put a monkey on me, i don't care: a weekend in marrakech

Around the end of last year, I started to get antsy and annoyed that I had not traveled anywhere since Dublin in October. And it was just Ireland! An amazingly hilarious drunken weekend away yes, but I wanted somewhere warm. And different.

So, Nick and I decided to go to Marrakech, Morocco. Warm, for sure, and different, I hoped so. A London winter can feel like a lifetime. This winter in particular seemed to drag, especially since we got our coldest weather in February. By the time it snowed, it already felt like we'd had our fill of winter weather. So, having an African holiday planned made those cold mornings and dark evenings a little more bearable.

We flew Easyjet from Gatwick to Marrakech on a Thursday afternoon. Despite a hideous experience flying back from Berlin after Christmas 2010*, Easyjet has been my airline of choice while living in London. I guess better the devil you know. This time, we actually had two flights that landed at their destination early. EARLY. Totally unheard of.

We got in about 8.45, and through our hostel had organised a taxi to pick us up, which ended up being a smart idea. Driving along the unlaned roads under a big fat yellow moon, I knew I had definitely found somewhere different.

We stayed at Douarskoll Guesthouse which was adorable, was right in the medina and made us delicious food. We also had an amazing room. It had a mezzanine! It was like sleeping in a treehouse. Here it is:




This was the view from the roof terrace. You could see all the way to the Atlas Mountains, which I obviously forgot to take a photo of.



the things we did:

Marjorelle Gardens




Cacti and brightly coloured pots. Marjorelle Gardens was created by a French guy called Marjorelle in the 20s. After falling in to disrepair, Yves St Laurent bought the gardens and restored them to their original state. It was the greenest place we saw in Marrakech; everything else was a dusky red, or dirty yellow. As per the rest of Marrakech, there were cats and badly dressed tourists crawling all over it.

In Marrakech in general, it was a different kind of tourist makeup than I was used to. There were more couples, groups of older travelers, and lots of families as well, which surprised me a bit. No large groups of young people, but I suppose the lack of readily available alcohol puts them all off.

Bahia Palace




This palace had sweet Moroccan style decoration. And even more cats.

The ruins of Bahii Palace




Not cats this time, but storks. They build these amazing nests up in the top part of the ruins. It was very hot at the ruins, with little shade, but pretty sweet imagining what it would have looked like in it's original glory.

Djemaa El-Fna




The main square was absolutely insane. A tourist trap, without a doubt. It is ringed by market stalls selling the usual fare, and in the day time, the square itself is full of juice stalls, date stalls, people with monkeys, people with monkeys wearing clothes, snake charmers, women offering henna, men offering cigarettes, men in traditional dress offering photos, donkeys, motorcycles, cars, bicycles.

At night, there are proper food stalls where you can have dinner, and also people performing. We didn't get too close to the performances, but one late afternoon performance we saw, involved some belly dancing performed by ladies in Muslim dress, so very conservative, but with the risque bikini tops and bottoms over their conservative clothes. Belly dancing finds a way.

The last night we were there we ate in a restaurant looking over the square. We saw the sunset, and therefore the sundown call to prayer. We watched all the men, and some women, head in to the mosque. We watched street sellers setting out their wares to catch the women waiting for the men, and the men on their way out of the mosque. It was amazing to watch a bit of life in Marrakech that wasn't trying to sell us something.

where we ate and drank:

Cafe Arabe




We went here every day and that's not a bad thing, nor a lazy thing on our part. It was just a really lovely place to spend the early evening. The top floor was a terrace that looked out over the rooftops of Marrakech, so you could watch the sunset. They served alcohol, which we appreciated, and the food was average, which by Moroccan standards, was good.

I really struggled with the food in Marrakech which annoyed me, because I like food so much. I think it was because Marrakech was an olfactory overload. Smells everywhere. Good smells like spices and leather and fresh fruit. But also terrible smells like dirty animals, smelly people, sewage and rotting food. The smells put me off eating and the food just wasn't good enough to tempt me.

where i shopped:



One of the main drawcards of Marrakech are the markets, the souks. They sell everything and they want you to buy it. A polite, no thank you, or non merci, was probably the phrase I used the most while in Marrakech. We soon discovered that the market street closest to our medina was the best. Perhaps they got used to seeing us, but we rarely got hassled as we walked down it.

