Morocco - Touring and Tea

We apologize for the length of this post. If you want to know the short version of our trip here it is - we had an amazing, interesting, and exhausting time in Morocco. If you want to know the details and reasons behind this, read on. To save time and words, know that every time there is an asterisk we drank at least two cups of tea (but probably more).

Monday
We began with a 3 a.m. sherut to the airport, from whence we took a plane to Istanbul and then a connection to Casablanca. We shared the flight with a group of professors from Bar Ilan, who had decided to take a vacation the week after the semester began. At the Casablanca airport we caught a grand taxi (which has a trunk and seats 5, as opposed to the petit taxi, which seats 3 and has no trunk) to the suburb of Oasis, where there is a Jewish museum. We were excited to be able to see the institution, which is the only museum in the city and the only Jewish museum in the Arab world, and we had thought we'd be too late to make it. Unfortunately, the driver had no idea where to go, and neither did the half-dozen pedestrians he assaulted as we got lost. When it became clear that we wouldn't make it to the museum before it closed we tried to explain that we wanted to go to the hostel instead. The driver, however, spoke no French, and when we found a pedestrian to translate we discovered that the driver didn't even know where the hostel was. Eventually, after a 90 minute drive that should have taken 25, we made it to the Hotel Galia.
Once checked into the the hotel we headed over to the Beth El synagogue, the only remaining shul in the city. Like most Jewish institutions in the country, this was behind a plain and unmarked door that we discovered only by luck, this time led by a Jewish butcher we'd stumbled across. The shul was beautiful, covered with white marble, wooden fixtures, and intricate painting. It was also full of Bar Ilan professors attending a lecture. After making certain we weren't interested in sitting in on the lecture, we made our way to the Cercle de l'Alliance, an unmarked kosher restaurant behind a locked door, video surveillance, and a burly Arab guard.. The place was situated in the middle of a dark and dirty alley, but contained crystal chandeliers, a bar, and a dozen rooms full of men gambling. Perhaps because many Muslims will not drink alcohol the establishment has become something of an illicit casino of sorts. After asking the man next to us to translate our menu, we had a delicious dinner of tagine and olive chicken.*

Tuesday
A 7 a.m. train took us to Fes, where we got lost for a few minutes (when we discovered that the street signs were only in Arabic and not in French like we had hoped) before finding a hotel that would let us store our bags and arrange an afternoon tour guide. As an aside - we got lost in every city partly because we had no maps, partly because every major city is undergoing a lengthy street-renaming process, and mostly because every passerby tried to guide us to our location but almost none had any idea where to go. In the hours before our tour began, we walked to the mellah, the old walled Jewish quarter. When entering the grounds of the Ibn Danan synagogue and cemetery (the shul now defunct) we picked up a guide (accidentally) who showed us around the area, including former Rabbi's home, another synagogue (Habbirim) and cemetery, and the courtyard used to celebrate Sukkot. Every location had its own bittersweet charm, as there were clear Judaic influences and many pretty elements, but it was equally clear that they were either neglected and forgotten, or devoid of life. One of the most interesting places was the mikvah in the Ibn Dannan shul, which is still full of water, and has a peeping-hole in the ceiling for family mikvah celebrations before weddings.
After lunch we met up with our guide, who took us on a meandering tour of the city's medina (central walled area) where we saw what is presumed to have been Rambam's house. The medina of Fes was far better than that of Casablanca. The latter city is a port and attempts to be modern, and the medina has turned into a bit of a slum. In Fes, on the other hand, the area is a massive jumble of mosques, medresas, tiled fountains, and souqs organized by guild and product (a souq is like the Machane Yehuda shuk, only more massive, stinky, and confusing). We muscled our way through the throngs to get a taste of each area, with each step happier we had a guide to show us to the highlights. We saw weavers, blacksmiths, and many other tradesmen at work, but the most interesting (and stinky!) were the tanners, who dry, treat, and work animal hides. The whole process was captivating, but the combined scents of lime, poop, wet animal hides, and dozens of dyes was so overwhelming that we had to be provided with sprigs of mint to stand it. At the end the guide took us to each of his favourite stores (where we assume he made a commission off the sales) and we sampled the wares and made some purchases.*

