When I was a kid, my father and I would drive from New Mexico to Los Angeles to visit my grandmother. We’d leave before dawn, and drive straight through. When we got out of the car in L.A., the night air was warm and humid and smelled of orange blossoms.
My grandmother’s house always seemed exceedingly elegant–tall windows, plush carpeting, long drapes. In the dining room was a drawing in pastels of a medina gate, busy with be-fezzed pedestrians. I knew it was a place in Morocco, though my grandmother had never been there. My father told me she drew it from a postcard, in a class.
Decades later, my father and mother went to Morocco to live for a stretch. Due to the drawing? I don’t know.
When I was just in Fez in June, I passed by Bab Bou Jeloud, the main gate into the medina, quite a few times–the ATM there was the handiest one that accepted my card.
It was only on the fourth or fifth pass that I realized: That’s the gate! (And if you’re thinking that was a slow reaction, note that I’d even been to Fez before.)
Bab #1, 1950sBab #2, present day
The gate was renovated sometime in the last decade, which I assume is why the decoration around it is a bit different. Or Grandma Carol took some artistic license. Who can say? But the two minarets are still the same, and though the fezzes are gone and synthetic fabrics are in, not too much else has changed.
Except for the fact that the drawing hangs on my wall now. Alas, we have no orange blossoms here in Astoria, but occasionally when I travel, I still step into a hot, humid night and think, “L.A.–we’re here.”
Poor unloved Casablanca–or “Caza,” as locals say it, with a nice buzzy z. Six million people strong, and typically dismissed by guidebooks and travelers as not scenic, too busy, too modern.
But especially in a still-very-traditional place like Morocco, it’s interesting to go to the modern place and see just what details are preserved. As I’ve written about Cancun, in a newish city, you can see what people value because it’s there by choice, not just hundreds of years of accreted habit.
So Casablanca has hammams. And it has a little medina. And it has a modern medina, the Quartier Habous, a winding-streets area built by the French. (This, I suppose, is a better reflection of what the French valued in Moroccan culture than what the Moroccans themselves do.) It has loads of cafes. It even has honest taxi drivers, a rare thing anywhere in this world.
And it has plenty of people dressed in djellabas, the long robes with hoods that both men and women wear (with differing levels of decoration). This shouldn’t be a big surprise, but when you see old men in djellabas shuffling along old medina alleyways, it can all seem a little…put on, you know? You get that creeping sense, maybe born of watching too many movies or something, that somehow a place is just an elaborate bit of stagecraft put on solely for your benefit.
But in Morocco, they’re not messing around. People really do wear traditional clothing because they like it–and have adapted it to modern needs. Women color-coordinate their babouches (leather slippers) with their djellaba trim and their headscarves, and they can ride a moped in a djellaba just fine.
What I saw the instant I got off the plane. And it just got better from there.
And when it rains, they can put up the hood. That’s what it’s for–it’s not just some vestigial bit of tradition.
Anyway, enough about fashion. Casablanca is fun, and you shouldn’t miss it, especially if you like Art Deco architecture. (And trams! They’re adding a tram line! Very exciting!) The whole French-built center is chock-full of old-fashioned bars and cafes with foggy mirrors and even foggier-looking old men. The tiny medina is still there, selling knock-off sneakers and vegetables. The sea is all around.
Other than that, there’s only one real thing to see. One of the things I like about Morocco, honestly, is that non-Muslims typically aren’t allowed in mosques. From a religious standpoint, that strikes me as slightly precious, but from a lazy tourist standpoint, it’s a huge relief–it knocks so much sightseeing right off my list! But there’s one mosque everyone’s welcome in, and that’s the Hassan II monster, right on the sea in Casablanca.
Photos can’t quite convey how large the thing is. Here’s one. Make sure you appreciate how tiny the people are. The whole mosque is like one of those sight-gag over-large chairs that make anyone who sits in them look like a kid.
Our guide said the mosque was built over six years by about 10,000 artisans working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even if I’m misremembering the numbers a bit (likely), is there any comparable building erected in the modern era? The level of craftwork is boggling, straight out of the middle ages.
