أكثر من مراكش

Something else I forgot about the day we left for Marrakech. At the end of Arabic on Friday, a man with an entourage walked into our classroom and began shaking everyone's hand as were were packing up our things. I had a little Arabic conversation with one of the guards and found out that he was the Tanzanian ambassador to Morocco.

One more thing I wanted to mention about the ride to Marrakech. The roads were strewn with election litter, as municipal elections were Friday. Morocco has an extraordinarily low voter turnout (in the last parliamentary elections, 3 years ago, only about 25%) -- but one would never know this from the elections' high visibility. Everywhere that we've gone, we've seen charts painted on the outside of walls (often at schools), and after election results came in, these charts were filled in with symbols (recognizable to the illiterate, which hovers around half the Moroccan population) representing the votes received by various parties.



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After leaving the Sa'adian tombs, we headed over to the ruins of the Badia Palace, built 1578-1594. Once as majestic as the tombs, it was completely stripped when the Alawwi dynasty came to power and moved its capital to Meknes. All that is now left are massive crumbling walls, underground tunnels, plumbing apparatus, and scraps of tile here and there. The main reception court is enormous, with sunken Andalusian orange groves and vast pool basins. The idea behind this kind of garden is that the tops of the trees are at human level, producing chirping birds and sumptuous aromas complemented by the trickling water of fountains. We moved into the apartments reserved for important visitors, now home to storks nesting on the tops of the eroded walls. We then climbed to the top of one of the walls and looked out across the city. We could see minarets and drying laundry, but also a sea of satellite dishes interspersed with the rooftop gardens of riads run by rich Europeans. While the rooftops were once the domain of Marrakshi women, the advent of riads hosting scantily clad tourists have changed the game.




Below is the Kutubiyya Minaret at the center of city, near the Djemaa al-Fna. The ruins of the original mosque for which it was built are to one side; 20 years later, a second mosque was built over a controversy involving the direction of the qibbla (but the second turned out to be worse than the first). The name Kutubbiya came from the adjacent street, which housed many booksellers (the Arab word for books is "kutub").