Category Archives: Travel

Morocco, the food

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Moroccan food is amazingly delicious. Period, end of statement. I don’t think we had one thing we didn’t like. And it’s beautifully served, too.

Our first night in Casablanca, which was also our first night in Morocco, we wandered the streets of the new medina after dark looking for something that might have the feel of someplace Moroccan that is yet also unpretentious and comfortable. We eliminated the idea of eating at the hotel from a menu whose prices might make some American restauranteurs gasp. Other restaurants seemed too tourist-oriented; nix on the Cafe de France right across the street from the hotel. The first floors of the street cafes and eateries were inhabited exclusively by (mostly cigarette-smoking) Moroccan men. Nix on the comfortable criterion. What we found, by chance, was Le Riad Restaurant on Mohamed El Quorri Street. It was upstairs from one of the seemingly all-male cafes. The decor was Moroccan-style and looked authentic. And it was beautiful.

  

And the menu was as attractive as the decor. We ordered a tagine of chicken with preserved lemon from the fixed-price menu. It came with a Moroccan salad of diced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and onions with cumin and lemon juice. We also ordered a harira soup and a vegetarian couscous. This didn’t seem like much–a first course and a main dish for each of two people–and we were hungry. The food was wonderful, but we couldn’t finish it. In truth, we couldn’t finish half of it.

Dan and I were brought up to clean our plates. We don’t like to leave food uneaten that will probably have to be thrown out. It feels selfish and wasteful. At a certain level, the rest of our trip in Morocco might be looked at as a quest to figure out how to order the right amount of food.

The darned thing was, we couldn’t finish a meal even when we ordered only one meal for the two of us. It didn’t help that several Moroccan people assured us that they eat these quantities regularly. It also didn’t help that the food was invariably breathtakingly, staggeringly good.

And so, perhaps it was only appropriate that our last night in Casablanca, which was also our last night in Morocco, we returned, wiser now, to Le Riad Restaurant. We ordered one meal from the a la carte menu:

    1. a bowl of harira (7 dhs)
    2. a Moroccan salad (10 dhs)
    3. a small chicken-and-olive tagine (25 dhs)

I emphasize that it was a small tagine because a large tagine was also offered for just 10 dirhams more. With about 8.2 dirhams to the dollar, this meal cost about $5 for the two of us, plus tax and tip.

And we couldn’t finish it.

Casablanca, looking over the old medina

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We booked a luxury hotel in Casablanca (the Hyatt Regency) for our first night, using Dan’s accumulated points. Our excuse for this indulgence, besides for the fact that it was “free,” was that we were bound to be exhausted from our flights and wanted to immerse ourselves more slowly into Moroccan culture. We were given a room on the sixth floor looking out across the old medina toward the Atlantic Ocean, which could barely be made out through the haze. The view took in the famous Hassan II mosque as well as the working port.

 

Now maybe, like me, you’re focused on the main attractions–the mosque and the port–but maybe, like Dan, you’ve noticed something odd about the rooftops of the old city.

Have you ever seen such an array of satellite dishes? How are all these people in this (presumably) poor section of town getting the money for satellite dishes? Many days later we learned that there are organizations who will give satellite dishes to those too poor to buy one for themselves. As for a TV, however, the people are on their own. How many, we wonder, have them? Is that what our juvenile “guides” are saving their tips toward?

Morocco photographs

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I have been sorting through the photographs from Dan’s and my trip to Morocco last month. There are about a thousand of them, so this is big job. Now that “film” has gotten so cheap, we take so many pictures. Since it now seems evident that it will be some time before I can publish this whole trip, I thought I’d get started with a random favorite photo here or there from out of the pile.

These goats seemed happily ensconced in this argan tree. Argan trees grow only in Morocco. They produce nuts from which people make an oil that allegedly has healthful properties and seems to work well on dry skin. It is nearly as impossible to escape Morocco without a argan-oil product as it is to escape without a rug.

