Moroccan and Mo'rollin through Morocco, part 2

October 15, 2024

Greetings Friends, Family, and Fellow Travelers,

Here is part 2 of our Morocco blog and what we know you all come to read — Justin’s deep thoughts and the children’s perspectives. Jonah has two videos for you!

Justin’s Soapbox: 

Morocco was a big change of pace for us, moving faster through multiple cities, and it flashed by like a fascinating dream of evolving landscapes moving by, unique people entering and exiting, and there always being something incredible to look at. In Europe we saw a lot of countryside and farms beyond the cities, and in Morocco outside the cities it felt much more earthen and tactile. We learned about how clay cement was made and spent time in newly built buildings entirely comprised of it. We saw incredible gorges and mesas and sand dunes. We worked a little clay ourselves. The boys became obsessed with the potential US dollar value of “genuine rocks from Morocco.” Earth, as in the rocky gravelly stuff, was very much a key theme of our time in Morocco.

Our two days in the desert deserve special mention in this regard. There genuinely is something mesmerizing about the dunes. Once we began our camelback journey across them, left behind the rockier town areas behind and were surrounded, it had a very clear effect on my spatial perception. For one thing, you’re surrounded by essentially just two colors and simple textures: pure blue above with the cloudless sky, and a beautiful tan-yellow below in the rolling hills of sand. Add in the very graceful rounded look of the dunes themselves and the fact that they appear to be endless, and your subconscious mind starts to go into “wait, what’s going on here?” mode. 

It’s something that you can’t really capture in a picture or video, the strange uncertainty of knowing where boundaries are, difficulty with depth perception and even perception of the steepness of certain hills - it’s a very physical experience that, to me, felt a bit like putting on VR goggles for the first time and having to recalibrate your spatial awareness. 

 I’ve never been to a “classic” desert before with rolling sand dunes like this, but now having been I can see how visually inspiring they can be, especially related to styles of art that I like. Being surrounded by the dunes sort of unlocked a sense memory of sorts for me from my childhood. Ok, bear with me on this a moment because this is a real deep tangent.

There’s a certain art style that has always been intriguing to me of, in part because of some early memories of puzzling over it. Basically it’s some combination of retro airbrush art, 1920s art Deco, and and 1990’s trapper keeper visuals. Stuff that is crisply defined but depicting something otherworldly. Anyways, my parents have a nice vinyl collection and when I was very young I remember my dad showing me the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Mystery To Me”, probably because it was ostensibly a picture of a strange gorilla. But the odd, smooth and rounded geometric textures of the image were really what was interesting me. Anyone who went to school in the 90’s had some example of the more pop-art version of this in their backpack on their binder cover. A more contemporary, uniting example here here is the cover art for Tame Impala’s The Slow Rush, which has this style along with a literal sand dune!

The point here is that, when actually in the sand dunes with nothing but clean-cut, elliptical horizon lines in every direction, along with the surrealistic waviness of the sand itself, it felt like being at a sort of origin point for this visual aesthetic. 

Now having ranted about that instead of the mind-blowing geometric art of the Islamic Madrasas or the Mosaics of the King’s Palace or the beauty of the architecture of some of the riads we stayed at probably constitutes some kind of touristic crime on my part and I wholeheartedly apologize. Everything we saw was beautiful. But it was particularly poignant for me to realize how the americanized pop-art that occupied a corner of my mind for one reason or another seemed to be activated by the visual power of the desert. 

Other highlights beyond the desert was seeing the monkeys, who generally seemed happy and unmolested by humans, and chefchaouen. Also the fact that they keep giving us little bowls of olives at breakfast and dinner, that’s a big plus for me.

To be honest, I was less charmed by Marrakech, or at least the area of the city that we managed to explore. This was in part due to the fact that we were there for only 2 days and thus had to hit the tourist-centric market district. The stores and sights in this area were more repetitive (you see the same items over and over, the same “snake charmer” display by 5 different guys in the square) and ultimately not for me. In CITY the market we traveled to was clearly meant for local residents, and our market experience in Marrakech was the opposite of that.

Jonah’s Musings:

October 3, 2024

I have never been to Africa before, nor has anyone else in this family. So today was a brand-new experience for all of us. We are only staying in Africa for 2 weeks instead of the 2.5 months we stayed in Europe. We're also only staying in one country: Morocco. Morocco is the most fast paced part of this trip so that is why this blog was written 1/3 of the way into this trip. We have been moving a lot so the longest we're going to stay in some places is 2 days. Most of the places we've stayed in were 1 day. 

