My winter trip to Morocco

I never really understood why Dutch people (who are not limited to school holidays) always travel in summer. In summer the weather is good in the Netherlands, so why would you need to go to some other place then? For me it makes much more sense to go on holiday when the weather in my own country is bad. Then I can go on holiday to a place where the weather is good and by doing this I maximize the amount of days with good weather in my year. This is also the reason, besides being eager to visit yet another new country, why I booked a holiday to Morocco in February.

Getting acquainted with Moroccan culture in Marrakech

My plan was to visit the most important cities in the country and to experience what it's like to live in a North-African country. My trip started in Marrakech, where I was supposed to meet my Couchsurfing-host Oussama at the airport. He was a lot later than we initially agreed and I wasn't able to reach him over the phone so in the end I left on my own to the city center and stayed in a hostel. It turns out that he did send an e-mail that he would be late, but since there is no wifi at the airport of Marrakech I only read that e-mail when I was already at the hostel. Luckily I met some very nice people there so I still had a good time in Marrakech. It was especially interesting to be at the main square (Djemaa El-Fna) at night, when there are so many things happening at the square. There are snake-charmers, circus acts, musicians, people with monkeys and a lot of food stalls. It was a really interesting - but very touristic - experience.

The only bad thing about Marrakech (and all other touristic places in Morocco) is that you are constantly harassed by people who just see tourists as wallets with arms and legs. Since I don't want the story about my trip too long, I have written a seperate post about Moroccan culture. In this second post(see below if you are on the homepage of my blog) you can read more about how I was harassed during my trip by these annoying men.

Follow the backpacker!

After visiting Marrakech for one day it was time to move on. I skipped the hectic city of Casablanca because there is not much to see over there and stopped at Rabat: the capital and economical heart of Morocco. As usual I didn't book any hotel in advance and since I also had no clear preference for a hotel I played a little game called "follow the backpacker". When getting off the train in Rabat I saw a tiny girl with a big backpack walking in front of me. I decided quickly that she would probably be better informed about the ho(s)tels in Rabat than I was, so I followed her to see where she was going. After stalking her for 5 minutes I felt like a creep and also I was curious about her, so I walked up to her and started talking to her. In a huge French accent she told me she had been traveling together with her friend for one month already, but he left this morning and now she was on her way to a hotel that was mentioned in her Lonely Planet-guide. We decided to go find the hotel together and even shared a room that night. Together we visited the city for one day, but after that I had to leave her in Rabat and move to the next city because otherwise I would not get to see everything I wanted to see. I now understand why people told me one week is not enough to see Morocco.

Chefchaouen

My next destination was Chefchaouen: a beautiful city in the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco. There was only one bus per day from Rabat to Chefchaouen and it left at an inconvenient time (3 in the afternoon), so I decided to change my schedule a bit and go to Meknes in the morning. I read somewhere that Meknes is called the Versailles of Morocco because there are many beautiful gardens, but overall it's a boring city if you ask me. After walking around for 2 hours I went to the bus station to catch a bus to Chefchaouen. Unfortunately the last bus of the day had already left at noon, so I had to take a grand taxi to Ouazzane and another grand taxi from there to Chefchaouen. A grand taxi is an old Mercedes-Benz 240D which is shared by 6 passengers traveling to the same destination. You wonder how you can fit 6 passengers and 1 driver into one car? The answer is very simple: remove the cabinet between the driver seat and the passenger seat to make room for two passengers in front of the car and squeeze four people on the two back seats of the car. Comfortable traveling is not the highest priority here.

In Chefchaouen there are two things that are impossible: not to get lost while walking around in the old center for the first time and not to get offered some marijuana by secretive men on the streets. The city is located in the area where a lot of marijuana is grown and you can see quite a few stoners in the city. It's not an unsafe place though and I absolutely loved this place. To get an idea of what the city looks like by night and by day, here are two pictures:

In fact, I loved Chefchaouen so much that I wanted to buy a painting from there in one of the many shops. I'm not at all into arts, but it just seemed like a great way to bring a bit of the atmosphere of Chefchaouen home with me. You can read my experience of buying this painting in my other post about Moroccan culture.

