~Not All Who Wander Are Lost~: Meknes to Marrakesh!

I was very excited when we got up Monday morning to get to Marrakesh. In my mind, Marrakesh is the Paris of Morocco and is the city that most comes to mind when you think Morocco. While Fez was unique with the medina, it lacked that certain "je ne sais quoi" and was a bit of an uptight and frenetic city. So, we were ready for the 7 hour train ridde. This was our first train experience in Morocco since the train system is not very big and is a bit wonky. In order to go from Fez in the north to Marrakesh in the south, you need to go west to the coast, pass through Rabat and Casablanca then cut back east to get to Marrakesh. We had an amazingly peaceful ride until about 30 minutes in when our compartment was over run by a group of high school French scouts of some sort who desperately needed showers.

The scenery was pretty similar up until we got close to Marrakesh (arid farmland). We passed some sort of magical line when we definitively passed into desert territory and the train got H-O-T even with the "air conditioning." The view was very cool, though, with all hamletst of mud-walled houses, usually surrounded by a mosque. As we learned from our faux guide in Meknes, every town needs five things: a mosque, a communal bread oven (people bring the bread to cook there then take it home), a fountain for water, a school, and a hamman (bath). As Court noted, many houses also had satellite dishes...

Once we arrived in Marrakesh on Monday evening we went in search of food and, of course, ended up near the DJemma El-Fna which is the main square in the old part of the city. The square itself is overlooked by the Koutoubia mosque, which was the protoype of la Giralda in Spain. The square and the mosque are the city's major landmarks and the square is interesting because UNESCO declared it a "Masterpiece of World Heritage" for the shenanigans that occur in the square than for the square itself. It was once a place for executions (its name means place of the dead) but now has everything from orange juice carts to monkeys to snake charmers to henna artists to fruit vendors.