Some parts of Morocco are very crowded and other places barely have any people walking around. But every place in Morocco we've been has the same animal everywhere: cats. I love cats, so it made me kind of sad to see them out on the crowded streets with little food and uncomfortable sleeping places. It made me feel better, though, when some of our guides said that people actually feed them quite a bit. I also have seen cats sleeping on cushions and benches, so it wasn't all that bad. 

Another thing that kind of made me a little annoyed that couldn't really be fixed was that we couldn't pet them. One of my favorite things about cats is being able to pet them, but my mom and I knew that they were stray cats, and they weren't owned by anybody. I didn't want to get bitten or scratched by a cat so I just left them alone. We did see a lot of kittens that were really cute, they were all snuggled up together so it was just adorable. The cats were great but what I really want to talk about is what we did today. Today we saw one of my favorite animals: monkeys. Monkeys weren't on my favorite animal list until today, and there are many reasons for that. We went to the Ifrane National Forest to see them, the monkeys were called barbary macaques. They were very cute and golden with little stubby faces. They were really cute. 

There were so many of them, there were some that looked like they were mothers, and others were babies and the males. The funny thing about them was where they lived, you would probably expect to find a monkey in the jungle or maybe in some cold areas but they were in a very different habitat. They were right in the middle of a forest with dirt ground and spread apart spruce trees. The monkeys themselves were really funny too, they were climbing trees and running around and doing all sorts of monkey stuff. Some of the monkeys actually started jumping off a tree onto our driver's car so we had to move it. I'm just surprised they didn't set off the car alarm. 

Another funny thing that they did was steal from people. There was a little restaurant-like area where people were eating bread. One of the monkeys seemed to want the bread and decided to steal it from a family nearby. The monkey jumped on the table and grabbed the bread right off the plate and scampered up the tree. My mom and I both thought it was really funny and cracked up for about one minute. This place was really cool and I really enjoyed going there. In the next blog I will talk about camel riding, so stay tuned!

October 9, 2024

I have never been to the desert, so when we woke up on the day to ride camels, I was very excited. Camels are one of my favorite animals and I was thrilled to ride one of them. After a lot of waiting we finally got to get on the camel. Getting on it was easy, because they were sitting down, but when they got up it was pretty bumpy. The camel would stand up after you got on it, and it felt like going up an elevator. I seemed to just keep rising and rising and eventually it stopped. I was about 7 feet above the ground on this thing, so it was really high up. 

I was afraid of falling off at first, but eventually I got used to the bumpiness and we continued our ride through the Sahara Desert. The dunes were beautiful, just massive hills of sand and some bushes. We walked on the camels for about an hour and a half. Eventually we arrived at our campsite of hundreds of luxury tents. The guide got the camels to sit down while we were on it (which was a little bit fun) and we checked into our tents.

The tents were quite nice and had some beds and a bathroom (obviously). Right before dinner when the sun had set we looked up at the sky to see if we could find any shooting stars. I have never seen a shooting star before so seeing one now would not only be my first time seeing one, but it would also be in the Sahara Desert.  But I didn't see one shooting star... I SAW OVER TEN OF THEM! They aren't what they look like in movies or TV shows, it's not like seeing a bright streak of light go flying across the sky.

It's more like seeing a little bright needle go a little far and disappear. I'm going to kind of skim over some of the stuff we did because I want to talk about my FEELINGS on this trip. I think that so far seeing other cultures has been pretty cool, we have seen a lot and I think that most of what we've seen in other places is amazing. But there are some things that I haven't been very happy about. Number 1 is that at these markets in Morocco people are calling to you from their shop stands and it gets really annoying. 

Especially since we're an American family we are targeted a lot by store owners. Another smaller thing that I don't like is the way animals are treated. We were at a market that sold pictures of you with monkeys. Selling the actual monkey was illegal, but you would have to pay to take a picture with it. They put the monkeys in these little cages and they looked really cramped, they also put outfits on them. I hated this so much, I just wish that some people would have more respect for animals. 

October 11, 2024

On our trip we saw a lot of buildings, all from different cultures. In this blog though I want to talk about the buildings that we saw in Morocco. I will talk about the shape, the materials used to build them. 