After we stopped and I took this photo, the shepherd–an old man with astonishingly bad teeth–appeared seemingly from nowhere and demanded ten dirhams (about $1.20). I didn’t mind paying him. The absence of goats in other nearby argan trees strongly suggested that the shepherd had put these goats there somehow. But ten dirhams seemed excessive in a country given to exaggerated bargaining. I gave him the two dirhams that were in my pocket, and he seemed well pleased. I probably overpaid.

Lake Tahoe

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Lake Tahoe is one of the world’s strange places. Once a drop of water finds its way into the lake, it takes…well, compare this with, let’s say, Lake Michigan. Once a drop of water finds its way into Lake Michigan, it takes on average about two years for that drop of water to work its way out of the lake. Once a drop of water finds its way into Lake Tahoe, by comparison, it takes on average some seven hundred years for that drop to get out. This lake requires a long-term commitment.

And besides for evaporation, there’s only one way out: the Truckee River, which heads out almost due west but ultimately disgorges to the east into Pyramid Lake in Nevada.

As nearly as we can tell–a totally subjective observation–the main purpose of the Truckee River these days is to provide an ecstatic floating experience to crowds of visiting tourists, culminating in heart-pounding Class 0.2 rapids, after which they make you disembark and return your rafts. It’s way fun.

There’s other fun around Lake Tahoe, too, and plenty of it: there is, for example, the early morning wake-up at Tahoe House Bakery with excellent caffeine-rich coffee and fresh, delicious baked goods just a short walk from our rental house; hiking trails everywhere, including a trailhead also within easy walking distance; and a cute little town with a perennial traffic jam that just can’t be beat. Neither can the scenery.

   

And restaurants with bars out on piers by the lake, where the sunsets beg to be watched.

 

And sunrises from the bedroom window. In Tahoe, it all seems beyond compare

Akumal, Mexico

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The only thing there is in Akumal is the beach. And a fine beach it is.

The curve of Turtle Bay

Beach with condos

Beach with boats

Oh yes, and there’s also the humidity. Dan and I get into the habit of going out for a run into town at around dawn, and even so, there is no place in the air for the sweat to evaporate. But the breeze is pleasant, and the ocean sounds good.

View from our patio looking east into the ocean sunrise

Sunrise along the road into town

Beach shortly after sunrise

We say “Good morning!” to the Americans who like us are out running or walking and “Hola!” or “Buenas dias!” to the Mexicans on their way to work. It is a mile and a quarter, more or less, from our condo into town, the same on the return. There is only one road, and it is a dead end. On the road we see houses and condos, a few shops, a restaurant or two. Very little traffic.

Condo complex on the road into town

Cute pink house with cute red cars and red bougainvillea

Front wall of a private house

La Buena Vida restaurant, not far from our condo

Roadside shops

La Lunita, the restaurant at (well, near) the end of the road, our favorite

I like being near the ocean but not going into it. There are mosquitos or other biting insects in the sand. I get bitten whenever I venture near the beach. Walking up and down the road is my main (only) form of physical activity. We walk or run into town maybe two or three times a day. Walking is a pleasure, although did I say it was hot and humid in Akumal?

Did I say “town”? That may have been a bit of an exaggeration. A few gift shops and restaurants catering to American tourists, a grocery store, a couple of realtors, and a dive shop cluster for about a block along the single road, just off the highway. It’s not a busy place. Everyone speaks English. There is a very nice beach and nothing much else to do. They roll up the sidewalks by about 9pm. What few sidewalks there are.

archway over the road at the entrance to town from the highway (yes, that's the main--the only--road into town)

Shops in town

Town residents, living across from the dive shop

I rewrite about half a novel in one week in Akumal, listening to the wind pounding the ocean surf against our beach. It’s not a bad way to live.

Our condo building--"La Bahia"--as seen from the street

View from the patio of our condo

Oaxaca – San Martin Tilcajete

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We come now to the moment of my greatest regret in all our trip to Mexico. Not that I could have done much about it, given the desires of my traveling companions. But even so.

