The Road to Marrakech

Marrakesh had hardly changed in some ways in the 25 years since my last visit, but La Maison Arabe proved a fabulous new addition to the city's accommodations. Luxurious accommodations, cooking lessons, and a personal driver were all ours for a modest price.

Quick Tips:

Book well in advance--the Maison Arabe has a following. Get the best map of Marrakesh you can find--it's almost a sure bet you'll get lost. Hire an inexpensive private taxi to take you on day trips.

Best Way To Get Around:

You can easily navigate Marrakesh on foot IF you have a good map. Use taxis for short hops around the city and to places farther afield.

La Maison Arabe is a traditional Moroccan building, with interior courtyards, fountains, hidden wings, and small passageways. It's a luxurious property featuring fine Moroccan antiques and rugs, spacious rooms with all the amenities, and a delightful restaurant offering Moroccan specialties. Guests can take cooking classes at the Maison Arabe's kitchen facility located outside the main medina. A spa is planned to open soon.

After spending two days in the Dordogne and one in Provence, my friend P and I are ready to leave for Marrakech. We're up at 6am.

A quick shower, cup of coffee, re-check of tickets and passports, and we’re in my bright blue rented Twingo heading for the Marseille airport.

The check-in line is short, but hectic. Muslims returning to Africa are piling huge, brightly colored striped plastic bags full of bedding on the baggage checkstand (could bedding be cheaper in France?), and everyone is laden with bags of all kinds even though only one carry-on is allowed. Glancing around, we decide that the Tunis line looks a lot more ominous than ours though, with a row of thug-like brassy-eyed and tattered men glaring at each other. Our line for Marrakech is simply full of over-laden shopper types and large veil-clad ladies who try to butt in line.

At the counter, the check-in lady asks to see our visas. We’ve both checked on whether visas are needed for Morocco (not), so we’re startled. P tells the woman we don’t need them for stays of less than 90 days, and the lady thumbs through a book and says "vous avez raison" (you are right). Phew. Then we wait in the security line while people with excess bags are sent back to check them and others are frisked and wanded and asked to empty pockets.

We’re off on time through a heavy cloud cover and not insignificant turbulence, and P. is amused at my anxiousness. I’m not the greatest flyer under any circumstances, but my flight of last week has jangled my nerves. The flight pattern seems to us to be quite odd. We first appear to go straight out across the Mediterranean, but are soon back hugging the coast of Spain. There are myriad huge round brown "fields" of some kind along the Spanish coast. You can see the circular plow marks within them from the air.

After I point out what is clearly to me the coast at Tangier (I tell P. with complete assurance that you can see the circular beach where all the young boys bathe in summertime), we fly straight over Gibraltar, and I’m completely confused; that can’t have been Tangier after all. Then we are hugging another coastline, which seems to mean to us that we must be traveling south along the Moroccan coast. There are more circular fields, 22 of them in one area, all different shades of brown and pale green. We fly over two cities, each of which I assume is Casablanca, before we come to Casablanca itself. There’s a sirocco or some other windy phenomenon going on, and the plane is bucking all over before landing, and I’m pleased to be on the ground when we land. A bus is waiting to take us about 20 feet to the airport entrance.

The Casablanca airport is a stark place, little changed from when I landed there 25 years ago. Patrolled by very sharp-looking military men, it has virtually no signs to help the traveler, and the ones that exist are confounding. We follow the "transit" sign, for example, and are stopped by soldiers and pointed back to the corridor we’ve been traveling in. Before we know it, we’re in the bleak waiting room, waiting for our plane, which doesn’t leave for an hour and a half. There’s no place to change money, no café, nothing but a pretty tiled room with an encased model of the city of Casablanca that looks oddly at contrast with the rest of the building, and the waiting room we’re in. There’s a soda machine, but it takes only dirhams, which we haven’t been able to procure yet. The three ladies outside the restroom are angling for money from people using the ladies’ room, but they can’t accept French change and shoo me in anyway.

The flight to Marrakesh is shorter and better, with breath-taking views of the stark North African terrain. We fly low enough to see it all--mountain communities surrounded by mud walls, animals grazing, a lone river but myriad wadis, the domed edifices that are the burial grounds of local religious leaders, the Marrakech Express trains speeding toward the city from Casablanca, and more of those mysterious circular fields.

Marrakesh is warm in both temperature and atmosphere. The passport control man smiles at the lime-green ink on my landing card, and another airport attendant goes through the line bringing elderly people to the front--a good thing because this is the longest passport control line in Africa, I expect. There are two men each in three booths, checking maybe 50 passengers, and it takes about a half hour to complete the job.

