Morocco Trip Part 3: Marrakech

We caught the early train from Casablanca for the 3.5 hour trip to Marrakech with little incident.  We thought Casablanca was warm - but Marrakech is an inland city and tops it by about 5 degrees, so it was getting above 40 degrees.

We decided to walk the few kilometres from the train station to our hotel.  We were initially a little concerned, as there were hordes of people on the pavement yelling and waving flags - I was worried that it was a political demonstration, but it turned out that they were excited because that evening, Morocco was to play a qualifying match for African Cup for football.  Apparently an upcoming football match, 14 hours away, necessitated a horde of people driving up and down the road on trucks, motorbikes and cars with flags, yelling and blowing vuvuzelas.  I could understand it an hour after they won, maybe....

Walking down one of the main streets, where we were constantly passed by flag-waving soccer hooligans :)

After we made it to the hotel, we wandered around the Djemaa el Fna for the afternoon - which is the central square.  The square is full of people doing all sorts of things - snake charmers (with real live snakes), monkey handlers, people drawing henna tattoos, jugglers, fortune tellers, acrobats and dancers.  We did take some photos but they don't really get across the scale of the place.  At night time, the sellers mostly clear out, and they bring in food carts and benches, to set up food stalls - like the Night Noodle Markets only with more people yelling at you to come and eat at their shop.

There were a bunch of carts like this selling freshly squeezed orange juice too.

We decided to hang around in a cafe for a while and relax, and try one of the local specialties - mint tea.  It was really nice!

Around the Djemaa el Fna was the souqs - commercial district/markets.  They were very busy and full of people, and you could walk for miles passing shop after shop.  They tended to cluster around certain professions - there was a dyer's souq, and a leatherworker's souq, etc.

The different parts of the souq has very different looks as well.

A more touristed street.

A street with more locals.

We saw a lot of carts pulled by donkeys on our wanderings as well - fairly old school.

The sky was incredibly clear, and we were staying in a riad right next to the Djemaa el Fna, so Stephen had the opportunity to take some arty photos of the Koutoubia Mosque (the largest in Marrakech).  It has a distinctive minaret due to the decorative balls on the top.

Koutoubia Mosque at sunset.

The old and the new.

Koutoubia Mosque by daylight.  As I said previously, we were staying very close to the mosque - this allowed us to fully experience the local culture by means of an early morning wake-up call for the dawn call to prayer.  It was much louder, and lasted for a much longer time than I was expecting.  Apparently there are loudspeakers on the side of the minaret.  It wasn't a very good sleep-in.

The street on which we were staying. There were many cats in Marrakech - they were everywhere.  I was slightly concerned that there were so many of them that they would end up in our evening dinner.

Tiny kitten on the mosaic floor.

We visited the Saadian Tombs, which has some beautiful architecture.  Apparently the story goes that the sultan built the tombs for himself and his family.  When he died, the next sultan was quite keen on everyone forgetting his predecessor, so he blocked them off from view, and they were only accessible through a tiny passage in the adjacent mosque.  They were rediscovered by aerial photography in 1917.

Ornate mosaics and arches.

These were the tombs of the chancellors and wives, scattered around the grass.

The mausoleum.

We also visited the Bahia Palace, which had yet more beautiful mosaics and architecture.

 Recess on top of a door.

Arabic calligraphy was engraved into the mosaics as well.

Unfortunately, the camera battery ran out at this point.  We did buy some more, however, they were "refurbished" batteries (someone had cut off the top and tried to glue them back together), and they didn't actually work.  So no more photos!

All in all, it was a whirlwind trip, but it was a very interesting place to visit.  It was fairly difficult to go straight from the comforts of home to a place that is so culturally, linguistically and meteorologically different (we arrived home to 5 degrees and raining).  If we were to visit again, a longer, more relaxed trip via somewhere more western and French-speaking might be a good idea as to help us transition.  

Morocco Trip Part 2: Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca

In Morocco, there are only two mosques in the country that non-Muslims are allowed to visit due to their interpretation of their holy book.  Luckily the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca is one of them, so we decided to go and check it out.