Wednesday
We caught an overnight bus to the southern town of Rissani, and after sitting through a 0 degree night (with no heat) found ourselves in a deserted central square. Rissani is little more than a village, and is the very last city on the highway, after which there are only dirt roads and dunes. We sat in the only open establishment in the area* (it was 6 a.m. after all) and waited for our guide to pick us up, while being pestered by the locals to try out every other tour, all of which were apparently far superior to our own. Hassan finally arrived and we squeezed into his little car and began the drive to Merzouga, an outpost of nothing but sand and Kasbahs (walled areas with native huts inside, usually next to an oasis). Halfway there the car ran out of gas, so we wandered the area while the sun rose and a friend of Hassan's brought us some petrol. After an hour of waiting the gas arrived, so we fashioned a funnel out of a discarded water bottle, filled the tank, and drove to the guide's Kasbah to shower and rest.
After a quick lunch, we took a tour of the Merzouga area, which is populated by Berber nomads who live off of herding sheep, guiding tours, and selling carpets and trinkets. We saw a seasonal lake populated by flamingos as well as a Berber community*, where they even had a few Berber Jewish artifacts.
At 3 p.m. we met another guide, Yousef, who helped us onto our camels and led us into the Sahara desert. After 90 minutes of riding through pristine and golden dunes, we arrived at a camel-hair tent pitched in a small valley. We dismounted* and wandered the area, admiring the vast expanses of sky and sand, before meeting Yousef for dinner* and a lesson in drumming and singing. The experience was complicated by Yousef's speaking of six languages, in none of which we were fluent (but we managed to converse in Jon's broken Spanish and Rina's broken French). Later we lay on a blanket beneath the silent night sky, awed by the perfect sharpness of the starts against the complete darkness of the desert sky. We saw more stars than either of us had ever seen before, with so many clusters of faint stars that it was difficult to make out even the familiar constellations (which were also in the wrong places). Before the temperature sank too far below freezing we bundled up and went to bed so that we wouldn't be too tired to wake up for the sunrise the next day.

Thursday
We climbed the highest of the nearby dunes to daven and watch the sun rise over the Sahara before having breakfast*. Neither of us had ever been in a place that was so silent and calming before. It was an amazing experience. After breakfast we remounted the camels (which were now hungry and angry, taking many breaks to eat the sparse shrubbery and nip at each others' behinds) to ride back to the Kasbah, where we showered and rested. On the way to our next bus we wandered through a local donkey and sheep market, where the nomads meet weekely to trade wares and livestock, as well as to catch up with friends. We also sat with a spice merchant who claimed to be a doctor*, and the dried up lizards and hundreds of packets of powders and salves convinced us. At one point he offered to sell us spices in exchange for a mixture of cash and the clothes on our backs, but our means fell far short of his expectations. The bus we found was not the same inter-city line we had taken to Rissani, which was like Greyhound, but rather a rickety local service operator that had blinds made out of burlap sacks, and stopped wherever the riders wanted along the highway if they clapped loudly three times. The 200km trip took six hours, but we commiserated with a German backpacker we'd met and finally made it to Ouarzazate, a boomtown along the route to Marrakesh used mostly for filming desert scenes for Hollywood productions.

Friday
After a night in a hostel we squished into a grand taxi with three locals and began the trip to Marrakesh. The road wound its way through the Atlas mountains, whose snowy peaks were a striking contrast to the desert we'd been in only a day before. After a pit stop in a tiny village, we made it to our destination around noon, got only a little lost (compared to other destinations), and dropped off our bags at Riad Zarka (a riad being a house with a central courtyard, the type of home inhabited by most residents of the Medina). We then made our way, with the help of many locals, to the hidden synagogue of Id Alijama, the only active shul in the mellah. We only made it into the courtyard on our first attempt, as the sham'es was having lunch, but upon our return got to see inside of the massive golden front doors. The building itself was a mix of remnants of the many other shuls that have by this time closed, but was clearly still in use and seemed to have more life than the other synagogues seen so far. A local boy then guided us to Amram and Annette*, an elderly couple that welcomed us into their home later for dinner after shul and lunch the next day, and who were housing a pair of bearded Sephardi hassidim from Jerusalem who were touring the graves of tzaddikim in Morocco. We spent the few remaining hours before Shabbat stocking up on a few supplies (including some fantastic Moroccan dates, which were the best dates we'd ever tasted) in case our meals didn't work out (read "we were too scared or lost to go back"), then walked to the shul for a Sephardi service followed by a massive dinner with lots of local flavours. The meal was very entertaining, as there were four languages spoken at the table, but not a single one was common between all six of us. Additionally, one of the other guests got drunk off of an Arak-like liquor that Amram procured out of an unmarked two-gallon jug, and spent the night singing as loudly as possible and blessing everyone present multiple times (we've lost count of how many MALE offspring we are now destined to have). The walk home through the dark, winding, and sparsely populated alleys of the Medina was a new experience, as we'd only ever seen them packed with shoppers and colourful things to sample and buy.

