after a lovely breakfast (these were always included in the riad and usually were nice breads with jam butter and Nutella, plus fresh fruit, plus eggs if desired, and a kind of Moroccan small crepe that was sometimes a little sweet and sometimes not - definitely enough food even for American appetites and probably way too much for the French, where 1 egg is un oeuf :-) ) we were met by our guide Mohamed (first of many) for a walking tour of Marrakech, shared with a Texan couple Gil and Tammy who were also staying at Riad Snan 13
we started at the Koutoubia, the tall square mosque that is the emblem of Marrakech - built between 1184 and 1199, 77 meters/253 feet high - with only 2 exceptions, non-Muslims are not allowed to enter any mosques in Morocco, so we admired it from the outside. Moroccan minarets are much wider than the ones i'd seen in e.g. Turkey and Egypt - the sides of the Koutoubia are 42 feet/12.8 meters long, so they look much more like towers than the tall skinny cylindrical minarets seen in other Muslim countries.
our tour included lunch with Mohamed Gil and Tammy at a place much frequented by foreigners - so the menus were in French and English - there was no alcohol served here, and we found this to be very often true even at places that looked like they had bars (used only for preparing fruit juices and tea) - it was honestly too hot most of the time to think about drinking alcohol, so it was not a problem (until our last day in Morocco, when we decided that we really wanted a bottle of wine for our last evening - as was so often the case, Lahsen came to the rescue by fighting horrendous traffic and no possibility of parking to make sure that our every desire was fulfilled)
it was VERY hot and so we didn't really take in much of the famous Jma el Fna (huge square filled with all kinds of food, juices and performers) on this first time through - even the cobras looked too hot to do much more than tiredly raise their heads to the music of the snake charmers - there were also a few very sad looking monkeys and lots of ladies offering to do henna patterns and/or tell fortunes
we visited the souk -we had been told about the quite open practice of guides getting a commission on any purchases made while he's leading tourists around, so we were not too surprised when we wound up visiting a few stalls (a man carving wood by turning it on a wheel at his feet with an extremely sharp-looking blade much too close to his toes for me to watch without wincing, and a scarf-seller who picked the perfect shade of blue for Kelly (but she passed) who showed us some of the natural dye materials used in his wares) - there was absolutely no pressure to buy (and we didn't, but Gil and Tammy did buy a cool set of kebab skewers from the wood carver)
most of the day we tried not to think about our luggage, but we really thought that our bags would be on the next flight from Chicago, and so we would have some word from the airline when we got back to the riad - sadly it was not to be :-( and in fact we still had days to go before we got them back
we had dinner at Cafe Arabe - there seem to be only a few really popular tourist restaurants in Marrakech and they get booked up quickly, so we weren't able to score seats on the roof terrace and instead sat in a lush courtyard that was absolutely fine - we were happy to sit down and have a good meal and a bottle of wine - after dinner we took a walk through the Jma, which really only comes alive in the evening - by now it was brightly lit and filled with both foreigners and Moroccans enjoying the respite from the heat - it was a bit like a carnival - if a carnival had dancing-boys, story-tellers telling tales in Berber or Arabic, magicians, and peddlers of traditional medicines
thanks in great part to the mini-tour Beatrice had given us the day before, we easily found our way back from the square through small alleys with hundreds of stalls selling slippers, ceramics, scarves, wood carvings, silver jewelry and rugs (we had decided to hold off on buying anything in Marrakech, since we would probably do much better in the hinterland)
when we found out there was no news at the riad, we realized that Turkish Airlines was not exactly knocking themselves out trying to get our bags to us - so we used the kind loan of Beatrice's computer to send out an SOS to all our friends and family to start calling on our behalf - it was quite incredible how much everyone stepped up, and we were really touched by so much effort to help us - we will never know if it mattered or not, but it wasn't for want of trying!
