I am queen. I am queen of the medina, queen of the travelogue, queen of the independent study.
Okay maybe not. But I sure feel like it. After a few days of living alone in Rabat, a weekend in Marrakech on our own, a few days of showing around my family, I am pretty impressed with myself.
So let's track back a little and chronicle my Moroccan caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation from day one.
We moved out of our home-stay into our apartment on a cloudy Saturday afternoon. The apartment is a little ways from the medina in a quiet residential neighborhood called Les Orangers. It was a fabulous little traditional house with a salon that seemed to stretch back into a black hole it was so large, a kitchen with probably every pan, pot, and utility you could dream of using, and of a shower chamber. This was really one of the main selling points for us, the fact that you could easily fit ten people in the shower chamber that had it's own little hobbit door in a corner of the house. The five nights we were there feel like a blur now, early mornings with makeshift cereal and milk (dry cereal with yogurt), days spent researching in the medina, running to the vegetable man down the street to pick up a whole meal's worth of vegetables for just fourteen dirham (less than two dollars!). We came up with innovative ways to cook things - plates as cutting boards, strainers as steamers, and burned the tips of our fingers each time we had to light the gas stove with the lighter. And of course sitting together working on our ISPs with only the plucking of our fingers on keyboards and the interesting musical accompaniment of the man who lived upstairs and his stereo.
I went to Marrakech for the second time (and will be going for the third this Friday). The visit was characteristically different from the last time I bestowed the Red City with my illustrious presence, proving to me that Marrakech is a truly a city with which you can make much of depending on what kind of time you'd like to have. If you'd like memories defined by how much you learned and the historical beauty of the city, you can do that. If you'd like to be pampered, sit by the pool, and wine and dine, you can do that. If you'd like to remember nothing about the nights you spent in Marrakech, only know that they happened and were awesome, you can do that too. Oh Marrakech, you sly dog. When I leave Morocco, I will have spent collectively almost a week there. But it feels like I've flitted just barely in and out of it like a shy kid who thinks the pool is too cold and only dips in toes before running back.
Almost a full day in Marrakech was spent on the terrace of our hostel as we worked on our papers with only the long, aggressive (unique to Marrakech!) call to prayer accompanying us. I've mentioned time and time again on this blog that the call to prayer is my favorite sound in the world. But let me be more specific - Rabat's call to prayer is my favorite sound in the world. As I've toured Morocco, it's become clearer and clearer to me that the call to prayer of each city really reflects its personality. By clearer, I mean this is something I've conjured up in my own head and really think is worth sharing. Rabat's is calm, soothing, content with itself. Marrakech's is aggressive and chaotic - all the mosques are singing different parts of the prayer at the same time.
Driving through through Meknes on the way to Fez gave me a serious case of deja vu to our southern excursion. The same expanses of olive groves, rocky mountainsides, with the Rif range one side and the Middle Atlas on the other.
We had a program director at the CCCL who was from Meknes, and as an addendum when he was introducing himself, would always say that it was the best city in all of Morocco. Even now, after visiting Meknes, dining in Meknes, passing through on the train twice, I still can't decide whether I like it or not. Meknes is the marriage between the urban noise and the hinterlands, kind of like an oversize small town that doesn't really boast of it's history at all as the imperial capital of Moulay Idriss, first Muslim king of Morocco.
I heard a lot about Moulay Idriss and his dynasty between Meknes and Volubilis. For example how he trekked across North Africa from the Arabian peninsula as an agent for the kings there to access new territories, but ended up assuming kingship in his own right. Essentially our good man Idriss I was pretty much responsible for the early Islamization of Morocco. Grandson of Prophet Mohammed, Idriss arrived first in the old Roman city of Volubilis (at this point abandoned). He founded his namesake town nearby in the mountains and proceeded to win the support of neighboring Amazigh tribes, who converted to Islam and eventually voted him as their leader. He founded the city of Fes soon after.
Volubilis (Latin)
وليلي - Walīlī (Arabic)
n. morning glory*
Okay maybe not. But I sure feel like it. After a few days of living alone in Rabat, a weekend in Marrakech on our own, a few days of showing around my family, I am pretty impressed with myself.
So let's track back a little and chronicle my Moroccan caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation from day one.