Once through, we find a nice gentleman holding a "Maison Arabe" sign awaiting us. He takes our bags and we go to change money from a silent guy at the exchange window. Then it’s into the jaunty little Maison Arabe van, out onto a broad boulevard, and into Marrakesh, which is just around the corner.

Marrakesh at first glance doesn’t seem to have changed much at all since I was last here, 25 years ago. I expected more cars and fewer donkeys, but it is the same jumble of horse carts, vegetable wagons, calèches, and donkeys laden with brush and swarms of bicycles that it always was. Olive groves line the boulevard, and in between their silver foliage, sheep graze and men squat in groups playing cards. Lone squatters are apparent in the midst of great empty, rocky fields, and at intersections. The traffic circles operate on the old French system--those entering have the right of way. No "vous n’avez pas la priorité" signs here.

We turn off the boulevard and head behind the walls of the old city into the old medina, the Jemaa el Fna. The congestion on the narrow street is astonishing, with vehicles of every description coming within fractions of an inch of one another as they maneuver through the crowds.

The street is lined with a hodgepodge of narrow, dark shops, each overflowing with high piles of goods: grocery shops with shelf after shelf of candies, teas, paper goods, spices, and whatnot, with a booth-like front. There's a young boy who will run up a ladder to get you your prize and a rug shop with rugs draped over the doors. Inside there are stacks of rugs in all sizes and colors; a mattress shop; a furniture shop where the workers have set up sawhorses on the sidewalk and are carving a headboard amid the throng; shops with used appliances; shops selling fabrics; bakeries; tool shops; and, yes, an Internet café. Cats are everywhere. Dust is everywhere. And then our car stops at an alleyway leading off from this swarm of sight and sound, and we are ten paces from our destination, La Maison Arabe, our oasis.

One of the enchantments of this part of the world is the way its architecture is so protective and inward-looking. There is a feeling of sanctuary within the walls and courtyards of every dwelling. The Maison Arabe has perfected this notion. From the airy reception area, with its antique stone oven and enormous carved banc, one descends into a calm of intertwining courtyards, sitting rooms, and alcoves, as mysteriously laid out as the medina itself.

One courtyard, which becomes our favorite place for afternoon tea (included in the price of the room), is open overhead and beautifully, but simply, decorated in white and Mediterranean blue.

The finely carved windows of our bedroom suite overlook this courtyard, where birds flock in the evening and early morning, and where one domesticated bird sleeps in the archway that leads into the dining room.

We have been upgraded to a suite, which is fine, except that it contains only one queen-sized bed and a long, comfortable window seat that is about as wide as a single bed. They will make the window seat up as a bed for us, and we will switch off sleeping in the real bedroom part of the suite. I get the window seat the first night.

The suite is L-shaped, with the main room off to the left and the bathroom beyond it. In the living room part of the suite is a beautifully carved fireplace and an exquisite collection of water jugs.

But we’re eager to get out and explore before sundown, so we unpack quickly and head out to the medina.

Two kittens, one black and one yellow, are lumped in a small heap on the doorstep of the Maison Arabe as we exit. For the following four days, they are there every time we come and go, each time with one draped over the other, fast asleep.

Just walking down the main street into medina is a challenge. Traffic moves in all directions at once, Donkeys line the streets with their noses in feedbags. People walk three and four abreast in the middle of the street, dodging pullcarts, bicycles, taxis, and delivery trucks. The noise level is intense, between all the workmen hammering and chiseling and drilling and the passersby talking and yelling, and the vehicular honking. The smells are pungent--cumin mingled with donkey dung and exhaust fumes, frangipani and sewage, sweat and honey, charcoal and wet wool, roast lamb and orange flower. It’s a heady, chaotic, intoxicating place.

Armed with a minimalist map of the city that shows the main boulevards, the outline of the medina, and the names of general regions within the old city, we enter the main medina square, where the scene hasn’t changed much in a thousand years or more. Row upon row of oranges are stacked up on lengthy tables that are lined up in the center of the market area. The stall owners furiously squeeze and yell out the prices for a cup of juice. Water carriers with their silver cups hung over their shoulders and their bright red tunics and turbans approach every foreigner who looks thirsty. Snake charmers with their drugged-looking serpents try to lure us to watch them kiss the cobra. A few dozen men are gathered in a tight circle, within which two of them are playing some sort of card game and the rest are taking bets. Rows of "petits taxis" are lined up on one side of the square and, on the other, rows of yellow Mercedes taxis. A tour bus improbably enters the fray, drives around the perimeter, and disappears. The number of women in the medina is minimal; most are tourists, of which there are few as well.

