Sick and Tired - Marrakech, Morocco

…”What’d you say? You got a problem?” I ask, like a badly written character in a Roger Corman film. We stand there for a few seconds eyeballing each other… I know I’m not really going to get into a fight with an amphetamine pumped Moroccan waiter. I can picture them plopping my entrails into the tajine cauldron after he and his 200 colleagues get done with me…

The smell is poo. Horse. Sheep. Person.

Every building is the same shade of tight-arse-landlord pink.

I’m in Marrakech.

I’m sick. I need to sleep. I check into the cheapest hotel in cheap street; “The Medina Hotel”.

(Above: even Dora would lose her bright and bubbly in Marrakech. This photo is available to buy in the Print Shop.)

I go get some bread and fruit.

There are miserable looking people everywhere. The touts look miserable. The waiters look miserable. The tourists look miserable. the snake charmers look miserable. Their cobras look miserable. The fat, nose mining, fortune tellers look miserable. The beggars look miserable… but that’s their job.
The only people smiling are the crazy guys and the crack heads. But they’re not the good kind of smiles.

At night, the Hotel Medina sounds like coughing, vomiting, farting, diarrhea. The hotel night sounds like the out of sync soundtrack to the daylight streets.

Day three: I’m feeling a bit better by late afternoon so I venture out to the Souk to see about some dinner. “Wonderful cheap street food” promises Lonely Planet. I’m immediately skeptical.

The waiters are like the vampires in “From Dawn till Dusk”. They swarm around me. They step in front of me, wave menus in my face, taunt, bull shit.
“Non, merci… Non merci…”, I keep repeating.
One tall guy gets right in my face.
“Hey, you’re not hungry? This is the food market. You come here to eat or just to look?”
He’s right in front of me and I am sick of stepping around these clowns, so I just keep on walking. I step on his Nikes and shoulder past him.
I hear him behind me:
“suck my cock!”

I stop.

I’ve been in Morocco for a couple of weeks so I’m not surprised, but I am pissed off.
I go back. I get in his face.
“What’d you say? You got a problem with me?”, I ask, like a badly written character in a Roger Corman film.
“What your problem?!” He spits back, “I’m not scared of you nothing!”
Our sweaty noses are two inches apart.
We stand there for a few seconds eyeballing each other. The frenzied Bollywood style musac from the shoe shop crescendos.
I know I’m not really going to get into a fight with an amphetamine pumped Moroccan waiter in the middle of the Marrakech souk. I can picture them plopping my entrails into the tajine cauldron after he and his 200 colleagues get done with me.
I turn on my heel and walk off.
“I kill you!” I hear him yap at my back.
It’s not the first death threat I’ve had from a frustrated tout in Morocco, so I don’t freak out.
I feel good.

Intellectual dissonance is the emotional anguish resulting from a clash between a person’s behavior and personal values. In cases where our actions and our principles come into conflict, our behavior triumphs. We become the role we play. In other words, “stress is the tension produced when the mind overrides the body’s natural desire to choke the living shit out of some prick who desperately deserves it.”
I have had a moment of Catharsis.

By day four, I hate Marrakech like I’ve never hated a place before.

I go to see a medieval palace. It’s forlorn. The walls are dirty. The tile floor is broken and crumbling. The exquisite wood work in the ceiling is thrown in stark relief by the stream of dirty water from the overflowing public toilet.

The palace looks exactly like every other medieval building in Marrakech. All us tourists linger because there aren’t any touts inside.

Day five. My flu, or whatever, is worse. I stay in the hotel room and write, and take pills, and eat bread and stuff out of cans.
Good city to be sick in. You feel fine about staying in bed.

I want to leave town badly, but I have nasty diarrhea, so I’m afraid to hitchhike. When I go down the street for tins of tuna and bog rolls, I race walk.

The hotel is humid and crowded.

I can’t sleep for the coughing and farting.
I think I’m keeping the other guests awake too.

I’ve run out of clean underpants.

The Muslim street barbers are telling me I need a shave.

I feel bad about all the times I bad-mouthed Bangkok.

I stay in Marrakech a few more days, getting well. My cough subsides. My fever passes. I visit some of the mandatory sights. I get a tip about an OK restaurant from a German guy at the hotel, and my stomach starts to settle down. I’m getting healthier. But the biggest factor in my recovery is being honest with myself about my reaction to that waiter in the market, and unwinding my ball of stress.

I’m good to go now. I don’t need the toilet every half hour. I’m going to the Atlas Mountains to see small villages and beautiful environment.
I’m sure I won’t give Marrakech a single backward glance.