It is a stunning building.

It has the world's tallest minaret, at 210m tall, and is built partially on reclaimed land and partially on a platform over the ocean.  Apparently this has something to do with a passage from their holy book that states that "the throne of Allah was built on water" - part of the floor is glass and looks straight down into the ocean.

The detail everywhere was beautiful - every surface was patterned with different mosaics and arches.

The pattern on the minaret in more detail.

The side of the mosque including the fountain.  The sky is incredibly blue.

We went on a guided tour of the mosque, which lasted around an hour.  We were surprised to see that they ran tours in French, English, Spanish, Italian and German, and English was one of the smaller groups.  Our clothing was fine here, but other tourists who apparently hadn't noticed that they were visiting a Muslim country were made to purchase shawls to cover their bare shoulders, arms, and, uh, cleavage.  I bet that was fun for the ticket seller to explain.

The Royal Door.  The guide suggested that this is only opened when the King wants to come and pray - everyone else enters through the side door.

The mosque has a retractable roof - like a sports stadium, but carved with many ornate patterns.  Apparently the King (Hassan II) who commissioned the mosque wanted the worshippers to be able to "contemplate God's sky and ocean", and the roof is opened on special occasions.  Pretty cool idea.

This is facing towards the front of the mosque - I am not sure what you would call this area on a mosque, but it would be equivalent to the pulpit of a Christian church.  We took our shoes off when we entered the mosque before stepping on the carpeted prayer area.  25,000 people can fit inside the mosque, some on the floor here, and some on the "women's galleries" that hang over this area (I couldn't get any good photos of them).  The women are completely segregated from the men - there are separate entrances and carved screens so that the women's entrance is not visible to the men.  The white carved portions at the tops of the pillars are actually masking speakers, so that everyone in the hall can hear the prayers.

It was quite dark inside the mosque, so here are some obligatory artsy photos, taking advantage of the light shining through the windows.

 Reflections on the tiles around the outside of the carpeted prayer area.

Patterns everywhere!

The dome roof of the entrance foyer.

Underneath the mosque are washing facilities - apparently one of the requirements before praying is for "ritual purification" to various degrees.

There is a hammam (Turkish bath) under the mosque too, but apparently it is never used as people visit the many hammams nearby instead.  Apparently at a hammam, one is supposed to hang around with various buckets full of water soaking - it sounds kind of like a public spa that one undertakes in one's underwear.  It wasn't really our kind of thing, so we didn't partake, but the patterns on the walls were beautiful.

A day was really enough to see Casablanca - the next day, we set off on the 3.5 hour train trip to Marrakech, which is the subject of the next blog post.

Morocco Trip Part 1: Casablanca

With Stephen's 30th birthday fast approaching, I asked him whether he would rather go on a surprise holiday or have a big party.  Unsurprisingly, it being Stephen, he picked the surprise trip.  Unfortunately for me, that meant I had to find somewhere cool to take him.  I struggled trying to find a location that was suitably cool while also being close enough for an extended weekend trip - until I saw an advert from Air France on a website, quoting cheap fares to the north of Africa.  Hooray, I thought, and booked flights to Algiers for a 5 day holiday.

I started looking up accommodation, and realised my error - I had thought that Algiers was in Morocco, but it  was actually in Algeria (who'd have thought).  I managed to call quickly enough and cancel the booking - rebooking the flights to the correct destination of Casablanca (which is actually in Morocco) this time.  Luckily they cancelled the booking, or this might have been a very different blog post!

The next problem was clothing.  Morocco being a Muslim country, I wanted to respect the local customs, so I took a number of trips to cheap local stores looking for appropriate clothing - long pants, long sleeved shirts and tunic-style tops that cover your hips (headscarves are optional, but most travel sites recommended wearing your hair in a ponytail).  It was tough to find appropriate clothing, considering that the forecast for Morocco was 40 degrees and it's coming up to winter in Canada - plenty of long sleeves, but all designed for -10 degrees.  I managed to scrounge together enough clothing in the end and hide it from Stephen - and then it was time to pack and go!