We wander into the labyrinth of the souks for a bit. There’s a certain organization to the souks, with most of the inlaid wood shops, all the silver shops, all the jewelry shops, all the leather slipper shops, and all the spice shops grouped together, but it’s not that simple--nothing in Morocco is. There is lattice over the alleyways of the souks, to keep the heat down in the summer months, but in November, and at the end of this afternoon just before sundown, it makes navigating within their shadows even more difficult than usual.

Marrakesh is not a center for dyeing wool like, say, Fez, but nonetheless there are plenty of sheep in neighboring communities, and djellabas and rugs must be made, so periodically we come upon a wool store with its brilliant offerings. There’s pottery galore, and admirable marquetry work in which cypress and lemonwood feature prominently. There's even a television souk--a new development since my last visit.

But what P and I are really after is spices, herbs, and potions. We find them at the Berber pharmacist’s shop.

The pharmacist is a naturally gracious man (in a nation of aggressively gracious people), a soft-spoken but eager-to-please man who seems ready to treat us as knowledgeable customers and not as targets for endless negotiations. We enter the shop asking for saffron threads, which he has (although not at first in the vast quantities we are seeking), but are soon seated and sampling all manner of dried flowers, herbs, and grasses. We buy cumin and a 12-spice couscous mixture, a 6-spice mixture, ginseng, musk, curry, rose water and who knows what--the weirder, the better. We buy more saffron than he has in his shop, and he has to send a runner to get some from someone else. Then he takes us up on the roof of his shop's building and shows us the wool-dyeing enterprise going on on a neighboring roof--today’s color is indigo.

It’s just about sunset now, and we have arrived in Marrakesh on the first day of Ramadan, so we expect some activity to occur at sunset. We wander back to the great square and sit down at a café and order coffee. It’s not two minutes before a man approaches us with that unwanted but sometimes fruitful geniality of the North African male and tells us he’s a French teacher and a Muslim and he’s about to go pray (he’s got a cell phone that’s got the exact time of the sunset this evening programmed into it), but he wants us to wait for him and he’ll buy us soup and talk to us further after he returns from the mosque, which is right opposite our café. At the exact minute of sundown, the mosque erupts in the evening prayer: ALLAHH-UH-AKHABAR!!!!!………

He runs to the mosque, removes his shoes (how do they get the right shoes when they come out, we wonder?), and disappears inside for a few minutes. In the interim, the chef of the café we are sitting at is busy piling up bowls of harira, the chickpea-tomato soup that is the traditional breakfast soup of Ramadan. Our friend has ordered a bowl for himself and one for each of us, too. He re-appears five minutes later, and the soup arrives in front of us, fragrant and filling.

Our "friend" comes back from his prayers and downs his soup in two big slurps from the bowl, while we pick away at it. Like all Moroccan men we tourists meet, he’s charming and educated and savvy and interesting, but what he really wants is for us to re-plan our vacation around his cousin the car rental dealer, his sister the rug merchant, and his brother-in-law the spice dealer. He’s trying to captivate P, so I play the annoying friend, who has business acquaintances she has to meet from Casablanca at exactly the same time he is proposing to meet us the following night. We *agree* to meet him at this same café tomorrow at 5:30pm, and I make a mental note to be nowhere near here at that time. He’s actually a very nice and well-educated man--he’s simply a product of his culture of opportunity. While we eat our soup, he explains Ramadan to us--he will be the first of many to take advantage of the time of year to expound upon the Muslims’ time of expiation. He explains at length about how going without food and water (and this is a surprise--I didn’t realize water was on the list), cigarettes, and gambling (how about those guys in the medina today? Guess they weren’t Muslims) strengthens the man and makes him holier in God’s eye. Everyone who talks about Ramadan with us is impassioned about it, and they all say the same things, implying it’s a horrible sacrifice and a terrible hardship, but as we’ll see, it can seem more like a brilliant hypocrisy.

We manage to peel ourselves away from the fellow at the bar who wants to commandeer our next four days and with our trusty non-map we venture into the souk again.

We return to the hotel and decide to dine there in the restaurant. It’s very hush-hush and elegant, but we convince a waiter who understands that we want to eat lightly.

