Unsteady and Off-Balance in the Medina
What the beautiful chaos of Marrakech revealed about letting go and standing my ground
Until I passed through one of the 19 monumental gates of Marrakech’s medina, it was as if I had never really wandered that far from home before. I still feel the gate’s imposing frame towering over me as my two friends and I collected both our bearings and our bags from the airport taxi.
Morocco may have been my twentieth country, but nothing could have prepared me for what this magical and transcendent city-inside-a-city would unveil. It was like no other place on earth I had ever been.
The medina, however, made quite the discombobulating first impression.
Medina means old city in Arabic. Marrakech’s old town made the equivalent cobblestone streets I had known and fallen in love with throughout Europe look and feel like Disneyland. This old town had an edge, a wily bite to it. To move here was to feel a kind of sublime overwhelm, one that can only come from subduing, taming and eventually converting culture shock into charged, fresh perspective.
My experience in Marrakech’s medina struck and stung as a curiously welcome but borderline assault on my senses.
I still feel the brush of motorbikes whizzing past me just a bit too close.
I conjure up, with little to no effort, that tiny burst of joy I found inside my first sip of Moroccan mint tea.
I close my eyes and see again the streets come to life with merchants carrying butchered animals between storefronts, snake charmers seducing tourists in the main square and everywhere children darting about and dodging it all.
And as quickly as that flashback dissolves, I smell and almost taste the aroma of every just-opened, simmering tagine.
My favorite recollection, however, is the shift in energy in the city when the Adhan, the call to prayer, is issued at timed intervals throughout the day on the medina’s speakers. Elegantly solemn and hypnotic no matter the creed of the ears and hearts it falls upon, it is a deeply mystical moment of community and connection.
Every sense was agitated and blissfully violated here. There was so much unexpected, unrefined and ordinary beauty everywhere I turned – in the disorder, in the dynamic between the hidden luxury of our riad hotel and the inequality in the streets, in a different way of simply doing things. Leaving unchanged was impossible.
At times, it could be humbling and unsettling. In the middle of all this beautiful chaos, I was, after all, just another dazed and bewildered rookie in motion. Any “wait, but I’m a world traveler” swagger I walked in with was shooed away like a pesky Saharan desert fly.
But more often, it was humbling and enlightening. Until I felt just how much travel could knock me off balance, I didn’t realize how hungry I was for it to challenge and demand something more of me. It felt mandatory to move here if expanding my worldview was a genuine intention.
If I was ever to evolve my relationship with travel from cathartic escape to a gateway of deeper connection and understanding, it would be in places like Marrakech, not from a beach chair or luxury boutique.
None of this would have been as convincing as it was if Marrakech hadn’t demanded my total presence. There was no half-in here. I had to show up with my mind, body, gut and soul alert, in perfect lock-step and coordination. Only then would I experience the compounding and unabridged Marrakech, its craft, spirit, texture and taste.
That surrender of my personal power to a place, its customs and ways of living, was new and intimidating but also liberating. It’s not always in my nature to let go and let be. I learned the more I succumbed to having my comfort zones and limits stretched here, the more movement registered somewhere other than just at the surface, the more I learned about me.
Never was this more evident and at play than when my two friends and I hired a tour guide to take us around the medina’s markets and shops. As all three of us are jewelry enthusiasts, we spent quite a bit of time browsing in our first stop, an old, filled-to-the-brim jewelry store. It was spectacular.
Until it wasn’t.
Our first nudge to proceed with caution should have been that there were no prices on anything – not like Cartier no prices on display, more like a flea market free-for-all no prices on anything. That meant everything we ultimately placed on the black velvet-wrapped trays that they handed each of us when we walked in was up for lengthy, exhausting negotiation. We quickly learned that changing our minds on any piece we were only half-in-love with was a costly exercise in wasted time and patience.
At one point, the shopkeeper, who had been incredibly attentive, suddenly broke form and raised the stakes, trying to manufacture an obvious sense of urgency. In what I can only assume was part of his routine with tourists just like us, he transformed from nice old man to aggressive closer, going so far as shutting the big wooden store door to the street. We were locked in.
My friends and I looked at each other. That’s when I instinctively ran through a lightning-quick linear account of how we’d gotten there. And by the looks on my friends’ faces, they were doing the same. Our highly respected and recommended riad hotel had recommended this tour guide >> and this tour guide had taken us to this jewelry shop >> where it seemed he had a very close relationship with the owner.
Escape route closed off or not, that felt more legitimate than suspicious.
What first hit us as a gut punch of panic eventually revealed itself to be nothing more than a used-car salesman tactic.
The moment that door was shut, after I’d assessed the level of threat, something in me woke all the way up. Not only was I offended by the antic, but I realized we had been doing this all wrong.
The shopkeeper had been telling us these fantastical stories for every piece of jewelry we had on our trays – bracelets from Mesopotamia, necklaces from the pyramids and so on and so on. I knew marketing spin when I heard it. And while we had no reason to believe or disbelieve anything he said, we did have a vote – with our credit cards.
The only way we could get to the truth and value of each item would be if we flipped the script. If this was the game we were playing, each piece was only as valuable as what it was worth to us. That’s when a necklace I had shown too much interest in, that started at 675 USD, looked a whole lot more like 57 USD to me.
It was the difference between meeting him at his anchored price and me having the nerve and taking the risk to establish my own. That changed everything.
Each of us left that morning with the pieces we wanted, paying a price that we felt they were worth, likely still being taken for some kind of ride. But when we pushed that big wooden door open again and walked out onto the sunny, crowded streets of the medina, our heads were held high.
I’ve thought about that lesson a million times since then. Not the necklace, which I got. And not the moment the door closed on us, which I still revisit as a healthy little reminder. But I think instead about how susceptible we can be to whatever narrative is playing in the background.
Traveling off balance in Marrakech had tilted my modus operandi just enough that I could finally see what the cost of letting go and leaning all the way in really was.
I’ll never know the true and exact total, but for now? I’ll settle on the difference between 57 and 675, or 617 USD.
Necklace purchased for 57 USD inside a Marrakech Medina Jewelry Shop
