Smitten with Essaouira

I’m starting this post from the lounge of the same quirky riad in which I spent last week's Saturday and Sunday nights. There are the regular trash statues adorning the fireplace mantle (the one to my left has old bicycle chains for hair, making him look a little like a Rastafarian), statues of the Buddha, an elaborate beaded elephant head on the wall, and a strange lit up man sitting in the corner, looking like he has something on his mind but is far too polite to interrupt. In my mind, he’s an intelligent British fellow who has something quite important to say, but doesn’t get past the “Ahem,” stage of the conversation.

 

We've come back to Essaouira in order to once again experience the famous fish and to bring Mike's cousin back to the airport in Marrakech. I'm delighted that Yaelle enjoys Essaouira so much, as it gave Mike and me the excuse to spend another couple of nights in the gorgeous seaside city.

A few more notes about Essaouira that I failed to mention in my previous post:

This city had such a large Jewish population because it was Morocco's main port city in the 1600s, and Mohammed ben Abdallah wanted the Jews to handle trade with Europe. They comprised about 40% of the population at one point, but their numbers have long since dwindled due to the introduction of Islam.

Not only does Essaouira boast world class kitesurfing and windsurfing, it's also a really artsy/musical town. One can find unique, tasteful galleries in just about every narrow alleyway, and it is home to the Gnaoua Festival of World Music. Visit Essaouira in June, and you'll have to share the small city with about 450,000 spectators and musicians who've come from all around the world to participate in the "Moroccan Woodstock."

Orson Welles shot parts of his "Othello" in Essaouira.

It appears to be the pot capital of Morocco. Mike and I were offered "something special" just about every night we were there. That said, Essaouira is as hippy as an African Islamic country can possibly be.

It attracts the kinds of tourists I really enjoy being around. People who want to stay in fancy hotels and eat in fancy restaurants and pay street performers to hypnotize venomless snakes end up in Marrakech. People who want to surf, experience good music, and see some excellent craftsmanship and art end up in Essaouira.

There are hundreds of cats wandering the streets. They eat the fish scraps, chicken heads, and sheep offal that people toss outside for them. They function in the much needed role of "garbage disposal" for the city. 

I feel like this animal would be very useful on a ship. For blocking leaks and things. 

Mike's cousin is very interested in purchasing her own Moroccan riad, so we went with her to tour the two in which she was most interested and give her our opinions on her potential vacation home. On the rooftop of one riad, we found this:

Even with the large Islamic population, Morocco still possesses many firm believers in black magic. This unassuming chicken foot, with its simple piece of black twine tied around the ankle, will keep your husband coming home to you each night, and not to one of the many prostitutes he sees along the way. Chicken foot not working? Well, just hope that Aisha Qandisha will visit him in his dreams. This genie, a seductive lady with the handsome legs of a goat, has a nasty habit of rendering men impotent. So, there's always that recourse if your chicken feet just don't do the trick.  Be sure to hide all the knives, though. If your husband is able to plunge a knife into the ground before Aisha Qandisha attempts to possess his soul, he'll be right as rain. 

And while I'm in the list-making mood, I'll add another couple of notes on Morocco in general:

If a Moroccan woman would like to marry a non-Moroccan man, the man must first convert to Islam. This is the law, as religion passes down through the father and the Moroccans would like all of their babies to be born good Muslims. 

If a Moroccan man is seen with a Moroccan woman in suspicious (sexual) looking circumstances, they can be arrested. Mike and I were stopped by the police the other night for no apparent reason. Mike told me that it was because they wanted to check to see whether or not I was Moroccan. As foreigners can do whatever they so please (even be alone with a member of the opposite sex in a car, goodness me), we were peachy. 

If you drive 6 km over the speed limit on the highway, you WILL be pulled over. However, if you know how to talk to cops, you can easily slip a hundred dirham into their corruptible hands and be off the hook and on your merry way. I regard this as part of the toll. The toll for the road costs 20 dirhams. The toll for the cops along the way is about 100, depending on the mood of the cop and your skill level when it comes to improvisation. 

