Culture Shock

We’ve been sharing the narrow streets of Marrakech with motorbikes, donkeys, bicycles, hawkers, and sometimes kids playing kickball. We’ve seen more Grannies on motorcycles than we’ve seen anywhere else in the world!  After living in the medina for 5 days we are feeling a bit of culture shock. Are women still treated as second class citizens here?  Not quite sure but Morocco is clearly still a male dominated society, you can feel the energy here.  It wasn’t until 2004 that the Morrocan Mudawanna legal code was passed guaranteeing women equal rights with respect to custody, divorce, property ownership and child support. Schooling is only required until you are 14 and 2/3rds of girls do NOT continue their education.

The men, for the most part have been very respectful to me but maybe it is because I’m with Douglas who gets all of the attention with his ‘Moustache.’  Still there are many young women with children and old people begging in the streets.  There is no real safety net for poor women and the elderly.  With no social security or welfare programs, your only security is your family.  The government just recently implemented free health care to the poorest in the country.  We decided to support a local non-profit that is trying to make a difference in the lives of women.   Amal http://amalnonprofit.org/ is a non-profit organization to help poor women learn culinary skills and work in the hospitality industry. They are the #2 restaurant in TripAdvisor so we decided to take a cooking class to learn how to cook chicken tangine.

We decide to visit a couple of museums we can easily walk to from our Riad in the medina.  The Musee de Marrakech is a former palace that became an all girls’ school in 1965.  It now houses traditional embroidery, inlaid daggers, and fassi pottery as well as some modern paintings. 

The Maison de la Photographie is a delightful museum that pulls together two guys’ collection of vintage Moroccan photography from 1870-1950.

Ali ben Youssef Medersa Foundation was one of the largest and most beautiful theological colleges in Africa, founded in the 14th century.  The courtyard has 5 color mosaics, cedar window and doors, fancy stucco archways and Italian Carrara marble. 

Everyone wants to buy a rug in Marrakech and we are in search of the perfect rug.  We’ve walked through the rug souks and it all seems a bit overwhelming.  I remember reading in Lonely Planet that you do not want to visit a rug shop or the tannery with an unlicensed guide because it will be a scam.  We meet some kid on the street who says he went to school in NYC and stayed with a family in Jersey.  He asks if we would like to have a tour of the tannery for free and…we both agree.  WTF? We are led and handed off to 4 different people before we reach the area where the hides are processed.  It is on the outer edge of the medina in a poor area and we can smell the place before we see it.  Our ‘guide’ gives us a handful of mint to put near our nose  (our gas mask) so we can enter the area without gagging.  The stench of pigeon shit is overwhelming.   The concrete tubs you see in the pics are filled with water and a mixture of natural ingredients (animal urine, pigeon droppings etc!) to soften the skins, and to remove the fur from the pelts.  There are children playing in the area and its all just a bit surreal.  

We are led to a 3 story look-out to see the largest tannery in the medina to take photos and then led back down to the leather shop.  They give us a hard sell.  Douglas wants to walk but I buy a small beautiful red Morrocan rug that I get for half price – quite the bargain.  Unfortunately, when we got back to our Riad and looked at the rug that was packaged up- it was a completely different rug!  We were ripped off!

Still feeling a bit sad about the rug but here are some random pics on the streets plus some yummy food we had at Nomads & Le Jardine near the spice markets:  

  I’ve been noticing a hand symbol all over the souks.  Sometimes it is a door knocker, on leather goods, on jewelry or painted on a wall.  In our Riad it was used as a coat hanger and a soap dish.   This is the hamsa, a palm-shaped amulet popular throughout North Africa and the Middle East. It appears in both Islamic and Jewish traditions, and is believed to act as a defense against the evil eye.  I should have been wearing one around my neck before we went rug shopping…