Monday, 15 June
A group of people and I wandered about the souq in Marrakech for a while yesterday. The outer limits are more touristy than the inside: snake charmers placing their snakes on people’s shoulders, telling their friends to take a photo of them, requesting money because harassing people with animals alone is just not enough; women with henna grabbing foreigners’ wrists and gracing their hands with designs before they have time to pull away, and that’ll be 250 dirhams, please; a monkey on a chain whose purpose I can’t discern. It’s all rather depressing, or at least I imagine it is for the animals involved.
Deeper in the souq, things are somewhat calmer. Vendors have set up booths to sell their wares: shoes, clothes, spices. Our group attracts attention, of course—no self-respecting lot of boisterous Americans wouldn’t (sigh)—but nobody is too pushy towards us. When it starts pouring, we stop inside the shop of a man who sells musical instruments, and speak to him in Arabic a little. Other people are better at this than I, so I leave them to most of the conversation, but he seems really nice and dispels some of my fears of talking to people in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a thing that nobody actually speaks other than TV reporters and the like, but nevertheless what I have been studying for the past four semesters. We have learned a few phrases in derija, the Moroccan dialect, but only the really simplistic ones, and I feel silly and impostorish using them. Oh well. I assume things will get easier in the weeks to come.
Mosque we saw on the way to the souq:
And then, the souq:
1 comment:
1. I, too, find this scene to be kind of depressing/stressful. Poor animals and poor unknowing tourists who have henna forced upon them.
2. Good luck with the Moroccan dialect. I know it's kind of a different situation, but I can sympathize with your impostor feeling. I only know a few choice phrases in Danish, and I feel ridiculous using them. Then the alternative is to use English and feel like an obnoxious American who just expects everyone to speak English... So, hope the impostor feelings fade.
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