Once you’re done being boggled by that, you can walk (slowly, if it’s a hot day) to Sqala for lunch. Or you can go to the mosque in the afternoon (2pm is the last tour of the day), and then wander over to Sqala and get an early start on dinner. Or you could go to Sqala for lunch, wander around the medina behind it, and come back for dinner. I’m putting so much thought into the timing of this because I would gladly eat there two, even three times in one day.
Sqala in itself is reason to go to Casablanca. You know how I was complaining about how all Moroccan restaurants have the same five things on the menu? At Sqala, all the treats are out: special juices (date, almond, orange-blossom water, for instance), all kinds of nifty salads, a million little sweets, and tagine combos I’ve never seen elsewhere.
We had a salad spread that included something conch-ish (abalone?) in a tomato sauce, green olives with chicken livers, an incredibly fluffy eggplant thing and something that was so tasty we ate it all, so it doesn’t show up in the photo and I can’t remember what it is. I’m crushed.
We also had a little stew with lamb, saffron, dill and what I thought were regular-but-exceptionally-good mushrooms but I now realize were so-called “desert truffles” (terfes). I had them in Syria a couple of years ago, and thought they were tasty but not tremendous. Here they were wonderfully firm and earthy, but also a bit light and springy. Maybe the Syrian ones weren’t so hot because they’d actually been imported all the way from Morocco that year, due to a bad crop in Syria.
I could go on. The setting here is beautiful, in a courtyard with fountains, under dappled shade. The place is filled with families, and the children are all well behaved. The prices are reasonable.
Another thing you could do to kill time between meals at Sqala is go see a film at the Rialto cinema, which has been beautifully restored. Just about everything is dubbed into French, but if something with enough explosions is playing, it shouldn’t matter. Or you could have a drink at the Hotel Transatlantique, where Edith Piaf once lived for a stretch. It’s not quite as down-at-the-heels as I’d like, but it’s hard to complain about any renovation in Casablanca, where the fabulous architecture is all in need of love and repair. Or you could just ride the tram to the end of the line and back–that’s what I intend to do next time I visit.
Morocco is a slightly tricky place to eat. “Restaurants are OK,” everyone says, “but the best food is served in people’s houses.”
But, the skeptic in me counters, isn’t that true everywhere?
In Morocco, though, it does seem to be more true than elsewhere. Restaurants serve the same three tagines, plus couscous with seven vegetables. Oh, and there’s soup. The end. It can get a little wearing after a few days, and even irritating, just knowing that somewhere people are eating many more varied things than this.
In fact, the best meal we had was in someone’s house. Granted, it was a house where the family had turned their sitting room and courtyard into a restaurant. And the menu, at first glance, did have just the standard items on it.
But what a difference a home cook’s hand makes! Dar Hatim opened a couple of years ago in the Lahoudi section of Fes. It is genuinely the owners’ family home, and is so family-stylie that the guy, Fouad, came to collect us in his car–fortunately, because we surely would’ve gotten lost halfway there from our hotel. Once he sat us down and dashed off to pick up more guests, his wife came out and got us settled. And Fouad’s mother was upstairs in the kitchen the whole time.
We ordered a couscous with vegetables as well as bistilla, the flaky-pastry sweet-savory chicken (or pigeon) pie that’s one of the ultimate dishes of Moroccan gastronomy. We hadn’t eaten it yet on the trip, because I was leery of getting it in a sub-par restaurant. In the wrong hands, it’s a sugary, slightly creepy mess.
But first, the salads. So simple…and so many.
Beets and black-eyed peas and string beans and carrots and and and...
First, I must congratulate Meg and Emily for their exceptionally restrained eating habits throughout the trip. Even when presented with something so-so in a restaurant, I tend to finish it out of some obscure sense of duty. Which is especially misguided in a place where serving sizes are monstrous. But Meg and Em were able to eat a normal amount, and sit back, guilt-free. I only wish I could bring them to Mexico with me, to keep me in line there.
At Dar Hatim, however, they were the teensiest bit undone but the array of salads. And then Fouad’s wife came in and gently chided us: “Is that the best you can do?” she said, with a small frown. She made no motion to remove our salads, just turned away and walked back to the kitchen.
“Activating. Second. Stomach,” Em said, gamely. We each earmarked our favorites, and when our judge returned, she deemed it acceptable to move on.
