One of the most time-consuming (and expensive) aspects of renovating a house in the medina is clearing away all the rubble you create. It all has to be bagged up into little sacks and left on the street overnight, for a horse and cart to take away first thing in the morning.
We’ve produced hundreds of cartloads since starting our renovation…hopefully not too many to go now!!
The walls in our house are not exactly uniform, and all manner of old stones and rubble break off during the ‘grattage’ process.
But even so we were pretty surprised to find this bone set into some of the plaster. Images of mafia-style killings filled our minds, but one of the builders assured us – with an alarming level of certainty – that it comes from “a dog on the beach”. Quite how he’s able to be so specific, we’re not sure…
When your house is built onto the battlements of a walled city, you don’t really expect your walls to contain a blocked-off doorway that might at some point have ushered you straight out of the city wall.
But that’s exactly what we found on the ground floor of Dar 91, as shown in this rather grainy photo (You’re just going to have to trust us on this one…it’s pretty dark down there and we didn’t have a lighting crew with us, ok? Ed). Which suggests our house pre-dates the city wall – or that our house was built where there used to be a door into the medina (which seems unlikely).
Kind of annoying, too – could make a rather natty shortcut to the off licence…
In the ‘old days’ there was apparently a tradition of families having stashed treasure in Moroccan houses as they fled from unfriendly regimes…so the builders get very excited when they find interesting things amongst the rubble.
We’re not sure the large iron balls the builders found under the floor are worth a lot, but they’re certainly an interesting find and did get them quite excited for a few moments.
Could they be cannonballs? The ends of weightlifting bars? Any other ideas?
One of the joys of our neighbourhood is waking up to find that the normally white terraces are an explosion of colour, thanks to the local blanket cleaning rituals. As you’ll see from the montage below, traditional Moroccan blankets now compete with modern, garish and synthetic alternatives. Having slept in a few of these, we can assure readers that what they may lack in style, they more than make up for in heat retention.
Weather – with at least 320 days of sun, it is HOT, with BLUE SKIES all the way.
The amazing sunsets giving every night a spectacle of colours, either PINK, ORANGE or DEEP BLUE…don’t forget your camera!
Lovely fresh fish and an ever changing supply of fresh fruit and vegetables…let’s EAT EAT EAT
It’s a shopping paradise, with fairer prices than in many other Moroccan tourist destinations, and less need to barter. So you can SHOP TILL YOU DROP
Essaouira is like a window onto a simpler past long lost in Western Europe. ENJOY IT!
This Sunday (25 April) is the finale of the Regraga pilgrimage, with a fantasia at Had’Dra.
The Regraga originate from the Chiadma region to the north of Essaouira, and their ancestors are said to have made the Hajj to Mecca, received the blessing of the Prophet and introduced the Quran to Morocco. Every year they and a host of pilgrims go on a marathon 38-day tour of shrines across the region, erecting holy tents and bestowing ‘baraka’ on the crowds who follow them.
About 30 days ago they came to Essaouira, bringing with them a new energy to the town as the locals’ friends and families descended from the countryside to celebrate this popular annual festival, filling up the houses and streets with hustle and bustle. The parade progressed down the main street to the beat of drums, with the pilgrims throwing water and blessings. It’s fascinating to watch the Moroccans being cornered by the pilgrims, demanding dirhams in exchange for a blessing, and an interesting custom is that unmarried women who stroke the white horse which forms part of the cortege, will apparently increase their chances of finding a husband.
The locals say that with the Regraga comes a wind that makes the wheat dance and other crops grow – and as is so often the case here, they managed to find time for serious shopping at a market to the north end of town, which went on long into the night and, given the lack of street lighting in that area, proved that Moroccans can even shop in total darkness.
From Thursday 29 April to Saturday 1 May Essaouira hosts this annual spring festival of classical music. The concerts will take place at Dar Souiri, the Alliance Francaise and in a concert tent at Bab Manzah.
Highlights will include a performance of Carmina Burana; songs from Falla, Bizet and Debussy, and an operatic evening including arias from operas by Mozart, Donizetti and Offenbach. Read more.
“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Now Incy Wincy spider went up the spout again”
A strange side-effect of starting the work on the house was the growth of a huge number of spiders’ webs at the lower levels of the house. This may have been partly that existing webs became more visible as dust from the higher levels landed from above. But we prefer to believe that the spiders themselves moved down the building to escape the noise and disturbance. We’ve never seen so many webs all in one place!
A few weeks ago we got the permit from the Council to start with the ‘grattage’. This basically means scraping away the plaster from the walls, and the cement underneath.
For such an exotic sounding word, grattage is a thankless task – and especially for our stalwart builder Hakim, who has managed it pretty much single-handed.
The grattage revealed that our house is built of stone rather than brick, and with wooden beams resembling a Tudor construction.
In Morocco it is frequently claimed that treasure can be found in old houses – people used to hide valuables before fleeing in local dynastic disputes….sadly we have not yet found any….but we did uncover a fantastic old terracotta downpipe set into the wall, from roof to ground level, which is a kind of consolation.
