tinaNtravel
CouplesSan Jose, California
A must see
The Medina is filled with one souvenir shop after the other (in the many hundreds) along with small cafes and restaurants. Many of the shop owners make their products within their shops. So you can watch someone making shoes or carving little decorative boxes or weaving a carpet. All of that is quite good, and walking the Medina is a must. The very big negative is that motorcycles, bikes, donkey carts and sometimes cars are also on that quite narrow walkway in the Medina. This makes it difficult to enjoy the walk as you constantly need to be sure you are out of the way of a vehicle. Imagine walking on a walkway that is perhaps 2 meters (6 feet) wide with tons of tourists – back to back – and then motorcycles weaving between the tourists from both directions. The main negative, was not that you might get injured, believe it or not, but the strong smell from all the exhaust in that small, mostly enclosed area mixed with all the other smells from a tannery, paint, etc. There are also a lot of stray cat and kittens in the Medina that somehow know not to move in front of a motorcycle. We saw the shopkeepers giving them cat food and water. But all in all, you still need to go to the Medina and inspite of everything I just said, if we return to Marrakesh, we will again stay in a Riad within the Medina and shop in the Medina. It is definitely something to experience.
