 35,000 feet.)



While during the year, observant Muslims refrain from alcohol, our experience in the supermarkets of Gueliz is that plenty of Moroccans take a more liberal approach to this rule. Not so come Ramadan, when it is not just a religious rule, but a government law that forbids Muslims to buy alcohol.

With Ramadan just three days away, I head to Acima for some groceries and wine, only to find the liquor section walled off but for a guarded turnstile. As I enter the line and the guard writes down my passport number, she explains that the prohibition on alcohol begins three days early to prevent Muslims from stocking up alcohol in advance. The French expat in the line behind me tells me to expect to be approached by Moroccans outside the store with handfuls of cash. Like teenagers in the States, they’re looking for someone to buy them a bottle of Syrah. The guard hears the comment, but doesn’t seem either surprised or inclined to do anything about it. She’s content to write down a list of what bottles I’ve picked out next to my passport number in her ledger.

Later, over dinner at our favorite bookstore-café, the proprietor tells us that she’d been told by one of her Moroccan staff that she is required to stop serving alcohol to Moroccans three days before Ramadan as well. And since the undercover morals police check in on her establishment from time to time, she will certainly oblige.

With this much buildup to the holiday, we’re excited to experience it for ourselves firsthand.

Sense of Space

BADI PALACE

As we all know, having visitors in town prompts us to check off cultural sights in the guidebook, points of interest that we’d perhaps neglected during the lazy days of summer. Before Tara and Carlo’s arrival, we decided to poll some of our more informed friends. This in itself proved a bit tricky. How to one, balance our need for a “Top 10” must-visit list or at very least a “Top 5” with two, our desire not to seem too terribly ignorant of Marrakech. We’ve lived here going on four months now, after all. Our friend Craig proved just the resource we were looking for. The fellow is a walking history of Marrakech (let’s just say he’s on his second biography of Glaoui, a notorious tyrant ruler of Marrakech), so there was no sense of insider one-upmanship – he wins hands down.



“Okay,” says Craig, “I like to start by taking people to the Saadian Tombs and then on to the Badi Palace. After they’ve taken in the opulence and artistry of the Tombs, I take them to the Palace and say, [and here he makes an expansive gesture with his arms] ‘Now, imagine this place covered in gilt and tile’.” Not bad. Since we’ve yet to see either place, we’re rather excited, and I practice mimicking Craig’s docent-like gesticulations. This is very good. A few more minutes with this guy and we may never fess up to Carlo and Tara that we’re looking at these two sites with newbie eyes, too.




After arriving at the Saadian Tombs five minutes before the long mid-day close, we decided to take in a leisurely lunch at Kosybar before returning to see the tombs; we’d worked up quite an appetite navigating the souks all morning. We took lunch on the terrace where we enjoyed a great view of the storks and partook of a tasty Moroccan beer called Casablanca. Wandering back towards the Tombs, we got lost and ended up at the gates of the Badi Palace instead. Laziness won out and we decided to reverse Craig’s appearance schedule, taking in the Palace before the Tombs. We expected ruins to be a quick stop at a lackluster monument. We were wrong.


Instead, the vast plot and sighting of the Palace ruins proved a real treat. In the cramped Medina, where many of the streets are only single-file wide, the expanse of Badi gave us pause. The ruins of this 16th-Century Palace include numerous sunken gardens with fruit and olive trees, a lagoon, grand pools, and many halls, the most notable of which was the Koubba el Khamisiniyya, which had at one time fifty columns. All are enclosed within not just one, but two protective walls. A true fortress, and the most appealing level of crumbling decay we’ve seen in Morocco. After taking in the endless blue sky with puffs of autumnal cumulous clouds (yes, fall has finally arrived!), we headed to the Palace’s troglodyte quarters. Creepy even on a sparkling afternoon, the caves went on an on, pierced with beams of sunlight shooting through Renaissance-era skylights. Who lived down here, we wondered. Slaves? Discarded mistresses? No, that didn’t seem plausible since Sultan Ahmed el Mansour, the fellow who built the Palace, named one of its pavilions for his favorite mistress. At most historic sites, these pedestrian questions would have been easily answered by reading one of many informational plaques on the walls. Not so here. We’ve never visited a monument with a more minimal signage policy. We counted about five in the whole place, two of which pointed us to the terrace and exit. While a bit frustrating, it was a bit like we’d discovered the ruins ourselves. “Hey look, guys, it’s even got caves . . . er, dungeons. Cool.”

After the caves, we all needed some air and hiked up to the Palace’s terrace, which has to be one of the tallest in the Medina and from which we could see most of the Medina and the Atlas Mountains beyond. The ubiquitous minarets of the city’s many mosques were the poetic foil to the skyline’s other icon: the satellite dish. If ever there was a good cause for airbrushing, the dish is it.

