At around 8:30 in the evening, I called Mourad from the Marrakchi train station. We were quick; I was about to board the train, and he had a late arrival coming. He said our good-byes, and I thanked him again for the month. We talked a little, and then I had to board.
That was the end of Marrakech for me. Some of us have talked about going back for a weekend, but it won’t be the same as living there. Next, we’ll be in Fez for two months, and as I write this, I’m already sitting in my new host-home. The new adventure is just beginning. In between Marrakech and Fez, however, we had five days to travel where we wanted, our basic version of spring break over here. The break was meant to give us a chance to explore the country a little, and equally a chance to rest and recharge our batteries.
In the original plans for the entire Morocco program, there had not been any space for free travel, so I hadn’t thought or prepared any plans about where I wanted to go. Pauls told us we were going to travel through e-mail, and I read the e-mail over breakfast in Mourad’s home. My first thought was, “I don’t want to have to deal with this.” About five minutes later, I decided I would go to Tangiers. I don’t know why I was even worried.
After I suggested it, everyone else in the group also decided on Tangiers, eventually. Some of us went to Agadir first. Ryan, Daniela, Sam, Hannah, and I all decided that we would rent an apartment Sam found for four of the nights, and that we would take the overnight from Marrakech to Tangiers, and Alexa, Carly, Lesedi, and Lily would all join us on that trip. That was why, at 8:40 in the evening, on Tuesday the 17th, I got on a train leaving Marrakech.
The train ride itself was nice. The sleeper-compartments were four rudimentary beds, two on each side of the compartment. Space was a little cramped, but we all sat and talked, walking back and forth between the two we had found. For silly reasons, Hannah had ended up in second-class, so we texted with her to make sure she was okay (she was, mostly). Slowly, one-by-one, we all drifted off to sleep. With four of us to a compartment, the space was hot and a little humid; I sweated through my sheets. At around 2, I managed to drop off to sleep.
The man who had checked our tickets when we got on in Marrakech woke us at 7, looking just as bleary eyed as I felt. He handed us our tickets, murmured something in French, and wandered off. Carly, the only one in our car who spoke French, was in the next compartment, so once he had talked to them, I looked over and asked what he had said. “We’re almost to Tangiers,” she said. “It’s the next stop.”
It was an overcast, rainy day, and out our window we could see the city slowly approaching. I noticed that the train was going a different direction than when we had left Marrakech, as in, our car was now at the front of the train, instead of the back. Ryan told me that sometime in the night, we had stopped for a while, and then there was a huge noise. After, the train began moving again, but in the opposite direction, so he thought the engine had been switched. When we got into the station, we quickly met up with Hannah, then split off from the other four to go find our apartment.
We didn’t know exactly how to find it, so we asked a taxi driver to take us to a cafe near the medina with internet. At least, that’s what we thought we asked him. The cafe he took us too was near the medina, but it had no internet. We were a group of five, all with baggage, who had taken up two tables when we sat down, so we ordered one coffee each out of courtesy.
As we drank our coffee, a woman wandered into the cafe, also carrying baggage, and I thought I had seen her getting off our train. She asked us if there was wifi, and once we told her no, she looked crestfallen. “Oh my,” she said. “I just got my wallet and phone stolen. I need the wifi to e-mail my friend.” She said all of this sort of at us, but not really to us. She put down her bag and massaged the side of her head. “The one across the street doesn’t open until 9:30. This has never happened to me.” We asked if she wanted to join a motley crew of Americans for tea, which made her smile and sit. After talking with her for a little, it turned out she had another wallet with plenty of dirhams in it that hadn’t been stolen, and she was planning to take the ferry across to Spain to meet a friend there. She was a professor at a university in Vienna, and had been coming to Morocco for ten years. I was right; she had also been on the train from Marrakech to Tangiers. It was on the train that her wallet had been stolen.
The only thing she asked from us was an Advil, which Sam gave to her as her tea arrived. As we talked, she began to noticeably feel better. She still had a lot of dirhams, and her passport had not been stolen. We laughed and joked, and she began to tell us about the house she and her husband had just bought in Marrakech, in the medina. She taught art at her university, and painted abstract art herself. She asked us about our studies in Marrakech. Close to 9:30, we had finished our coffees, and we paid for her tea as well. She thanked us for talking with her, and we left her with a smile on her face. Strangely, at no point did any of us tell her our names, nor did she ever tell us hers.
