...halved by light and dark...

Name:
Location: Madrid, Spain

I love eating Golden Delicious apples with peanut butter. I shop too much, drive an old car, and save my Starbucks money for traveling. Disillusioned women writers are my inspiration, especially Sylvia Plath and Sara Teasdale. I adore used book stores and fleamarkets.

6.30.2008

A Glimpse of La Medina


On the second train to Marrakech, broiling in the hallway


My monkey wanted my earring


The royal tombs


Deep inside the market, Saturday night

6.24.2008

Willie Wonka Moments

The tazi brings us into Medina, the old city that comprises the heart of Marrakech, but stopped when the road becomes too narrow for the old tan Mercedes. Shouldering our bags, we set out through the winding nameless alleys, corner piled on dust-orange corner the way the market vendors pile their leather bags and gaudy brass earrings and shoes of every color. It is nearly 9.00 and the sun has just set. Finally, we submit to be led by a child who has been following us, offering to lead us wherever we need to go. This is neither the first nor the last of what Sara calls Willa Wonka moments - from the movie, when Willie Wonka trips going up the stairs and says "Ta-dah!" as if he meant to do that. We are three girls in Morocco for the weekend, and we have many Willie Wonka moments.

La Medina is quite small, and we understand most of it within one day. At least, we understand the more famous parts, the streets surrounding the ancient palace and royal tombs and olive gardens, although the streets of the Jewish quarter remain a mystery. We had a guide in the Jewish quarter, meaning a man who led us to a particular spice shop where we looked at the barrels of cinnamon and anise and tumeric and cadamon, white powdered clay and blocks of ambergris, saffron in a large crumbling red pile. The owner poured us hot weak mint tea, gave us mini facials with the clay, and showed us pictures of his year-old son. We bought clay and ambergris, and the sweet scent of the amber stayed on our arms all through the long afternoon.

All the signs at the palace and tombs are bilingual French and Arabic, and we did not remember to bring the guidebook, so we wander through guessing ages and histories and significance. Brynn takes pictures of cats and I take pictures of flowers, just as we had in Portugal.

During the day, the main plaza is surprisingly empty and small, but in the evening the spaces cover themselves with dried fruit carts and henna-painting women and long skinny steel tables and spice carts and children begging and white-aproned waiters calling for you to come to their restaurants. Our favorites are the orange carts, where for a mere 3 dirham (30 Euro pennies), we can drink a glass of thick freshly-squeezed juice. Three more dirhams buy us a bowl of thick soup which we eat with wooden spoons across a metal table from a changing array of Moroccan families and Korean tourists.

Saturday evening, Brynn and I need to change more Euro so we stopped in a big hotel to ask where we can go. The older men we ask says he can help us, and from his pocket he pulls 500 dirham for Brynn. For my 400 dirham, he unlocks the ice cream chest just inside the door and pays me in frozen bills and coins. Ta dah!

The market spreads out on all sides of the plaza, on all levels and corners. Through a shoe-filled walkway, down three steps or up twelve, turn right or go straight, walk past the beckoning shop keeperĀ“s arm. We are called the Spice Girls and Victoria. It takes a poker face to walk through, and if the men make you laugh they have a chance. Everything is a game - the call and response, the simultaneous flirting and bargaining, the final price. We play the game until we are exhausted and our brains stuffed with sensory impressions and we stumble through the now-familiar alleys to our hostel.

Our plane leaves at 3.10 Sunday afternoon and, since it is a small airline, there is only one flight. The first train gets in at 2.00 and we dash to the street for a taxi, not waiting for the second train. In a mixture of Spanish and English words with French pronunciation, we bed the driver to go quickly. Boarding has just closed when we arrive, but we beg to be let on; passport control lines are agonizingly slow and I must wait for the officer to reqrite my name more legibly; security is mercifully lax and I slip past with my water, perfume, and grapes; we run in slippery flipflops up the ramp and to the right. The plane is not yet there. We collapse panting, grateful, relieved, giggly and shaky from adreneline, surprised. It is our last and greatest Willie Wonka moment - ta dah!