Time Zones

July 3, 2012

It became evident that we weren't successful at the whole time thing when we were awoken by a knock on the door telling us our guide was waiting for us downstairs. Yikes! Mind you we are still sleep deprived, jet lagged sleepy heads. It is a miracle we did not injure ourselves trying to throw our clothes on in a rush. But we made it out the door with all the clothing right side out. It turns out Marrakech is an hour later than Madrid, ten hours later than California.

We did a four hour walking tour with just the guide, Leea and I. It was really nice because our guide was very informed about his country and it's history and we were able to ask questions and share with each other. We went to the Bahai Palace, the central mosque, the markets and even the area where the artisans make the goods. Seeing items like shoes and lamps being hand made was amazing. And talk about fresh organic vegetables! There were potatoes, onions, leeks, and all manner of fruits an vegetables for sale with the dirt still on them lying in piles on the pavement.

After our walking tour we wandered around trying to find the parking area where we were supposed to meet our driver for the hot air balloon ride the next morning. We were not successful. We had to call and tell him he would need to meet us at the door of our hotel because we were hopeless with directions. In our defense I should mention that there is no map of this area, that there are about a thousand little streets and passage ways, that there are no street signs even for the few streets that do have names, and that you are running a gauntlet of human and visual distractions every moment of your search. At one point in our search Leea ended up with a monkey on her head. The driver understood. Apparently we are not the only hopeless tourists. I have wandered around many cities in the world including those on mainland China, but Marrakech is truly daunting.

After this we needed a nap. We awoke in time for dinner. We decided to have an early dinner because we had to get up at 4 am for the hot air balloon ride. It was not to be, getting to bed early. We went right down the street to a restaurant that attracted Leea's attention earlier. The door was open and the guy standing outside welcomed us to enter. It was about 7:30, but they were not really open yet. They were setting the tables. They invited us to sit and said it would be ten minutes. Apparently ten minutes in Marrakech is equivalent to sixty minutes in our time. But we had a soda and talked, so it was actually relaxing. The was exquisite. It was set in an open air courtyard with gorgeous tile work and fountains, trees, plants, and lovely lighting. They had live music, rose petals on the table and the food was yummy scrumptious. We started with a section of about ten cold salads, a bean dish, lentil, cold cold tomato, eggplant, and on and on.

When I ate the lentil salad I bit down on something hard. It turned out to be a fair size chunk of glass. Leea wondered how that could happen. I suppose something glass broke in the kitchen and when glass breaks it flies about and maybe a piece flew into the lentils as they were cooking. Who knows? I wasn't too concerned. I was just hoping and hadn't actually swallowed another smaller piece, but if I had there wasn't much to be done about it, only time would tell. I thought about trying to tell our waiter about it so it wouldn't happen to someone else, but the waiter and I did not share a common language.

After the salads we had a pigeon pastry dish. Yes, it said pigeon on the menu. I don't know if pigeon means in Arabic what it means in English. I seem to remember in Spain last winter my mom in Salamanca used the word pigeon to refer to game hens. But whatever it was, it was delicious.

Dessert was sliced baby bananas, slivers of water melon with chocolate and strawberry ice cream drizzled with chocolate and mint tea. Sinfully good. Note to self: mint tea is deceptive. I didn't end up getting to sleep until about one in the morning.

When we were satiated and got the bill it turns out they couldn't process the credit card because the Internet reception was down and they couldn't communicate with the bank on the machine. Leea ran back to the room and got some cash and we were able to pay. I'm not at all sure how that would have worked out if we hadn't had sufficient cash on hand. Oh well Marrakech is a mysterious place which seems to work on some other systematic plane than we are used to in the US. Though this is a Muslim country the Tao works well here.