One Yank Abroad: Vacation: Marrakesh

I'm back in London after a lengthy Moroccan vacation with Celia. The trip was fun, and I'm self-aware enough to know that absolutely nobody cares about the details of the trip. People do seem to love pictures and videos though, so I'll post dozens of those over the next few days. I visited five cities and spent a half day in the mountains, so I'll cover those over the next 3-4 days. I'll make up for not posting for 10 days by posting something each of the next few days.

The first photo/video set will be from Marrakesh. This was by far my least favorite of the places we visited. Marrakesh is a great city, but it is filled with hustlers and people looking to bother you or rip you off at every turn. There seems to be no place in that city that a tourist can go and not be hounded to buy a souvenir or meal at a restaurant or a taxi. In addition, Marrakesh was the first city we visited and our naivety was exploited. Taxi rides were about €4-7 each in Marrakesh, where we agreed to a price before we got in. In every other city, the taxi drivers simply turned on the meter and we never had to pay over €1.50 for a taxi again. The same ripoffs happened to us with our first dinner and first purchase in the shops.

That's all I care to talk about Marrakesh. If you want to know more then there's a thousand ways to do so. The last thing I'll mention is that we stayed all but one of our nights in various riads, which are centuries-old houses in the old town of cities that have been redone into B&Bs. The riads were very nice and I'd recommend them to anyone going to Morocco. However, they are often in sketchy looking areas. Even though there is absolutely no danger in Moroccan cities, it feels very dangerous because of the narrow streets of the old town terrible lighting. Now on to the photos! A couple videos at the bottom too.