I left San Martin Tilcajete without shopping bags full of alebrijes–the carved wooden figurines for which this town is justifiably famous. I miss every one of them that I wanted but did not buy. I miss every workshop we did not visit.

Alebrijes, you might ask, what’s the big deal? Let me show you the few alebrijes I bought for myself, and I think you will see.

Two small winged fire-breathing dragons with large ears and (!)antennae

A winged cat

These are just commercial-grade alebrijes, available inexpensively in the workshops where they are carved. We could have bought hummingbirds (every feather carved and painted separately), porcupines, robots, and a profusion of other real and imaginary creatures. Other alebrijes are of collector quality, gorgeous one-of-a-kind creations that are worth the high prices they command. Here are some good examples of both.

In one workshop we watched the artists at work, skilled carvers and imaginative painters both.

 

Even the entry to the workshop exuded the whimsical fantasy that makes the alebrijes so endearing.

 

Oaxaca – Monte Alban

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This post has taken a while to put together simply because I have too many pictures, and it’s been hard to winnow them down. Not that I haven’t taken too many pictures of other places in the past, but…it’s so terribly hard to take a bad picture of Monte Alban. And therefore so hard to choose just a few.

It takes a visit to a place like Monte Alban to realize how pathetic our educational system is in the US. Or at least, it was when Dan and I were growing up. How many of us even heard of the great Zapotec civilization that flourished for over a thousand years in southern Mexico?

Over a thousand years.

And vanished (not the Zapotecs, who are still thriving in the region, but the great civilization they created) without a trace, and no one knows why.

Here is a map of the site at Monte Alban, estimated by some at less than ten percent of the original city, a mountaintop artificially leveled to create this stunning city center whose main plaza is the size of several (American) football fields (300 by 200 meters). The English description says:

Monte Alban, the largest pre-Hispanic city in the region of Oaxaca, represents the first urban plan on the American continent. Its continuous human occupation spans more than thirteen centuries (500 B.C. to 850 A.D.), when its gradual abandonment began, for reasons still unknown.
In its golden age, this city was composed of a Main Plaza, the heart of the ceremonial center, and a series of nearby monumental architectural complexes...
It was characterized by having developed a true State as its system of government, led by the priestly class. A large part of its economy was based on tribute paid by communities in the Valley of Oaxaca, complemented by the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, and other rain-fed products grown on a system of terraces built on the slopes of the surrounding hills.

Monte Alban is one of the few sites in the world where the rise of the State as a system of government is clearly shown...

In 1987, UNESCO named this Zone of Archaeological Monuments a World Heritage Site for the convservation and enjoyment of all people of the world.

Here are some views of the monumental ruins, mostly those to the north of and surrounding the main plaza.

  Looking from the north platform back over the main plaza, you can get an idea of how huge this site is. And yet, it is only a small part of the original city.

   

And here are some views of the setting. You can see the city and valleys of Oaxaca on all four sides of this site, a breathtaking setting that people would come and visit even if the ruins of the city weren’t so stunning.

    

 

2,501 Migrants in Oaxaca

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They are strange. Eerie. Haunting.

Over two thousand ceramic sculptures of misshapen, forlorn people watch the plaza silently. They stand by the side of the street and watch the living people pass by. They do not interact. They are the people who are seen in the mind’s eye but who are not there.

The artist is Alejandro Santiago. According to his statement, he enlisted the participation of more than twenty-five people from his village over a period of several years to complete this work. He says these sculptures “represent the men and women who leave their villages to travel to the United States.”

The people are no longer here, but their shadows, cast in ceramic, remain.

    

One shop owner tells us that these are people who have died while trying to migrate to the US, or who have been killed by organized crime in Mexico. In Mexico, he assures us, his American customers, not in the United States.

There is something about these figures that lends credence to the idea that they represent those who have died, though the artist’s statement doesn’t say so. Many of the statues show corpses on their backs.

They line the street outside the grills of the shop and restaurant windows. Silently, they watch us, who are still here.