Vacation! Marrakech!

The best time of the year is Vacation Time, so I took a week's holiday last week and went to Morocco. Unfortunately the English weather decided to accompany me for the first couple of days in Marrakech so we battled epic rainstorms that dumped six to twelve inches of snow on the mountains we visited later in the week ... but more on that then. On our first day our Marrakech guide Abdou led us on a tour of museums and the souks of the old city, the Medina. Here he is in the Ben Youssef Medersa, describing Morrocan architecture in one of the columned arcades off the central courtyard while we try to avoid the rain.

And here is the central courtyard itself. Windows from the some of the many, many dormitory rooms that housed the medersa's (male) students overlook the courtyard.



Living in one of the rooms with a view can't have been too bad but we saw some uber-tiny cells -- the largest of these dorm rooms was about ten by twelve (here's a picture of one, in its entirety) and the smallest half that size. Hard to believe over eight hundred students studied here at one time, all living in these cells for years on end.



We also wandered through the Marrakech Museum, which is housed in a 19th-century palace called the Dar Mnebbi, built for the defense minister of Moulay Abdelziz (who ruled from 1894-1908). Mehdi Mnebbi (the defense minister) later became the Moroccan ambassador in London (hey! connection! cool!). He sold his palace to the pasha of Marrakech and it later reverted to the state on Moroccan independence in 1956, fell into disrepair, was bought and fully restored in 1995 and opened as the Marrakech Museum in 1997. It's packed full of detailed tile mosaics, beautiful laterns, intricate carvings and other lovely pieces but my favorite was the sacred cow!