Italy and Morocco 2009: 04/15/09

Travel days can be the worst. This trip's major travel day required us to get up at 5 a.m. in Venice so we could pack and catch the 7:20 a.m. vaporetto to the parking structure, get our car, and drive to the Milan airport. From there we flew to Casablanca and drove to Marrakech, parked, and headed into the old Medina to our riad. It all sounds so simple ... but we crossed centuries and continents and cultures, and so although this day was arduous (and it really took its toll on little Ria) it was also the most profound day of our trip, so far at least.

It began with the beautiful sunrise along Venice's Canale di Giudecca.

The drive to Milan was uneventful, and although we'd read reviews of Royal Air Maroc that made us expect a cattle call of people with bags and chickens, it was really just a budget airline with a rather tatty Boeing 737. Ria slept for much of the flight, and we arrived in Casablanca on time. After some moderate confusion at the car rental agency, we drove off in our rather tatty Fiat into the subtly elegant Moroccan countryside. It is hard to capture the quiet beauty of this landscape, particularly from a car. But I am so very, very content to be back in this country, and do wish I could find a way to spend more time here.

After a couple of hours of driving through mostly empty countryside, a sign announced that we were five miles from Marrakech -- a city of a million people -- and yet there was no evidence of the city. No suburbs, no billboards, nothing. Then we turned a corner and saw the city lights. Within minutes we were smack in the middle of the city -- buses swerving between lanes, trucks spewing diesel smog, swarms of motorized scooters, unlit bicycles ridden by people in black clothes, carts pulled by donkeys or pushed by people, pedestrians of course, armed police standing right in the way, broken-down vehicles, sales carts, even piles of construction materials right in the lanes of traffic. The Lonely Planet's map was useful for getting us to the Medina, and there it broke down. None of this surprised us. But it took nerves of steel for Thom to keep driving when we accidentally drove into the Medina -- a labyrinth of improbably narrow streets coursing with streams of humanity, again on bikes and scooters, in cars and even buses and trucks as wide as the roads, and total and exhilarating madness. Nana, take your Paxil before coming here! I didn't bother to take a single photo for fear of distracting Thom and causing him to kill someone on a scooter.

We overpaid a young man to find us a parking spot, overpaid three more to take us and our luggage to our riad (a private home in the Medina, now serving as a hotel), and left the chaos of the Medina behind. The riad is a sanctuary, cool and quiet, dripping with brightly colored flowers, and as safe and secluded as any place we've stayed.

Venice, as you can imagine, has devolved into a massive and crowded theme park, to a large extent. Sure there's a complex and historic culture underneath. But the tourist layer that lies atop that culture is significant. And with a five-year-old in tow, even the obvious cultural points are a challenge to access. We didn't want to stand on a line several hundred people long to enter the Basilica, or go to a museum that would be crowded and expensive. My loving and cultured parents took me to many museums all across Europe when I was Ria's age, and what I recall most from that time is just how powerful a force gravity is, as it sucked me to the ground any time we paused before a masterpiece.

So, we wandered the streets, took the vaporettos (public bus-boats), ate gelotto, played with Italian children we ran across, and generally just absorbed the ambiance of Venice, which is considerable. Here are pictures of the people and places in Venice which particularly caught our eye, including St. Mark's Basilica, La Fenice opera theatre, shop windows, and both locals and tourists.