Another Weekend in Marrakech
My father flew to Marrakech on the 17th on February for his break. Being so close (Rabat is only a 3.5-hour train ride away), I decided to join him the following weekend. After spending Friday walking around Rabat, eating breakfast at Bert’s Café, and drinking too many coffees in a short amount of time, we went home to spend some time with the family. We left Rabat at around 4 PM and headed towards Marrakech.
First arriving in Marrakech at around 8 PM, we got ourselves a bottle of wine from the lobby and sat on our huge balcony (that had no furniture… Novotel, what were you thinking?). We began reminiscing the year before when we met in Marrakech during my two-week volunteering trip, the first one that I had ever done outside of Europe. Oh, how things have changed since then!
Taking Friday night to relax, we went to sleep early to have a good time the next day.
On Saturday, we walked around the Medina, went back to the restaurant we went to the first time and enjoyed some tea while looking at the tourists get somewhat harassed by henna artists and men carrying around monkeys and snakes. It’s funny to sit back at the very restaurant we sat at a year ago, and seeing how much we’ve accomplished since then. We went on to visit a restaurant my dad had previously tried, and it was wonderful, I highly recommend it.
After stopping by Carrefour to buy some wine (pro-tip: avoid the ones sold in hotels, they are at least three times the price), we went back to the hotel to spend our last evening together before he flies back to Hamburg.
My father leaving at around 8 AM, I made full use of the hotel before checking out: went to the gym, did some work for university, and enjoyed a coffee on the terrace before getting a cab to the train station. Another pro-tip: make sure to settle on a price with your driver before stepping in, and only take that money out of your wallet. Don’t be fooled by their “my counter isn’t working today”, Moroccans are really nice most of the time, but it’s not rare that a cab driver will try to fool you into paying ten times the price (yes, it happens all the time!).
I then made my way back to Rabat with the train, got picked up by Mohammed (if you don’t remember him from previous posts, he is my ‘host brother’ here in Rabat) and went home to get ready for the week ahead.
Overall it was a great weekend, and even though it does get exhausting to constantly be driving up and down to Marrakech and back to Rabat, it’s a great experience! Why not take the full advantage of being in Morocco to visit a bit?