There is a tourist price and a local price. The tourist price is about twice the local price, so if you're interested in filling your suitcase full of Moroccan knickknacks and spices, find someone who speaks Arabic and understands the bargaining system to accompany you on your journey into the labyrinthine souks. 

The tap water is full of minerals, so be prepared to either drink bottled water for the duration of your visit, or to end up with an upset stomach and black teeth. 

EAT THE NUTS. Morocco produces amazing almonds, cashews, dates, pistachios, peanuts, and walnuts. 

EAT THE OLIVES. They're very cheap and absolutely delicious. 

NEVER take a taxi close to a touristic location. I tried to take a taxi near the main square yesterday, and he told me it cost 50 dirham. I waved him off immediately. A couple hundred meters down the street, I waved down another taxi. This one quoted me 20 dirham. ALWAYS set the price before you get in the car. 

Try the Mechoui. More on that later. 

A Weekend by the Sea -- Essaouira

Although Essaouira is a name no average Coloradan will ever be able to pronounce with confidence and ease, it is a town that every decent Coloradan should visit at least once in his/her life. Mike had taken me to see the City Wherein I Shall Eat Fish for a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, but as we'd only been able to enjoy the unique seaside town for a few hours, he decided that it would be a good idea to spend an entire weekend soaking up the scenery. Mike's journalist cousin from Paris, a bubbly redhead named Yael, adores Essaouira perhaps as much as I do (and can certainly pronounce it better), and had scheduled a week of fish eating, surfing, and horseback-riding to recoup from her chaotic Parisian life.We met Yael at the airport in an air-conditioned car that her father had arranged for us to use during our weekend, and set off for the mutually beloved city. 

This trip to Essaouira was much greener, felt much faster, and left me with much less pain in my lower back and derriere. It wasn't quite as exciting, to be sure, but I enjoyed being able to sleep in the back of the car enough to let the low-excitement factor slide. 

We arrived around 18:00, parked the car, and found a Moroccan with a cart to guide us to our riad and help carry the luggage. We followed behind through narrow streets and open squares, al lined with wood carvings, brightly colored scarves, spice vendors, beautiful leatherwork, endless tea shops, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and shapeless Moroccan clothing billowing in the breeze. The streets were dirty, but the air was clean. The shopkeepers called out an occasional, "Madame?" but the tone was much friendlier and no one pushed me to buy anything I didn't want. A child on a bicycle said, "Excuse me" as he passed, and I nearly kissed him. 

Our riad was lovely. Mike booked a suite that was bright, quirky, warm, and so very comfortable. It fulfilled so many of my childhood fantasies, with the draperies and the lamps and the strange wooden statues propped up in every corner. 

The main bed where Mike slept. He was quite the gentleman and offered the best bed to me, but I preferred to take the bed in the loft. I've always been a sucker for bunk beds and tents and lofts and mobile homes and anything that makes me feel like I'm on an adventure. 

These statues are made entirely out of trash and are found all over Essaouira

After we'd settled into our quirky weekend riad, we moseyed out into the city to meet Yael for drinks and dinner. The city is even more enchanting by night. 

Yael at the bar/restaurant. The band played only bad American lounge music and made me feel a little homesick. 

After drinks, we wandered through the winding streets to an Italian restaurant Yael makes a point of visiting when she frequently vacations in Essaouira. It reminded me a little bit of Agritourismo Ca'Lattis, with the two women bustling busily in the kitchen, preparing all the food on the spot (I could watch them through the windows), and the single waiter rushing between tables of the packed restaurant, taking orders and delivering food as fast as he could. 

I have a feeling that the restaurant is not often very busy. Certainly not as busy as it was on Saturday night, at least. It took us nearly two hours to get our food, and when it finally came, we devoured it so quickly in our hunger induced delirium that we hardly tasted the meal. Serves us right for ordering meat in the City Wherein I Shall Eat Fish. 