To the couscous. Which, you know, isn’t filling at all. It was full of butter, and vegetables with a texture that said “cooked to death” but flavor that said “I am exactly what a dream zucchini was always meant to taste like.”
Fortunately we didn’t have to finish that before our two bistillas arrived. They were beautiful, so plump and flaky on our plates, bedecked in cinnamon, confectioner’s sugar and toasted almonds.
“Third. Stomach,” croaked Em.
There are several secrets to bistilla. One is to balance the sweet and the savory. Another is to get the moisture of the filling–a combination of chicken, eggs, herbs and stock–correct. And another is to keep the warqa, the pastry sheets, whole and properly flaky.
Warqa on their own are such an art that most sensible cooks buy them from specialists. Here’s what the process looks like, by a dedicated expert in the Fes medina:
Yes, the woman is applying gobs of dough by hand to the hot skillet–a very sticky, wet dough that leaves the barest film behind, just enough to create a translucent, slightly stretchy crepe-like thing that’s whisked off (again, by asbestos-hand) and set in a stack. According to a cookbook from the 1950s that I bought in Marrakech, it takes 140 of these sheets to make a proper family-size bistilla, about as big around as a small coffee table.
Fortunately, Dar Hatim’s bistillas are single-serving (er, allegedly), so require a slightly fewer sheets of warqa. We managed to eat just about all of ours.
Emily looked truly sad as she left her last bit untouched. Fouad’s wife had mercy and did not chide us this time. After dinner, she invited us upstairs to see the kitchen–just a regular home kitchen, with the addition of a nice oven for the bistilla. We groaned slightly as we hauled up and down the stairs. I, at least, was slightly relieved we’d had only this one meal in a house. I’m not strong enough for many more.
This post covers the practicalities of visiting a hammam in Morocco, and what to expect when you go–skip to the end for the summary. But first, some preamble.
At some point in my Middle East Studies academic experience, I read part of a travelogue by a 19th-century Egyptian government guy who’d gone to France on a diplomatic mission. “The people there are quite strange,” he mused (I’m paraphrasing). “They eat in public and bathe in private.”
Maybe this is why I like the Middle East–I love me a public bath. I’ve been to hammams in Turkey and Syria, but never before in Morocco. In Istanbul, the hammams are pretty much a tourist thing. In Damascus and Aleppo, they’re half-and-half–some are glitzier than others. Tragically, in Cairo at least, there are no remaining non-sleazy hammams (although I read one was being restored?).
In Morocco, however, they’re still really used for regular old bathing, because so many people don’t have good facilities in their oh, you know, six-hundred-year-old houses.
First step was locating a hammam. They’re so common in medinas that often they don’t have signs (or they’re marked only in Arabic)–you just have to know that there’s usually one near the mosque. I was in Marrakech, so I went hunting for the Bab Doukkala hammam, which is through an unmarked red-and-white-painted entrance off the northwest corner of the Bab Doukkala mosque.
After I’d scoped out the location and asked the door guy what I needed to bring, I went out to collect all my accoutrements: gooey traditional Moroccan soap, a scrubby glove, a towel, underwear. I had to buy underwear because I’m the kind of mercenary traveler who packs only thongs because they take up less room. Mine are also totally shot and barely stay on, so I figured it would be better to have a pair that would guarantee some decency. Buying this underwear, incidentally, was my first introduction to the Marrakech custom of quoting prices in rials, which are a fictitious unit that’s 20 to the dirham. First I was indignant at the underwear seller asking me to pay about $20 for a crappy pair of granny panties, then humbled when he kindly picked the right amount (4 dirhams) out of the coins in my open hand.
The $20 granny panties in question
My guidebook had exhorted me to bring a plastic mat or a stool to sit on, but I couldn’t find any mats, even at the shops that seemed to specialize in hammam gear, and investing in a plastic stool seemed like a waste. So I figured I’d subject my butt to the hammam floor, and hope I didn’t shock anyone with my poor hygiene–these fabled mats weren’t ever used in the Turkish or Syrian places I’d gone.
