Time is ticking...

Oh readers, I know that on my second-last day in Marrakech I should be a) doing something worthwhile and b) posting about it, but really I am too excited/anxious about Paris to think about Marrakechness or to bestow any uniquely insightful pearls of Moroccan wisdom upon you today.

I am excited for all the obvious reasons (including the new Paris blog). I am anxious because there are many little things that need to be done before we leave - indeed I need to do most of them right now. I need to ring DHL, email my new landlord, email the old tenant (again - why didn't she reply the first time?), go on the French IKEA website and order a bed, wonder how to arrange telephone/internet in Paris in the quickest possible manner and find out if ebookers.ie did or did not cancel my husband's flight from London to Paris next Wednesday and if they *did*, rebook it (although not, this time, with ebookers).

In the meantime, our house is full of workmen as our landlord tries to fix all the little problems before he leaves for his exotic life abroad again, so we have scuttled off to our usual hideout. I leave you with a picture of Bab Fteuh, which takes you from Place Bab Fteuh, which is just off the Djemma el Fna, to Rue Mouassine and our little world.

Before digital cameras...

In my possession, I have thirteen postcards that I bought here in Marrakech in the gift shop (and I use the term loosely) of the Medersa. They are reproductions of postcards from 1910 - 1930 and I had been meaning to do a blog post about them and get pictures of them up here when my camera died (I promise you faithfully that I will be getting a new one for Paris).

Then today, in an unrelated frame of mind, but inspired by a fabulous art deco door-handle that I spotted on our way though the Ville Nouvelle, I did an online search for Art Deco Marrakech to see if I could do a post on that subject, but I found something even better for you to look at!

It's a *huge* quiz on a noticeboard where the poster has put up positively hundreds of beautiful photographs and postcards of Morocco from the first half of the last century for you to identify. Well, whatever your chances of identifying them are, the thread is most definitely a visual feast of a world that you can still see peeping through the mopeds and mobile phones of Marrakech today.

http://www.darnna.com/phorum/read.php?2,12330,page=1

Our last week...

Today is Thursday and we have less than a week to go here and I am feeling very pro-Marrakech indeed. Maybe it's the light rain we have had on and off today, the coolness in the air or the pomegranates and roses in our kitchen but today is a good day to be in Marrakech, I think.

This morning we got up to a chilly, rainy morning and after breakfast and pooching around for a bit I announced that we were going into the Ville Nouvelle for brunch at Kechmara again. And that after that we were going to have lunch in Grand Cafe de la Poste. And you know what? That's exactly what we did and it was wonderful. We have been very bad in recent weeks about hiding in our lovely hourse instead of going out and walking around the city as much as we should have been and to wrap up warmly (although all the tourists were wandering around in their usual - and not always flattering - skimpiness) and march through the Medina, out Bab Laksour, through the huge city walls into the Ville Nouvelle.

I tried to buy some of those perfume bottles, by the way, but they were a little overpriced, I thought. It turns out that most of the bottles in the shops along Rue Mouassine are recycled Western perfume bottles that have had the metalwork added to them. Some were pretty, but the Gaultier ones were just strange. Anyway, I decided that three euros was about right and although he came down from fifteen to six, I wanted five bottles and wouldn't budge up from five euros each. So I left it - I'd rather hold out for real bottles anyway, rather than recycled ones.

And yes, I had nutella crepes again.

Frozen toes.

Well. I picked a name for the new blog, but I'm keeping it a secret for a few more days. The last two hours have been spent registering the domain name and setting up the blog. Tiresome things, like putting in all my info, entering the links of all the blogs I read on Google Reader and picking a colour scheme etc. take *forever* and my birkenstocked toes (seen above) are completely frozen from sitting here in this chilly sitting-room. The new colour scheme, incidentally, is monochrome - black text on white, with grey bars to either side. There will be lots of photographs and images on it, so it's not as though the whole experience will be black and white. What do you think?

