England / Scotland / Morocco

Edinburgh

The last week has been an eventful one. Jeralyn came out for a bit and we did some traveling. There were a couple of formal events to attend to, but the majority of the time was spent seeing the sights around the local area, a day trip to Edinburgh, and a few days in Marrakech, Morocco.

The day trips in the local area were nice. Being able to go home every night is very convenient and means not having to lug anything around, which is also a bonus. It's funny, too, how one tends to not worry about pickpockets while in an area that is familiar. Maybe that has more to do with being in a place where you don't stand out.

Black Sheep Brewery

At any rate, we went to York, Hawes, Ripley, Ripon, and Masham while in England. The weather was really warm for this time of year and we avoided any rain. The sun wasn't shining as much as it could have while we were in England, but you can't have it all.

Edinburgh was lovely as always. The sun is always shining there, somehow. We ended up only going up for a day; train in the morning and then back again that night, but it was enough time to hit the major "must see" attractions (minus the scotch tour that looked like a Disney ride), eat some haggis, and explore the narrow passageways.

Walking through a 'close' in Edinburgh

Morocco was a little disappointing. I think a big part of the disappointment was that we had already done some trips in the UK and were accustomed to UK style traveling. Morocco was obviously a very different place, which is part of the attraction, but is also something that can take people off guard.

The most perfect tower in all of North Africa, allegedly.

Inside the Saadian Tombs. The only place I felt comfortable taking pictures was inside attractions that we had to pay to get into. If you stopped anywhere else, people were on you like stink on stank.

The thing that really threw me about Morocco was the aggressiveness of the touts and locals. It was to the point that we literally couldn't stop walking without being accosted. When we wanted to figure out which way to go, we would have to just pick a way and circle back if it was wrong. If we stopped to debate or consider, we were swarmed. I really got the feeling that everyone was doing everything they could to get as much money out of us as possible, by any means possible. Other than that, they were annoyed by our presence.

Cooling off after an extra hour or so of fumbling our way through the souks back to the riad.

The best example of that is when we asked a kid to point us to a street we couldn't find when we were lost in the souks (separate story: crazy complex alleys and roads). I asked a boy, about 12 or so, if he could point me to street. He walked us to it, which was nice of him, but there was an older boy, maybe late teens, that came along, as well. We went around a couple of twists and turns that we had circled a couple of times already and, two minutes later, we were back on track. We gave the older boy 10 dirham (about $1.25), but he looked at me with disgust and said, "10 dirham? This is nothing! Give me 50!" It's worth noting that most Moroccans make less than 80 dirham a day. When I turned away to ignore him, the younger boy took the money.

On the plus side, the streets and alleys were really neat. As long as you don't mind being lost (it's fun for a short while), you can come across a lot of things and interesting sites. It seems that the locals spent most of their time in these alleyways. It was mostly younger boys, but the girls were out and about, as well. A lot of the areas had the classic dude arc welding in sandals and no eye protection, people overloading vehicles of all sizes, and 20 people all giving their opinion in an argument that really only required the two primaries.

Jemma al Fna, the big, open square in the southern part of the Medina, was interesting, but we weren't there to shop, so we spent most of our time noticing how every shop had the exact same things. It really makes you wonder who the supplier is for all of them. It seems like every place you go that has all of the tourist trinkets must be supplied by one person or company. One interesting piece of that puzzle was the food stands that go up every night in Jemma al Fna. There are supposedly over 100. As we were walking around looking for a place to eat, the touts with the empty stands kept telling us, "it is all the same. Eat here or eat there, all the same; eat at ours, there is no wait." In the end, we went to a place that was packed with locals, but when we ordered a wide variety of items from the menu, we noticed that only one thing (the tangia; slow roasted mutton) actually came from that stand. Everything else, the bread, soup, salad, and eggplant, all came from somewhere else. Maybe even the food stalls have the same supplier...

Our riad

Although the place we stayed in was windowless to the outside world and pretty much impossible to find (we hired a local kid), we had a pretty nice stay in a riad, which is apparently the authentic Moroccan style guest house. Basically, it is a small place with a courtyard and a handful of rooms built around that. The place we stayed had 5 rooms. The staff didn't really speak very much English (and we didn't speak French), so that was a bit of a challenge, but it was nice to have something that wasn't crowded. There was a group of French travelers staying there who we would bump into at breakfast. We also randomly sat next to them at a restaurant on the other side of the city, which was odd.

Other than that, back to work, Thanksgiving coming up, and some more excitement (depending on how loosely you are willing to define that word) that I will write about as it happens.