MINISTERIO DEL GUSTO

We’d be remiss not to mention our trip to the thirteen-year-old Ministerio del Gusto space, tucked away on a side street near the Mouassine Fountain. Since most of our experience has been with more traditional riad renovations – even those that embrace a European minimalism retain some of the classic Moroccan architectural details like carved plaster and wood and interesting tile work – it was refreshing to enter the MdG space and get a shock of something entirely new. Or sort of. The place does have a slightly outmoded, kitchy feel. The references here are tribal and harken to styles south of Morocco’s borders. The gallery has been a favorite of all the design books on the country and we recognized elements like the rope banister that weaves up the house’s three stories, the fountain-plunge pool with its ethereal stick sculpture hanging above.

MdG is a gallery for art – more of Martina Bigot’s luminous sculptures – furniture, comprised of a mixture of classics like Eames lounge chairs (not so common here in Marrakech as in LA!) and designs by the gallery’s owners, as well as an enviable collection of vintage fashion and some beautiful glass pieces from Italy.

On the terrace is a rope hammock suspended between two columns that’s big enough for four and the place’s outdoor shower makes us regret our decision not to install one. We were concerned about our mosque proximity!

Context is, I guess, everything. Over the past several months, we’ve been inspired by Marrakech’s compactness and its Andalussian/Islamic design influences. MdG and the Badi Palace reminded us that big open spaces and great mid-Century furniture where you least expect them can be thought provoking as well.

PARTING SHOT

And we leave you with a bit of “poetry” that we overhead in the Place. It was delivered by a young Moroccan, one of the white-coated juice sellers, to an elderly Englishman:

Hey Old Man
Your promises like child
Fucking off.

Hurray Visitors

Our first visitors, Tara and Carlo, have arrived from Los Angeles for a four-day stay. Despite the warnings we’ve heard about visitors that stay for weeks on end – it’s Africa, after all, hardly a trip to Maine for a long weekend – expect no-holds-barred entertaining, complain about minor inconveniences like donkey dung in the streets, et al, we’d like to get it on the record that we’re very pro houseguests. Granted Tara and Carlo are our first guests since we arrived three months ago, and they’re more-than paving the way for others by being brilliant company and providing news from home and amusing conversation (subtext: the Caitlin and Samuel show can get a bit old without some outside influence). At any rate, the gauntlet has been thrown, so go check out those fares on Atlas Blue.

As for Tara and Carlo, they’re providing us with an opportunity to enjoy our adopted city with fresh eyes. The result is that we appreciate some of Marrakech’s marvels anew: fresh-squeezed orange juice in the Place; the shock of color and smell one encounters upon entering the souks for the first time; the adrenalin rush of maneuvering through a narrow street with donkey carts, scooters and pedestrians all jockeying for place; the somber, sometimes melodic sound of the call to prayer at five in the morning. At the same time, we also take great vicarious pleasure in watching Tara and Carlo navigate some of the trickier elements of Marrakech culture . . . like haggling.



It all began with a carpet, or the prospect of a new carpet, we should say. It’s common knowledge that Morocco affords some pretty incredible shopping, from leather goods and pottery to chunky jewelry and textiles. And a visitor would be a fool not to pack and extra bag or two for one of the many types of carpets on offer. Carlo and Tara, who graciously lugged in 20 pounds of supplies from home for us, were positioned with a full bag ready to fill with goodies.

Up to now, we’ve only bought simple Berber kilim rugs at the Bab El Khemis flea market, so we decided to check out a giant rug emporium near the Place to get an overview of what the many choices are and what colors, patterns and textures our guests might be most inclined towards. This is just a scout trip, we all agreed, no need to buy, just look. Rug salesmen are always obliging and there’s a certain ceremony to their salesmanship that’s quaint – at least the first time you experience it. We were led into a cavernous room and two fellows were summoned to help unfurl rugs for us to touch and admire from every angle. And unfurl they did; we probably saw forty rugs before narrowing down the field to the two or three that Tara and Carlo most liked. We were shown the difference between knotted, woven and embroidered rugs are and watched as a vermillion carpet turned to, yup, dusty rose when we moved to look at it from another angle.

Once we’d narrowed in on a few selections, mint tea was offered and plush chairs pulled out. Though we’d already explained that no purchases were to be made that night, the salesman couldn’t help but suggest that the front-runner was a truly unique carpet and one that another savvy buyer might snatch up before morn. As we felt ourselves weakening, a swift call to Hamoud brought us back our established strategy – look first, buy later – and we strode out of the shop confident that for tomorrow’s buying outing we were well prepped.

Cut to the next afternoon and the four of us, along with Hamoud, are sipping sugary mint tea with the proprietor of a very swanky rug shop near Bab Laksur. The guy has assistants bring out framed photos of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith in the shop, beaming after purchasing 35 carpets. Another shows Dennis Hooper (in the blurry photo we think we recognize Dennis Hopper) though his name has been misspelled and a third has Frank Langella. This is no Will Smith, but the photos are clearly proud property. “Look, that’s me,” says one of the assistants, pointing to the photo with Patrick Stewart. He’s a man of about forty now with a beard and slight paunch, but back in the photo his face has the pink scrubbed, freshly shaved look of and eighteen-year-old.

