Away from my Desk

Inside the walled city (Medina) of Marrakech (photo by Simon Ward)

P’tit Habibi’s manager, Abdelouaffi, warned us that if we looked lost in the street, we would be accosted by young people offering to guide us, then refusing our payment as offensively low and demanding more. To help us out, he walked us partway to the souks and pointed out landmarks to look out for, and gave us some small change so we had something to give to guides if we needed them (as is probably already clear, I’ve never met a more thoughtful hotel manager than Abdelouaffi).

We haven’t been accosted by teenage guides yet, despite my repeated inspections of our large and difficult-to-fold map (though I’m sure it will happen before too long). On the contrary, when we’ve approached people for directions they have been solicitous, conscientious (two people looked blank, confessed they didn’t know, and then consulted someone more knowledgeable) but they were always partial – they seemed to end with an unspoken ‘and when you’ve got that far, as someone what you should do next’. Or perhaps it’s just that in a city with no right angles, where most roads have no names and different maps disagree about the names of those that do, the phrase ‘follow this road until it ends and then turn right’ is open to multiple interpretations.

At one point, I asked a young man in a café for directions – he in turn asked an older man, then came outside to show me where to go. He took me around the corner, where we discovered that a woman had been knocked off her moped by a taxi. The taxi driver and the woman exchanged strong words in Arabic (even as she remained pinned down by her bike) and another man helped her up and gave her a lift on his bike. Everyone else either honked (if they were in cars) or swerved around (if they were on mopeds) or, as in the case of our guide, took no apparent notice and continued giving directions, making sure we understood what he was telling us. 

Bab Taghzout at night (taken by Mr Libraryman)

 

I have never been anywhere as alive with commerce as Marrakech. Almost as soon as we left our Riad P’tit Habibi, on a sleepy residential street just north of Bab Taghzout, we passed a man in a tiny room whose doors folded out to reveal a brightly painted display of savon noir and argan oil – the man himself was sanding down a very small table. Next, we passed a slender teenager selling spiky green fruit in the shade of an arch. Then beggars outside the courtyard of Zaouia Sidi Bel Abbès (virtually the only beggars we saw all day, and all of them ill or wounded in some way), then down the Rue de Bab Tagzhout, were there were fruit stands in the road and beside the road, and a different business in every doorway – tailors of all sorts,  moped repairs, a man winding purple thread which ran through hooks along the wall for perhaps fifty feet, someone sitting at a makeshift podium made of cigarette boxes (was he selling cigarettes? I have no idea). There were people in rooms full of mysterious objects, with blue plastic tables out front.

Everyone had a business, and no-one had agglomerated – that was what seems most remarkable: nobody is merging. ‘We work for our families, not for a boss’, a Berber spice-seller told me, shortly before selling me a hundred grams of cinnamon for 80 dirham (I’d gamely talked him down from 100 dirham – he scowled theatrically and told me I must have some Berber in me, in a tome that made it clear I’d just been taken to the cleaners.

 

 

 

Here I am, writing in my notebook on our first day

 

Yesterday, I got back from a holiday in Morocco with my partner, Briony. 

I'd brought a notebook along (a Canson 5.5"x8.5" recycled paper sketchbook, if you're into stationary). I brought it along because I always bring a notebook on holiday, and because I didn't want the notebook I brought to be my work notebook (a Black and Red softcover A4 notebook).

On the first day of the trip, I surprised myself by actually writing in the notebook, something I haven't properly done for years. I decided to type it up when I got home, and start a blog. 

From here on out, 'Away from my Desk' will provide a home for observations and thoughts that have nothing to do with what I do at work. Naturally, it will begin with Morocco.