birthday

today is my birthday and we spent the afternoon and evening in marrakech, morroco. yes!
last night, we had stayed with p’s brother and family outside of london. we got up early, took the train to the airport and flew to marrakech without incident. with all the crazy weather happening around us in paris and london in the last week, we have been so lucky in all our travels without any major delays. the temperature was in the 60’s when we arrived. we are watching the news right now and seeing the crazy amount of snow on the u.s. east coast. we are thrilled to be here!

anyway, we arrived at our “riad” – traditional house with courtyard – but in our case, boutique hotel – with only a small adventure. there was supposed to be someone from the hotel meeting us at the airport, but no one was there. so we took a cab, but the driver had to ask another driver how to go. he dropped us near enough to the hotel and passed us off onto another man who wheeled our luggage in a little cart to the hotel. i was a little uptight about it, but p. handled it all well. luckily we had a map, our riad was on a main street and we knew where we were. we didn’t have any adventures like the ones i read about, where tourists are dropped off in the medina and get lost before they even get to their hotel.

our hotel is new and very beautifully done and we are pleased. there is a nice terrace on the roof where we had our welcome tea. we went out to the medina (old town) and walked to the main square and then into the souks (small market roads). we did not get lost and arrived back to the square. it is so exciting to be in such a different culture! the women mostly wear head scarves and long caftans, though there are many women dressed in western wear. there are also lots of men in caftans.

we decided to eat at one of the market stalls. some offer barbecued meats, some offer fried seafood, some offer just hard boiled eggs and some offer calf heads. we picked one that offered a variety of food and we had fried calamari, grilled aubergines(eggplants), green peppers, mixed meat skewers and french fries. it was very tasty and total cost was around 15 euros/$20 for the three of us. we noticed that the man serving us would just grab the food from a big plate, with his hands, and put it our serving plates. i also wondered how they actually washed the dishes, since these were stalls set up in the middle of the square without running water... oh well, hope for the best...

in the square we did briefly see one snake charmer and there were lots of musicians and storytellers. we went to have ice cream in a cafe that said it was a “glaciere” and which had a big menu of ice cream on its front wall. but they didn’t have any ice cream, so we just had a mint tea. we came back to the hotel and were hanging out watching tv when there was knock on the door. our host, saladin was there with a birthday cake for me! a delicious strawberry tart with a candle in the middle. they were so sweet! they knew because they had collected our passports for our information. so i just had to write my blog to tell you about it!

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