A Stroll in Two Cities

Dixieland jazz being played on the corner, American accents everywhere.  Where else could we be but Paris?

Vast numbers of tourists notwithstanding, and we're here after the peak, there is an undoubted magic to walking around Paris.  Even the quieter streets seem to be lined with magnificent buildings.

Don't panic - it's not me...

We really were only here for a whistle stop visit.  A quick shower and a stroll down the banks of the Seine to Notre Dame before heading back into the Latin Quarter for a meal.  We even had an arrogant waiter to complete the Parisian experience!

Named after the American University

The next day's forecast was for rain - after 11.00 am.  And at 11.38, it duly began to pour.  While this was frustrating, the accuracy of the weather forecast was impressive.






Fortunately, we'd managed to make our way to get an eyeful of that tower (and before anyone complains, that pun is stolen from an old, of course, I hear you say, song).

Of course there was fabulous food and very expensive fashion on offer.

Nice books too at Chez Ralph's

That chap Ralph (as in Lauren, not the one out of Happy Days) decided to combine the two and open a burger joint in his swish store, not that we could afford these either...  Ah well, there's always bread!





A day later, a train trip to London, an extortionate left luggage charge and it was another afternoon amble.

These were the shortest of visits, and as is the case with a good trip, you leave with the feeling that you need to come back again.  Soon!

And on that note, with a return flight beckoning, I'll sign off.  Thanks for the company to all those who commented (and/or emailed) and I hope you at least enjoyed the pics (if not the quips)!

Porto - What, No Chicken Burgers!

Spectacularly unhealthy

Well, there probably are chicken burgers but their real regional speciality, explained our cab driver, was the Francesinha.  "Cheese, ham", he opined, and I'm thinking "I'm just hearing toasted sandwich here", "bacon, spicy sausage", he continues and now I'm starting to think "Oh my God!", "Steak, topped with melted cheese and a fried egg - served with chips" he concludes.  Okay, so now we're talking heart-attack on a plate...  "All Porto food", he informs us, "Is basically fat and spices".  My kind of place then.

If I turn it on, Starsky & Hutch must come on

We'd stopped for one night en route to Porto in Coimbra, a university town according to what little research we'd done and so it appeared by the many troupes of uniformed young women marching about town.  It was clearly induction week and there was a lot of competitive singing going on, like between the Ravenclaws and the Hufflepuffs.  We were clearly the Muggles in this town.  Our hotel had been described as a 70's hotel.  The TV was probably a technological breakthrough in its day...

Porto, where we finish our trip in Portugal is a remarkable place.  We were staying out near the beach, and in the tradition of 70's style hotels, this one was billed as something of a Fawlty Towers experience... and whoever coined that description was right on the money.  There was a constant air of disarray at the front desk, any questions would be met with a vague wave and "Down on the corner".  Clearly, a Creedence fan, I thought to myself.  Either that or it's one magical corner.

As it was, I had to make a visit to a pharmacy on this magical corner and was promptly referred to hospital as an insect bite (although I am none-the-wiser as to when this occurred) I'd received on my leg had flared up.  The chemist printed me off a map and called a taxi for me.  And this was how it was in Porto.  People were incredibly friendly and helpful.  The doctor who saw me at the hospital came back out of her office after seeing me to wish me a great rest of my trip.  In a cafe, the young girl serving us said to me "I can see you are not well.  I hope you get better soon."  People were genuinely warmhearted.

Add to this that Porto is a very beautiful city, and it all makes for an amazing visit.  We decided to do a bus tour.  This took some persuading following my previous such tour but I had a jacket this time!  This tour took us into the Ribeira area along the banks of the river Doura.


This is the area where Port was first exported to the world.  And yes, that's what the city's name relates to.

Not, apparently, spicy chicken burgers.

Next stop: Paris!

Lisboa - Looks Like a Goa!

It was an early start.  We had to check out of our hotel at 5.45 am, take a ride to Fes Railway Station and then catch the Marrakech Express as far as Casablanca.  That was a 5 hour train trip followed by a shuttle to the airport.  Any ideas of seeing Casablanca (nothing much by all accounts, so stick with with movie), were abandoned as the hours ticked away.  

Organisation is not one of Morocco's strong points.  Train seats are not numbered sequentially, so nobody can find their seats.  Why this also happened on the plane where they are numbered very sequentially is anyone's guess.  I've never been on a flight with so many people in the wrong seats who then argued about it when being confronted with what would have to be the rather indisputable evidence of a boarding pass.  I was looking forward to that drink in Portugal...

Lisbon, by contrast, has a much lighter feel.  There is a real old world grandeur to the part of the city we're staying in.  It's an absolute joy to walk these streets.  

Okay, so it wasn't all walking

But they have been making those tarts a while... 

