A teen boy in a football jersey was the first of many shopkeepers I’d meet in Morocco. I didn’t get his name, but when he learned I was American, he lit up and shared how excited he was to be going to Miami next year for the World Cup. He was a gentle introduction to haggling in the souks—I’d been informed one should never pay the first price—and I walked away with a colorful vintage tote I paid half the asking price for.
Kamal was the first shopkeeper I tried my French on while eyeing his ceramic wares. After saying, en Français, how poor my French was, he quizzed me on the color of each cup in his shop. My French passed with flying colors and we progressed to small talk about our lives. He looked to be in his 60s and shared with me he had a brother in Houston, Texas. “What do you think of Trump?” he asked. I’d say it was a loaded question except the exasperation with which he asked it betrayed that we felt much the same. He told me how sick his brother was of Trump, and we shared many eye rolls and head shakes to emphasize our distaste for the president across the obstacle of my shaky French. Hating Trump shares a universal language it seems. “You know who was a better president?” he asked. He didn’t leave me time to guess. “Obama!
Kamal was only the first of several Moroccans who would volunteer this opinion. I shared my tepid agreement. I haven’t been blown away by any U.S. president in my lifetime, but if forced to choose, I’d choose the same.
I left Kamal’s shop with two colorful, striped espresso cups. I don’t drink espresso, I drink tea, and Kamal was explicit that these cups were only meant for coffee. But they were so much cuter than the tea cups on display that I purchased them with the intent to criminally misuse them for tea. Don’t tell Kamal; it would break him.
Marrakech’s medina enchanted me. By the end of my time in Morocco, I’d come to realize each city’s medina has its own signature look, particularly its own color scheme. Marrakech’s is a beautiful red terracotta with hints of pink. Within weeks of returning home, I settled on painting my new dining room this color, and I’ve never been more in love with a paint job.
But it wasn’t just the color of Marrakech’s medina that caught my attention. It was the latticework shade structures sprinkling dappled sun over the souks. It was the squatness of the doors in my narrow alleyway—how ducking to enter my riad felt like discovering a secret place. It was how quickly quiet descended as soon as I escaped one of the medina’s arteries to wind through its capillary maze. The vines dangling from trellises overhead. The calico cats on every corner.
I only ventured from the medina once and found it wholly overwhelming. To leave the medina is, on one hand, to escape the torrent of tourism, but it is also to be spat from a relatively walkable and quaint landscape almost entirely free of cars, into an oven of pavement and clotted five lane roads.
Various forums had cautioned me that, as a woman traveling solo, I’d be the target of harassment and catcalling. This warning didn’t hold up in my experience. And in Marrakech in particular, the only time I felt in danger was in attempting to cross the road outside the medina—a game of Frogger I hoped never to repeat. Except I did repeat it just ten minutes later after abandoning my walk to the Jardin Majorelle with “Fuck this” conviction. The cobblestones combined with my thin-soled sandals had torn my feet to shreds by that point and I was loathe to step in one of the city’s many suspect puddles with open blisters.
This low point was a blessing in disguise. The sky had gathered dense gray clouds, and right as I stepped into the courtyard garden of my beautiful riad, it began to gently rain. Something about the little pools so common in Marrakech’s riads makes them seem intended only for decoration in spite of reviewers saying how lovely it was to take a dip. But there’s something eternally compelling to me about getting into the water when it rains.
Soumya, the manager who greeted me when I first arrived wasn’t there that day, and the woman I asked about the pool spoke only French. Thankfully, I had the vocabulary for this inquiry well in hand. She enthusiastically pointed out where the towels were and told me to come down and grab one when I was ready.
Alone in the courtyard, I slipped into the wading pool. I was mesmerized by the way the movement of the water and the raindrops on the surface distorted the pool’s green checked tiling. The rain was steady but light. All the other guest windows that looked down on the courtyard were shuttered. I had the magical place all to myself. Privacy and silence under a rainy sky in Marrakech.
This silence, as always, left me alone with my thoughts. I thought about the last time I’d been in water, in the rain, overseas. It was while snorkeling in the Adriatic off the island of Brijuni in Croatia. Part of my joy that time had come from seeing how happy my partner was in that moment. He surfaced about twenty feet from me, raised his snorkeling mask and looked around in awe at the rain. I beamed seeing him so happy. In hindsight, it was because I didn’t often see him that way. Awe didn’t come easily to him; it took a lot to hold him in a moment. I don’t think he indulged in my joy that day the way I did in his. I wish I’d understood that sooner.
Now I indulged in my own joy. There was an alcove with a mirror in it at the end of the little pool. I smiled at myself this time. A big smile, surrounded by wisps of hair that had started clinging to my cheeks in the rain. I was still settling into the forty-year-old body that I’d barely known for half a year. I appreciated how strong it looked after a year of lifting weights.
The woman I’d spoken French with crossed through the courtyard and fretted over my things being out in the rain. I insisted she needn’t worry about it. The rain was so light that it wasn’t a threat.
I stayed in the pool until the rain stopped. I felt loose and light, like I’d visited a hammam for a massage. But it was just the drug-like effect of desert rain. Inhaling the petrichor of a new desert halfway around the world wasn’t so different from the scent I grew up with of summer rain in Phoenix.
I slipped into linen pants and went out in search of dinner under the still-gray sky. The first place I sought was like a riddle. I could see its wide open windows and clay lamps overlooking the street, but circling the block over and over, I found neither sign nor door. An observant shopkeeper across the street stopped me. “Are you looking for the restaurant?”
I nodded, grateful for his recognition of a lost tourist.
“It’s closed,” he said. “Renovations.
I thanked him and wove back into the narrow alleys of my neighborhood, eventually finding another little door in my neighborhood with a discreet sign on the wall.
