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,