Walking back to our riad with very unhappy tummies.  

I woke up bright and early on Sunday morning and worked on designing some yoga sequences. Mike has invested heavily in my career as a yoga teacher, and has bought me three notebooks to help me organize my sequences, notes, and quotes. I'm going to design a website when I get back to the states, purchase insurance through yogajournal.com, and start up my own company called Adara Yoga. Adara is sanskrit for "with adoration" or "with great respect". I enjoy that it sounds a bit like "dare".  Adara Yoga or Atara Yoga. Atara doesn't sound quite as nice, but I like the meaning a bit better -- "crossing over the river".  Thoughts? 

Anyway, morning yoga with Mike went swimmingly, and it's so rewarding for me to see the progress he's making. It's nice to know that he's an absolute beginner, so everything he does right is because I told him to do it right, and everything he does incorrectly is because I gave him poor direction. 

After a small omelet at the riad (they're not used to catering to people who don't eat bread), we took a walk about town. We stopped in a bookstore/knickknack shop and browsed around for a few minutes. Turns out that the shop was started by a Jewish man who knew Mike's stepfather (who grew up in Essaouria). Of all the cities that used to be very Jewish in Morocco, Mike tells me that Essaouira was one of the most Jewish. I bought a book buy Paul Bowles, a famous American author who found great inspiration in the northerly town of Tangiers, and I'm very excited to read it. 

We ordered a starter of Salade Nicoise, thinking that we'd still be hungry enough to eat proper fish later. The salad was so enormous that it made even my American belly shudder at the thought of stuffing all that lettuce inside, so once again, we didn't properly eat fish. Canned tuna and marinated anchovies don't really count as fish when you've got the ocean right behind you. 

Facts of the day: A camel can drink 100 liters of water in ten minutes. When a male camel wants to get a lady's attention, he puffs up his soft palate and lets it hang out his mouth. He also pees on himself.  

After eating a good 3/4s of my behemoth plate of tuna and salade verte, we went back to the riad to take a short nap before meeting Yael for horseback-riding on the beach.

Sometimes I don't realize how incredible my life is until I write it down. Goodness.

These are Berber Arabian horses. Not the most comfortable to ride, but bullet-proof. We had several dogs charge us, barking and growling as if they wanted to rip the horses' bellies out, but the Moroccan horses glared at them quietly and plodded on. 

This was Mike's first time on a horse. I don't think he got the balance quite right...

After our two hour ride through the desert brush and down the beach, I led Yael through a hip-opening yoga sequence (never do this in jeans), and scheduled to meet up with Yael and her 9 friends from France for dinner at a Moroccan restaurant.

Ever had a monkfish tagine with pear? No? Well, you should make that happen as soon as possible.

Essaouira in the morning.

After a cardio yoga session with Mike, we packed up our things, found a Moroccan with a cart, and followed him back to the car. As the tiny omelet was not quite enough for either of us, we stopped at a butcher's on the way back to Marrakech, bought some kefta, and had the fellow at the restaurant next-door grill it up for us. There is nothing quite so sublime as kefta dipped in cumin and salt with a mint tea. Whilst having one of the many feral cats clawing and yowling at your shins, begging for a morsel from your feast.

Jewish Passover in Morocco -- Marrakech

My host often jokes that I'm going to leave Morocco with the incorrect impression that the country is entirely Jewish. Although I certainly see a good deal of the Islamic crowd when I walk to the Acima, to the butcher's, or take a quick, harried jaunt through the souk, the majority of people I meet through Mike are Jewish. And if they're not Jewish, they tend to look uncannily Jewish. As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, Morocco was heavily populated by this particular race until 1948, but now there are around 3000 remaining in the entire country. I believe I've met about thirty of them, so I now know 1/100th of the Jews in Morocco.

Things I never thought I'd be able to say.