Finally, I gathered my traveling companion, and we set off. Meg had never been to a public bath situation, but said she was up for it. I knew roughly what to expect, but when I’d peeked my head into this and a couple other hammams in the neighborhood, they looked pretty bare-bones. The ones I’d been to in Syria and Turkey all had lavish lounges for sitting and drinking tea after, and loads of towels available and that kind of thing. Here, I’d seen no such comforts.
We paid our entrance fee to the man at the door, and then he carefully made change for me so that I’d have exact money to pay the attendants inside for our scrubbing (gommage) and stashing our bags. We got the stink-eye from the main attendant for not getting massages, but I figured a regular rubdown was intense enough.
In the big, very vaguely defined changing area, we stripped down to our undies, put on our flip-flops, clutched our little towels and gingerly removed our glasses. We were at the mercy of the hammam ladies now.
We needn’t have worried: As soon as we were inside the big central domed steam room, a woman bustled over with two plastic mats (hooray!) and sat us down by a pillar. She hung our towels up for us, then grabbed our tub of soap and exhorted us to rub it all over. Some other women sitting nearby made sure we lathered up our faces too.
We sat and softened up for a bit in the steam, while our attendant filled a giant bucket of water and dragged it over to us. When we were suitably tender, the attendant pulled on one a glove and set to work on Meg. She scrubbed and scrubbed, occasionally pausing to see whether Meg’s skin had flushed. She didn’t move on to a fresh limb until the first one was properly lobster-red. Then she sloshed on warm water from the bucket, and proceeded to the next quadrant.
Notably, the hammam attendant didn’t stop to show off the little rolls of dead skin that were building up on her mitt. This is a standard part of hammam-for-tourists theater. Here in Marrakech, scrubbing off those little wormy bits of skin was just so completely normal that I don’t think it occurred to our woman to highlight it.
While Meg was down, I got to look around the hammam, with my fuzzy vision. It’s so rare in the US to get to see naked people, and there’s something so heartwarming about seeing so many different sorts of flesh. Here was everything from an astoundingly lithe and firm young woman to a mountainous older matron, all happily scrubbing themselves and each other. Maybe it was the steam talking, but it did feel like world peace was attainable, if we all just took our clothes off.
Then it was my turn to get the gommage. I slipped around on my plastic mat like a fish on a boat deck. I grew gradually warmer as each inch of my true skin was brought to light. Being in such authoritative hands was more relaxing than any massage I’ve ever had.
When she was done, I sat there panting a little as the attendant went off to get some shampoo. She also brought one of those little plastic brushes that fit in the palm of your hand, and proceeded to mercilessly detangle both of us. A few days later, I invested in one of those for the long haul.
Our attendant stood us up and sloshed us both with the last water from the bucket. We’d been scrubbed clean like newborn babies inside half an hour. We could’ve lingered and chatted, like all the other women in the steam room, who were working at a much more leisurely pace, but I wanted to get outside and marvel at my brand-new skin.
Though it did seem a shame to encase my perfect cleanness in my nasty old traveling clothes–and to subject my steam-dazed brain to the rigors of regular Marrakech street life. I could’ve used a little buffer zone between freshly bathed me and the real world, a little more time to sit and marvel about how odd and unfortunate it is to bathe in private.
Practicalities: Hammam Bab Doukkala, Marrakech
Cost: 10 dirhams entry, 10 dirhams to stow a bag, 50 dirhams for gommage (scrubbing). These are the general rates at all neighborhood hammams. Massages are also available (I think for another 50 dirhams or so). Women’s hours are from noon till about 7pm; men’s are early morning and later in the evening. (Some hammams have separate men’s and women’s sides, so you can go anytime, but it’s more typical to see this split schedule.)
All the gear you need is available from shops near hammams, or in the spice-seller areas of medinas. You’ll usually spot them first by their displays of the scrubby mitts–most sellers hang a bunch of them on strings, like garlands.
sabon baldi the gooey black soap made from olive oil, sold in bulk. I got a small tub, good for about five washings, for 10 dirhams. Of course you could bring regular soap, but it’s not as good! If you decide to bring some home, ask to get it wrapped up in a plastic bag with tape, so it doesn’t ooze in your bag.
a keesa a scrubby rectangular mitt made of crepe de chine. Some women are old-school and use a terracotta thing that looks like a pot-scrubber, covered in a crochet cozy. This seems harder to maneuver.