My last day in Morocco

On my last day in Morocco I decided to enjoy some typically Moroccan delights. The day started with a Moroccan breakfast with some delicious tea at my hostel in Fez. After breakfast, I went to a hammam (a Moroccan bath house) to wash myself and to get a massage. In my mind I always picture a massage as something that should be done by an young attractive woman (she may be a bit older as well, as long as she makes up for that with massaging experience) with soft but firm hands. This is not what a massage is like in Morocco though. When entering the hammam I was approached by a chubby, 50 years-old bald man with a moustache. He offered me a massage and full body scrub. With a confused look in my eyes I quickly scanned the room for other people who could give me a massage. There were no attractive women around (in fact: there were no women at all), so it was either getting a massage from this man or getting no massage at all. I did want the full hammam-experience, so with hesitation I agreed to let this man give me a massage.

The massage started with some experiences that could be described as a bit gay-erotic. We were both sitting on the floor, the man behind me with his legs pushed against my legs. The chubby was pulling my arms and body in every possible direction to warm up my muscles and while doing this he pushed his fat belly to my back from time to time. I felt a bit uncomfortable now, but up next was another stretching exercise where I was told to bend over and hold the toes of this my massage-man while he stretched me some more. I felt even more uncomfortable, but I had promised myself to have a real Moroccan experience today and did everything that the man wanted from me. Despite the uncomfortable feelings, the massage was very good. Then the body scrub started. It was a strange experience for me: I never did something like this before. After 10 minutes of scrubbing the massage was over and I was given some time to wash myself with the ultra-warm water of the hammam and to relax in the steamy area. I must have sat there, still on the floor, without any movements for like 5 minutes in some sort of trance. After my visit to the hammam I was feeling extremely peaceful and relaxed.
There was still one thing I needed to do before going home. My hair was a bit long and I hadn’t shaved for a week, so it was clear I needed to go to a barber as well. Unfortunately the barber didn’t speak any English or French, so I really did not have any control over the situation and was forced to watch the barber do his business to me. To my surprise he didn’t shave off my “beard”, but rather made it look more stylish. I wasn’t quite sure what to think about my new look, but decided to “wear” this stylish beard at least for the rest of the day. Unfortunately for you guys I forgot to take good before- and after pictures.
With my new haircut I went into the medina one last time to have a warm lunch. Unlike on most other days, the food was not that good, but that didn’t really bother me any more: I had enough good food in the past week to know that Moroccan food is delicious.

After lunch it was time to go home, so I went to the bus station to catch the bus to the airport. I had to wait for more than 1 hour for the bus to come, not knowing if and when it would come, because there is no fixed bus schedule for local buses in Morocco. But I’m not complaining. This only added to the experience of my Moroccan day.

My trip to Morocco part 2: the Moroccan culture for tourists

In Marrakech, just like in all other touristic places in Morocco, there are many people on the street who see tourists as walking bags of money. These guys can "accidentally" meet you at the bus station, chat with you for a while, offer to take you to your hostel (or say the hostel is bad/closed/far away and recommend a ho(s)tel they have connections with - or that pays them a higher fee for bringing in tourists) and then require you to pay a "tip" afterwards. I was aware of these practices - unlike two Brazilians I met at the hostel, who actually paid 10 euros to the guy who brought them there - so I told all of the men who approached me that I didn't want their help and tried to walk away. These men were very persistent though: even when they were walking in front of me and I deliberately took a wrong turn to try to shake them off they would still come after me. These men were not aggressive (I only felt unsafe once during my entire travel), but rather EXTREMELY annoying.
In the end I managed to shake off both of the men who tried to be my guide, but at the corner of the street of my hostel I met another man who walked the last few meters with me. Of course I gave him no money for doing this, but the bed in my hostel suddenly cost 1 euro more than other people in the same room had to pay for their bed: probably the commission that this guy earned on me.

