Marrakech
Learning to drink mint tea slowly
11 — 18 April 2025
Morocco
31.6295° N, 7.9811° W
The medina is not designed to be understood on the first day, or the second, and getting lost is the fee you pay for eventually knowing where you are.
Nothing prepares you for the noise, and then nothing prepares you for how quickly you stop hearing it. By day three the souks had resolved from chaos into something with a grain to it — this alley is metal, this one is leather, this one is where the cats live.
The riads are the counterweight. You come in off a street that is all elbows and heat, through a door, and the temperature drops ten degrees and the sound stops. Every one of them is built around this single trick and it works every single time.
“It is not fuel. It is a way of making a conversation take an hour.”
We got the tea thing wrong for the first few days, drinking it like coffee, quickly, as fuel. It is not that. It is a way of making a conversation take an hour. Once we understood that, the whole trip slowed down and got substantially better.
Getting around
Gallery — scroll
Places mentioned
Sight
Jemaa el-Fnaa
Go at dusk, when the food stalls come out and the square changes character entirely.
Sight
Le Jardin Secret
Twenty minutes of quiet in the middle of the medina. Worth the ticket.