We had planned in June already to go to Morocco together, and booked our flights. I wanted to use the public holiday and Marion was going to arrive in Marrakech on Saturday evening. Because flights were cheapest/the timing was best, I flew to Rabat and spent two days there.
I had nothing special to do there, so decided to try couchsurfing there.. I stayed with a Senegalese guy who seemed quite disappointed when I didn’t fall in love with him at first sight 😀 I learnt that InDrive is illegal there, but everyone still uses it, and only taxi drivers actually mind. So it’s hard to get a car come to the airport for pickup, or a very touristy place that’s full of taxis. Rabat was very calm and peaceful, especially comparing it to Marrakech. When I considered buying shoes, and asked about the price and the quality, a shop owner took me to the (closed for prayer!) shop next to his and told me those shoes are better.. then showed me his own again and how bad they are.. 🙂
We went to some kind of shopping mall where my CS host’s friend had a shop – actually two.. got some chili and special rice to cook, and then had Senegalese beignets and coffee in some park. At every bench there, different people sold different stuff.. our beignets were in one corner, the coffee in another, and then there were also shoes and phones available.
The next day, I took the bus to the centre, then walked around the touristy fake medina area, saw the sea from above, and Sale on the other side of the river. Then I walked through the small streets of the ‘medina’, had pomegranate juice, looked at more shoes, then got a fish sandwich from a stall where lots of people were queueing.
The train ride to Marrakech was funny, my seat was in a compartment for 8 people, and a woman sat on my seat.. she pointed at some other seat which is actually hers, but a man was sitting there. The compartment was almost full.. and from then on, at every station, someone would enter with a seat in there, find it occupied, and everyone would start to state their original seat.. until none was left, and finally they figured out that that one man who had just ignored all discussions was, in fact, sitting in the wrong compartment.. A man told me in French (and wouldn’t react to any of my tries speaking Arabic!) that it’s great that German people read so much.. Moroccan people don’t.. the woman next to me joined the conversation.. And his brother writes books – he showed me videos of his brother,… then another guy got in, who worked in Jmaa el Fnaa a few years ago and told me where to buy shoes and where to find cheap tajine there 😉 One woman was on the way to the airport to fly to Zaragoza, was wearing a sweater and coat, while I was dying in just a t-shirt, she hated wearing shoes on the train (yes, she did take off her boots), was wondering how to get to the airport from the train station, had never heard of InDrive, and was wondering if her backpack was too big.. Another woman who had been on the train since the beginning was going on a women-only trip for a few days and showed me photos of some previous such trips she had taken.. And I got a link for an Instagram restaurant-review page for Marrakech from her 😉