If you think all vacations should be just fun and relaxing, you are missing out. Trips that exhaust you mentally and physically may prove to be more worthwhile. Visiting Marrakech, Morocco was such a trip, and it proved to be the most rewarding kind.
Aside from loving "Casablanca" and eating dinner in Epcot's Morocco last spring break, I had no clue what to expect when I flew to Marrakech last November. Okay, maybe I was expecting fewer English speakers, exotic architecture and tagine-cooked food, but that was about all I knew of Morocco.
However, by the time my brother, a friend and I reached the Souk - the main market square of the old city of Marrakech - we realized how much we underestimated how far that three-hour flight had taken us from home. Donkeys were as common a means of transportation as the smelly, diesel-fueled motorcycles that nearly hit us. No one seemed particularly bothered as flies headed from the donkeys onto the dates and nuts for sale. A dagger shop bordered a hookah shop, which bordered an "I don't know" shop.
And, as I learned from the shouts of the snake charmers after I took a picture and the guy who shook us down after giving us directions, nothing came without a price.
Our first day in Marrakech, we were a pathetic sight. We got lost less than ten minutes after leaving our hostel, since maps have no use in a city which barely has real streets, let alone street signs.
We sullenly ate lunch, wondering why we didn't go to Prague or Barcelona. We let a crazy 60-year-old Australian woman lecture us on how we would get sick if we did anything from brush our teeth with tap water to shake someone's hand. It wasn't a good day.
But things improved. Refusing to cower in fear in our hostel for the next three days, we set out on a bus tour around the city. By the end of the tour, we realized we didn't need the bus. We were walking around the Kasbah, haggling guys down to a quarter or a third of their asking price. We even got into a conversation with a local merchant who talked about everything from his Minnesotan brother to Chernobyl. We boldly walked around at night, now buying food from vendors off the street. Stomach infections be damned!
But that doesn't compare to the next day. Hopping into a 1988 Mercedes - all Moroccan taxis are 1988 Mercedes - we ventured out into the Atlas Mountains, to areas that made Marrakech look like a more interesting version of Boston. That trip was more than a sign that we had come a long way, grown so much bolder in just a few days. It taught me how ignorant I really am about the world. I mean, we all hear stories about third-world countries. We see pictures and are constantly told how lucky we are to live in the United States, but that's only on TV and in lectures. In reality, there is an indestructible barrier between them and us.
When I was standing in a half-roofed, two-room clay house, which relied on waterpower and held a family of eight and their animals - a family which drew in extra income from prostituting its daughters - I suddenly felt like a pretty big jerk for being annoyed about how my friend screwed up my sunglasses haggling in the Souk.
Devin Toohey is a junior majoring in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