The shape of the traditional Moroccan buildings is cube-based, and arches are pretty common. Also, the designs we have been seeing don't have designs of animals or people because it is forbidden in the Islam culture. Insides of buildings are also look much nicer on the inside, The reason for this is for more privacy. The buildings that were usually owned by the Jews had more windows because they had a different tradition. 

What the buildings are made out of were very interesting as well. The schools and palaces we saw had mosaics on the flour and carvings on the walls. I really liked the design, in was really unique and I have never seen anything like it before. We also saw a lot of buildings made of mud. The mud was dried and held together with wheat, which was pretty cool. I think that the building designs were seeing in Morocco are pretty cool and that more places in the world should use them. Anyways that was my little blog on the building styles in Morocco, so I hope that you enjoyed, and stay tuned for the next blog!

 Simon’s Reflection:

I am going to write my blog about three things: cats, visiting Essaouira, and being stranded.

There are a lot of cats in Morocco, but I think there was more in Italy. But the ones here are far bigger; they must be fed more! I’ve been counting cats every day now, and I’ve always been getting so much because there's so much cats around. Also, it’s fun to do it all day because it keeps my brain occupied. I am good at it because I have good sight and most of the time I see stuff what people don’t see. The most I’ve seen in one day was 134! I like seeing the babies best.

In Essaouira, we went to the docks and we saw all these fish. There were fish there because the fishermen were getting so many good catches. There were small sharks called “mako sharks” and “thresher sharks.” There was also this giant tuna about 6ft long! I asked if I could touch the tail of it and they said yes. Jonah, did, too. We also asked if we could touch the heads of the sharks. They thought about it for a second and said yes. Dad was like, “nooooo” but we did. It was very fun, and then we got fish burgers for lunch.

Finally, a few days before that, we kind of got stranded in the rain at night because the road was blocked off with water. We didn’t have any food, and we were worried we would have to wait out the night. Luckily, though, the water cleared, and we got to our hotel. Thankfully. We had the quickest dinner we ever had and I went to bed as quick as I ever did and all was good!

Overall, what I thought about Morocco was I thought it was going to be much more hectic, and the food would be much different, but the food is awesome. I also thought that most of the places wouldn’t have bottled water because there wasn’t much tourists in Morocco, but there was. And there was camels, so that means it’s awesome! In all, it was very fun. I had a good time in Morocco.

Calla’s Corner:

Interview attempt #1:

The scene: Hanging out in our riad in Marrakech

Calla: I like staying in hotels lots and I really much love staying with my mother and father and my favorite family, and I love spending time.

Mommy: Can you tell everyone about visiting the desert?

Calla: <….>

Calla: We saw churches!

Mommy: We did not. Morocco is a predominantly Muslim country. We saw mosques. As well as some Jewish sites.

Calla: YES WE DID!

Interview attempt #2

The scene: Sitting in a henna café, waiting for our tattoos to dry

Calla: Ok, so I got a tattoo, it has like like …it’s gonna be on the plane… it’s gonna last and it’s gonna last and it’s gonna last [Ed note: she is referring to the fact that it won’t wear off before we leave Morocco]. Malaysia will be really fun. We didn’t see any churches but was really fun and we looked around. We saw palaces. It was the best thing I ever found before. I’m happy cause I’m famous ‘cause all my babies want to have fun, so I’m happy. I’m happy I got this time. I really have loved this unicorn tattoo and I hope it lasts long until Malaysia.

I like it so much we went on the camels. We walked down and plopped down on the sand - we went poof and we went until bedtime. Fairytale story is the best. It’s only thing I found before. Well, I like the… that we went plop. We went in the dunes and we plopped and we had so much fun. And I love it because we went on a lot of camels and we hand fun times and I like the sand and mostly had a joyful time. We played for hours and had so much fun. We had a volcano pie [Ed note: Even with follow up probing, I have yet to understand what this means. Maybe something she created in the sand?]

Mommy: Calla, what is the best thing you’ve eaten in Morocco?

Calla: We have not eaten any noodles in the chicken.

Mommy: Do you like the chicken?

Calla: I liked all the chicken!

Mommy: You liked all the chicken?

Calla: Yes, and I liked all the burgers too!

Mommy: Yes, we were very surprised by that.

Calla: Yes, I never ate one until I ate one one day and then it was the best. It was the best burger I ever ate before.

 See you all in Kuala Lumpur!

xo,

Sara, Justin, Jonah, Simon, and Calla