We woke up naturally. We had asked them to knock at 7am but they never did. We didn't have breakfast because we didn't have time, but we bought a croissant and a piece of "galette" (quite dry cake), which turned out to not be that great.
It was a long train journey, and the people on the carriage were not chatty this time. At Rabat (we think), four Moroccan medical students from France came on and never stopped chatting until Marrakech, mostly about medicine. We were both quite tired, but we still talked and played scrabble a bit. The landscape was still nice, although more like France or England. Sometimes though, when we thought it was very boring, it suddenly turned into mountainous desert. The train was annoyingly slow at times, and the track was again very bendy. Approaching Marrakech, an unexpected sight - two camels in a field near a farm. We thought we wouldn't see any; what we'd mostly seen until then were donkeys. When everyone was getting ready to get off, we thought we were arriving, although nothing around us in the scenery was announcing Marrakech.
The station wasn't very big, but it had interesting tile work as usual, and big photographs of the King and his princes. Music was playing. Outside the station there were lots of taxis, beige this time, most of them were Peugeot 205s. The drivers were asking us where we were going, as always, and pulled faces when we told them we wanted to walk. We had a map and we knew where we were going, the Medina area.
Marrakech was very different from the towns we had seen thus far, the avenues were very wide in the French part, lined with trees, and the walls were pink as opposed to white or yellow. It was really hot, and there were an awful lot of tourists, sometimes in horse-drawn carriages. There were also typically western restaurants and hotels (Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Ibis) It could have put us off, it did at first, but then that was another aspect of Morocco that we had to see, and as long as you know that this is not real Moroccan life, it's OK.
We had quite a long walk and had to look at the map a couple of times, and soon we saw the walls of the Medina. Despite being in Morocco three days, it was the first time that we'd been to a specific Medina, however both Nador and Oujda were primarily native cities anyway. It didn't look that different to the Ville Nouvelle anyway; that was until we turned a corner and onto a road leading to the Djenna El Fna, the main square in the Medina.
Even on the short road leading to it, there were hundreds of people wandering about. It was like Place de la Concorde in Paris, with lots of cars (and bikes, and mopeds, and people don't wear helmets) and no road markings at all, and a pedestrian area. We thought they could improve it, but they probably don't want to otherwise it would lose its atmosphere. There was an incredible density of people there, and because we wanted to first go to the hotel we didn't see much of it. There was a snake-charmer and Laure naively thought she could take a picture of him. But someone quickly covered the cobra and another man came to ask for money, 10dh.
We checked into the hotel after passing a restaurant that seemed cheap enough. Double rooms had gone up 20dh since when Laure called. Again we had two single beds. The hotel was very interesting; bedroom doors opened onto a balcony around the patio. The floors and walls outside were covered in lots of broken tiles in different colours and shapes. That gave a very nice effect, plus it was really smooth to walk on. At the top, above the roofs, there were terraces, from which we had a view of the town. We sat a little bit, and checked the toilet which were "a la Turk"; that is a hole in the ground with a tap and bucket for want of a flush.
We went outside (after the receptionist took ages to fill in his forms), and ate harira, spicy Moroccan salad, and tajines of chicken and lemon at the restaurant we had seen earlier. The harira was fuller flavour but less spicy than the Oujda one. Football was on TV, and Laure was glad the food was hot because she was a bit cold. While Laure ordered, Ian went to post our postcards (big post office on the square). We watched the people go by on the street, and tried to guess the nationality of the tourists.
After eating we went onto the square; there were about 60 or 70 stalls arranged in a snail shape, with no.1 in the centre. People could sit and eat at them; brochettes, sheeps-heads, salads, fried fish, orange juice. The stallholders would hail you and almost command you to come and eat or drink. Because it was windy, the smoke was blown away but occasionally we choked a bit, but the smells were really nice.
Then we tried to find postcards and possibly a couple of gifts, so we looked in the shops around the square first. A man tried to sell Laure a knife, then we went deeper into the souk where you have less tourists. The streets were very narrow and winding, yet sometimes we had to avoid mopeds with two people on them which screamed around the corners. We had no idea where we were going, but figured that we'd hit a main road at some point. In Marrakech, Laure felt the looks from men a lot less disturbing, probably because they saw her as a tourist with money before seeing her as a woman.
Moroccan craft was very nice; there were polished wood objects, scarves, metal boxes and mirrors and nicely decorated teapots. We didn't have that much money to spend, generally we preferred to feast our bellies and eyes rather than buy things. Of course a lot of people hailed us into their shop. Laure bought four nectarines from a man who seemed to have passed the age of retirement several lives ago - only 5dh in total for very good fruit. We found postcards for 2dh each, and stamps as well as a map of the country for Ian.
Somehow we got back to the square and we needed to draw out some money. We saw a cashpoint and we were going to use it, but a kid with a tray of doughnuts, shoeless, told us it didn't work, and took us to another that did, and indeed there was a very long queue going to it. While Laure queued, Ian went back to the hotel to get a drink. Hundreds of mopeds were parked by the cashpoint. Ian returned to the hotel down a road with lots of mopeds parked in rows outside shops and cafes, like bicycle racks. He stayed in the room about 15 minutes.
After that it was pretty dark; we went back to the square to eat some food, and ended up with small beef sausages, 10dh for a plateful, with rice for Ian and chips for Laure, and hot sauce to dip in. It was very filling and the atmosphere was quite funny; the stall tenants were hailing people, one of them in lots of different languages, including Japanese. At some point he tried to guess some tourist's nationality (and gave a whole list of countries, to which the tourist smiled amusingly and kept shaking his head), who indeed didn't look Portugese which he was. When we arrived, the benches around the stall were empty, but by the time we left, they were full. Laure got some orange juice and then we tried to find a cybercafe to try to get the info from Renfe again. We were marginally more successful than last time, but it did take 45 minutes and 15dh. We went back to the hotel, wrote postcards, and went to sleep.