Initially we were told we could walk to the Marjane, but for some reason I didn't buy it and insisted we take a taxi. A fifteen minute cab ride later, vindication was mine!
We pulled up to a giant parking lot, something we hadn't seen in Morocco yet outside of the airport. At the back end of the lot was a dull building, and immediately my mind said to me, "holy shit, since when did Wal-Mart get to Africa?" But no, my friends, Marjane is much more than Wal-Mart could ever wish to be. Marjane is a superstore and a mini-mall, all rolled into one!
Unfortunately, half of the stores were closed because it was a Sunday morning during Ramadan, but inside were cafés, high-end clothing stores (including a Lacoste store!), teleboutiques, even a toy store; all of it was outside the main section of the building devoted to the Marjane itself. The main area of the store was divided as you would find a Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, whatever. There was an area for linens, home furnishings, electronics, appliances, crappy books, school supplies, sports, toys, auto repair, beauty and toiletries, and, at last, a supermarket!
I trolled the aisles, finding goodies from home and from Europe. Kinder chocolate, Mars (Milky Way in the States,) Crunchips, Lay's, Coca-Cola, Pepsi (including the new Pepsi Max, surprisingly) and dozens of other types of junk food. And actual food, REAL food: Barrilla pasta, Kikkoman's soy sauce, ketchup, gnutella (but no peanut butter, alas) and on, and on. We even found pork, in a section divided from the rest of the meats.
I dug hard, and found processed cheese so I could make cheeseburgers, though finding buns is proving a challenge.
In the end, we bought quite the variety of goods, and have been back on several occasions. One mini-adventure I've had that was Marjane related, I bought a set of hair clippers because for the last year or so I've cut my own hair, and the set I had back home were not dual-voltage. I found a decent set on sale and grabbed them up, because they came set with what appeared to be all the necessary lengths (1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1", etc.) Alas, I'm halfway through cutting my hair later in the day when I realize that the extensions only go up to 1/2". Oops. After covering my hair with a hat the rest of the day, I trekked back to Marjane the next night, but of course, they didn't have just a set of extensions I could buy. I was all set to sell my clippers to another guy who had come to buy the same set, and then thrown down for a more expensive set that I had just verified had what I needed, when all of a sudden I spot in the bottom of the case a bunch of extensions just lying around. Not attached to a set of clippers or anything. So I'm asking the clerk in broken Darija and gesturing wildly trying to get my point across, trying to figure out if I could just give them some money for those and be done with it and such, when suddenly he reaches in and just hands one of them to me. Safi. That's it. I ask twice what I owe, and he just replies "you need it, take it. Safi." Moroccan hospitality, indeed! So I went home and cut my hair, yet somehow it took everyone here a good week to notice...
Later that day, it was back to the mdina to check out the soukh, or weekly market. They're usually on Sundays, and in the towns there's lots of veggies/fruits and second- (and sometimes first-) hand goods for sale at dirt cheap prices. In the cities, all the shops will open up and it's a veritable buyer's market, with lots of haggling, insulting of the other person's relatives twice removed, and goods exchanging hands.
Other volunteers had tons of adventures to which I was not a part, sadly, such as one of the guys who was with me when we got lost in the mdina the first night in Fez. This time, he found a snake charmer performing his act and took a picture from the back of the crowd. As he's staring down at the picture on his camera, the music stops and the crowd in front of him parts wide. And there's the snake charmer barreling towards him, one empty hand outstretched and demanding money, and in the other hand the snake. After he pays up for watching the performance, the snake charmer little dumps the snake around his shoulders and saunters off to take a break, leaving the volunteer completely flummoxed and with nothing else to do than just stand calmly and give his camera to someone else so he can get another picture.
For myself, I had my first run in with "tour guides," people who come up and argue they're not there to "guide" you, but just to show you around their city and practice English with you (since technically tour guides are against the law.) They may lead you around for a while, but in the end will always demand money for "showing you around." Eventually the ones pestering us got so bad and upset my group so much we had to leave the mdina and enter in through one of the other gates (the modern one for cars that I mentioned previously.) After that, however, things went smoothly and we were able to mill around all the shops. It was so packed I was afraid to stop and take a picture for fear of pickpockets, because we've heard that the Fez mdina is one of the roughest around. Considering other groups got tons of pictures and plenty of adventures in the leather tannery, or with snake charmers, or haggling, that here's my advise for all you future world travelers: take your precautions just as you would traveling somewhere in America, but remember to have fun and not let anything (or anybody) get in your way!
Overall it was nice to see both sides of Fez in one day, and even nicer to see the mdina when it was light out and everything was as busy as could be. We were through with one full day of language, and all that now loomed in front of us was a full immersion into Darija, with Ramadan serving as a great introduction to local religion and society at the same time.
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