The custom is for men to wear long pants in Morocco as well (apparently wearing shorts is like walking around in your underwear), so my packing instructions to Stephen the morning of the trip gave the game away - I said to pack long pants and no shorts, but no jumpers.  When we got to the airport in the evening, I asked if he could guess where we were going, and he suggested that if it needed long pants but not jumpers with absolute certainty, it must be for religious rather than weather reasons, and therefore he thought we were going to Morocco (I knew I was dating him for a reason - smart man).  

Once I confirmed that we were going to Morocco, we were both a bit nervous - I had been so busy organising the trip that I hadn't really had a chance to think about the cultural and language issues that we were about to experience, and Stephen had only just found out.  We caught our flight to Paris, changed into appropriate clothing, and caught our flight to Casablanca, arriving in the early afternoon local time.  

Nothing ever goes quite to plan when you are in a strange place.  I had plans for getting from the airport to our hotel - the airport train should take us right there - but we discovered while purchasing tickets in our best French (most people in Morocco speak French and Arabic but no English) that the airport train didn't actually go to that station - but it went to one 3km away that we should be able to catch a taxi from.  We quickly discovered on the train that there were no stop announcements, and very few signs on the stations.  We figured that our stop would be the last one, so we hopped off 45 minutes later when the train stopped... in the middle of nowhere, 10km past our hotel.  Stephen managed to negotiate a taxi fare (with me translating for him), and we finally made it to our hotel around 4pm, exhausted and ready for a shower and some sleep.  All things considered, we didn't do too badly for the first mistake of our trip.

The next day, we headed out to see the local sights.  Our first stop was Casablanca's main attraction: the Hassan II Mosque, of which we took so many photos that it requires its own blog post (to come).  We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city.  

Casablanca is the biggest city in Morocco, but it doesn't actually get that many tourists - it's more the business hub.  Most of what we saw was beautiful buildings.

Stephen really liked the cute little balconies on this building.

Even the local Christian cathedral manages to look vaguely Moorish.  No giant cross, for some reason.

The main square was a nice garden surrounded by government buildings, mostly empty of people.

You would have thought that we were the only tourists in the city or something.

We also visited the tiny local market - here's a swordfish just lying there dead in the open.  Ugh.

Apparently they eat turtles too.

Next up, Part 2 (where the good photos start) - the mosque!

A Year In Retrospect

Yesterday marked the anniversary of our arrival in Canada - 1 whole year!  We've come a long way since stumbling off the plane in Toronto after 35 hours with no sleep and heading to the hostel, followed by kebabs for dinner because nothing else was open.  Thinking about it, everything has gone better than we could have possibly hoped.

Here are the top 5 awesome things about living in Canada.

1.  We have a totally awesome group of friends.
I thought that making friends would be the hardest thing for us to do in Canada.  When I moved to Sydney, it was very difficult to find people to hang out with - I had my friends from university who had moved with me, and I met a couple of other people who had moved from interstate, but the vast majority of the "locals" didn't really seem interested in hanging out.  Full social rosters, I guess, and it only got worse over time as my university friends moved back to Brisbane for various reasons.  I was expecting a similar issue in Canada, but it hasn't happened that way.  One of the things that I did when we moved was look on Meetup.com for some "people like us" who might be interested in hanging out.  I found a meetup group of World of Warcraft players who ran a Toronto-based guild, and had regular meetups at pubs and the like to hang out, so I convinced Stephen and signed us up.
It was with a bit of trepidation that we went to our first meetup - it was a Rock Band night at someone's house, which was a little scary (going to someone's house you don't know is kind of weird).  Our doubts were soon put to rest as everyone turned out to be totally awesome and great fun to hang around with, and I even got to show off my Rock Band skills.  We moved our WoW main characters over, and many Rock Band nights, pub nights, random drinking nights, board gaming nights and raid nights later, plus the unforgettable week in Indiana and most recently, Pam and Luke's wedding day - the rest was history.  Moving to Canada would have been a lot harder if it wasn't for the brilliant friends that we have made.  (Including the ones who don't even live in Toronto!)  We love you guys and we're very lucky to have found you :)

