Consider this a blog post

After four days and nights immersed in a medina in Marrakesh, I’ve concluded that the people who inhabit it are extraordinarily kind and patient, especially to an old woman with a cane. Young men have been known to bring their motorcycles to a screeching halt in front of me or carry over a stool for me to sit on when taking a break from our wandering. Always polite and with a kind smile. Their mothers would be proud.

It’s interesting how we human beings organize ourselves into a community, even when we’re very poor and crowded together. Or, I guess, especially then. Each morning, the men open up their stalls, small spaces full of all manner of things. The cobblestone alley has been cleaned up of any garbage, and they have sprinkled water on the stones to tamp down the dust. They spend the next twelve hours or so hawking their wares and talking with their neighbours, or watching a soccer match on their cellphones. Our experience has been that they are rarely aggressive. When they see we’re not buying, they generally laugh and ask where we’re from. When we say Canada, they invariably say they love Canada, and  I believe them. We should cherish our reputation and work on making it so much better, I think.

Howard and I ask ourselves how they can possibly feed their families on what they earn in a day. One stall may be all pots and another hundreds of wooden spoons. How many spoons do you have to sell in a day to bring home dinner?

The workshops are the most interesting. Men are creating goods from leather, wood or cloth from tools and sewing machines that are very rudimentary. Every so often, there is a little mosque between the stalls. There are always shoes at the entrance and praying going on. Five times a day the medina rings out with the call to prayer. There’s no drinking of alcohol anywhere, and even arguments seem pretty rare.

I don’t want to romanticize poverty. The narrow winding streets are crowded with people, tourists and residents, children on their bikes weaving around the baby strollers, women in burkas buying produce, someone in a wheelchair, a woman talking nonsense to herself, people sitting on the ground asking for coins. Plunging through these crowds is an endless stream of roaring motorbikes, driving what feels like way too fast, leaving trails of exhaust fumes behind. We’re grateful to know that no one is driving drunk. Then there are the donkey carts. They break my heart because the donkeys are working so hard, and, according to Rashid, our hotel manager, they are treated notoriously badly. 

Apparently the government is trying to do something about that. Then, there are the cats, hundreds of them. They dash between motorcycles and eat what they find on the street, definitely feral, but they look very clean and have shiny, soft-looking coats. They curl up to sleep against a building or under a stall and seem oblivious to the chaos around them.

The air in the medina is not good. It’s an oppressive mixture of frying meat, spices, diesel exhaust and people’s bodies. In the summer, when it is 48 degrees and there is no breeze, I can’t imagine how people cope. It has to shorten one’s lifespan.

Finally, I’ll describe our riad, or hotel. It’s one of many in the medina, owned by an eccentric woman from Scotland who bought it as a ruin from a family and hired a contractor, Rashid, to rebuild it. He then stayed on to manage it. It has six rooms and a peaceful rooftop garden with fresh air and birds and bumble bees and cats. Rashid and the cook and the cleaner are very friendly and helpful. We’re going to miss them.

You find riad Linda by going down one of the innumerable laneways, with various turns and the collapsed building from the earthquake two years ago as a signpost. At night it’s quite dark and empty save for the cats and the occasional person heading home. In the USA, this scenario would be terrifying, but here it is peaceful and quiet and a welcome break from the noisy streets we’ve left behind.

So that’s a brief description of the Marrakesh medina from an outsider’s perspective. Howard has felt some angst over the museum that was inexplicably closed or the walk that was longer and more arduous than he expected, but I hope he appreciates the priceless experience that he created for us over the first four days of our visit to Morocco, the totality of which was so much more meaningful than any one tourist site.