The climate in Casablanca is like California—palms, eucalyptus, bougainvillea, citrus, olives, hibiscus, etc. There are vineyards and local wines. This morning’s lecture by Ronald Messier about Islamic art was excellent. “No boring monotony, no abrupt changes” was the take home message.
The road to Marrakech is a four lane, limited access highway heading SE and rising steadily from flat plains with roadcuts of buff and cream colored sedimentary limestone to hillier land with red soil and gray rock outcrops. These roadcuts have no well-defined strata. The climate is more arid than at the coast. The roadside activity is all agricultural, cattle, sheep, olives, vineyards, vegetable crops and prickly-pear cactus. The cactus fruit is eaten, the greens are fed to livestock and the plants are used for fences.
Our hotel in Marrakech, Le Meridien, has adobe buildings, like most of the structures here in this city. We had buffet lunch at the hotel on the patio by the pool right after arriving and then hit the old town. Most buildings are reddish-brown adobe, but the Bahia palace that we visited was painted white with blue trim. The inside of the palace is decorated with lots of tile work and very fancy carved, cedar ceilings. We spent time in the market, souk, in the old town, medina, inside the kasbah, originally a fort whose walls now define the medina. Storks live atop those deteriorating walls. The adobe walls were built using wooden cross-supports holding construction forms together, now the walls are holed where the wood has eroded out. Pigeons and other birds use those holes as nesting sites.
Djemma el Fna Square, the center of the old town has stalls selling everything plus snake charmers with cobras, monkeys, street food, music and huge crowds. Val and Lucy, who are on the trip, did it all, including the snakes. After a quick turn to buy soccer shirts for presents, Judy and I watched the action from the upper floor of a watering hole. Dinner, the best yet, was at Yacout.
Casablanca.
Play it again, Val.
The tat.
Sheep galore.
Stork on the wall.
Herbery.
Palace room with mosaics, a fireplace and carved cedar, no plain white plaster ceilings here.
Charmed cobras.
Central Square.
There's a shirt shopper in there somewhere.
Those cones are spices and herbs.
Holes in the walls of the kasbah.
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