The owner of the shop is an old friend of Hamoud’s, a sort of mentor figure, so we’ve been promised fair prices. His shop is a soaring mid-nineteenth-Century place with ornate plaster and wood carving, beautiful zellij and carved marble pillars. He’s from Fez and the place reminds us of some of the amazing architecture we saw in that city.

Again, carpet after carpet is rolled out for Tara and Carlo to inspect. Since last night’s scout, we know the general style and color palette they’re after, but since all of these carpets are hand made and unique and because the shop is lined with thousands of them, it doesn’t make the going any easier.

To watch a couple select and then haggle over the price of a rug is a curious psychological study. First off, Tara speaks French quite fluently and Carlo does not, so the bulk of the communication about what they did and didn’t like about each carpet fell on her to convey. This also meant that she needed to distill the text and subtext of Carlo’s vague comments about the carpets; in his defense, few of us have the faculty to articulate the nuances in color and pattern and texture that make one carpet more appealing than another. After an exhausting 2-hour session of looking at another 40 carpets, who wouldn’t be a bit tongue-tied. Also, although they’d come to Marrakech determined to leave with a carpet, they hadn’t actually discussed their price range or measured their living room to know the size carpet that might work in the space. Fortunately, they both seemed drawn to the same rose and gray-blue color palette and simple geometry of the Berber rugs, but when it came down to four favorites and calculators came out, things fell apart. Knowing that our friends were in danger only of dispensing a bit more cash then they’d hoped, we settled in to watch the circus.

Quick note: Moroccans love to present price offers and counter offers either in writing (I guess it seems binding), or on the face of a large calculator. Once they’ve set a price, they offer the paper or calculator to you and you are meant to scratch out their price and put in your own counter offer. This can sometimes go on for an hour or more, with scratched out numbers in columns filling a whole page.

To start, the prices were a fair bit higher than those we’d encountered the day before, though the rugs were undeniably of a much higher quality. Regardless, they needed a minute for the sticker shock to settle and since Carlo was keen on spending more than Tara, a team huddle was required. We all watched as they whispered in the corner, cheeks flushed, arms pointing and waving in agitation. Since the first quoted price from the shop owner was higher than either wanted to spend, Hamoud was called into the circle to help determine what kind of counter would toe the delicate line between insult and a good deal. Hamoud, who’s steered innumerable foreigners through this very purchase, must be the type of knowing father that pushes his son off for his first ride on a bike without training wheels knowing that scraped knees are inevitable but necessary. In other words, he shrugs and says, “Go for it.”



Tara and Carlo turn out to be shrewd negotiators and leave us wondering if all that hemming and hawing was part of the act. They discard the most expensive rug and have the proprietor and his minions bring out a second slew of rugs in a more moderate price range that have similar color tones and design. From this new batch – is that sweat I see on the brow of the uber-cool proprietor! – they pick two faves and then use our ever-handy tape measure – hey, I thought they didn’t know the size of their living room! – to cast another rug off as too small, another too narrow and long. Within 15 minutes, we’re left with a winner and Carlo’s low-ball offer warrants nothing more than a tired sigh and a minimal counter.

A decision made beats out caffeine and probably a few other uppers for bolstering the energy and spirits of a crew. While Carlo is lead upstairs to the credit card machine where two receipts are generously created: one to share with customs; the other with the true amount charged to his card, we are lead to the VIP room (we recognize it from the Will Smith photos) for our own photo op. “You send me photo of carpet in home,” says the owner, “I want to put you in my book.” (Note the photo of Patrick Stewart that’s being held proudly by the assistant in the picture of Tara and Carlo, Hamoud, the rug seller and Samuel.) Look at a carpet from one direction and it’s all pale, soft tones, walk around to the other side and its rich colors are revealed. I guess you could say the same about some so-called-novice rug buyers.

Also included are a few pics from our trip to the Jardin Majorelle.

Barbershop Blues

Barbershops are about as common as internet cafés throughout the medina, which is to say that every street has at least two. Tiny little rooms with one or two chairs serve a regular clientele of men. Back in Los Angeles, it seemed the barbershop was a dying breed, and it certainly lacked the glamour of the latest salon with its list of A-list clients. I don’t think we’ve seen a salon here, and since so many women cover their heads, it might be that Marrakech isn’t quite ready for the trend. For men, though, the barbershop is a regular visit. It seems especially popular on Thursdays and Friday mornings, before Friday’s midday prayer. This particular prayer is so important that mosques run up a white flag to remind people. We wonder if even locals begin to tune out the frequent calls to prayer, in much the same way a new worker on a construction site soon ignores the constant beeping of a bucket loader driving in reverse. We certainly have.

Whether as part of a ritual cleansing, or to keep up on the neighborhood gossip, the barbershops are popular indeed. That doesn’t mean that we feel the need to peer into them; we tend to pass with heads down trying to avoid the pitches of adjacent salesmen. So it took Craig, an American expat who’s recently retired to Marrakech, to point out a series of photos in the window of a barbershop the other day.

