1 part culture

We did flee the compound, ahem, resort for one day. Here are pictures from our day trip to Taroudant, a small city known as "Little Marrakesh."

This is one of the first things we saw when we got out of the car - A man carrying a soon-to-be-dead chicken by the feet walking with with his son.

We stopped right away for a drink but mostly just to take in our surroundings. In the square in front of us were snake charmers and a few medicine men. Each of the medicine men had a huge crowd of men surrounding them. I don't know where all the women were. Our guide told us that the medicine men tell stories and give animated "sales pitches" about their herbal remedies. The men listen to these and (hopefully) buy some of the medicine man's offerings. These sales pitches and the intent way the men all stood listening reminded me a bit of preacher delivering a passionate sermon. Unfortunately, we couldn't understand a bit of it. The language spoken in Taroudant is a Berber language.

The snake charmers were there for tourists. As we walked by each one they would suddenly play their flutes. After our drinks we wanted see who of the snake charmers for the girls, but they had all packed up by that time.

There are 2 large souks in Taroudannt. We were lucky to see both the Berber Souk which sold dried fruits, household goods and clothes and the Arab Souk which sold a huge variety of handicrafts (carpets, silver jewelry, pottery.) There were many stalls selling fresh herbs, mostly mint and cilantro. We also saw "tea" stalls that sold nothing but dried herbs and flowers for making tea.

This particular stall sold items used in an hammam. A hammam is a public bath facility. But it is really more than that. Hammams were created because many Moroccans didn't have running water in their homes. A hammam provided a place to bathe. They evolved from merely a place to bathe into a communal space used for socializing. There is a specific process to being bathed at a hammam (yes, there's no self service, someone will scrub you) and a variety of different cleansing products - pumice, black soap, olive soap, henna (for women's hair.) Click on hammam link to get a detailed description of the hamman experience. The red bowl in the middle picture contains black soap. In the first picture you can see pumice stones and henna. The bottom picture is of tooth brushes (at least that is what our guide told me.)

The doors in Taroudant were amazing as were the ones that lined the road from Agadir to Taroudant. I could have just walked done the road photographing doors. Most of them had some kind of metal overlay or detailing on them and then were painted a bright color.

This short, little day trip to Taroudant reconfirmed in me what I love about traveling - seeing things that are so very different than what I'm used to.

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Dear Friends, you may or may not have noticed my lack of posting of late. I'm still trying to rise above the post holiday inertia that inevitably plagues me each year. Still searching for my boot straps so I can give them a hefty tug. I have no doubt that I'll find them, just taking a bit longer than I'd like.
At the same time I'm wondering whether or not to continue this blog. I'm not sure what it is about, why I write it and what I (or anybody else) really gets out of it. I wonder if my attention would be better off in the "real world." Ugh. So there you have it, a self-indulgent spewing of where I've been. Have you ever felt stuck? What helps you get unstuck?