Into Another World

July 2, 2012

We get up an out the door to go to the airport with three hours until departure. We checked in Leea the night before on my phone, but it wouldn't let me check in, so we knew we would have to do airport check in. It took about twenty minutes to get to the airport and what we discovered at the Iberia terminal can only be described a massive lines everywhere with lots of stressed out travelers. I'm thinking there has been a bomb threat or something and all flights have been cancelled, but no, it was just hundreds of people all trying to check in at once. The lines were like summer lines on a new ride at Disneyland, only lots of luggage and panic about missing flight. We stood in line for two hours, but made it to security, only to subject me to one more pat down and a noticeable boob grab. Seriously. But we got to the gate on time and made our flight on a little puddle jumper to Marrakech. This entailed a bus ride out around the landing gates and boarding from the tarmac. Old style.

The flight was lovely on a tiny plane. Landing again involved getting down to the Tarmac and riding on a bus. It was a very small airport, but when we got to the passport control it was packed and the lines moved very slowly. They do not have passport scanners so they have to type each persons information into the computer and from what I could tell their Internet connection was very slow. We stood in line for two hours.

Once we got out of passport control our bags were waiting alone on on the carousel like forgotten children. We collected them, exchanged some money for Moroccan Dirhams and went out to meet the driver from the hotel. And then we were introduced to Marrakech, warmth, business, cars, donkey carts, bicycles, motor scooters, trucks, buses and hand pulled carts all on the same roads. It is semi organized chaos. When we were off loaded and walking to the hotel it was even wilder, if that is possible. There are narrow, narrow passages with goods set up on either side. When I say narrow, I mean you could stand in the middle and reach either side. Competing for passage are pedestrians, motor scooters, donkey carts and hand pulled carts of various sizes. While you are walking there are men young and old trying to engage you in conversation to entice you to look in their shop or buy their goods. It is a game.

At our hotel they had a cup of mint tea for us and a dinner menu to choose what we would like to eat because someone was going to go to the open market and buy the ingredients to make our meal for us. Incredible! We made our selections and went to our room to nap until dinner. After dinner, about 9:30 we went out exploring. It was still about 85 or 90 degrees. We returned to our room, read, did some emails and Facebook and tried to figure out what time it was because we needed to be up and have breakfast by nine to meet our guide for a walking tour.