As we paused to lean in, we expected to see the barber with his regular clients smiling broadly, showing off stylish new coifs. Instead, we were treated to photos of clients whose expressions could be better described as grimaces. The sun-faded prints taped to the grimy glass showed five-year-old boys moments after being circumcised. For the most part, they were well dressed from the waist up, but their faces covered in tears emphasized that the barber’s scissors had more than hair to snip. Evidently it’s customary for photos of bloodied, freshly clipped penises, photos taken by beaming fathers, to be proudly displayed in the windows of the obliging barber’s shop. The event is the subject of much paternal pride (a rather late-term bris, if you ask us!), though we wonder if the boys themselves are eager for their friends in the street to see their scared, tear-streaked faces in the shop window. That’s one appointment at the barbershop you want to make sure to get straight.

As we were “admiring” the photos in the barbershop window, the scissor-wielding barber himself emerged. Moroccans love a good joke, and he indicated to the three men in our group that he’d happily do the honors. You’ve never seen such swift back stepping to a chorus of high-pitched “Fait accompli! Fait accompli!”

Les Copains

We’ve never had a front entry hall before. In all of our apartments, and even our house, the front door opened directly into the living room. So the fact that we’ve got a real live entry hall at Dar Noury has been cause for some mild celebration, silly as it may sound. It’s been hard to imagine what it might look like after it’s finished. It started out with a sink right in front of the door, which evidently didn’t fit in the bathroom. And as the walls were skinned back to the underlying brick, it seemed impossible that it would ever be finished.



But from the bedroom window of our rental, we saw a broken old window frame that we thought could make a dramatic mirror. The window was on the roof of an adjacent little general store, and since the store doesn’t sell our preferred brand of water, we don’t shop there. So it’s with a little guilt that I approach the shopkeeper, who recognizes me from the 10 times a day I pass his store with bags from other shops, and ask him about buying the window frame. He’s friendly enough, but tells me that it belongs to the landlord, the woodworker with a shop across the street who just left town on vacation.

Of course, this only makes things worse. The woodworker is quite friendly to us. He and his friends at adjacent shops, a barber and a realtor, pull up chairs in front of door and chat most of the day. Sometimes they’ll bring a little radio and listen to it late at night under our bedroom window as we’re trying to fall asleep. We’d been thinking of buying something like a small coffee table from him as a neighborly gesture until Hamoud told us the woodworker is over priced, and any design of his we liked we should take to Hamoud who’d get it made for less. The woodworker knows we’ve bought a house and has intimated he’d like to sell us something; we’ve indicated we’d wait till we’re finished with the house.
“How’s the house,” he’d ask as we came home.
“Petit a petit,” we’d reply. It’s the first half of the popular French expression, “little by little, the bird builds his nest.” One day he nodded knowingly, and shared with us a Moroccan version of the expression. “Little by little, the camel enters the marmite.” Moroccan marmite is a large meat stew made for family holidays, not the repulsive British spread. The point is, that when you’re making a meat stew, no matter how big, it takes a fare bit of work chopping up the camel into pieces and making a stew of it.

After a couple weeks, the woodworker returns, and we debate who’s going to ask about the window. The broken window. The old broken window. Should we call it rotten? Should we say, we’d take it so he wouldn’t have to go to the bother of throwing it out? The following morning, we open the door to head out, and there’s the woodworker sitting in front of our door. No time like the present so we start in about the window. He’s quite friendly and offers to sell it to us if we get a ladder to climb up on the roof and look at it. We ask about cost, and he replies that we won’t have a problem with him about price. He likes us, he says. Likes chatting as we come and go. We thank him for looking after the place, and dumping the occasional bottle of water over the plants by the front door. I’m trying to turn our little love fest to our advantage. We’re neighbors after all, and that’s got to be good for something. But as I’m speaking, the word for neighbor eludes me for a second. As I’m trying to say, we’re voisins, I say instead that we’re copains, and while you can rhyme the two in a pop song, a copain is a very good friend, sometimes used for a significant other, and now I’m wondering how to back pedal. It’s out there, that we’re these great friends. Do I now say, “no, we’re not great friends, I misspoke. We’re just neighbors?” Or is that worse, should I just let it stand and hope that he chalks it up to cultural differences or my language skills? And he steadfastly refuses to state a price, repeating with a big smile that we’ll have no problem with him about the window. How hard a bargain can we drive with our new copain? We smile and back our way out into the street and disappear into a throng of video camera wielding Italian tourists.

The problem has not gone away, but it has been put off for want of a ladder tall enough to scale the wall of the shop. He’s promised to bring one in a few days and I guess then we’ll know the truth: are we voisins or copains?

