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Rock The Puppy! Rock The Puppy!
Jan. 24th, 2015 12:14 am...We all looked out over the fabulous vista, which would probably have been better in the daylight and had it been a lot closer to the downtown, before coming to the conclusion it was too cold to be outside with no heaters and we opted to go back inside, the English crew to the bar on floor six and us back to the ground floor bar. It was great that we had made such an impression on one of the bar staff in the ground floor bar - he shook our hands on the way in and told us about how he found our tea, as if it was a great mystery. He also said he would get us anything we wanted so we grabbed some beers and crepes (ham and soft cheese), while he told us a little about life in Morocco. Unfortunately we couldn't stay too long and upon our departure, he asked whether we would come again on Friday night. He looked quite disappointed that we couldn't but we said we would come back again on Monday evening before we leave. It was nice to experience the famed friendliness of Moroccans without having the pending financial transaction and hard selling in the background - our experience in the souks has made us suspicious of the intentions of everyone, even if they are trying to be genuinely helpful. In a way, it was reassuring to discover that our Australian friends had suffered the same experience - apparently a henna tattoo artist had grabbed the lady's hand and dawdled something on it, asking for the equivalent of €60 for the privilege before they had chance to stop her. Sadly such acts means you always need to be on your guard so it was good in the hotel that we found someone genuine.
Most of Marrakech was closed down at midnight by the time we walked back to the hotel, with very few bars or clubs to be seen. Downtown may be different but this was the trendy new district (it even has two Nespresso shops) so I was surprised how quiet it was. Still that suited us as we were knackered and needed to get up for our train journey to Rabat, which was due to commence in the morning. We had hoped to squeeze the Jardin Majorelle, a giant garden gifted to the city by Yves Saint Laurent after the city adopted him in 1964. Containing 300 plant species from five continents with a desert theme, it promised to make for good viewing. Unfortunately, we miscalculated how far the walk was - 30 minutes each way - and we initially encountered the main gates closed, discovering soon after that the main entrance was 200m further away around a corner. We bumped into two French people, one of whom was deaf, who had the same difficulties we had and resorted to asking a local. Having a train to catch at 10:45am and still ending to check out of our hotel and get breakfast, we came to the conclusion that we didn't have enough time to do the gardens justice and would try and come back on Tuesday given time. So we trudged back to the hotel, with Wolfie's ankle and blisters causing him all sorts of problems, and off to McDonald's at the train station, the only place we could get breakfast quickly. Except we couldn't - it had opened at 9am but by 10am it was still selling nothing, while they don't seem to have a breakfast service here assumedly because most of their breakfast products contain pork (or at least they do in the UK). So it was convenient store biscuits for us as we first checked out of the hotel and went back to the station to catch the train, which we could see boarding from our hotel room.
I always enjoy catching trains in foreign countries as you see a dynamic of local life that you never normally get to see. This was certainly the case during our four and a half hour journey north from Marrakech to the Moroccan capital, Rabat. We had opted to go first class as it was only £5 cheaper than second plus it guaranteed a seat reservation. It was in an air conditioned compartment of six seats, two of which were occupied by a local lady wearing a traditional shawl and her little boy, who must have been around five years old and was learning to draw numbers in a workbook. Three men got on at Benguerir station about an hour down the line and they spent quite a large portion of the journey in stoic silence. Sometimes they talked to the lady but I'm not sure if they had ever met before, while the youngest of the men was talking to the child and encouraging him to make tiger noises. The kid was quite bored and spent a good portion of the time in the train corridor swinging on a bar attached to the window but he was reasonably well behaved and certainly not irritating. Meanwhile, the lady spent quite a while updating social networks or playing a racing game on her tablet - technology is a big thing here despite the relative poverty, with shops selling TVs and the like jostling for supremacy amidst the traditional jewellery and handicraft stores of the souks. At the lady's request, the thick red curtains were drawn closed in our cabin but I pulled them back occasionally to spy the countryside and towns through which we were passing, with the drumlins and escarpments of the Atlas giving way to flat fertile fields of grass, a surprise for Africa but then Morocco is quite fertile. While we were on the train we also picked up some snacks from the buffet trolley - a rather dry chicken sandwich containing some green stuff before a plain cheese sandwich later for lunch. At twenty dirhams it was quite reasonably priced I thought and added to the synthetic biscuits with the strawberry filling that we had picked up at Marrakech train station, it sustained us until late evening. Around Casablanca, most people got off and I was a bit perplexed with the timetable saying we had a ninety minute layover there. In the end, we didn't and carried on straight through, although we were running fifteen minutes late due to a hold up earlier down the line. It is great watching the world go by from a train window, seeing young urchins selling bunches of lavender on station platforms and glimpsing a sight of rural life in a country and I felt quite privileged to share the journey with Wolfie. The train may not have been the quickest or the newest but it was reasonably comfortable and the journey certainly didn't feel as long as it was.