We moved out of our home-stay into our apartment on a cloudy Saturday afternoon. The apartment is a little ways from the medina in a quiet residential neighborhood called Les Orangers. It was a fabulous little traditional house with a salon that seemed to stretch back into a black hole it was so large, a kitchen with probably every pan, pot, and utility you could dream of using, and of a shower chamber. This was really one of the main selling points for us, the fact that you could easily fit ten people in the shower chamber that had it's own little hobbit door in a corner of the house. The five nights we were there feel like a blur now, early mornings with makeshift cereal and milk (dry cereal with yogurt), days spent researching in the medina, running to the vegetable man down the street to pick up a whole meal's worth of vegetables for just fourteen dirham (less than two dollars!). We came up with innovative ways to cook things - plates as cutting boards, strainers as steamers, and burned the tips of our fingers each time we had to light the gas stove with the lighter. And of course sitting together working on our ISPs with only the plucking of our fingers on keyboards and the interesting musical accompaniment of the man who lived upstairs and his stereo.
I went to Marrakech for the second time (and will be going for the third this Friday). The visit was characteristically different from the last time I bestowed the Red City with my illustrious presence, proving to me that Marrakech is a truly a city with which you can make much of depending on what kind of time you'd like to have. If you'd like memories defined by how much you learned and the historical beauty of the city, you can do that. If you'd like to be pampered, sit by the pool, and wine and dine, you can do that. If you'd like to remember nothing about the nights you spent in Marrakech, only know that they happened and were awesome, you can do that too. Oh Marrakech, you sly dog. When I leave Morocco, I will have spent collectively almost a week there. But it feels like I've flitted just barely in and out of it like a shy kid who thinks the pool is too cold and only dips in toes before running back.
Almost a full day in Marrakech was spent on the terrace of our hostel as we worked on our papers with only the long, aggressive (unique to Marrakech!) call to prayer accompanying us. I've mentioned time and time again on this blog that the call to prayer is my favorite sound in the world. But let me be more specific - Rabat's call to prayer is my favorite sound in the world. As I've toured Morocco, it's become clearer and clearer to me that the call to prayer of each city really reflects its personality. By clearer, I mean this is something I've conjured up in my own head and really think is worth sharing. Rabat's is calm, soothing, content with itself. Marrakech's is aggressive and chaotic - all the mosques are singing different parts of the prayer at the same time.
Driving through through Meknes on the way to Fez gave me a serious case of deja vu to our southern excursion. The same expanses of olive groves, rocky mountainsides, with the Rif range one side and the Middle Atlas on the other.
We had a program director at the CCCL who was from Meknes, and as an addendum when he was introducing himself, would always say that it was the best city in all of Morocco. Even now, after visiting Meknes, dining in Meknes, passing through on the train twice, I still can't decide whether I like it or not. Meknes is the marriage between the urban noise and the hinterlands, kind of like an oversize small town that doesn't really boast of it's history at all as the imperial capital of Moulay Idriss, first Muslim king of Morocco.
I heard a lot about Moulay Idriss and his dynasty between Meknes and Volubilis. For example how he trekked across North Africa from the Arabian peninsula as an agent for the kings there to access new territories, but ended up assuming kingship in his own right. Essentially our good man Idriss I was pretty much responsible for the early Islamization of Morocco. Grandson of Prophet Mohammed, Idriss arrived first in the old Roman city of Volubilis (at this point abandoned). He founded his namesake town nearby in the mountains and proceeded to win the support of neighboring Amazigh tribes, who converted to Islam and eventually voted him as their leader. He founded the city of Fes soon after.
Volubilis (Latin)
n. morning glory*
n. morning glory*
*the actual latin root word volubilis apparently means "mutable," however this is not what our friendly guide told us and I rather like the idea of a bustling, proud Roman outpost in North Africa being named after a flower.
Like most Roman ruins, the old city of Volubilis was pretty...crumbly. But crumbly in a really impressive way, a very artistic crumbly that is a mere suggestion of the grandeur these structures were in their time, of the heights they reached with ease and the wealth they both supported and boasted of. In 25 BCE, King Juba II of Numidia and his wife, Cleopatra Selene II (daughter of Cleopatra I and Marc Antony) set to developing the city as a royal capital, which it was for almost 200 years. But then it was abandoned after falling to surrounding Amazigh tribes and remained half inhabited for the next 700 years.
Walking through thousand(s) year-old ruins really gets you thinking about the passage of time. How empires have risen and fallen, how invincible and unmutable the great civilizations are until they're so unceremoniously destroyed in the name of religion, love, human ego, take your pick. The Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Mughals, the Romans, just a small selection of ancient empires who did their fair share of vile, yet also innovative, enough things to constitute a large part of our history books. And all victims of humanity's greed for its own glorification whether it be military, architectural, or spiritual.
"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid."
-Frederick Buechner
Yes, I think that about says it all.
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