Sabotage

Yes, it’s an ugly word, made all the fouler when it involves a drainage pipe that has run amok inside the walls of a just-painted house. Owning to circumstances that are still not clear to us, one of our workers stuffed a plastic water bottle (oh, how we’re bemoaning our earlier post extolling the many uses of said bottles!) into the drain pipe that runs from our terrace through the walls of the guest bathroom and dining room to its eventual exit in the city sewer beyond the mosque’s walls. Not only did the offending creep hide the bottle in our drainpipe, he then added a 40-centimeter layer of cement and other rubble that contributed to a colossal blockage and the resulting backup and overflow. You see, each night before heading home, our workers shower on the terrace (and doing other things that involve a drain, though we hate to even think of them as we consider our mucked up walls), so you can imagine the grimy water that filled the pipe. Having no where to go but up, once the “dust” as Hamoud so poetically calls the stuff that goes down drains (toilet, sink and otherwise), it overflowed and stained our freshly tadelakted and painted walls with vile brown rivulets.





Once the sabotage had been discovered, the Marrakech equivalent of RotoRooter arrived to clean out the drain and then the team set to work repairing the not inconsequential damage. “Look at this,” said Hamoud in disbelief, fishing his hand in the murky water and pulling out bits of debris that had comprised the blockage. Now, our new tadelakt must be stripped and reapplied (a two-day process), the dining room ceiling must be replastered and the walls repainted, and so on. Mustapha, our plumber/electrician, has remerged and set about cracking walls to ensure that the pipe has not suffered long-term damage and that we won’t sustain further leakage. Welcome back, Mustapha!

While we are upset by the setback, the sting of the betrayal by one of our own team is even worse. All those times we pinched ourselves for the good luck we've enjoyed with our able crew, especially as we listened to others complain about their worksite woes, is coming back to haunt us.

We were quite pleased, however, with how Hamoud and Mohamed handled things. Once they’d discovered the identity of the pipe plunderer, they swiftly fired him and rallied to right the problem caused by his sabotage. To be honest, the remaining crew seems even more cohesive and dedicated to getting our renovation back on track. When we located a photo of the saboteur on our computer (curiously, a lanky smiling boy who’d been one of our favorites), the team gathered around and shook their heads in disbelief at the traitor that had infiltrated their ranks. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. In Marrakech, though, one has to wonder if a sheep’s attire is the safest costume to don.

A Welcome Presence

Yesterday’s thwarted bombing attempt at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus served as a bit of a reminder to us of our guest status in this Muslim country, and a warning not to get too complacent or comfortable. We were struck too by the swift military and police response. The medina was crawling with uniformed officers and before we put two and two together, we assumed it must be some kind of parade or that Tom Cruise had decided to pay a visit. Watching all that military might patrol the streets had the desired effect of making us foreigners feel safer while at the same time driving home the seriousness of the situation. The recent red alerts in the States and London seemed very far away, even the attention surrounding the fifth anniversary of September 11th was remote until we found ourselves walking through the souks to our house along a familiar route now lined with stern, watchful soldiers.

The appearance of Morocco’s military has coincided with the disappearance of one of our trusted workers. Mustapha, our plumber/electrician has gone AWOL. Several weeks ago, he took a week-long vacation with his family in Jadida. At the time, we were a bit taken aback seeing as how his absence would hold up work at the house during the crucial final stages, but vacation is vacation and we wished him a happy trip. He returned from the seaside break a few days later than promised, but seemed refreshed and as anxious as us to get the job done. A few days later, Hamoud took us aside at the end of the day and explained that Mustapha wanted an advance on his final payment (including a healthy bonus) in order to enroll his kids in school. Evidently, he’d overspent during the holiday and was having trouble scraping together the cash for his kids’ tuition. We’re not talking break-the-bank prep school prices here, just 30 dirhams per month, but boy did he know which strings to pull with us. Despite all that we’ve been told about not paying people in advance, we acquiesced without a second thought, throwing in some extra money for school supplies.

Well, the next day Mustapha doesn’t show up. “He had to deal with some stuff,” explains Hamoud rather lamely. But when the same thing happens the next day, we hit the roof. This time, Mustapha’s excuse is that he doesn’t have any place to work, meaning the worksite is too crowded for him. With steam coming out our ears, we walk though the house room by room with Hamoud noting the electric/plumbing projects that are still incomplete and that the whole first floor is free of workers so Mustapha would have plenty of room to breathe. Alas, it looks like we’ve fallen victim to a classic construction woe and walked right into the situation like one of the lambs that will soon find its throat slit in our courtyard. Mustapha’s got another job and is two-timing us.

We have to remind ourselves that screaming gets you nowhere with Moroccan workers and try our best to channel our anger into the more effective grave disappointment. “Tell Mustapha we trusted him and were generous with him and now we’re very, very unhappy at how he’s mistreating us,” we tell Hamoud. The problem is we’re the only ones set to lose on this one; Mustapha has been paid, and to get another electrician/plumber will only cost us more time and money. Hamoud promises that if Mustapha isn’t at the worksite by 6:30 a.m. tomorrow, he’ll go to his house himself to shame him in. In the meantime, lovely Hamoud takes up a pickax himself to carve out a trench in the wall for our shower line.

The incident is a classic novice mistake, but to be honest, we’ve felt so lucky about our team and the pace and quality of the work that we’d started to wonder about all the horror stories we’d heard from other renovation projects. Maybe this day has taught us never to let our guard down, or maybe the appearance of the black cat is a sign that our baraka needs a little replenishing.