2.  We adopted Jax, who is occasionally infuriating but mostly awesome.
The rental market in Australia is such that it's almost impossible to find a rental property if you have a dog.  Here, though, we have Jax and we live in a nice apartment next to a giant park on the subway line, which is totally awesome.  Adopting Jax was certainly an "experience" - I didn't realise before we adopted him how much work it would be having a dog (sometimes I feel like we adopted a kid, only one that you can't take into restaurants).  On the whole it's been a positive experience though - it's pretty awesome coming home to Jax's wagging ears and tail and knowing that even if nothing else is going right, at least he is happy to see you.  I feel pretty happy knowing that he has a good life with us that he might not otherwise have - and he loves the walks, boats, and the leftover steak that are the perks of living with us.  Having Jax forces us to get out of the house to walk him twice a day, sun, rain, or -35 degrees and snowing, and I`m pretty sure that this stopped us going crazy through the winter.  Jax is awesome :)

3.  We both have jobs that pay us more than we earned in Australia, and the cost of living is lower.
I was a little worried about finding professional jobs on working holiday visas, but it hasn't been an issue at all.  Stephen has had a full-time job for 6 months now, and I've had various offers and taken a couple of contracts - luckily, the market for my job is through the roof here, and my experience and portfolio impress despite no one knowing any of the company names I worked with.  On top of this, we pay 75% of what we paid for rent in Sydney, and everything is cheaper, including food and clothes.  The upshot of this is that we are living very comfortably here, and that gives us plenty of money to spend on........

4.  We have been on a number of awesome holidays.  
It`s fantastic living somewhere that is so close to so much of the world.  Since we moved here, we`ve been to Montreal, New York, Costa Rica, San Diego (apparently I never wrote a blog post about this trip?!), Orlando and Indiana, and it`s been incredibly cheap.  It`s also been really cool to be able to take a long weekend to go to these places, rather than needing two weeks minimum.  I look forward to heading to a lot of exciting new destinations in the year to come!

5.  Winter was pretty cool, and nowhere near as bad as people had led us to expect.
The Canadians seem to think that we`re crazy, but I really liked winter.  It dragged on for a bit long, but it snowed, and the temperature wasn`t really that bad.  It really helps that the houses here are built for winter - it`s warmer inside our Canadian apartment than it ever was in our Sydney apartment during winter.  Going dog-sledding was a highlight of the year, despite how touristy it is.  The other highlight was going into a pub for dinner, and coming out to find that the whole world was covered in a blanket of snow that wasn`t there when we went in - that was certainly an experience.

Bonus:  6:  Homesickness?  What homesickness?
I was expecting to be homesick, but it hasn't really happened.  Thinking about it in retrospect, it isn't too surprising - after emigrating halfway across the world at 7, I don't really have those kind of strong bonds to a place-where-I-grew-up, and I already lived 1000km away from my family in Sydney.  It is hard sometimes missing birthdays, weddings and occasional trips for one of Dad's fried egg butties, but it is all manageable.  Mostly I wish I could just convince all of our Australian friends to come and live here.  Or else invent a teleporter.  Hmmm....

All in all, I am so happy that we decided to move to Canada - it's been all positives and no negatives so far, and I look forward to another awesome year!  So what's to come in the next year?  Hopefully more gainful employment, and more awesome holidays!  In the next year we want to see more of Canada, and this winter we are definitely going skiing.  I think we should add Washington DC to the list, as well as trips to Seattle and LA to see friends.  I'm also hoping that we can make it to Cuba this year, being as it's so close and all.  I imagine that if we asked Jax, he'd say he wants more boats and more steak, so we'll have to fit that in too.  (I would say that I want a kitten too, but Stephen has already said no to that one.)  We'll probably have to head back to Australia at some point as well - if only to have a couple of beers and some decent brie.  And to introduce the Aussies to poutine! :)

Tonight, we are heading off on a top secret vacation to celebrate Stephen's 30th birthday - it's top secret because he has no idea where we're going.  I think I will have to tell him at the airport.  Hopefully all goes well, and we'll be back with awesome photos in a week!