A pair of Matching Souks

Hamed arrived promptly at ten, just as promised.  Today we will walk the souks of Marrakech, the little shops that you see in every travel show.

We walked.  And Walked.  We walked some more.  We dodged donkeys and horse-drawn carriages, scooters and carts, buses and taxis and berbers and bedouin grandmas.  Americans look at this and say chaos.  Moroccans look at the same thing and say what's the problem?

The souks are arranged like a department store: there's a spice souk, a clothing souk, a carpet souk, and iron souk, and just about anything else you would needs souk.  We walked through most of them.  I think the most interesting one was the iron souk, where craftspeople were actually making things by hand, hammering copper and brass, turning wood on manual lathes, and shaping tin and iron into lamps and other implements.

Five hours of souking is enough.  We went back to the riad and slept until dinner, which consisted of tagines and kebobs and live Moroccan music.

Today is the 21st, and we are now back in the Casablanca airport awaiting our flight to Barcelona.