As one who’s visited Morocco three times (and Marrakech twice — mid ’70s + the 10th annual Marrakech Film Festival (12.3 to 12.11) I can only say how sorry I am for all the misery and suffering following last Friday’s earthquake. The epicenter was closer to the Atlas mountains and so Marrakech didn’t get hit too horribly, but I wonder what the Marrakech town square (setting of the knife-in-the back sequence in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the medina look like now. I’m very, very sorry.
UPDATE: The number of people killed in Morocco’s deadly earthquake has reached 2,681, according to official stats.
🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/NfK0xSQUDY pic.twitter.com/UlU4HK1cS0
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2023
Good Marrakech paragraph, posted on 12.6.10: “The Marrakech Film Festival wifi problems have been unrelenting but everyone you run into is polite and calm and gentle to a fault. There’s apparently no such thing as an impolite Marrakech resident.
Okay, I did run into a couple of ruffians on a bike on Saturday night who tried to assault me and steal my wallet — I later named them Dick and Perry — but I pushed one of them in the chest and told them both to fuck off and then ran in the opposite direction and they were good enough not to follow, so even the thieves and the roughnecks are polite.
There’s no indoor smoking ban, and there are no helmet laws so you can scooter down the street with the wind blowing through your hair. And the food is wonderful. And the energy in the main old-town square is so exciting and heavenly. And there are horse carts all over the city, and sometimes as you’re driving down the street you can smell horseshit, and that is a very good thing. The older you get and the more plastic and corporate the world becomes, the better horseshit smells.”