Mike knows that I'm very interested in studying different religions and experiencing good food, and as Passover is an ideal time to experience a bit of Jewish religion whilst eating good food, he arranged for us to enjoy Friday night Passover and Saturday afternoon lunch with Gad's family in Marrakech. Mike assured me that Gad's family wasn't nearly as strict in regards to Passover as many of the remaining Moroccan Jews, so the prayers would probably take about forty minutes (as opposed to a couple of hours), and that they'd be very happy to share their feast with me after we'd performed the appropriate pre-feast procedures. As I grew up in a fairly religious Christian family, I'd already been able to experience a couple church Passover ceremonies during my sunday-school years, but I very much wanted the opportunity to compare and contrast.

What I remember from my sunday-school years:

I remember sitting in a cold, grey room with people a fair few years older than me. I remember the plastic tables, the plastic chairs, the paper plates, and the tacky tablecloth doing its best to disguise the cheap table and only exacerbating the condition. I remember practicing my tap dancing steps and twirling my waist-length braids in extreme impatience as the master of ceremonies droned on and on about the Bible stories my eight-year-old self already knew by heart. I remember everyone was very, very quiet. No laughing, no shenaniganizing, no slouching. I remember that after what seemed like hours of hapless waiting, I was awarded some horseradish and some salt -- to commemorate bitterness, or something of that nature. After the horseradish, someone passed me a tiny morsel of tasteless cracker -- that I might remember how quickly the Israelites fled their rather unsavory working conditions. I remember the best thing about the whole tiresome experience being the grape juice. After the prayers, I remember the food being bland and not nearly enough.

What I experienced Friday night:

Gad's mother, father, two sisters, random friend, Mike, and myself shared Passover of 2012 in Marrakech, Morocco. Before easing ourselves into the ornate wooden chairs surrounding the elaborately laid-out table, we sat in the parlor and took our aperitifs (it's a Jewish/French/Moroccan Passover). We passed around toasted nuts, champagne, olives, and pickled vegetables that were so salty I failed to distinguish the difference between the turnip and the artichoke.

After chatting amiably with Gad's sister over my pickled green beans (who studied in New York so speaks fluent English), I joined the rest of the family as they headed into the dining room to perform their traditional Seder Ceremony.

It was so much nicer than I remember. My goodness. Gad's family replaced the horseradish with celery, the grape juice with wine, and as I now know that I'm celiac, I was excused from ingesting the flavorless crackers (which were very much the same as I remember). The family laughed and joked the entire time, occasionally reaching such a crescendo that I could no longer hear Gad's father reading his Hebrew text through the cheerful French babbling.

The wine. We had to drink twice before the meal began. The instructions and reasons for drinking were in Hebrew, so I'm not sure as to why I drunk, but I did drink. Twice. If you attend a Passover and you only drink once, assume that you are being cheated out of your extra glass of wine/grape juice. 

Part of the ceremony involved passing a pot of flowers over all our heads whilst saying a prayer. This is Gad's mother (you'll notice she's sitting at the head of the table). I think she's delightful. 

Celery instead of horseradish... I don't think we even ate the rest. A little bit of date jam, but that's it. 

Mike can be very Jewish indeed. 

The ubiquitous bland, flavorless crackers. Sometimes I think it might have been better for the Israelites to have waited in Egypt for the bread to rise, even if it meant another 100 years or so of slavery. Then their descendants wouldn't be cursed to consume this sandpaper every April. 

Here's a bit of Gad's father reading in Hebrew:

After we'd finished the feast of veal, apricots, walnuts, dates, and vegetables, Mike and I bid everyone a very contented "a bientot," promising we'd see them for lunch the following day. 

Before coming to Morocco, I assumed that most Jewish food would be the fairly similar regardless of the country in which the Jew resided. The Bible tells you what you can and cannot eat, so I figured kosher would be kosher and the differences between Moroccan Jew and European Jew wouldn't be all that vast. 

