April in Review
Travels on a new continent!
Other than a big vacation, April was a quiet month. The weather is slowly but surely warming up, and the long darkness of the winter days is giving way to long, bright evenings. We’ve enjoyed exploring the coastal parts of Edinburgh on our bikes and are looking forward to warmth to go along with those long days.
April included the next long break in the semester, so we sought out warmer temperatures in Morocco—and were greeted with rain. Thankfully, it warmed up and became much sunnier the last half of our trip!
We knew before we set foot in Scotland that the inexpensive airfare would be a huge benefit to this time, but an equally wonderful aspect that we didn’t consider in advance is the lack of jet lag. We caught a morning flight to Marrakesh and landed four hours later in the exact same time zone. It feels great to not have to spend a couple days adjusting when traveling to a different continent!
Sight
We started in Marrakesh, then made a three day tour to the east to see the Sahara before arriving in Fes. The old town (medina) of Marrakesh is overwhelming—it feels like whole square miles are taken up by stalls selling various crafts and goods. And there’s a lot that’s impressive, but it again feels hard to process it all when there are sixty stalls in a row selling leather goods, then thirty all selling ironwork, etc. Each section/alley is dedicated to one type of item, and if you paused more than a couple seconds at a stall, the owner would start trying to sell you something very aggressively. Getting outside the medina to see large gardens and parks like the Jardin Majorelle (created by Yves Saint Laurent for his home there) quieted the crowded bustle that was pretty wearing and overstimulating.
Overall, I (Micah) didn’t love Marrakesh, but I was rewarded as soon as we left the city. Marrakesh is pretty flat, but you quickly hit the huge Atlas Mountain range. Where we envisioned dry, rocky cliffs, for much of the country, the Atlas Mountains are lush, cedared lands. Even where the geography does become rockier, a blend of brown and orange, the valleys are still abundantly green with olive trees, palm groves, and fields.
Our eventual destination was the Sahara Desert, which pokes through the southeastern corner of Morocco. Elisabeth has a pretty short “life goals” bucket list, and seeing the Sahara Desert is on it, so we couldn’t miss this chance. The sandy part is really a tiny area—there aren’t many views where you can’t see past the dunes. There also aren’t many views where you don’t see another dozen or so tourists. We fell in with every other group, riding camels or ATVs out to some tents (countless Sahara glamping options, all of which look almost identical). The touristy aspect was certainly a disappointment, but we found moments to wander back into the dunes on our own. It gave us incredible stargazing late at night and a beautiful sunrise early the next morning, with hardly anyone else bothering to be awake and outside.
From there we went to Fes, another chance to see Morocco’s diverse landscape. Dry plains gave way to canyons replete with palm groves, then higher mountain passes cut through to farmland, forests, and vineyards. To be honest, Fes was much cooler than Marrakesh: the medina isn’t all markets and shops; it’s also filled with residential and cultural areas, so it felt more vibrant and less consumerist to walk through. The best day of our trip hands down consisted of a cooking class (the best couscous we had the whole time was what we learned to make), a hammam (spa) in the afternoon, followed by sharing a bottle of Moroccan wine (who knew Morocco produces wine!) watching the sunset over the rooftops of Fes.
Taste
Moroccan food is good, but we—surprisingly—got pretty tired of it. You have tagine (roasted meat and/or veggies in a thick sauce) or couscous (which is also served in a tagine and also comes with roasted meat and/or veggies, but without the thick sauce). It’s very straightforward, and at least what gets served to tourists doesn’t have much variety. We ended up pretty excited to find some other types of restaurants (Lebanese, Berber) to switch things up.
That said, the Moroccan salad game is on point. If you ever go, and a restaurant offers an appetizer of [some number ranging from 4 to 11] salads, do it. These are essentially a bunch of veggie small plates, some like diced cucumber-tomato salads, others like roasted and pureed eggplant. Anyway, it was delicious, frequently our favorite part of a meal.
Smell
Camels—not the most impressive animals around. That’s all.
The tanneries of Fes, where they still prep and dye animal skins for all the various leather products, are really cool to see. The process is still very traditional, which also means very manual: workers just tossing large dried skins into deep vats of different dyes in the open air and heat. And yeah, it smelled pretty bad.
Morocco also knows how to make the most of good smells. Visiting in the spring, the scents of blooming orange blossom were everywhere, and rose water perfumes a lot of indoor spaces. A summary: When Morocco is beautiful, it’s knock you over gorgeous and a feast for every sense. When it’s not … they hand you mint sprigs so you don’t have to smell it.
Sight Pt. 2
I recently posted reviews of Project Hail Mary and The Drama (as promised), as well as Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, a new, interesting-enough diversion that popped up on Hulu. I also just reviewed Mother Mary, which confirms that David Lowery makes movies that are my kind of weird. My latest review covers Bi Gan’s Resurrection, which is weird (and insanely arthouse and esoteric) in ways that I’m still not sure what to do with.
My final essays for this semester focused on two films I’ve thought about more than most in the last few years. In one, I wrote about the disruptive sound design of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which was a great challenge. It helped me wrestle with ambiguous elements of sound and how those sounds still affect our experience of a movie. My other essay took a lighter subject in Hail, Caesar! which, I contend, is sneakily a top three Coen brothers movie. (At least for a certain audience, i.e., me.) If you’re curious about either essay, let me know. I’d love to share them and get your thoughts, and fingers crossed I’ll find a place to publish them down the road.
Sight Pt. 3
Oh my word!! Morocco looks stunning and so different from landscapes and regions I’ve seen. What a treat this visit must have been! I so enjoy your writing and the chance to experience the world through your travels, thank you!
Beautifully written and well-placed photography! I would love to read the reviews you wrote! Thank you for sharing!