29th April - We appreciated the rest when we were shown our room, had put our luggage down, and had surrendered our passports to the hotelier so that he could fill in the form that every hotelier has to fill in, to hand over to the police, listing his guests, where they have come from, and where they expect to be next.
Once we were rested we realised that the room was a little small, and that we had to do something about Anthony's suitcase and about food. But first we had to retrace our steps back to the market alley, to investigate that. Anthony led I followed and had to take note of what I saw and limit how much I allowed myself to be distracted. Then we had to get some money from a cash point. There was only one place on the square where there was a cash point, and it had two cash points. That place was the post office. The queues were long at both of them. We got in the nearest queue and shuffled forward slowly about thirty minutes in the sun, getting quietly annoyed at the sense of entitlement in the comments of some of the people ahead of us, We both got our allotted two thousand dirhams, the maximum that could be taken out per day, equivalent to two hundred pounds.
Walking back, not quite ready to eat yet, we stopped at different restaurants and looked at their menus, where the they put one up outside the establishment. The menu that mentioned pigeon caught my eye. Whilst we looked at a couple of other places to eat, the restaurant the might serve pigeon was the one we returned to. It was normal but still felt good to have our starter of olives and bread, The earthquake of Autumn 2023 had done it's damage to the whole of Marrakesh and a tiny part of that damage was how uneven the floor was. I fixed the solution to the table rocking was for me to put some of my olive stones as chocks underneath the table foot to the near right corner of me, so the table rocked less. Anthony had the vegetable tagine, I had the chicken tagine. A tagine is both a serving dish and a recipe. The dish is a thick circular pottery base with a rim, diameter about ten to twelve inches, inside but close to the rim sits a conical lid. They withstand great heat. The recipe is whatever vegetables and meat are arranged in a conical shape for the lid to go over it comfortably. Carrots and potatoes are basic to the recipe, whatever else is put in. It is the spices that the Moroccans use that stop the dish becoming a hot pot in disguise.
Walking back to our hotel in the evening was a relative pleasure. There were no mini-dumper trucks ferrying hard core from sites where the earthquake had struck like there had been earlier in the day, I'd guessed that he felt rather put off by the scale and closeness of the traffic in that narrow space earlier in the day. I had coped, but did not really want to know how I had got through it. I guessed I would be finding out on my own at some point tomorrow.
That night I slept well on my own in my single bed, as did Anthony. Particularly when he got me to change position because with my sinuses 'being bad' I was snoring. I had the full compliment of company in my dreams, where all the friends I'd known in my twenties appeared in ways that lifted me up, whilst the family home was full of arguments.
Find Part Three of this diary here.
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