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Thursay 11 September, a night at Jemaa el Fna square

Marrakech - part V

Elisabeth & Teije
2006-07-19 19:06:53

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don't want to pay.

When the sun sets the tourists and locals pour over the square and taxi's and carriages arrive constantly to bring new tourists. People with fully loaded carts also arrive and start to build stalls.

Since we are much nearer to the eqautor the sunset only takes 15 minutes and soon the square is only lightened by lamps and cooking fires. We thought the square had been already very busy, but now it is turned into a pandemonium of clamor and smells.

Most visitors are tourists but we see also a lot of local people eating at the stalls. We also try one, but the meat is either burnt or almost raw. The fish is allright. But the cook gets very angry when we don't want to give him a tip. According to him he sells the best meat on the square. We hope that isn't true for the sake of all other people eating at other stalls.

It's big bussiness, but also a fantastic spectacle one shouldn't miss. We stroll for some time between the stalls and we are very firm in holding the salesmen at distance. We have to, since they keep insisting when they notice that one is hesitating.

When we later step into a cab we soon regret it: we have met one of the many suicide cabdrivers, or so it seems. The driver thinks 1 centimeter between cars is more than enough space, especially when driving behind scooters. He is swaying from left to right, sometimes even uses the other side of the road and honks his way through the traffic, arguing loudly with other drivers, through the open windows of other cars when they are in between. He has dozens of nearly misses and is constantly very resentful about the other drivers which he lets us know, shouting to us. I am shaking when I get out of the car. I only see that his cabnumber is higher than 1100 when he drives away at a tearing pace, and I will not enter another cab with a number between 1100 and 1199.

Restaurants and bars are open quite late, so we take our place along the Mohammed V boulevard, first at Charly's Cabana where we are welcomed every night with more enthousiasm. They don't care if we have dinner or just have a drink and all people of the staff take some time to talk with us.

Just before the restaurant is a taxi stand and there are always 5 to 10 taxi's. Every minute one or two drive away and new ones arrive. But we also see an average of 8 taxi's a minute passing by. That is 10 per minute while there are 1600 taxi's in Marrakech. Statistically, we only have to sit here for a few hours to see all cabnumbers passing by! The numbers are on both sides of the taxi and at the front. The same is true for other places in the city, we have often counted them at several times of the day. Near Mohammed V boulevard it is almost impossible to look at the street without seeing less than 4 taxi's at the same time, regardless of the time of day. Another puzzle. This way there seem to be much more taxi's than the 1600 we were told.

It is a city full of contradictions: a medieval centre and the souks, the modern busy urban traffic, old palaces and new apartment complexes, heavy veiled women and people following the newest fashion. We are told that the economy is growing rapidly here, but that mainly the already rich people benefit of it and the gap between rich and poor only grows bigger.