It’s impossible to get to know a city just by visiting. One can feel a city’s vibe by pulling her corners and snuggling in her smells and colors and sounds, however a short-term connection rarely feels intimate. It can take years before a city reveals her soul to an outsider, and even then, it depends on the individual’s own openness to really see all of her, unbiased.
Marrakesh’s old city – or Medina, in old Arabic – is unashamed to show her visitors her natural chaos. Like a smothering mother who is obsessed with her children, she surrounds the traveler with friendly greetings followed by a torrent of questions: have you eaten? are you thirsty? do you need to rest? do you like art? do you want a shirt/pair of shoes/purse/decorative item/random service/this thing you don’t even know what it is? Knowing exactly what you need before you do, she is already abundantly offering. And if you don’t like the price, she’ll chase you down the street to give you a cheaper price. Her ceaseless approach never feels intrusive, until you realize she is already under your skin.
And she smells like mint. Enclosed by twelve miles of red walls that gave her the nickname the Red City, the Medina has many other smells traveling through its souks – markets in Arabic – and they’re all pleasant: freshly juiced oranges, burning frankincense, spices, charred meat. However, her pure essence is a mint plant flowing out of her crevices, penetrating the passers-by, until they too are convinced that mint is the only existing plant in the whole world. Sold in the souks’ corners in small piles and in the square’s market in larger ones, added in hot water to make tea and in cold drinks to complete a smoothie’s taste, the local people exchange their money for mint as if their life depends on it, which it might as well be.
I got lost in the Medina’s souks which happens to be the largest in North Africa, more times than I can count. It’s almost as if getting lost was the intention behind building those narrow corridor-like streets. I came across dead ends where men cut leather, banged on metals, and colored fabric. I got unsolicited directions to the main square – since that’s where all tourists belong – and I pet skinny, friendly cats asking ruthlessly for appreciation, as cats tend to do universally.
There are no cars allowed in the souks, just motorbikes constantly transferring people across this microcosm. When I witnessed two bikes (unavoidably) colliding, the two drivers got up with the younger attending to the older; both unharmed, they hugged, and the younger kissed the other on the head before each heading back their own way. Old women rolling slowly their own wheelchairs, carts with all kinds of stuff, bicycles, locals and tourists alike looking at shops, a river of bodies with a mind of its own, moving slowly in all directions. It felt safe, being a drop of that river.
In less than 48 hours of strolling the Medina’s souks I observed open-mouthed cobras swaying their upper body to the music coming from a flute; monkeys on leashes; rams shoved on the back of a handcart; donkeys pulling trash filled carts; hawks, parrots and pigeons tamed enough to be placed on kids’ arms and heads; and men’s bodies creating a makeshift ring for a gloved boxing match, all while the police was just a few steps afar. People gathering at the square playing their random instruments, both euphony and cacophony coming from all sides, yet everything pausing magically to make way for the imam’s prayers.
Some of the scenes I witnessed I am sure happen for the entertainment of the tourists, but not all of it – one cannot force this much absurdity in one place. Like a painting created by mixing all the colors on a painter’s pallet together, the scenery at Marrakesh’s Medina does not make much sense until one pulls away and looks at everything as a whole: that’s when everything simply comes together organically exactly as it’s supposed to.
Passers-by can, and do put labels on Marrakesh’s Medina. Like a piece of art that affects everyone differently, each one of those labels holds its own truth. “An unorganized yet highly functional chaos”, the label I would give the Marrakesh I met, one that seen through the mirror our experiences hold, I believe fits us both quite well.