One afternoon I stopped to talk to this kid about the kittens outside his father's antique stall - he was an amazing kid, really confident and verbose, and he sold me an antique amber ring. Turns out Sarah Jessica Parker and other Sex and the City actors shopped there when they were in Marrakech filming the (awful, insulting) second SATC movie. His father's two stalls were crammed with amazing antique jewelry and I was so jealous of the story he told about Sarah Jessica Parker, plucking rings and necklaces willy nilly and chucking them in a bowl to buy. So jealous, so so jealous.

the end:

All in all, Marrakech was everything I wanted it to be. Hot. Different. A holiday. A great travel story.


nick & lorrie, bahii palace, march 2012

* The plane was delayed by hours, and when we finally got on a plane, it wasn't even an Easyjet plane, or an Easyjet crew. After far too long in the air, we were told that we couldn't land at any of the London airports due to inclement weather, nor any nearby. The closest airport that would take us was Liverpool. We waited even longer while on the tarmac - it was the middle of the night, so they had to open the airport for us. Once we finally got through immigration, we had to sit around in the closed Liverpool airport to wait for coaches to take us back to London. We were twelve hours late to Gatwick. It was MISERABLE.

it is fucking snowing: a london waitangi day experience

I am totally going to get in trouble posting this photo

Well, this blog thing is going really well, isn't it. Not a single blog entry in February! Come on Lauren, truly pathetic. OK; an attempt at a catch up.

Way back in early February, a group of us ex pat New Zealanders celebrated Waitangi Day by getting drunk on the underground. It is a strange way to celebrate New Zealand's national day, but I've done it twice now, and it doesn't disappoint. I was hesitant, in 2011, didn't commit to it too much – wore an All Blacks shirt under my winter coat – but soon got in to it, drinking on the street with a four pack of Strongbow in a Tesco bag swinging from my arm.

This year, we were the Maori colours of the rainbow, which ended up being a good choice, as it meant we could wear coats of various colours – the temperature had dropped significantly the week before and it was hovering around the zero mark. I wore heat generating leggings under my jeans, two pairs of socks, two thermals under my t-shirt, a coat, a beret, scarf and gloves. It actually ended up being enough.

There weren't as many people out as the year before, I think the cold kept many away, and the costumes weren't as impressive, which again was probably the fault of the temperature. But everyone was as good natured as always. I'm sure residents of these areas are used to this Kiwi invasion by now but there definitely were some confused tourists wondering what they'd missed.



As per usual, we ran in to people we knew, and a few times, I recognised people from the dusty recesses of my past. Living in New Zealand it is quite usual to run in to people you know when you’re out and about. In London, it is a very uncommon occurrence.

Before leaving NZ, I would have never have called myself a very patriotic person. I knew NZ was a pretty sweet place to live, and I really loved growing up in Wellington, but overly sentimental shows of patriotism always left me feeling a little uncomfortable. That has totally changed since living in London. I got up in the middle of the night to watch the All Blacks play during the World Cup. I woke up early on a Sunday to watch the final and I cried when we won. Thanks to Waitangi Day pub crawl, I can now say that I’ve sung our national anthem at the top of my lungs on a packed underground train. I mean, if that’s not patriotism, I’m not sure what is.

After getting to Westminster and watching some brave (silly? Drunk?) Kiwi men take their shirts off to do the haka, we decided to head to the Temple Walkabout for a few hours. At about five thirty we realised it was snowing, for the first time that London winter.

So, no more Temple Walkabout for us. We decided it was back home for some drunken dinner and some drunken playing in the snow.

On our way back to the Temple underground station, we stopped to have photos with a very good natured cop. He let Katie wear his hat for a photo, and was easily convinced to wear it sideways for another photo. There was a huge stink in New Zealand (not so much over here; although maybe I just didn't notice) about the London Waitangi Day pub crawl – some New Zealander complained to the New Zealand High Commission about the behaviour of Kiwi's on the pub crawl.



It's absolute crap, obviously – thousands of us drinking in the streets and not a single arrest? And it's not for lack of cops, they were everywhere we went. I was happy to read the response of the police chief for the Westminster Borough, saying that his cops look forward to policing the Waitangi Day pub crawl due to the good natured attitude of the Kiwi's involved. I would say that is absolutely true – at Gloucester Road we saw a cop happily tucking in to a bag of Burger Rings. At Westminster, Kiwi’s were having their photo taken with cops wearing those hard bucket hat things. And this guy at Temple was loving life hanging out outside the Temple Walkabout.

The snow that night was the first and only proper snow in London this winter (and I hope I can say that with confidence, as it is now March). Being on a Saturday and on a day that we were together as a big group gave the whole experience a sort of Christmas-y feeling, which I understand is a really odd way to describe it. Perhaps it's the fact that you can't help but be reduced to childish antics when faced with a snowfall - snowmen and snowballs and snow angels. It makes you feel like your normal adult rules have been suspended.

The last time I went out in the snow that night was at about half past two. It had stopped snowing but the light was still funny, the sky had a yellowish tinge to it. Theresa and I threw another couple of snowballs, but when we accidentally hit the neighbour's window, we figured it was time to call it a night.