Saturday
After breakfasting on freshly squeezed orange juice we davened at the same shul as the evening before, and made the locals very excited and mad when they found out that Jon is a Cohen. Apparently they would do Birkat Cohanim here each week, but almost never have someone to perform it, and were ecstatic when the discovery was made, but not until after shacharit. Lunch was the same as the day before* (broken but entertaining conversation, enough food to feed us for the week including Dafina - a sephardi chulent!, and drunkenness). Apparently the drunken sephardi Rabbi acts the same when he is not drunk and we were blessed once again with many male children. During the afternoon we wandered the labyrinthine souqs, happy we could not have money with us to spend on the faux guides and shopkeepers. In one store we stumbled across a collection of confusing Judaica that included half of a sefer Torah bolted to a copper fixture (priced at $50,000) and a wooden door with a chanukiah attached and decorated with pictures from the Bible and Hebrew phrases.
After Shabbat we walked into the central square of Djemaa el-Fna, which nightly changes from an open area into a packed market full of steaming food stalls, buskers, story-tellers, and cafes, in addition to salesmen hawking their goods and the ever-present dried fruit stands and orange-juice vendors. Some of the best sights - acrobats, snake charmers, stewed lambs' heads and platters of intact brains. When the sounds and smells became to much for us we retired to the balcony of a nearby cafe* to take in the scene from above.

Sunday
More fresh juice to begin the day*, followed by a walk to the Palais al Badi, the former grounds of the Sultan's palace. After seeing older and better-presented ruins throughout Israel the archeological elements of the location weren't particularly impressive, but the history behind it was very interesting. The museum also housed a recovered minbar ('lectern' from a mosque) that was covered in intricate mosaics and woodcuts, which was a beautiful example of Islamic art. We then walked to the Saadian tombs, the cemetery and mausoleums of the same Sultans who had inhabited the palace. Perhaps because of superstition the tombs had not been looted and defaced as the palace had, so the fantastic artistry was still intact. We took a long walk to the public gardens of Jardin Agdal for lunch, then wandered the same souqs as the day before, this time with purchases in mind. Rina's High school French worked splendidly throughout the bargaining process and we came away with exactly what we wanted.
Before dinner we went to a Hammam, which is basically a Turkish bath. We sat in steam-filled rooms and were alternately slathered with olive-based soaps and scrubbed with abrasive gloves by almost naked attendants, then relaxed in darkened rooms full of cushioned couches.* After a relaxing dinner (of salami and olives - yum) we went to a nearby cafe*, again overlooking the Djemaa el-Fna, and ate the most expensive date we could find (75 cents for one, or 150 dirhams per kilo).

Monday
A train returned us to Casablanca, and we took a cab to the Hassan II mosque. In order to give the swarthy city something to be proud of and to create a lasting legacy, the previous king about 15 years ago built this $800 million structure, which is the largest mosque outside of Mecca and has the highest minaret in the world. The tour took us through the marble and mosaic-filled prayer hall that can hold 25,000 worshippers, into the cavernous ablution room and the hammam. It was perhaps the most awe-inspiring building either of us had ever been into, both in terms of artistry and scope. We followed this with a walking tour of some of the architectural highlights of the classier district of the city, then relaxed at a nearby cafe* full of locals watching soccer, the combination of which is something of a local pasttime. At most hours of the day one can walk past coffee houses and see tables full of men staring up at the screen while pots of tea go cold on the table in front of them. We then had our final dinner at Cercle de l'Alliance, where we finally ate some actual Moroccan Moroccan cigars.

Tuesday
After a 5 a.m. train to the airport we flew to Istanbul*, where we met our tour guide Gurkan. He walked us through the sights of the Old City, which centered around several centuries-old churches and mosques. The Hagia Sophia was the first stop, and in terms of awesomeness it easily eclipsed the Hassan II mosque of the day before. The 500 year old structure is massive and full of marble panels and golden mosaics. It has served as a church and mosque to generations of Sultans and Kings, but today is a museum. The majesty and beauty of the enormous central hall is impossible to describe, so we'll stop here. We also saw the Blue Mosque, so called because of the thousands of hand-painted blue tiles that cover its walls. We only had 20 minutes here because of an impending service, but that was plenty of time to take in the beauty of the room. Our third stop was an Egyptian obelisk that had been used in a Roman hippodrome, but now rests in the middle of a busy traffic circle. We finished our walking tour in the Bazaar, one of the largest covered markets in the world. The experience was impressive, but made less so by the many bustling shopping centers we'd experienced in the medinas of Morocco. However, we did get to stop for a cup of Turkish coffee with our guide (although there they just call it coffee). We moved from the Old City to the middle of the bustling modern Istanbul (not Constantinople) on our way to dinner at the Carne restaurant (a suprisingly fancy kosher venue)*, where we ate some deilicious Turkish meals, then it was back to the airport for our late-night flight*.