Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Place Jemaa-El-Fna At Night

Elena and I decided to check out Jemaa-El-Fna at night since the Routard guide said that's when it comes to life (and to watch your wallet).  And how!  Holy cow!  There must be 10,000 people there.  There are dozens of orange juicers, dozens of food vendors cooking open air kebabs, snails, cakes, cookies, tajines, cous-cous, sausages,--everything Moroccan.  As we wandered around, the owners kept coming out and trying to invite us in to sit at the benches surrounding the grills.  We had eaten so it was a no-go.  They invited us back tomorrow telling us their number.  The number is the only distinguishing feature of the rows of otherwise identical booths.  The guy from 117 told us "Eleven Seven takes you to heaven."  I presume he means it's good, not deadly poison. ;-) They asked where we were from.   The 117 guy and a couple others were Obama men.  I can't complain about that. :-)  Obama has Kenyan blood and people in Africa are very aware of that.  We walked through the smoke.  It smelled good and if I hadn't just eaten a big meal, I'd have been salivating.  I did have 2 orange juices.  Elena had a grapefruit juice and an orange juice.

We saw some drumming, some other acts, a guy trying to hand a monkey to a tourist who didn't want the monkey, all manner of stuff.  But the most impressive was just the huge crowd.

When the time came to head back, we thought we'd grab a cab.  Foolish us!  It is easy to find a cab--but not a cabbie willing to give us the metered rate.  We tried a couple of cabs and gave up.  We just walked home.  Well, we need to be tired, anyway.  The night is not cooling off nicely at all and we need something to make sure we sleep well.

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