Arches

Slowly but surely the arches have come into existence. Some required knocking out cement and bricks and reforming with fresh concrete and rebar, others were already in pretty good shape.



We’ve had a team of three plasterers here for about a week. They replastered all the ceilings, and then turned their attention to the doors, doing their best to mimic the classic design of the arched doors at the adjacent mosque. It’s been interesting to watch the hand mixing, shaping and carving of the plaster and that have been passed down from the master to his lieutenant to the assistant who brings them water.


For the most part, the plaster has gone up pretty painlessly. That was until yesterday. With two arches remaining, the master plasterer gave his team the day off and went about finishing the job on his own. Suddenly his skilled hands betrayed him, and he carved a lopsided arch that seemed the work of a novice. When he asked how we liked it, we pointed out the adjacent arch, and how beautiful it was, noting politely that the one he was working on “wasn’t finished.” He nodded and went back to work, only to come to us 30 minutes later with an arch lilting decidedly to one side. We brought over Hamoud to try to explain what we were after.


Soon, most of the work crew had gathered around and was laughing and teasing the master plasterer, asking him if this was his first day on the job. We joined in and asked if he’d had a little too much to drink, a favorite joke between Muslims and non-Muslims here. After another hour of frustration, he took out a hammer and chipped away all the plaster, having decided to give it a fresh start in the morning.

Black Cat

A black cat jumped from the roof of the mosque next door, scampered across the top of our terrace wall and then made itself at home on our terrace. As it did so, the late afternoon light turned a ghostly yellow. Hamoud shook his head: bad luck. “If you see one at night and say God’s name, it will disappear. Like a Jinn.” Jinns are the evil spirits we’ve heard tell of in Morocco, though in our experience they’re not frequently discussed with foreigners. We didn’t know the bad luck of black cats was so universal. “Oh, yes,” said Hamoud. “Back cats and black dogs.” Now there’s a different twist, we think. This is one of three neighborhood cats that have been scouting our worksite, weighing the place as a possible residence once the work is finished. Since terrace hopping is second-nature for Marrakech cats, we have no idea how to keep them away.



More often than Jinns, we hear of their opposite: baraka, or blessing. Of course, that’s the name for our blog, as it seemed pretty obvious that for two people to have the opportunity to pack up and move to a new country for a year’s exploration was quite a blessing in any language. We’re told rain is a baraka, the bird living in our house brings us baraka. Frankly, we’re pleased that the list of things that either are or bring baraka is quite generous. The word has many meanings and many uses as well. The most recent usage we’ve learned is a polite way of saying, “that’s all.” As in when buying vegetables at the market, after ordering kilos of black figs, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados and leeks. The vegetable seller will ask if you want anything else, and the answer, “baraka,” means blessing enough, that’s all for today.

Back on the terrace, the black cat continued to eye us warily, and the work crew (Team Hamoud, we’ve dubbed it) was hard at work. The brother of the chief mason is a long lanky guy who works quite hard all day, except at lunch when he pauses to smoke a little hash in a long wooden pipe. We get along well, despite the fact that he speaks no more than a handful of French words. So in the eerie yellow light on the terrace, we were both a bit confused when he seemed to say something to us about “couper un mouton.” We frankly were not sure if he was speaking in French or Arabic, but he repeated the phrase a couple of times and then for emphasis, drew a line across his throat with a finger. Not quite sure where this was going, we took our usual approach, and called Hamoud to explain.

“He wants you to sacrifice a ram when we finish the house,” Hamoud told us. “It will bring baraka.” We look at each other a little surprised. “Is it to get rid of the Jinns?” I ask eagerly. As we arrived in Morocco we both read a book called “The Caliph’s House,” about a British man who redid a palace in Casablanca and was nearly thwarted at every turn by workers trying to rid the house of Jinns. We’ve had no such problems, and if one of us feels we should count our baraka, the other feels we might be getting a little gypped. At any rate, we tell Hamoud we’d be happy to slaughter a ram in the courtyard to celebrate with the house workers when they finish, so long as he takes the role of honor and does the actual throat slitting. Hamoud is pleased, and shares the good news with his team. We learn that they will all divvy up the meat amongst themselves and give some to the neighbors. The plumber took the opportunity to show off his new drainpipe, and claimed it can easily handle all the spewing blood, unlike older drainpipes where the blood would back up and rot in the courtyard for a week. The imminent slaughter has clearly made the workers’ day, and more than once they mime the throat slitting, giving us a smiling thumbs up. We’re not sure what we’re getting ourselves into, but it seems too late to let down the members of Team Hamoud. Of course, there’s a lot more work to be done before we head out to the ram auction.

Blame Canada

Whether walking through the souks or riding in a cab, the two pro forma conversations we encounter over and over are about the weather and where we are from. For the merchants in the souks, country of origin borders on an obsession. Among the various expats and seasoned travelers we’ve met, the understanding is that there are strong stereotypical assumptions made about people’s spending habits based on where they come from with Japanese ranking first in the shopkeepers eyes, and the French last.