We asked the waiter what the neighborhood we were in was, and from that Sam was able to figure out the general direction we needed to go to our apartment. We walked aways, found another cafe, checked our e-mail, figured out where we needed to go, and walked back the way we had come a little, walked around a block a few times, until a man with a white beard whistled for us to stop. He was the doorman for our apartment building, and the owner of our apartment had told him to keep his eye out for five American students. He brought us to the right building, led us up the stairs, and let us in.
Our apartment’s biggest room was the living room/salon. One half of it had a Western style seating set– couch, love seat, armchair, coffee table– made of beige colored leather and a black granite top for the table. The second half was lined with couches and looked in on a wooden table. You entered the living room by just walking through the main door. When you turned right, your first door on your right was the kitchen, which had a stovetop oven, another table, a fridge, some counter space, a sink, and a washing machine. The kitchen also had a second door at the back, which led out onto the small patio in the back. Through another archway, just left of the kitchen door, was the bathroom and two more bedrooms. Sam, who already knew the layout of the apartment, had made plans for the sleeping arrangements, putting me and Ryan in one bedroom, Daniela and Sam in the other, and Hannah on one of the couches in the salon.
Though we did different things each day, the days did follow a general schedule. In the morning, we’d get up at various times. Daniela would go for a walk, Sam would get some work done, Ryan would read. Hannah and I usually woke up last, around 9 or 9:30. We went out for most of our meals, including breakfast in the morning. Most of the places we wanted to go were a distant walk, so by the time we finished breakfast it would be past noon. We would eat our lunch at around 4 or 5, and wait for dinner until around eight. Between meals, we would end up going back to the apartment, where we could rest for an hour before it was time to start walking again to the next meal.
Here are a few of the moments that stand out.
On the first night, we invited the other four who had come on the train with us to have dinner at our place. We ate pasta and homemade hummus, and talked about things to do in Tangiers. After, Ryan, Hannah, and I walked them back to the medina.
On the same night, the five of us decided to walk to the nearby beach. The beach was empty when we walked out to it, and we walked down to the water. After standing there for a bit, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by the police, who told us we weren’t allowed on the beach at night. Hannah later said it was probably because they were worried about the beach being used for drug running at night.
On the second afternoon, Ryan and I went for a walk through a park in the medina. We found a secluded corner and sat on the carcass of a bench where we could laugh without disturbing anyone. We talked until the sun had begun to set over the nearby buildings, then met up with the others and walked back to the apartment.
Daniela came back from a walk one afternoon smiling from ear to ear. She had found a wonderful shop, where she had talked with the elderly shopkeeper for hours. After they talked, it was getting dark, so he told his much younger friend to walk her back to our apartment. He was apparently quite handsome, and we spent the rest of the trip teasing that she had found her Moroccan husband.
We came across a book store on one of the main streets with a sizable selection of books in English. Hannah bought a book called The Forty Rules of Love that she would end up hating. I bought My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, which I have had trouble putting down since. The owner was a handsome and smartly-dressed French man who let the selection of his bookstore speak for itself.
We ate dinner one night at a restaurant called Number One. The entrance was covered with streamers, and the music was a mix of Western classical music and covers of Dire Straits songs. There was a TV surrounded by flashing white Christmas lights that played French nature documentaries the whole night. Our waiter, who may also have been the owner of the restaurant, had us laughing from the moment he walked up to the windowed door beside our table, opened it, turned to us and, with a giant smile, said, “Bye bye,” before stepping out to fix the light outside. I shared a plate of paella with Hannah that was a little overcooked but otherwise delicious.
We left on Sunday the 22nd, and went back to the train station to take a day train to Fez. Since none of us would need to sleep, we were riding in second-class. Most of the six hour trip, I read my book or looked out at the passing countryside, which was extraordinarily green. Occasionally, there would be towns, and sometimes even a city, but for the most part it was countryside. I sat near a tired looking Moroccan man in a black leather jacket. He slept most of the way, but as we approached Fez, he heard me say something in Arabic to the man wheeling a cart of food up and down the train and struck up a conversation. He lived in Fez, but was going to school in Tangiers to get his Masters. While being a student, he also was teaching at an elementary school. We talked a little more, and then he went back to sleep while I turned back to my book.
After a while, I looked up from my book, and in the distance I could see a large clump of buildings, larger than any I had seen on the way. As the train began to rumble in between the buildings, the Fezi teacher looked at them passively. “This is Fez,” he said.