We had booked our tickets to Rabat Ville station in the centre of the city but before we set off, we realised our hotel was at Rabat Agdal, the station before. I thought this station would be far bigger but it was little more than a halt, with even the main stations not being that big. I guess this is what happens when your train network isn't particularly extensive and there is only one mainline service every two hours. We got off at Agdal and headed to the hotel, which is conveniently on one side of the station car park. We checked in and pretty much headed straight back out again, using the convenient map the hotel had given us, as we had two hours of daylight remaining and we wanted to take advantage of this. Our destination was the Tour Hassan and Mausoleum of Mohammed V, both in the eastern portion of the city and conveniently a direct tram ride away from our hotel on Line 1. Granted we had to walk into the centre of lively Agdal, one of the major districts for professionals here, but ten minutes later we were on a sleek modern tram heading into the heart of the city, all at just six dirhams (46p) a ride. The journey to the other side of the city only took around twenty minutes and we soon disembarked to a wonderful view, with the imposing Tour Hassan looking over the Oued Bouregreg river towards Sale, a delightful small town on the opposite bank to Rabat. To our left, the west, you could see the Atlantic Ocean rolling up the river while the marina complex and bridges are new completions designed to regenerate the Sale area, which is in bitter competition with its bigger and more prestigious rival. We crossed the road to look at this marvellous view from a promontory upon which there were a handful of teenage girls and a man selling his sticky nut sweets. We also spied a puppy on the street just doing his pup thing. We then turned around to see the magnificent Tour Hassan, built by the Almohads in an attempt to become the second largest mosque in the world at the time after the one in Samarra in Iraq. Sultan Yacoub el-Monsour died before its completion in 1199, but the minaret had intended to be 60m tall, but it was abandoned at 44m in height. The mosque was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755, with a forest of shattered pillars all that remains of this grandiose project. The tower itself was modelled on the Koutoubia in Marrakech, an impressive minaret that we had already viewed.
Next to the Tour Hassan is the Mausoleum of Mohammad V, a beautiful white marble edifice built in the intricate Moroccan style. The doors and exterior fountains in particular were beautifully adorned while there are a number of guards in full military regalia and armed with ornate pistols guarding the tomb of the late King Hassan II and this father inside. You can view the mausoleum from a gallery above, admiring the delicate interior tiling or zellij and sombre scene below, with the King's white marble tomb surrounded by Morrocan flags. It's quite a grand yet peaceful place and a rather moving place to be.
After seeing the sights on this complex, we opted to head into the centre of Rabat, utilizing the rather convenient tram network. As we did, we spied the Rabat Ville railway station, noting how much smaller we expected it was going to be, as well as the huge Roman Catholic St Pierre Cathedral, built in the Art Deco style in 1919 and completed two years later. It has two very distinctive towers on either side of its front, which were completed in the 1930s. There's a tram stop right next to it but it dominates the square upon which it sits and indeed the skyline of the city as a whole. It is a breathtakingly unique building and a relative modern triumph, serving as the seat of the archdiocese of Rabat. We were headed to the medina however, the heart of the old city before the French arrived in the early twentieth century and significantly enhanced it. Indeed the importance of Rabat has waxed and waned with the ages - in the eighteenth century it was a haven for corsairs while in the latter part of this period it was briefly made the capital by Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah. The medina itself was built in the seventeenth century and apart from the Tour Hassan and a few other bits, it was all there was of the city up until 100 or so years ago. It was laid out on a grid system so it's far easier to manage than the souks of Marrakech, while there were also very few people hassling us as we walked around, making for a far more pleasant experience. Added to this was the magic of the gloaming, enhanced by the call to prayer which reverberated around the small alleyways from the number of mosques contained inside the old city walls. It was tremendously evocative and we could even peer in and watch the prayers take place as some of the mosques had their doors wide open. The main road west-east in the medina is Rue Souika, which has textiles and silverware shops on the eastern side and food and spices further west. Each souk is arranged like this - with products being sold split by area so there was a spice quarter and a leather quarter etc. I get the impression it's less strictly enforced now than it may have been in the past but it was just great watching people conduct their daily business, bartering, buying and selling, and encouraging customers to do the same. Halfway down we stopped for a cake and a cocktail smoothie before we came upon the Grand Mosquee around the gaudy gold jewellery section of the souk, with the Mosque having stood here since the fourteenth century.