“Italian?” one shopkeeper shouts. “Bonjour,” says another. “Fish and Chips?” says a third, guessing we’re English. We always find this frustrating and beside the point, whether we’re interested in buying something or passing quietly through the souks. Perhaps, if it felt like sincere curiosity rather than the first line of a script, we’d be more open, but our knee-jerk reaction is to say we live in Marrakech.


Recently, Hamoud took us to the lantern shop of an acquaintance of his. As we need over two dozen lights, we were looking for a good bargain. Only this lantern maker was a bit more political than most and when we told him we were American, he asked why we hadn’t done anything to stop the slaughter in Lebanon. As we left his shop, Hamoud suggested that with some people it might be better to say we’re Canadian, a practice several other Americans we know have adopted.

So that afternoon we give it a shot, beginning in a taxi. “Oh, it’s cold there,” says the taxi driver, and the conversation ends. Cold there? That’s all you have to say about our country? We’re not very pleased. The next taxi driver goes a little farther. “Cold,” he says. “Like Siberia.” “In the winter, sure, but it gets hot in the summer,” we qualify defensively for our adoptive homeland. “120 degrees?” he asks, and we have to shake our heads in shame. We don’t think it gets that hot in Canada. But suddenly he’s grilling us: What’s the capitol? How many people live there? What percentage speaks French? We look at each other, struggling to remember these details out of respect for both 7th grade teachers and Canadian friends alike. Ottawa! 32 Million! 30 percent! As the cab pulls to our stop, we get out pleased that we’ve handled ourselves well as Canadians.



But still, it all feels a bit too safe. Other than commenting on the cold weather, nobody has a bad thing to say about Canada. When we were Canadians, nobody blamed us for the killing of innocent women and children. But then, nobody lit up as they said “New York City! I love rap!” Or “Hollywood. You know Jim Carey?” Or “I have an aunt who lives in Florida, near Disneyworld.” Although our three days spent playing Canadians passed smoothly, we realized that nationality isn’t something you put on like a cap to keep the sun off. Sure we’re ashamed of many of the actions perpetrated by our government; nonetheless, we’re Americans and to deny this seems both silly and disloyal. It may make life easier here pretending to be something we’re not, but we’ve decided to embrace that elevated state of curiosity each time we say we are American, and wonder where the conversation will take us.

Red, White and Blue

The Martha Stewart paint collection alone must have 50 different shades of white, from summer linen to antique parchment. Factor in the white offerings from Ralph Lauren, Farrow & Ball, Benjamin Moore and others and you’d have the Rose City looking like Casablanca pretty quickly. Color choice, and lots of it, is something to which we’ve grown very accustomed.

Since the painters start at the house today – though what exactly they’re going to do is a mystery since we haven’t a single room finished enough to entertain a coat of paint – we trekked off to the paint store yesterday to stock up on supplies. As we’ve done for the other work projects, we bid out the labor for the paint job and are buying all of the supplies ourselves to ensure quality and a better price. Unlike trips to pick up sheet metal and various types of cement, we feel like we know our way around a paint store and are looking forward to weighing swatches and color options. Comfortable territory at last. When we arrive, we jockey for position in line at the storefront. This is no palace of paint like you’d find at Home Depot; no, the store is more like a musty corner bodega with employees scuttling to retrieve items for customers from the shelves in the shop’s dark depths.

Hamoud hands our list to the shop owner and we wait expectantly for the forthcoming color wheel. What we get is a piece of laminated paper with color tabs divided into two finish groups: peintures brilliantes, or “glossy” and peinture mates. No eggshell, no semi-gloss. There is a subcategory for façade colors, which is basically a study in rose: Rose Mamounia; Saumon; Rouge Marrakech; Rose Chtouka; Rouge Brique, and so on. I catch Samuel eyeing these shades longingly, despite the fact that our home has no exterior walls to be painted. Evidently, when a budding, 12-year-old aesthete, he’d begged his parents to paint his room “dusty rose,” a color he associated with the heights of sophistication. Saving him from sure skewering during birthday party sleep-overs, his sage parents steered him to a mocha color instead. He’s clearly not over his rose fixation.

“But we don’t want glossy or matte,” we say to Hamoud, “we want the walls to be semi-gloss.” “Don’t worry,” he replies, “we just mix the shiny and the flat,” he continues, miming the mélange. Seems plausible, I guess. But what about the colors? We see just one red in the gloss section and one in the matte category. And there isn’t a single white on the page. Not one. “Red is red, and white is white,” says the shop owner when we inquire, the dawning realization of our paucity of choice making us momentarily faint. “But how, but how, but how . . .” we stammer. Surely all of Marrakech is not painted in just Rouge 700 and Rouge 704. Where are the other 699 shades of red? The chart we’ve been given has just 36 colors total; like we said before, Martha’s whites collection tops this number easy.

