Thursday was a planned workout day and Sandy found another great gym option for us, called Fitlife that is about a 13-minute walk from our apartment.  We’re back in a big city so we’re back to the equivalent of $10 each.  The owner is so friendly.  He would come over and make sure we were both comfortable with the machines and offer suggestions – he thought I should do a couple of the machines in a different order to work certain muscles in a more advantageous order.  It was great and we will go back again before we leave town.

Lunch was back at Saladbox – good, healthy food and then we spent the afternoon back at the apartment doing some research on a couple of day trips we wanted to do from Marrakesh.  More on those next week when we actually take the trips.

As mentioned in the last journal entry, we had tickets to the ballet tonight so we took the bus to Djemma El Fna (the main square) for dinner.  Djemma El Fna is the large square that you would picture in a Moroccan city (if you pictured one).  You see snake charmers, people with monkeys for photo opportunities, all kinds of vendors, including a ton serving fresh juice.  It’s a lively place and should be experienced day and night.  At night, there must be close to a hundred food stalls that set up and offer all kinds of dishes from snails to tajines, to barbecue skewers – lots of options.  We had dinner at one of the many restaurants that offers a rooftop terrace overlooking the square.  This one is called Zeitoun Café.  The server was great – I had ordered the chicken tajine and when he set it down, he said it was fish tajine (it was still covered) and was that ok?  I said no, I ordered chicken and he said it would take 40 minutes.  I didn’t want to wait 40 minutes and I didn’t want fish, so we landed on beef.  As he walked away, he pulled the top off and it was chicken.  We all had a good laugh about it.

After dinner, we were off to the ballet at the Bahia Palace.  This is the cheapest ballet ticket we’ve ever purchased – $14 for both of us. The story line followed what I think might be a fairly well-known story in Muslim countries.  It was called The Rihla.  This is a travelogue written by Ibn Battuta, documenting his lifetime of travel and exploration.  Apparently he covered 73,000 miles and his main objective was to travel throughout the Muslim world.  His travels took place in the 1300s.  The ballet (and accompanying orchestra and narrator) did a great job of moving from place to place and the digital backdrop provided great images of the locales.  The concert was in the courtyard of the Bahia Palace – just a beautiful night for an open-air concert and ballet. 

We went back to the main square afterward and it was packed – we thought it was busy during the day, but pretty sure it was even busier at 11pm.  We had a couple of crepes back at Zeitoun Café before getting a taxi home. We were home in time to watch the first two periods of the Lightning game. With the time change, I needed to get some sleep so I planned to watch the third period the next morning.

Friday started with finishing the Lightning game (another loss – now down 3-0 in the series) followed by Starbucks time and then we walked to the Musee Yves Saint Laurent.  He and his partner fell in love with Marrakesh and split their time between Paris and here for many years.  I found the museum to be really interesting – again, so much of it comes down to how the curator puts the content together.  No pictures allowed unfortunately. I guess a YSL trademark was his inclusion of flowers in his designs.  The displays were of his various designs and there were cool poems about flowers (some for 800 years ago) that went along with the displays.  There was a short documentary film about YSL’s career, too.  There are gardens that we want to explore but tickets were sold out for the day so we are going to try to get back to them before we leave Marrakesh.

We were hungry after the museum so we stopped at a café and had chicken tacos.  What are called tacos here are more like what we know as burritos and they are delicious.  From there, it was back to the apartment to plan next week’s activity and also start to discuss what happens after Marrakesh.  We think we will leave Marrakesh on Monday, May 6^th.  It was time for dinner and we decided to go to one of the cafes just outside our apartment building – Snack Yaniisiin.  Sandy had a pizza and I had a burger.  To finish the night, we have wanted to watch the movie, Casablanca, while here in Morocco, so we started that.  We watched half and then it was time to sleep.

Saturday started with a four-mile run around our area – pretty similar route as the walk we did earlier in the week, although this was more of an out-and-back route instead of a loop.  It seems like it has been a while since we ran so it was nice to get out and do that again.  Today’s highlight was the Musee de la photographie, which is in the Medina.  It is housed in a fondouk, which are ancient inns that were used for the camel caravans crossing the desert from Timbuktu.  The building was certainly interesting, but the photography was amazing.  It is a collection of photographs mostly from the first half of the 20^th century and the content is from all over Morocco.  What most stayed in my mind was how timeless it made Morocco feel.  In so many pictures from more than 100 years ago, there was absolutely nothing that would differentiate from a picture taken today (except black and white versus color).  The museum also has a 90-minute documentary that was the first done in the indigenous Berber areas of the Atlas Mountains.  It was so interesting that we did not know the length, we watched the whole thing, and then couldn’t believe when we were told it was 90 minutes.  I’d like to find it on Youtube and watch it again.  It is called Landscapes and Faces of the High Atlas by Daniel Chicault and it was filmed in 1957.  Here is a picture of the room where we watched the documentary.

For dinner, we went back to Le Zar (same place we had our anniversary dinner) and repeated our salmon order.  The it was home to watch the Lightning game – and they won!  Down now in the series, 3-1.

That brings us up to today.  Really not much to report today.  It was a day around the apartment getting laundry done.  We did go out to get groceries and we cooked my favorite for dinner – spaghetti!  We did have trouble with the stove. The burners wouldn’t stay lit.  We’re not used to gas stoves to begin with and then here, they have the gas tanks in the cupboard.  I didn’t even think to look there, but the security guy for the building came up and showed me.  Easy fix – just turn on the tank and we were cooking with gas.  😊 We wrapped up the day with another highlight – talking with our friends, DT and Hawt!