"Make sure to go to the night market and find the snakes," a message to us from CatandPat Patterson WorldRiders2.com. They cycled Morocco on their world odyssey and recently revisited the country.
At lunch near the Djemaa El Fna square, we eat listening to the snake charmer's music and drumming. Rachel says: "I always thought the worse job would be a salesperson in a cuckoo clock shop, but maybe listening to this all day might also be trying." Patrick observes, they probably don't hear it anymore.
We go out in spurts coinciding with finding food, and each time the crowd grows. Shops are slowly opening and interspersed in the crowd on the square are the monkey handlers and the cobra snake charmers. We don't take pictures of either, this all seems to be animal abuse that we don't want to sponsor. We make a wide berth walking around the snakes.Those cobras are big, it does give one to pause about camping in the desert.
Breakfast "pancakes" at the restaurant under our hotel. The crepes are more breadlike and the thicker pancakes are made of cornmeal.
First set of stairs of our hotel. Then past the reception desk, around a corner and another set of stairs and a hallway back to our room. It's a bit of a maze. It appears like several building were later connected by cutting holes through walls.
Now it's late afternoon and early evening. The square becomes a carnival-like atmosphere: crowds gather around games being played; opportunities for henna tattoes; card games; crowds around what appears to be medicine man; wandering salesmen of cigarettes and sunglasses, sim cards.
There are plenty of food stalls each with a man out front trying to get you to eat at their place.
A row of stalls selling escargot. And although escargot is commonly identified with France, the first known consumption of snails occurred in Spain – about 10,000 years earlier than France and other neighboring countries.