I was wrong. So very, very wrong. These are not gefilta fish eating Jews. These Jews eat a Saturday lunch of vegetables and meat that have been slow-cooking for twenty-four hours. The meat cooks on top of the vegetables in a large pot, so the drippings from the beef marinate the vegetables all night long. The meat falls apart in your mouth, and I don't remember the last time I've had more flavorful vegetables. 

In conclusion, if you visit Morocco before all the Jews pack up and leave for France, do your absolute best to track down one of the remaining 3000 and ask if you can join them for Passover. It's a really marvelous occasion in Morocco. 

In the Atlas Mountains

After practicing yoga and eating our standard breakfast of eggs and spicy sausages, Mike and I packed our bags and loaded into a rented car for our weekend adventure in the Atlas Mountains. 

Almond trees on the way

One of Mike's Jewish friends in Marrakech knows a guy who owns a beautiful hotel/resort in the mountains, so he booked a room for us. I anticipated that the hotel would be nice, but I didn't anticipate something quite as stunning as this...

We dropped off our few belongings and headed out for a very basic lunch in a nearby village. We bought our meat from a butcher, he ground it up for us, and then we carried our sack of beef to a grill across the street. The Moroccans took our minced meat, added some onions and spices, and presented us with mouthwatering meatballs, cumin, and salt a few minutes later.

I eat really well with Mike. My goodness.

So very satisfied

There are a lot of stray cats and dogs in Morocco. People are generally afraid of the dogs and annoyed with the cats. 

After lunch, we hopped back into Mike's car and drove to yet another mountain village. This village was quite touristic, as it was at the base of several hiking trails leading deep into the Atlas Mountains. It actually reminded me a little bit of Telluride, with all the stores selling hiking boots, ice-picks, and other climbing paraphernalia. I caught sight of some American tourists who were dressed like they bought all their clothes at REI, and I felt very much at home.

I enjoyed the atmosphere of the small mountain villages much more than the small desert villages through which we passed on the way to Essaouira. The people seemed a bit friendlier and things were generally much cleaner. Mountain country is Berber country, so the inhabitants aren't quite as religious as they are in the villages surrounding places like Marrakech and Casablanca. Mike says that television is spreading religion to the mountains though, so as more and more people get electricity, more and more people get themselves some Allah.

On the way into town, a couple of guides waved us down and asked if we wanted them to take us to the waterfalls on their mules. This sounded grand to me, so Mike and I parked the car, browsed around a few local shops, and then met the guides and their complacent looking mules for a short trek up the mountain.

Mike's mule and guide

We had to do our own trekking near the end. The guide tried to hold my hand nearly the whole way. It was quite charming.

This fellow led my mule up the mountain. He knew that I didn't speak Berber, Arabic, or French, so he'd look back at me every two minutes, flash a broken toothed smile, and ask, "Ça va?" "Ca va," I'd happily respond. "Bien?" he'd continue. "Oui, bien," I'd confirm. Every two minutes. He was very concerned with my well-being, that one. 

Our guides. They offered to take us on a two-day excursion up the Atlas Mountains. I think this would be great fun.  

I am creating a very eclectic yoga portfolio. I don't recommend trying this pose in jeans, however. 

As the weather had turned ridiculously wet, we decided to call it a day and return to our hotel. Not very adventurous, but I suppose that running around in the mountains after dark in barefoot running shoes isn't exactly my cup of tea.

As the weather was even more inclement the next day, we decided to drive around for a few hours, enjoy some new scenery, and then cut our mountain trip one day short and head back to Marrakech that afternoon. Not a lot to do in the pouring rain, unfortunately.

A mountain village. All the houses in Morocco used to be constructed out of this mud, but cement is now used in most of the cities. I love how the houses  meld into the mountains.

There's usually a gorgeous view at this ski resort, but the mist was so thick that we could hardly see 20 meters in front of us. There was something really magical about driving up that treacherous road in such god-awful weather, though. 

More rain than Morocco has seen in eight months.