As we were getting lost amongst all of the shops, Wolfie started to struggle, with his ankle giving him a range of pain due to his need to walk funny as he has a number of blisters on his feet. This forced us to leave the medina, passing through all of the delicious smelling food shops including snausage stands and butchers with dubious cuts of meat, to try and find a place to sit. Normally, we would go to a bar but this is a Muslim country and such establishments are few and far between, indeed most of the bars we have discovered were in mid to high range hotels so consequently were pretty sterile places. We traipsed up Avenue Mohammed V, which like many of the highways here was brightly lit by lights resembling Christmas ones back home, looking for somewhere to go but aside from the numerous ice cream parlours, there was nothing. Ice cream is a massive thing here and it seems that patisseries, cafés and parlours replace pubs and bars in terms of things to do. Indeed there weren't that many restaurants around either, with most of the places we found tending to be establishments selling tea, cake and ice cream, backing up the guidebook's assertion that Moroccans tend not to eat out. It made me wonder what we would do without pubs in England and how much we rely on them to provide us with our social life. I certainly couldn't live without them and while Morocco is not a dry country by any means, it has been quite an adjustment to not find alcohol and the social spaces that go along with it quite so readily. We did happen across a tea house but they said this was closed, despite 15 or so tables being occupied, and with Wolfie in increasing agony, in the end we plumped for the terrace at the Hotel Balima, which we had initially discounted as we thought it was a snack bar. There was a bar underground but there was no one in this while on an adjacent street there were two dive bars that we didn't risk venturing into, particularly as there were a lot of kids begging outside. On our journey to the Balima, we also got accosted by a deaf man who wanted to give us a leaflet on sign language and a pen for the sum of ten dirhams each. We bought one out of kindness but needed to save the rest of the money for the tram. In addition to the relative lack of bars, the people here are dressed far more traditionally and conservatively than those in Marrakech, perhaps reflecting the latter city's status as one of the more liberal places in the country (and also a city with a greater tourist influence - we haven't seen any tourists in Rabat so far).
After yet another bottle of Flag Special - there seems to be only two beers brewed here and we are alternating between them - we opted to go back to Agdal to get some food. Unfortunately, we struggled to find a restaurant that wasn't a patisserie and found ourselves back at our hotel, hungry but with Wolfie unable to continue due to his ankle. As a consequence, we had an uninspiring meal in the hotel with the backdrop to the Africa Cup of Nations in the background, a tournament Morocco had been due to host but pulled out from last month due to fears over Ebola. This was a huge shame as it would have been great to have seen a match live but I guess it wasn't to be. The locals do seem to be quite heavily into it, with the spaces around the TVs full in every restaurant I have seen broadcasting it. Perhaps I'll catch a match tomorrow - we already have some good restaurant recommendations from the hotel now, places we couldn't visit today due to Wolfie's foot and there is a bar we are meaning to try too. With sights planned out too, Saturday should be a good day. Hopefully anyway.
Most of Marrakech was closed down at midnight by the time we walked back to the hotel, with very few bars or clubs to be seen. Downtown may be different but this was the trendy new district (it even has two Nespresso shops) so I was surprised how quiet it was. Still that suited us as we were knackered and needed to get up for our train journey to Rabat, which was due to commence in the morning. We had hoped to squeeze the Jardin Majorelle, a giant garden gifted to the city by Yves Saint Laurent after the city adopted him in 1964. Containing 300 plant species from five continents with a desert theme, it promised to make for good viewing. Unfortunately, we miscalculated how far the walk was - 30 minutes each way - and we initially encountered the main gates closed, discovering soon after that the main entrance was 200m further away around a corner. We bumped into two French people, one of whom was deaf, who had the same difficulties we had and resorted to asking a local. Having a train to catch at 10:45am and still ending to check out of our hotel and get breakfast, we came to the conclusion that we didn't have enough time to do the gardens justice and would try and come back on Tuesday given time. So we trudged back to the hotel, with Wolfie's ankle and blisters causing him all sorts of problems, and off to McDonald's at the train station, the only place we could get breakfast quickly. Except we couldn't - it had opened at 9am but by 10am it was still selling nothing, while they don't seem to have a breakfast service here assumedly because most of their breakfast products contain pork (or at least they do in the UK). So it was convenient store biscuits for us as we first checked out of the hotel and went back to the station to catch the train, which we could see boarding from our hotel room.