Unfortunately, this tale does not have a clear conclusion. We left the store with 400 kilograms of paint, mostly white, some black and a half-gallon each of the two reds on offer. Over the next few days, I guess we’ll have to channel our inner Ralph Lauren and come up with some passable versions of Tuxedo White and Dressage Red. We’ll let you be the judge of our mix-master success with forthcoming photos.

It seems that yesterday was destined to be a day of color quandaries. Our bejmat tiles arrived for our bathroom floors. We’re doing a white and black basket-weave pattern. Bejmat is the term for terra cotta tiles that are glazed and fired. Because the glazes are mixed and painted on by hand, there’s always a good deal of variation in the color. Our white batch, unfortunately, could only be described as khaki. A nice color, but not what we’re going for. The problem is that the tiles are made to order and come from Fez. To have a new batch made and shipped would take at least a week and our contractor is ready to lay the tiles this week. Given that our first guests arrive in just two weeks and with Ramadan looming, we’re loathe to invite a delay like this.

Sure, a house project is all about compromises and creative solutions, but some things are non-negotiable. Yesterday, on his birthday, and with king-for-a-day attitude, Samuel threw down the gauntlet: We find white bejmat tiles today or, or, or . . . else! Hamoud shook his head at us – he hates it when voices get raised or when we seem stressed out about anything -but his good nature and resourcefulness soon had us all in a better mood as we set off on a journey to find pure white bejmat, one that took us first to the industrial zone and then to a factory 20 kilometers outside of Marrakech on the road to Essaouira.

We have varying degrees of luck when we decide to stick to our guns about something, but yesterday it paid off. While we can’t be sure what color red our dining room will end up, we’re damn certain the bathroom floors will be a pristine Vermont Snow White.

Reduce > Reuse > Recycle

In the States the environmental movement is founded on the basic belief that it’s the responsible thing to take care of the planet; that we’re using up the earth’s natural resources and will have no future if we continue this way. From afar, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the “Al Gore documentary,” or AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Needless to say, it hasn’t made it to Marrakech just yet.

In Marrakech, and indeed throughout Morocco, there’s a great deal of environmentally friendly behavior, and though the motives are quite different, the net result is in many ways positive. The three Rs of environmentalism - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - are very much in evidence here, though the motivation is primarily a financial one.



The first thing we noticed was how little electricity is used. While looking at close to a hundred houses between Fez and Marrakech, we were struck by how stridently people conserved electricity. A light would be turned on in each room, and tuned off the moment we left, both conserving electricity and helping to keep the rooms cooler in the hot summer. Almost without exception fluorescent light bulbs are used because of their energy efficiency. Fluorescent is an aesthetic concession, though; we’ve had dinner in high-end restaurants where we asked them to turn off the harsh green glare, leaving us in near-dark candlelight. The pervasive American habit of turning all the lights on and leaving them on (not to mention TVs, stereos, air conditioners, etc.) is completely foreign here. Scooters are a popular alternative to cars: in addition to being dramatically cheaper, they’re cherished for their fuel economy.



We’ve also been struck by how much less garbage Moroccans generate than Americans. This garbage can is the product of a street full houses for a week. Garbage bags hardly exist in the stores; people reuse grocery bags. And even the garbage that accumulates is subjected to a form of local recycling. It’s common for garbage bags to be torn into and scavenged for useful things. And the men who drive the donkey carts will frequently find any organic material - watermelon rinds, for example – and feed it to their beasts. And since all the garbage bags are torn open before they’re carted away, we’ve had ample opportunity to observe that there is no junk mail. There is no evidence of the vast, vast quantities of paper – paper towels, paper napkins, computer paper, newspapers, catalogs – that we are accustomed to throwing out in the States.

Repair shops proliferate for any item imaginable. Scooter repair shops can be found on virtually every block. Someone will patiently tinker on an old industrial engine indefinitely. The idea of repairing most electronics in the States is a bit of a joke. Why spend $80 to repair something when you can buy a new one for $100? And so the garbage dumps and landfills continue to expand. In Morocco, the cost of skilled labor to repair is much cheaper, and since a savings of $20 amounts to about two day’s wages, demand for repair stores keeps even VHS Camcorders in use.



Of course, there are problems. Water use is very high. The standard cleaning practice for tile floors is to pour bucket after bucket of water on the floor and then squeegee the water across the tiles and into drainpipes. And there’s an odd habit that shopkeepers have of watering down the sidewalk in front of their little stores. It’s meant to keep down the dust and make the area a bit cooler, but we sat in one café that watered down its sidewalk five times in as long as it took us to drink an orange juice.

In addition to water, there is no recycling in the American sense. All the plastic water bottles we drain daily are thrown out with eggs shells and stale bread. And while we’ve seen plenty of creative uses for water bottles on our construction site, the two of us alone generate more than is needed for all of Marrakech’s construction sites. So while Morocco has a lot to learn about recycling from the West, the West could learn a great deal from Morocco’s frugal approach to its refuse. And speaking of stale bread, we’ve discovered that the heels of our day-old baguettes make for an excellent bread pudding. Maybe we’ll share the recipe and get the neighborhood recycling its bread come cooler weather.