Apart from that, this morning I woke up from a dream that awful people I didn't like had gatecrashed a dinner party to my husband bringing me a cup, nay a pot of Lapsang Souchong. A good start, don't you think? Of course, he had to get me into a good mood, and quickly, because this morning was the morning we had decided to go to DHL and have our huge lamp (do you remember the huge lamp?) shipped to either Dublin or Paris, whichever was cheaper. Turns out that Paris was cheaper, although cheap wouldn't really be the first word to spring to mind. Nevertheless, we sent it off and we now have one less thing to worry about on our *very* early morning flight out of Marrakech next week.

After that, we had brunch in Kechmara (Nutella crepes!) and made our way home, marvelling at the heavy traffic. Our housekeeper informed us later that President Sarkozy is here today and lots of roads were closed.

Well, off I go to thaw out my toes.

Ennui!

I have been sitting at this desk too long and have done no work! I am supposed to be writing a chapter and although it is going well, I keep being lured into wasting time on the internet and frittering away hours doing things that I *tell* myself are practical - researching things about Paris, keeping up-to-date on other blogs and buying winter woollies on ebay, but you know as well as I do that as delightful as the archives of Petite Anglaise are, or as diverting as searching for cashmere on ebay.com is, it still doesn't *quite* count as PhD work, does it?

To add to the gloom of internet guilt, it is a lovely afternoon outside (thirty-two degrees) and I could be sitting on the roof and reading about Gide (or indeed, reading Gide himself) with a glass of wine, but instead I have wasted the day sitting not just indoors, but in a very dark and frankly, chilly room, as we are not blessed with wireless here and I am tied to this room if I wish to, well, waste the day online.

However, all is not lost. With a burst of superhuman determination, as soon as I hit the "Publish Post" button, I am unplugging my little ibook and taking it upstairs to our sun-bathed sitting room where I can lounge on our lavender couch and gaze idly at the contrast between the blue sky and the pink bougainvillea. At least then I will be wasting time sensibly.

I know you're out there...

Readers, I need your help. When I move to Paris at the end of this month, I will be closing this blog and starting a new one and I need a name for it. Something chic, simple, non-location-specific and relevant to an academic girl's interests in fashion, interiors, food, culture and literature. I like texture - grosgrain, velvet, brocade - and I had thought of things like "Grosgrain and Velvet", for instance.

What do you think?

The post of the bath...

It has to be said that I love baths with a passion. Oh such a passion. It has been a point of almost daily heartbreak for me that we do not have a bath here in Marrakech, although there are certain moral issues to such wanton water wastage here in North Africa and particularly in Morocco where there has been a drought for the last decade, but such issues aside... I miss my bath. Of all the glories of our new apartment in Paris, the fact that it has that longed-for tub almost brought tears to my eyes, but still, it has to be admitted that even through a claw-footed, cast-iron Victorian bath is rare in the average Moroccan household, they have certainly dreamed up a few rather fabulous alternatives.

Now, I must first disabuse my romantic readers of any notions of scenes like those above. Unfettered orientalism completely aside, it does rather seem as though Debat-Ponsan, Bouchard and Ingres were just looking for rather tenuous excuses to paint naked girls in exotic (i.e. sexy) environments. But it has to be said that the luxury of some of the hammams here in Marrakech does make one feel rather like one of these extremely clean young ladies by the time they are done with you.

In Le Bains de Marrakech I was steamed, soaped, and blissfully scrubbed to within an inch of my life and slathered with mud and left to steam a bit longer before having bucket after bucket of hot water poured over me to wash the mud away. At Les Jardins de la Koutoubia I had a similar experience, albeit in far more luxurious surroundings, and delivered by a girl so tiny that she had to stand on the edge of the fountain to reach to pour the hot (and cold!) water over me. You leave both relaxed and invigorated and cleaner than you have ever felt before in your life. Practically any luxury hotel here in Marrkakech (and most of the non-luxury ones too, for that matter) feature a hammam somewhere, even though it does seem that saunas and Western steam-rooms are unusual, and even if you are staying in the cheapest of the cheap, eighteen euros will see you scrubbed and steamed in Bains and twenty-five or thirty in Jardins. Who needs Clarins?

If you simply must have more, then you must surely buy The Book of the Bath.

Bernard Debat-Ponsan, Scene du Hammam
Paul-Louis Bouchard, After the Bath
Jean Ingres, The Turkish Bath

PS: I have added a few more blogs to my list on the right hand side of this page - do give them a visit!