Old Hands, part 6

The next big plan for Mike and me was a trip to Marrakesh, Morocco, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. To watch the girls we had hired Dolores Sainz de la Peña, the school’s gym teacher—quite a character, with a Brooklyn accent to give the lie to her long Spanish name. “We’ll have a great time,” she assured us. “I’ll show them my collection of Esther Williams videos.”

The Moroccan trip was a standard travel package that was widely available—Morocco is directly south of Spain, not far at all—but we had a hard time deciding which class of hotel to choose. “How much time do we ever spend in the hotel?” Mike asked. “As long as you’ve got a decent room, you’re set. I hate to spend the money for something fancy.”

“Yeah, but this is for our anniversary,” I said. “Everyone says that La Mamounia is really worth the extra expense.” La Mamounia was a famous old hotel from French colonial days, well known for having been a favorite of Winston Churchill. It had been completely remodeled in 1986, and it had the added advantage of being the closest hotel to most of the tourist sites in Marrakesh.

“Okay, okay, let’s do it,” Mike said. We were buying the travel package for another puente weekend—it was a special charter scheduled for the five days that started on a Wednesday with the holiday La Inmaculada and continued with Friday’s Día de la Constitución. Most people took off the Thursday in between, making for an extra-long weekend. The result was that the tourist parts of town, otherwise empty at this season, were occupied by us and about 500 Spaniards.

The hotel was stunning, with a lobby full of marble, mirrors, gorgeous carpets and a huge chandelier. Vases full of roses were everywhere. The staff was unfailingly helpful, and our room was large and comfortable and beautifully furnished. We unpacked and took a quick stroll around the hotel’s famously lush gardens, then headed out to the Medina, the old, walled central city. It was a ten-minute walk to Djemaa el Fna, the central plaza famous for its snake charmers and water sellers.

The atmosphere was as exotic as I could have hoped for. Many people were dressed in djellabas (robes) and caftans and pointed slippers, and not to impress tourists. Donkey and horse carts were everywhere. There were smells—spices wafting out of restaurants, horse dung on the streets, warm bodies close by. People touched us and asked us to look at what they had to sell.

I was full of fear, having read about the Moroccan men who hang on tourists and try to get hired as guides, but I didn’t want to sit in the hotel for five days. We began picking up would-be guides right away. A half-dozen or more waited outside of every hotel, looking to catch whoever emerged. We walked to Djemaa el Fna, feeling really hassled, then tried to walk into the souks, the covered market that radiated from the square. Eventually the most persistent hanger-on—a young guy named Mustafa—got us to hire him as a guide, and it turned out to be a good idea, as he kept other people away from us. Also, we never would have found our way through the souks alone. We walked through a few souks, and I was still feeling nervous, but when we got to the spice souk I started to feel better. Big baskets of colorful spices filled every booth, and I understood what I was looking at. I bought some spices I hadn’t been able to find in Spain—ground coriander, turmeric and ginger—and had fun doing it, bargaining a little over the few pennies I was spending.

Mike asked Mustafa to take us to the rug souk. It was clear that Mustafa had connections with certain merchants who undoubtedly paid him a commission on anything his clients bought. Mustafa took us to a friendly rug merchant who escorted us into his attic shop and showed us all the different kinds of rugs and carpets and explained about their provenance and served us mint tea.

Then came the big sell. I had been a salesperson, but I had never seen anything like this. There was no way to resist this guy, no way to say no.

We stumbled out onto the street, the light of day nearly blinding us. “What happened in there?” I asked Mike. He was holding our purchase, a silk and cotton Berber rug.

“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered. “I didn’t go in there to buy a rug. I don’t think I even bought this one, but somehow it was sold to me!”

“I thought I knew something about sales techniques, but that guy invented them,” I said, amazed.

We didn’t even quit after that incident. Mustafa took us through many more souks—leather, wood, brass, slippers, djellabas. The merchants were doing some business, mostly with local people engaged in their daily shopping. Then we asked Mustafa to take us to a restaurant. He dropped us off at the Grand Hotel Tazi, and we paid him a few dirham (the Moroccan currency), about $5 worth. The restaurant was good, but we found out later that they must pay a great commission, because every other guide we had in the next few days tried to take us there, too. The first bite was like the first bite had been in Paris the year before—“Wow! Spices!” Spanish food, though we loved it, was very plain.

We chatted with a Spaniard at another table and compared notes on guides. “These people are so poor,” he said, “you just make up your mind to give out about $10 a day in tips to guides. They aren’t official guides, but they can lead you to the main attractions. One’s as good as another. It’s not unreasonable, and it makes your day a lot more comfortable.”

So for the next couple of days we didn’t hesitate to hire a guide the minute we left the hotel. We saw the Koutoubia, a minaret and the Saadian Tombs, the 16th-century mausoleum of a sultan and his family. It reminded us of the Alhambra in Granada, the greatest Moorish architecture in Spain.