I always enjoy catching trains in foreign countries as you see a dynamic of local life that you never normally get to see. This was certainly the case during our four and a half hour journey north from Marrakech to the Moroccan capital, Rabat. We had opted to go first class as it was only £5 cheaper than second plus it guaranteed a seat reservation. It was in an air conditioned compartment of six seats, two of which were occupied by a local lady wearing a traditional shawl and her little boy, who must have been around five years old and was learning to draw numbers in a workbook. Three men got on at Benguerir station about an hour down the line and they spent quite a large portion of the journey in stoic silence. Sometimes they talked to the lady but I'm not sure if they had ever met before, while the youngest of the men was talking to the child and encouraging him to make tiger noises. The kid was quite bored and spent a good portion of the time in the train corridor swinging on a bar attached to the window but he was reasonably well behaved and certainly not irritating. Meanwhile, the lady spent quite a while updating social networks or playing a racing game on her tablet - technology is a big thing here despite the relative poverty, with shops selling TVs and the like jostling for supremacy amidst the traditional jewellery and handicraft stores of the souks. At the lady's request, the thick red curtains were drawn closed in our cabin but I pulled them back occasionally to spy the countryside and towns through which we were passing, with the drumlins and escarpments of the Atlas giving way to flat fertile fields of grass, a surprise for Africa but then Morocco is quite fertile. While we were on the train we also picked up some snacks from the buffet trolley - a rather dry chicken sandwich containing some green stuff before a plain cheese sandwich later for lunch. At twenty dirhams it was quite reasonably priced I thought and added to the synthetic biscuits with the strawberry filling that we had picked up at Marrakech train station, it sustained us until late evening. Around Casablanca, most people got off and I was a bit perplexed with the timetable saying we had a ninety minute layover there. In the end, we didn't and carried on straight through, although we were running fifteen minutes late due to a hold up earlier down the line. It is great watching the world go by from a train window, seeing young urchins selling bunches of lavender on station platforms and glimpsing a sight of rural life in a country and I felt quite privileged to share the journey with Wolfie. The train may not have been the quickest or the newest but it was reasonably comfortable and the journey certainly didn't feel as long as it was.
We had booked our tickets to Rabat Ville station in the centre of the city but before we set off, we realised our hotel was at Rabat Agdal, the station before. I thought this station would be far bigger but it was little more than a halt, with even the main stations not being that big. I guess this is what happens when your train network isn't particularly extensive and there is only one mainline service every two hours. We got off at Agdal and headed to the hotel, which is conveniently on one side of the station car park. We checked in and pretty much headed straight back out again, using the convenient map the hotel had given us, as we had two hours of daylight remaining and we wanted to take advantage of this. Our destination was the Tour Hassan and Mausoleum of Mohammed V, both in the eastern portion of the city and conveniently a direct tram ride away from our hotel on Line 1. Granted we had to walk into the centre of lively Agdal, one of the major districts for professionals here, but ten minutes later we were on a sleek modern tram heading into the heart of the city, all at just six dirhams (46p) a ride. The journey to the other side of the city only took around twenty minutes and we soon disembarked to a wonderful view, with the imposing Tour Hassan looking over the Oued Bouregreg river towards Sale, a delightful small town on the opposite bank to Rabat. To our left, the west, you could see the Atlantic Ocean rolling up the river while the marina complex and bridges are new completions designed to regenerate the Sale area, which is in bitter competition with its bigger and more prestigious rival. We crossed the road to look at this marvellous view from a promontory upon which there were a handful of teenage girls and a man selling his sticky nut sweets. We also spied a puppy on the street just doing his pup thing. We then turned around to see the magnificent Tour Hassan, built by the Almohads in an attempt to become the second largest mosque in the world at the time after the one in Samarra in Iraq. Sultan Yacoub el-Monsour died before its completion in 1199, but the minaret had intended to be 60m tall, but it was abandoned at 44m in height. The mosque was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755, with a forest of shattered pillars all that remains of this grandiose project. The tower itself was modelled on the Koutoubia in Marrakech, an impressive minaret that we had already viewed.
Next to the Tour Hassan is the Mausoleum of Mohammad V, a beautiful white marble edifice built in the intricate Moroccan style. The doors and exterior fountains in particular were beautifully adorned while there are a number of guards in full military regalia and armed with ornate pistols guarding the tomb of the late King Hassan II and this father inside. You can view the mausoleum from a gallery above, admiring the delicate interior tiling or zellij and sombre scene below, with the King's white marble tomb surrounded by Morrocan flags. It's quite a grand yet peaceful place and a rather moving place to be.