View from our local metro...shame about construction

A lot of steep hills

A lot of massive buildings

There are also great day trips to be done at very little cost - a subway ride costs 1.40 Euro for the whole way, the connecting train ticket costs about 2.40.  So for a few dollars you can be in a completely different environment.

And so a 30 minute trip sees us strolling along the waterfront (no ice creams unfortunately) and through the cobbled streets in Cascais or, even closer the grand buildings and parks of Belem.

From the turrets of the Moorish Castle

Possibly not designed to subtly blend in

Likewise, a train ride in a different direction puts us in in Sintra,  "The heart of Portugal" enthused the girl at our hotel reception desk.  it is a place you could come back to many times be it for the history, the beautiful views or just the uniqueness of it.  Some of it was quite psychedelic!

Lisbon is a late night town, in the Latin tradition.  By the time you'd had dinner and a drink, it was usually around midnight.  Time just seems to get away here!  I should also mention that we arrived just in time for Lisbon Beer Week.  Wow!  They must have heard we were coming!

 

Fes - What, No Hats!

My tales of our misadventures in Morocco thus far may give the impression that the whole city was like the Medina.  Actually, most people do not want to have to run into the likes of us blundering around and choose to live in the very modern part of the city.  Our only glimpse of this (in daylight at any rate) was when we made our way to the railway station to start the journey to Fes.  This was a large and modern building.

Some of these lanes get really narrow

While travelling on the train, we read about Fes because that's the kind of long-range planning we do, which is also why we arrive in places on religious holidays...  Apparently, its souks are far larger and far more complicated than Marrakech's.  Terrific!  Based on our navigational skills shown to-date, we decided that a guide might be the better option.  Dirham (the Pink Panther's favourite currency - dirham, dirham...) well-spent we figured.  And so it was.  The next morning, after a few turns, we were deep into the labyrinth.

The biggest pile of pigeon poop in Morocco

The souks are organised by trade, so the brass is in one area, the leather in another, the shoes in another.  No department stores then.  There are over 9400 steps (as in up and down - it's hilly here) and over 170 mosques in Fes (prayer call sounds like the start of a grand prix).  There was another tannery, the oldest and largest in the country but we were experts now and were used to the smell or, as its termed by the locals, Coco Caca...

The brass district

The town's also host to the world's first university, although the doors of this were closing as we arrived.  Are you picking up a theme here?  In actuality we would not have been allowed through the doors in any case, as we weren't studying to be imams (which is all it teaches now)...but the door was closing nonetheless.

Closing time - go away (actually he was very ok)

But we could sneak a look from the other side

With this city being build around AD 900, there are a lot of old buildings still intact.  And, Paul, not the guide, tells me that in fact it is the world's largest car-free zone.  This, actually, is great.  Only the odd donkey or mule to negotiate and not the scores of motorcycles you encounter in Marrakech.

Those are gas cannisters - in other words, one explosive mule!

There was also of course the mandatory visit to the carpet shop where, amazingly, they get their merino wool thanks to Dave Dobbyn (as in Slice of Heaven fame) who organised it all after visiting there.  It's a Unicef project, so no child labour is involved.  Actually, the rugs were amazing, with the highest quality ones actually changing colour in the shifting light but I couldn't spring for the $1200.  And there were visits to silk weaving shops although there were some rather shifty characters in there:

Look out!  It's half a Berbershop Quartet!

Dave's Slice of Carpet Shop

After working our way through the trade districts and blithely turning down the chance to buy stuff, we reached the other end of the Medina with the famous blue gate.  Which is actually green when you first see it (from the inside).  It's blue on the other side...Green is the colour of Islam, Blue is the colour of Fes (and a couple of English football teams but I let that slide).

The Blue Gate 

After this it was back to our riad.  And this was just the morning!  This was followed by a relaxing afternoon in our beautiful riad as we watched the sun set on the distant hills.  This holiday thing is hard work!

Next stop: Lisbon.

Moments Like These, Everybody Needs Mint Teas

Eerily quiet in the souks

If yesterday had been pre-feast carnage, today was feast-day ghost town.  On the one hand this made it much easier to walk around and, believe it or not, we had finally mastered our 16 steps to and from the hotel.

Unfortunately, the quietness of the streets also meant that a lot of places were closed including the (apparently) "magnificent" Bahia Palace, which is one of the must-sees in Marrakech.  Oh well!  As it transpired it had been closed for days for this feast, so we didn't have much chance of getting there.

That's a lot of lamb - in more detail than I'd prefer

The only sign of activity on the streets were the fires being lit for the barbecues.  This also meant a lot of sheep carcasses and a lot of hot poker and machete action...Not a time to be antagonising any of the locals... Meanwhile a lot of cats looked on with a great deal of interest.

 We did manage to visit one of the two synagogues in Marrakech.  At one time, there were over 35,000 Jews in Marrakech but now they're down to 200.  Paul managed to walk in on one of them while she was sleeping.  To be fair, her room was in between two of the exhibition rooms and the door was open but he did get quite a shock when what he thought was an exhibit, woke up and stared at him!

