Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Morocco: Jemma and Souks

The shopping in Morocco was amazing!  Ammon and I spent hours wandering through the souks at the Jemma.  You could get lost winding in and out of all of the alleyways, actually we did a couple of times.  There were things to see everywhere and it was just so full of life.  We absolutely loved it!

When you first get to the Jemma you walk into this HUGE square.  It's packed full of people and so many things to see.




Can you tell what that is?  A pile of HUMAN TEETH! You could just dig through the mound of teeth and find the ones you wanted to add into your dentures. 





You could hold monkeys.  Ammon's positive this monkey gave him a disease.  I was more worried about the monkey owner who stuck his hat on Ammon's head and the lice I was positive he'd end up with. (Don't worry, he's clean.)

When this guy realized we were taking a picture with some other guy's monkey he ran over and jumped into this picture too.  He then wanted us to pay him.


These awesome hat wearing men are known as 'Water Carriers'


 Snake Charmers




This man is a fortune teller.  I sort of really wanted him to read my fortune, but I didn't want him to tell me something horrible was in my future.  And I wouldn't have been able to understand him anyway.


These teenage boys were always trying to sell these fairy outfits.  It made me laugh every time.



 We spent New Years Eve at the Jemma.  It was seriously alive with activity.  There were groups of performers everywhere, and people gathering in circles to listen to story tellers.  We couldn't understand anything that the story tellers were saying, but they were so animated with their story telling that we were completely mesmerized.

All of the food stalls in the Jemma were decorated for New Years Eve.




There were stalls and stalls filled with all kinds of dried fruit.


The building in the background is the Mosque.  Nothing in the entire city is allowed to be taller than it.







 There were also tons of tea stands were you could stand and have a cup of tea and spice cake.  Ammon loved the spiced tea, I thought it was just ok. Note the Happy Birthday banner.  They obviously went all out for New Years. :)
 This was the random drunk man that found us.  He spent at least 40 minutes acting out scenes of American movies to have us try and guess them.  Sadly, in his inebriated state he wasn't a great actor, so we were not very good guessers.  He wanted a picture with Ammon.  
 Here's us with the spice cake.   It basically tasted just like what you'd expect if you ate an entire mouthful of whole bunch of random spices.  It sort of burned.
 These were the delicious sossis (sausages) that we ate at in one of the stalls.  There are tons and tons lined up everywhere and they have men trying to talk you into coming to theirs.  Then you can sit and watch the cooks make your food.  It was a lot of fun!



The Souks!

These were great!  We wandered and wandered through these things, and I don't know if we ever walked past the same shop twice.  There was just SO much to see.



This door was made entirely of inlaid wood.  I can't even imagine the work that would go into something like this.  This door led to a HUGE shop full of all kinds of amazing antiques.  I couldn't even believe all of the things that they had in there.

This man was in the top floor of the building.  He was actually in the middle of reading the Quran when Ammon stumbled upon him.  Ammon was able to speak with him in Arabic for a little while.  (Fun Fact: While in Morocco, Ammon actually managed to speak four languages with different people.  English, Arabic, Spanish, and French).





 Aren't these lamps so cool?!  We actually got to see some people make them (although they wouldn't let us take any pictures while they were doing it).  It's an extremely time consuming process, and they definitely didn't use the proper eye wear for such work, but the end result is amazing.  We actually bought one and brought it home, now we're just looking for the perfect place to hang it.




 Some of the sweets in the Souks.  

One of our favorite things in Morocco were the olives.  They were so good.  They had so many different options and every place had different seasonings that they would put on them. They were just so good.  This section of the Souk had an entire row of olive sellers.  It was so fun!






 Delicious!



Thursday, January 17, 2013

Morocco Part 1

Here's the first of probably a billion posts about our trip to Morocco/Lebanon/Some London.  I have a whole ton of photos to dig through, so hopefully I get it all blogged before the end of 2013.  






Morocco was wonderful!  It felt like we had traveled back in time and landed in a foreign land where snake charmers, fortune tellers, and acrobats roamed freely.  

We seriously loved it!  It felt like a huge adventure and totally different than anywhere else that we had been.  There was just so much to see everywhere, and just being able to interact with the people of Morocco was awesome.  The people were SO friendly and willing to help you with anything.  Seriously, people would leave their shops and walk us 3 blocks away just to show us where we could find something that we were looking for. 


Our first day in Morocco we walked over to the El Badi Palace which was located like 30 seconds away from our Riad (the awesome place that we stayed).  It was beautiful, and had a bunch of orange trees growing in the middle of the courtyard.





This was on the outer wall of the palace.  When we stood on the roof of our Riad we were right next to this wall.  All day and all night long there were TONS of pelicans standing up there with their massive nests.  One of the taxi drivers that we talked to said that they guard the palace.  I believe it.



In one of the parts of the palace you could walk into this huge Hammam.  We were able to walk down the stairs and look in all of the different parts.


The tile in this Hamaam was beautiful.






One of the first things that we did while in Morocco was have a bath in a Hamaam.  
The entry of our hamaam.

The hamaam that we went to was actually a really nice one.  It was still an intense experience, but at the end I don't think that I had ever been more clean.  Someone comes in and scrapes/rubs down your whole body with what I'm pretty sure was sand paper.  I'll be completely honest here, and say that it hurt like heck.  After they finish scrubbing all of your skin off they then rub a special 'black soap' on your skin.  (I'm not entirely sure what the black soap is, but when we saw it in the Souks with the spice sellers it pretty much just looked like a huge tub of earwax.)  They then have to rinse you down, and they do it by just throwing buckets of water in your face over and over and over again.  You barely have time to breathe before you're being drowned again by another bucket of water. 

It was an experience I will never forget.

The front walk leading into our hamaam.






More to come!