There’s an American woman dining not far from us in the company of a nattily dressed European man and a younger woman who might be the woman’s daughter. The older woman has a Virginia Hunt Country Volvo station wagon look about her--turtleneck and blazer and thick straight blonde hair, a good scarf, and large but simple gold jewelry. The daughter says little, but as their dinner progresses and more wine bottles are brought to the table, the older woman gets more and more animated, the head tosses become more frequent, and the goo-goo eyes more blatant. Over dessert and coffee she starts to smoke his cigarettes. P and I definitely sense we’ve got an international jet-set gigolo situation here, perhaps even a ménage à trois in the making. Imagine our surprise when we find out later that evening that we’ve just seen the American Ambassadress to Morocco and the hotel owner dining together!

Back upstairs in our Sheherazade suite, we watch CNN and prepare to settle in for our first night’s sleep in Morocco. How very naive of us.

It’s around 11:30pm when P and I climb into our respective beds and turn off the lights. A perfect crescent moon shines through the latticework of my window. Here and there a cat’s meow can be heard from one of the thousands of feline denizens of the city. A motor scooter passes through the alley, the muffled voices of passersby fade into the crevices of the city, and just as I am drifting into dreamland. . .

ALLAH-UH-AKHBAR!!!!

ALLAH-UH-AKHBAR!!!!

ALLAH-UH-AKHBAR!!!!

"Holy sh*t!" I hear from the other end of the suite. The prayer continues for several minutes, then silence. I turn over and prepare to begin the descent to sleep again, but within minutes there is a swelling sound in the streets of Marrakesh. A drum begins to beat. A crowd is clearly forming somewhere nearby in the medina. Soon there is chanting. Then waves of smaller crowds passing by the hotel street, singing and cheering. Then hordes of children can be heard and, soon after, fireworks erupt throughout the city. Dogs are barking everywhere, and soon there’s the sound of a violent dogfight. A cat is either outside my door or on the windowsill, plaintively meowing. And who knew that Marrakesh was a city full of roosters? They prepare to crow the night away. The cacophony swells and recedes, but never dies down enough to hope for sleep. I try to sort out the sounds and rank them from most to least annoying--the drum wins hands down for the former prize.

Somewhere around 2:30am, when the roar has died down to a fervent din, another prayer begins. This one is long, complex, and with the bits of Arabic I can recall from long-ago study, it seems to be reciting the five pillars of Islam. The words "Ramadan" and "mecca" are audible, but with my brain in an exhausted tizzy by now, it also sounds like snatches of a CNN report: "MULLAH OOOOMMMAAAARRR!!" "JJIIIIIHHAAAAAADDD!!"

In fact, there are three mosques competing at once in this orchestra. Oddly, the prayers are different coming from each, and the tone of each is different, creating a godawful discord on top of the pure noise of it all.

When this ruckus subsides, a new sunami of sounds begins, with people scurrying through the alleyway beside the hotel, speaking in loud tones and cheers emanating from first one side of the medina and then the other. The city’s animal life also becomes revitalized. More fireworks. And then, in a final insult, someone with a horn--an extremely loud horn, and one that mimics perfectly the pitch of the muezzin’s call – begins to blow hard and steady. Whoever the wretch responsible for this is, is roaming all over the city, but he’s never out of earshot of our room. On and on it goes, and we toss and turn and curse under the covers.

At last, toward about 4:30am, there are pockets of silence, then a brief stretch of calm. I have practically given up hope of any sleep, but think that perhaps I have one last chance. I am breathing steadily and trying to clear my brain of the clutter that has built up in it overnight, when a bird chirps outside my window. And then another, and then a dozen, and then a few dozen, and then there is a great whirring of wings and a few hundred birds descend on the palm in the courtyard to herald the morning, all bleating their morning greeting. I sit up in bed, looking ruefully out over the courtyard, and at that moment, the call to dawn prayer clamors out of mosques 1, 2, and 3 and I abandon all hope.

As a fitting finale, when the dawn prayer has ended, the city’s World War II air raid siren goes off for a full minute--JUST IN CASE YOU WERE THINKING OF SLEEPING IN, YOU INFIDEL!!!!

Needless to say, P and I are up in plenty of time for our cooking class. We’re scheduled to leave at 10am, but first we have to tank up on coffee after our all-nighter.

Breakfast is delightful, with several kinds of breads and pastries, butter, delicious honey, marmalade, and jam. And coffee, lots of coffee. I don’t even drink coffee normally (well, I do in France from time to time), but I need coffee this morning. Reviewing the night’s events is pretty comical--"How about that horn? That was a nice touch. What time was that? Around 4?", "Yeah, but the siren was really the finishing touch, don’t you think?"