After seeing the sights on this complex, we opted to head into the centre of Rabat, utilizing the rather convenient tram network. As we did, we spied the Rabat Ville railway station, noting how much smaller we expected it was going to be, as well as the huge Roman Catholic St Pierre Cathedral, built in the Art Deco style in 1919 and completed two years later. It has two very distinctive towers on either side of its front, which were completed in the 1930s. There's a tram stop right next to it but it dominates the square upon which it sits and indeed the skyline of the city as a whole. It is a breathtakingly unique building and a relative modern triumph, serving as the seat of the archdiocese of Rabat. We were headed to the medina however, the heart of the old city before the French arrived in the early twentieth century and significantly enhanced it. Indeed the importance of Rabat has waxed and waned with the ages - in the eighteenth century it was a haven for corsairs while in the latter part of this period it was briefly made the capital by Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah. The medina itself was built in the seventeenth century and apart from the Tour Hassan and a few other bits, it was all there was of the city up until 100 or so years ago. It was laid out on a grid system so it's far easier to manage than the souks of Marrakech, while there were also very few people hassling us as we walked around, making for a far more pleasant experience. Added to this was the magic of the gloaming, enhanced by the call to prayer which reverberated around the small alleyways from the number of mosques contained inside the old city walls. It was tremendously evocative and we could even peer in and watch the prayers take place as some of the mosques had their doors wide open. The main road west-east in the medina is Rue Souika, which has textiles and silverware shops on the eastern side and food and spices further west. Each souk is arranged like this - with products being sold split by area so there was a spice quarter and a leather quarter etc. I get the impression it's less strictly enforced now than it may have been in the past but it was just great watching people conduct their daily business, bartering, buying and selling, and encouraging customers to do the same. Halfway down we stopped for a cake and a cocktail smoothie before we came upon the Grand Mosquee around the gaudy gold jewellery section of the souk, with the Mosque having stood here since the fourteenth century.
As we were getting lost amongst all of the shops, Wolfie started to struggle, with his ankle giving him a range of pain due to his need to walk funny as he has a number of blisters on his feet. This forced us to leave the medina, passing through all of the delicious smelling food shops including snausage stands and butchers with dubious cuts of meat, to try and find a place to sit. Normally, we would go to a bar but this is a Muslim country and such establishments are few and far between, indeed most of the bars we have discovered were in mid to high range hotels so consequently were pretty sterile places. We traipsed up Avenue Mohammed V, which like many of the highways here was brightly lit by lights resembling Christmas ones back home, looking for somewhere to go but aside from the numerous ice cream parlours, there was nothing. Ice cream is a massive thing here and it seems that patisseries, cafés and parlours replace pubs and bars in terms of things to do. Indeed there weren't that many restaurants around either, with most of the places we found tending to be establishments selling tea, cake and ice cream, backing up the guidebook's assertion that Moroccans tend not to eat out. It made me wonder what we would do without pubs in England and how much we rely on them to provide us with our social life. I certainly couldn't live without them and while Morocco is not a dry country by any means, it has been quite an adjustment to not find alcohol and the social spaces that go along with it quite so readily. We did happen across a tea house but they said this was closed, despite 15 or so tables being occupied, and with Wolfie in increasing agony, in the end we plumped for the terrace at the Hotel Balima, which we had initially discounted as we thought it was a snack bar. There was a bar underground but there was no one in this while on an adjacent street there were two dive bars that we didn't risk venturing into, particularly as there were a lot of kids begging outside. On our journey to the Balima, we also got accosted by a deaf man who wanted to give us a leaflet on sign language and a pen for the sum of ten dirhams each. We bought one out of kindness but needed to save the rest of the money for the tram. In addition to the relative lack of bars, the people here are dressed far more traditionally and conservatively than those in Marrakech, perhaps reflecting the latter city's status as one of the more liberal places in the country (and also a city with a greater tourist influence - we haven't seen any tourists in Rabat so far).
After yet another bottle of Flag Special - there seems to be only two beers brewed here and we are alternating between them - we opted to go back to Agdal to get some food. Unfortunately, we struggled to find a restaurant that wasn't a patisserie and found ourselves back at our hotel, hungry but with Wolfie unable to continue due to his ankle. As a consequence, we had an uninspiring meal in the hotel with the backdrop to the Africa Cup of Nations in the background, a tournament Morocco had been due to host but pulled out from last month due to fears over Ebola. This was a huge shame as it would have been great to have seen a match live but I guess it wasn't to be. The locals do seem to be quite heavily into it, with the spaces around the TVs full in every restaurant I have seen broadcasting it. Perhaps I'll catch a match tomorrow - we already have some good restaurant recommendations from the hotel now, places we couldn't visit today due to Wolfie's foot and there is a bar we are meaning to try too. With sights planned out too, Saturday should be a good day. Hopefully anyway.
