TRAVELWITHZOE

As you might have seen in Morocco diaries part 1, I had decided to book two nights in a hostel in Marrakesh (it was called Riad Jennah Rouge) to basically spend one full day there before moving on to a different part of Morocco.

I had a decent sleep in the 6-bed dorm after my flight and decided to check out the free hostel breakfast in the morning, but I wasn’t really expecting there to be anything vegan except maybe bread. To be fair, the free breakfast was quite impressive considering the fact that the bed was only £5 per night… it had a cupcake, egg, pancake, bread, yoghurt, orange juice and tea. Obviously I just ate the bread, and then finished my plane snacks.

Nothing had particularly caught my attention when I was Googling “things to do in Marrakesh”, so I decided I’d probably just spend the day walking around, eating and checking out a few parks and markets, because you can’t really go wrong with that. I made it to 3 different parks in the morning and it was very uneventful to be honest.

By the way, I always get questions about this t-shirt. It was given to me by Brittney who owns the small business madebybrittneyh (that’s her name on Instagram). She’s based in Trinidad so please check out her page if you’re there!

Anyway, for lunch I decided to find some falafel because it seemed like an easy vegan option. I stopped at the first place I saw that had falafel written on the big menu on the outside, and the option was a falafel sandwich or a falafel plate. I went for the plate because he said it would come with chips/fries and salad.

Guys, I was not prepared for this combination!

It’s important to note that everything on this plate was cold (not room temperature. Like, fridge cold), except the falafels and the chips. It was edible and I ate it, but it was just a surprising and slightly unappealing mixture of foods for me personally.

The cold cubes of potato brought back this memory of my early school years when we had to choose a certain amount of things from the salad bar and I sometimes had to choose little cold boiled potatoes because I didn’t like anything on offer, and the teachers came around to check if you’d finished your plate so I used to try and hide the cold boiled potatoes under a banana skin or something because I found them so disgusting!!!

Anyway back to this falafel plate. I just mixed all the salad stuff together and ate it – it basically just tasted like onion because there was so much onion mixed in (I love onion so that was fine), and honestly the falafels weren’t very good but I’m not too fussy… I’ll pretty much eat anything once it’s vegan and a bit nutritious.

After lunch I went to check out “the big square” which is actually called Jemaa el-Fnaa. Obviously it’s a big square… I’d say it’s probably the most touristy part of Marrakesh – there are lots of people selling souvenirs, food and drinks, and sometimes there are performances of traditional music/dance (for tips).

My least favourite thing I saw in the big square was the caged monkeys. Basically there was a stack of tiny cages with monkeys inside, and some had monkey chained to the outside on really short chains and obviously they were constantly moving/jumping around, clearly distressed and trying to escape. Tourists can pay the owner to hold a monkey and take a photo. It made me feel really sad seeing them.

My favourite thing (and only reason for revisiting the square after this) was the juice stands. This square is juice heaven. I would say there are about 30 juice stands there, all with huge displays of different fruits along the front. You can get a mixed juice or just choose one fruit, and it’s around 10 Dirhams for a small cup and 20 Dirhams for a big one (£0.80 and £1.60).

Obviously each juice stand has a lot of competition because there are so many of them, so they all do their best to try and get the customers, which mostly involves them waving juice samples at you or shouting “hello, yes, over here” etc. I had no idea which one to choose but I ended up getting eye contact with this guy (I’m guessing his name is Hafid judging from the sign on his stand) so I got an apple juice from him. We had a nice chat and he was helpful when I asked him where I could go in the market to look for fake Crocs.

So, yep you guessed it, I then went to look for fake Crocs in the medina (I had cute orange fake Crocs that I got in Guyana but I lost them at a waterfall and wanted to replace them ever since). It was interesting walking around in the markets but I didn’t find any Crocs that I liked.

The markets in the medina felt quite touristy and there were a lot of annoying men trying to tell me I was going the wrong way (I’ll explain more about this later), and I still had time left in the day, so I decided to use Google Maps to go to a more local market that I’d read about in a blog post. The pin drop I used was called “The Morocan Doors Souk el Khemis” but I ended up just walking where I felt like walking rather than following it exactly.

When I arrived, it was about 5pm and the market was finishing so there wasn’t much left to see, but it was still interesting to walk through some less touristy neighbourhoods. Unfortunately the annoying men telling me I was going the wrong way were also present there.

So how it works with these annoying men is… basically, they see that you’re walking looking at Google Maps for directions (aka you probably don’t know the area that well), and they come up to you in the middle of the road and say something like “excuse me madam, you cannot walk there, the road is closed”, or “madam you cannot go there, now is prayers time and only people who go to the mosque can walk there. The road is closed for prayers”. They then start walking down a different road and say something like “come with me this way, I show you the way”.

Their plan, apparently, is that you will believe them and follow them, and then either you’ll give them a little tip as a thankyou for them rescuing you and showing you the “correct” route, or even better (for them), they’ll become your sort of tour guide for the rest of the day and then you’d pay them for their tour guide services at the end of it.

I found this extremely annoying because it was usually clearly a lie, as there were plenty of other people walking alone the road that they were saying was closed. I noticed that this scam seems to be common in Marrakesh and a bit in Fes, but I didn’t really experience it in the other areas.

I found them to be quite insistent with their lies and their tone was quite aggressive. I just find they have a lot of audacity to tell such obvious lies with such conviction in their voice. I have no problem with people trying to make money from the tourism in their area (as they should), but I don’t respect them doing it just by lying.

I started to feel quite frustrated by the time I was walking back from the local market because the men were so annoying (mostly the lying ones, but also the some catcalling etc). This resulted in me having a kind of weird argument/conversation with a random restaurant worker on my way back.

So basically, by this point I was looking for somewhere to eat dinner, so I was keeping my eyes open for vegan options any time I was passing a restaurant. Near one restaurant, I heard a man saying “hello, where are you from?” but he was kind of half shouting it from across the road which personally I don’t find to be normal behaviour, so I just carried on walking because technically he could have been shouting to someone else and not me.

He then started walking up behind me saying “lady you are unkind, you must respond” etc. Usually I would just carry on walking in this situation, but I was quite annoyed at these men in general so I turned around and asked him if he truly believes that it would be reasonable for me to stop and have an entire conversation with every one of the 50 men who had tried to talk/shout at me from across the street today.

He ended up understanding (or maybe he didn’t want to argue with me) but then we argued again when he asked which guesthouse I’m staying at and I told him there isn’t any reason for him to know that information. I obviously had to hit him with the “if you had a daughter, would you like her to go around giving every random man her address when he asks for it?” because usually the only way I can get men to understand stuff like this is when I relate it to their real or hypothetical daughter.

Anyway, we argued about a few more things and then he asked if I wanted to meet up for coffee later?!?!?! (Not all men but) men are truly delusional sometimes.

I walked back in the direction of my hostel, which was through the medina, and I found a little spot that had lentils so I stopped there for dinner. It really changed my mood for the better because there were some chill and friendly young men in the restaurant who helped translate so I could communicate with the owner, and then I sat at the little table out the front with an old man who was also super chill and we had some nice conversation about his work and what I was doing in Morocco etc.

After people-watching at the table for a while, I walked back to the hostel where I spent the evening on the roof terrace doing some online work. The plan for the next day was to head to a town called Zagora to stay with a local family (to be continued in part 3!)