Another thing that was new to me was the fact that I had to speak French more often than I would have liked to. My desperate attempts to change the conversation with a random stranger on the street to English failed miserably.
Me: "I'm going to meet a friend."
Random man on the street I was talking to: "Yesss. French."
Despite not having spoken French for at least 5 years I managed to make myself clear at all times. I'm sure that "Vous pouvez prener une photo de moi?" (at the last second I kept myself from just saying "picture" with a French accent) is not 100% correct, but the other person got what I meant.

Let's talk business

As mentioned in my other post, I bought a painting in Chefchaouen. Here is the full story.
It was my first morning in Chefchaouen and I was planning to first go sightseeing and buy souvenirs in the afternoon. When I saw a small shop with some beautiful paintings I thought it wouldn't hurt me to look around and get informed about prices and went inside.
One of the artists, a man with a grey beard in a white garment who told me he was from a small village in the Sahara, proudly showed me his paintings of camels and the desert, but of course I was more interested in the paintings of Chefchaouen. He showed me some more paintings and I complimented them in my "thanks, but no thanks" style until he showed me a painting that I absolutely loved. He told me the price was 30 euros and I told him it was too much for me. I wasn't planning to make a counter-offer but the man told me there are no fixed prices in Morocco and that I couldn't offend him with my offer, so I offered him 5 euros. He said it was not enough, put the painting down and showed me some micro-paintings with the price of 8 euros (5 euros after 10 seconds of saying I was not interested) but they were too small for me so I started leaving the store. The man walked back to the painting I liked so much and noticed my hesitation while walking away. He then surprised me by asking me for my final offer out of nowhere. I was too surprised to answer strategically and gave an honest answer: 10 euros. Of course he wanted to make this 15 euros quickly and almost started begging for "a liiiiittle more", but when I told him that it really was my final offer and started to leave the store again the man said that my price was ok and so I had to buy this painting.
I'm happy that I got this painting and I do think I got it for a reasonable price, but I wasn't too happy that I had to carry it with me all day while climbing up and down the mountains around Chefchaouen.

Another strategy that can be used while talking about prices in shops is the guilt trip. I wanted to buy a mirror for my sister and walked into a store to look at one. A man (not even the owner) walked up to me, introduced himself as Mustafa and asked me how much I wanted to pay for this mirror. He refused to make an offer first, so I told him I wanted to pay 4 euros. He asked 20 euros. The mirror wasn't too special in my opinion, so I wanted to walk out the store, but the man blocked the entrance (in a non-offending way: again, people are not unfriendly, just very much focused on earning money) and asked me to pay a bit more. I offered 5, then 6, but wasn't going to spend more than this because there were many other shops as well which offered reasonable alternatives. Mustafa gave me a hard time and the store-owner came to support him and just when I was thinking we wouldn't reach an agreement the owner started packing the mirror. I wasn't sure what price we agreed and the owner said "let's make it 7 euros". I felt a bit angry because I never agreed on this price and then Mustafa said with a nasty and disrespectful tone "you're really going to make a problem out of 1 euro?". This is a very mean strategy. Of course 1 euro is like nothing to me now that I have a full-time job and I can easily pay 1 euro more. So in the end I did pay those 7 euros, but I left the store with a bad feeling, because I felt I paid too much for a product that I might not have even wanted to buy.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this and can learn from my experiences in Morocco to be better prepared when you go traveling to a similar country yourself. Soon I want to write a blog with travel advice by the way. So if you're interested in that, stay tuned! ;)

Results of ISC#5

The voting deadline was yesterday and so the voting section has been closed. The points given by myself and the other 9 wonderful people who voted in the contest have been added up and a winner has come out. Do you want to know who won? Check out the result by clicking on this link.

Thanks to everybody who voted! In the coming weeks I will be sharing some more music from other countries that just didn't make it to this contest. 

First I will go on yet another trip though. This time I'm going to visit Morocco for a week. I'm already excited to go Couchsurfing again (can't believe that it has been 2 years since my last CS-experience!) and am very eager to try some of the delicious Moroccan food that is for sale at the main square of Marrakech. Also I'm going to spend Valentine's Day at a very romantic place this year...

Stay tuned and you will be among the first to read my travel stories.