shampoo
ghassoul Totally optional, but for the full hammam treatment, use this clay-like stuff to treat your hair. (Don’t be tempted to put sabon baldi on your hair! It’ll never wash out.) It’s sold in small brownish chips, again in bulk. A standard-size bag of it is about 10 dirhams and will last for many washings. You make a paste with the ghassoul and warm water, then work it through your hair and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Then you rinse it out and shampoo.
a comb or brush with big teeth for using on wet hair. Those little palm-held brushes are good and cheap.
a towel Don’t tell them I said so, but one from your hotel is probably fine–it won’t get nasty.
plastic flip-flops to wear inside the hammam, more for your own good than anything. The place I went, not a lot of people were wearing them.
a plastic mat If you’re in Morocco a while and think you might go to a hammam more than once, get your own, so you have you a smooth, clean spot to sit on (the floors are often just rough concrete). If you don’t bring your own, they’ll probably have an extra for you to use, but again it’s more for comfort than for strict hygiene etiquette–I think you could go without one and not shock anyone. The typical mat is about twice as large as a placemat, and they’re usually rolled up and stashed off to the side at shops selling hammam gear; once I knew where to look, I saw ones that were smooth plastic, and others that were sort of ridgy foam things.
a caftan or some similar loungewear (or a couple more big towels), if you want to sit around a bit in the changing area to relax
an extra pair of underwear You’ll wear yours into the hammam, so you want a dry pair for later.
Here’s what the soap and glove look like:
Nasty, right? No! Best spa tools in the world.
And here’s the hairbrush. Note the random application of the alligator logo.
Probably just as good as Xochimilco itself is the market in the neighborhood. It was the first one we stopped into on our trip, so we just assumed it was normal. Turned out it is a slightly cooler than usual market, and man, was it bustin’ out with the food.
While Peter was buying snacks from ladies in sparkling aprons, I took a spin around the place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such luscious-looking lard.
As I said in an earlier post, chicharron here is better than I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d taken photos of the normal display technique: propping it up vertically inside a glass case, with a light behind, so it glows orange (paging Matthew Barney).
Instead, here’s some more prosaic chicharron for sale, still certainly flaky and delicious:
I haven’t seen such a variety of moles before either–in the Yucatan, there’s a smaller number of recados (spice pastes) on offer. This market sold them both as dry powders and as pastes, with almonds, with shrimp, with walnuts, with pine nuts….
But this is my favorite photo from the market, and perhaps from our whole trip. How fresh is food in Mexico? It’s this fresh!
OK, chicken butts–this concludes our Mexico City photo tour. Thanks a million for looking.
Now the question is: When can I go back? And what should we do next time?
Years ago, when I lived by 36th Avenue in Astoria, there was a restaurant down there called Xochimilco. It was slightly upscale Mexican (which I now realize is just normal Mexican), and even though I couldn’t pronounce the name, I did know it was this beautiful network of canals in Mexico City.
It didn’t seem to go with the restaurant, exactly, as it sat under the rumbling N-train tracks, but it seemed even more improbable to me that there was this lush area of gardens and canals in Mexico City, which in my mind was nothing but concrete and traffic and smog.
But now I’ve been there, and I can tell you it’s true. But it still seems like a dream.
We took the metro and then the nifty little tram. Here’s the boss’s office at the tram terminal:
That looks so calm and normal, right? No indication of what lay ahead… On the tram, Peter and I are the only non-Mexicans, and then I see a guy with stubble and a Sonic Youth shirt get on, and he comes walking toward us. Sigh–must Brooklynites follow us wherever we go?
He and his girlfriend stand near us, and proceed to start speaking…in Greek. So Peter joins in, and it turns out they live in Belgium and a very cool and nice. And good thing we meet them, as once we get to the boat docks, a short walk from the tram stop, it’s clear that we would’ve been a little sad and lonely, just me and Peter on a boat. Because these boats are big, built for giant family outings.
Nothing’s really going on at the dock, and we feel a bit sad, as we’d thought we could maybe share a boat with some Mexicans, and now we feel like we’ll be missing out, on our lonely, only-four-people boat.