As the day drew to a close, activity returned to the streets and we made our way to one of the terraces overlooking the main square (that's the one that's "16 steps" away) to watch the market come to life and the sun set.

Sadly,now that we knew where we were going, we realised how often people were deliberately giving you the wrong information.  This was usually the unsolicited advice you received from people.  This was confirmed by an English couple we were chatting to at our hotel who had had some quite confrontational experiences.  Xenophobia or just mischief?  Who knows?

Relaxing courtyard

View from above

But Marrakech had been an interesting place and as crazy as it got outside, there was always the sanity of the riad to return to, accompanied by the  strangely reassuring sound of sparrows also returning to nest in the enclosed orange trees.  It was in this tranquil environment, that you'd have a Berber whisky to finish off the day.  In other words, a glass of mint tea.

Someone else who relaxed at the riad - with my stuff!

From here it was a 7 hour-train journey on to Fes on the other side of the other country,

Marrakesh Espresso

Getting out of Casablanca was a rather confusing affair.  There appeared to be some kind of riot going on at the gate although it was also possible that this was just how Moroccans talk.  Mind you, it did feature a lot of storming off and people just deciding to wander onto the tarmac in search of the plane until the police ordered them back in.  There was a gate change for my flight with some official making a guttural kind of noise - luckily, I checked - he had actually said "Marrakech".  I had thought he was just clearing his throat.

I arrived at our Riad, a Moroccan house, essentially, with an enclosed courtyard, at about 2.15 am whereupon, I was greeted with the traditional mint tea and warm hospitality.  Nonetheless, my bed was the most welcome sight for me.  It had taken about 20 hours door-to-door to get here.

Plotting the route - sheer fiction

Our riad is located at the northern tip of the Medina, as the enclosed part of the town is called.  This is very much a maze of alleyways and lane ways.  Lanes do not run into any main streets, they just run into other lanes and, what with everything being so closed in, there are no reference points.  It also doesn't help that all of the buildings are done in a kind of pink daub and that while the streets do have names, you were lucky if you could see these.

It did not look like this on the map

At least someone knows where they are

 Well, of course it wasn't very long before we'd taken a wrong turn and were very much disorientated.  Now, every single article you read on Marrakech talks about getting lost.  And how much fun it is.  Well, it's not quite the jolly wheeze it sounds.  We ended up being given advice by all manner of helpful people who then turned around and wanted money, although we could see this coming, so we managed to avoid it altogether or talk our way out of it but it gets tiresome very quickly.  

As it turned out, we did see quite a few sites accidentally. which, given how far we wandered, it would have been hard not to have done.  We'd been steered towards the tanneries at one point.  That looked like back-breaking, not to mention very smelly, work.  Apparently it involves soaking and treating the skins (lamb, cow and camel) in lime, pigeon poop (you read that right) and mimosa.




To add to the general confusion, today was the day before the big feast they were going to be having tomorrow (Eid-al-Adha).  What this meant was a lot of people, a lot of traffic and a lot of sheep, who if they were rattled now, had no idea how bad it was going to be tomorrow...

All kinds of traffic

Bikes and donkeys wait for cars

Tomorrow's Feast... For some

Having now wandered (and wondered) for over 6 hours, we decided to call it quits and head for home.  Now, we had been given a map and a set of directions on how to get back from the main market.  These instructions involved 16 steps.  Sixteen!  This, however, is rather like that Irish joke: "How do you get to Dublin?"
"Oooh, I wouldn't start from here."
Those sixteen steps weren't much use until we could find the starting point...
At one point, we dropped in on a museum as it had free wi-fi and anywhere out of the sun at this point was very welcome.  The proprieter even made us a cup of tea as we plonked down on the sofas in the main exhibition area.  The next tourists may have thought we were part of the exhibition.  We then made our way up to the roof terrace to get our bearings.  Luckily, we could make out a mosque and decided to heard towards that.  Back down in the laneways however, it was all very difficult, very quickly- "How did we manage to lose a mosque?", posed Paul.  As it turned out, the mosque we were looking at wasn't the right one anyway and talk us further off course, although it is a fine looking mosque!

Mosques- definitely easier to spot from the roof

After further wanderings, we stumbled into the main market and found the pot plant shop that were mentioned in step 1.  This was like a treasure map!  We were so pleased with our progress, we had to stop for a smoothie at step 5!  It was with some relief that we finally reached our hotel.  These places really are oases of sanity.

Venturing back out later, but being careful not to go more than 6 steps away from our hotel, we enjoyed a delicious meal on a terrace accompanied by some bongo music but sadly, no Berbershop Quartet or Moroccan Roll to end the day on a pun-filled note...

The laneways - also best viewed from above...