At 10am we are at the front desk, where our driver awaits us. It’s a short ride to the grounds where the cooking school is located. We shove our way out of the street and onto the Avenue Mohammed V, past the Royal Gardens, which are hidden behind a high wall, with only palm fronds showing from street level, down a lane with a number of butcher stalls, past a few of the ubiquitous lone squatters, and are soon entering the Maison Arabe’s other compound, which houses the cooking school as well as a swimming pool and gardens. Eventually, I expect, the spa which was supposed to be open in October, but which isn’t open yet, will be here.

Karim, our host, meets us at the entrance and gives us a brief tour of the place. It’s magical, even to my exhausted eyes. There’s an Arabian Nights-style tent to one side of the pool, full of low tables, cushions, and candlesticks taller than I am. I surmise it’s used for parties and receptions, or perhaps just as a cool place to get out of the heat in the summertime.

As we climb the stairs to the second-floor kitchen we’ll be cooking in, a group of people passes below--"the American Ambassadress," says Karim, "She comes here often." P and I exchange knowing glances.

An antique spice chest greets us inside the kitchen, which is huge and light-filled.

Karim introduces us to Lali (which means "darling" in Arabic), who will be our teacher, only she speaks only Arabaic, so Karim is there to translate to French for us. But first we take a lesson from him in the origins of Moroccan cooking. We sit together at a wooden table where a sheet of paper and pencil have been laid out neatly for each of us, and we listen and take notes.

My notes show that there are three "ingredients" in Moroccan cooking: civilization, ethnography, and climate. The Romans, Wattasi, Phoenicians, Berbers, Arabs, and Jews all came to the region with their various weapons and spices. Meat was scarce, but there was a tremendous variety of vegetables from region to region. Some dishes developed specifically to disguise vegetables as meat ("elle donne l’impression qu’il y a du poulet dans le pôt"). The Sultan never ate the same dish as the rest of his entourage--a safeguard, no doubt. Karim tells us that even poor Moroccans never eat the same thing twice--it’s always something different every day (well, they must repeat a dish ONCE in awhile!). The cuisine is a "vrai mélange" of products and cultures. There are special dishes for marriages and births and funerals. It is, in sum, he tells us, a cuisine that aims to please both the individual and the community and that it reflects the unity of many diverse peoples and ideas.

Notes taken, we don our aprons and head for our places in the kitchen. We’re making bastilla, a traditional chicken or pigeon pie that is fairly complicated and incorporates techniques used in making other Moroccan dishes such as tagines and couscous. We have four pieces of freshly killed (and, we think, a bit tough) chicken which we sautée in olive oil with a chopped medium purple onion, chopped coriander, pepper, salt, cinnamon, gee (clarified butter), ginger, and saffron. When it’s cooked through, we cover it with water and bring to a boil and add a few chopped cinnamon sticks.

Once the liquid is reduced, we remove the chicken from the heat and begin the next "layer of the pie," which is an egg stuffing. While the chicken cools, we break four eggs into a dish and add them one at a time to the remaining liquid from the chicken. We stir and stir until they have scrambled and become hard and absorbed all the juices. Then we press the remaining juice out of them. Lali checks up on us at every stage and whispers to Karim, who passes on her suggestions to us in French.

While our egg stuffing rests, we debone the chicken and, with scissors, cut it into small pieces. Then we make the third layer of the pie by mixing a bowl of chopped almonds with sugar (Lali likes to use lots and throws more in when I’m not looking, but P and I agree it’s better not so sweet), orange blossom water, and cinnamon.

It’s time to put the pie together. Lali takes out a pile of "ouarka" dough, which looks a bit like phyllo, but is round in shape. She’s having problems with it from the start, and needs to keep using the scissors to cut it into the right size pieces. Some pieces are so thin and unwieldy they simply have to be scrapped. Anyway, we take a sheet of ouarka and place the chopped chicken on it. Lali sprinkles a layer of sugar and cinnamon on that. Then we beat an egg and brush the ouarka with it. Then the egg stuffing goes on, followed by the sugar-cinnamon mix, then another sheet of ouarka and egg wash. Then the almond/sugar/cinnamon mixture and more ouarka and egg wash. Then we top the entire pie with another sheet of ouarka that gets folded around to make a perfect circular pie, more egg wash, and then we sift sugar and cinnamon on the top in a grid pattern. Into the sautée pan they go (you can cook them in the oven, too, but sautéeing them yields a more moist bastilla). A few minutes on one side and a few minutes on the other, and voila! A perfect bastilla--unless of course Lali turns the heat up on yours and it burns slightly on one side, as in the case of mine.