Our captain says, No, don’t worry–there will be plenty of party for us. And he gets us a cooler full of giant beers, and we set off. Slowly. These boats have no motors–they’re just punted, gondola-style.
After a little bit, we turn out and onto a canal, and I think we all privately must’ve laughed to ourselves about feeling lonesome and like we were missing out. Because this is what we see.
Soon we’re up in the fray, which miraculously never turns into total gridlock, and our boat just glides between parties.
What’s great is that the boats are so big, and the families so big, is that there’s enough room for kids to split off on their own. I saw one boat with sullen teens flopped on one end, texting, while their grandmothers gossiped on the chairs nearby. These kids were taking a breather:
And we’d also stupidly worried we should’ve brought food. What was I thinking? You never have to bring your own food in Mexico. Of course there was someone–on a boat–ready to make us lunch:
Lunch service, on our own boat, included the festive checked tablecloth:
We glided around a bit more, got off and walked through a greenhouse, and spied this odd guy:
All this time, I haven’t mentioned the music. Boats full of freelance mariachis glided through, latching on to host boats to sing a few songs, then carrying on. We’d been mooching off of everyone else’s ambience, so near the end of our two-hour tour, we flagged down our own guys.
“Sing us songs that will make us cry!” we said. Not that we needed to specify–they could be singing about rainbows and kittens, and all we have to hear is those trumpets and that full-throated voice, and we’d be weeping.
That’s our Greek fellow passenger in the foreground. Thumbs up for Xochimilco. I think I want to go back and have my birthday there. Or your birthday. Or anyone’s, really.
OK, let’s get this one out of the way first. It’s ridiculous and unfortunate:
And this is also pretty unfortunate. But it happens to be in a very nice neighborhood.
And there are other lovely combinations:
Excellent subway advertisements. Only because we were in Mexico City during Semana Santa, when crowds in the metro are at a minimum, could we take these photos without other people in them.
And then there’s this, much classier, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. This font makes me want to buy tickets to anything.
Finally, back to the metro. You may know that Mexico City’s metro is notable for the fact that each stop has a symbol as well as a name, to aid illiterate riders. We happened to walk past the public transport office (honest, just happened to!), where we saw these sign showing the inspiration for several of the metro-stop symbols.
Favorite: It’s a toss-up between the duck and the grasshopper, I think. What’s yours?
And then I read the story and thought, “Wow, what a bunch of assholes.”
The story, see, suggests that it’s somehow a bad thing that Baghdad’s police department is now painted purple. I thought journalism was supposed to at least appear to be balanced, but there’s not a single quote in the article from someone saying how much they like the colors. Instead, it’s all a bunch of prissy architects whining–and basically agreeing that the old way, when Saddam Hussein controlled what color all the buildings were, was better.
Because how can you grouse about color, once you’ve seen it so exuberantly applied? Along with hot weather, fresh food and music that makes me cry, Mexico offers a glorious treats for the eyeballs, such as these:
El Camino Real hotel, midcentury fantasy by LegorretaToken Bug-matches-house photo, in Coyoacan, the Park Slope of Mexico CityI match the metro!Note the clothes drying too.Simply salmon, at the Trotsky Museum
And color isn’t just limited to buildings, of course. Here, in the market, enterprising lime-sellers put green shades around the lightbulbs above their stands, to cast an eerie glow.
And if you just want to buy color straight, here it is. As a bonus, I suppose it tastes like various fruit flavors.
Basically, I just want to say: Baghdad, welcome to the club. Don’t listen to the haters. If color makes you feel better, rock it–you deserve it.
Union power rocks. Maybe it’s because the union logos are so fantastic.
Here’s the same logo, painted on the Zocalo, and surrounded by shoes, I believe to represent all the people killed in the drug war so far.
And another on the Zocalo:
But by far the best was the very first one we saw. Stay strong, telefonistas!
The coolest part: After we crossed the street to take a photo, we saw that in front of the building, there was a stand set up selling tchotchkes featuring its bad-ass logo: notepads, coffee mugs, key chains, little hooks to hang your purse from the restaurant table. Seriously? Not only does the Mexican Syndicate of Telephone Workers have the most righteous logo in the country, they know it.
, by Tahir Shah, and 
, by Joseph Braude.
