Marrakech day 2 part one

The day started wonderfully with breakfast on the roof terrace. We had 2 types of rolls, one of which was brioche like with seeds and spices. We also had fresh fruit cocktail, yoghurt, a carafe of freshly squeezed orange and mint tea. Delicious!

After that we headed to the Kasbah for some sightseeing. Gem has somehow hurt her neck but I managed to buy ibuprofen gel in a pharmacy which is helping a bit. Our first stop was the Saadian tombs which were lovely but had a couple of school trips visiting so were pretty busy.

We managed to find the entrance to the Badii Palace with some help from a stall holder and we spent ages in there. There are storks nesting at the top of all the palace walls so they were flying about getting twigs to build up their giant nests. There was also a photography museum within the palace which was great and there was a big mural on the wall too.

Our next stop was the Henna Art Cafe which involved going through some of the souk. It was cool seeing all the stuff and was nowhere near as aggressive ad I'd been expecting.  The cheekiest thing that happened was a guy pretended he worked at the cafe and told it wasn't open yet and tried to get us to follow him to another cafe!

When we eventually got into the Henna Art Cafe we managed to score a terrace to ourselves. We had a date milkshake each and chilled before heading downstairs to get some matching fore arm henna. The intricate pattern was applied quickly and expertly with a syringe. We then had to sit with our arms infront of a heater for ages til it dried which was horrible. The boy that worked there was lovely and we chatted for ages about his English literature degree that he's doing. He explained it's hard because there isn't a culture of people reading to their kids in morroco.

We headed up through the souk, through the main square and into the real crazy souks. So. Much. Stuff. We stopped at Cafe Des Epices and managed to get an upstairs window seat overlooking a square in the spice souk. It was fantastic, gem got the house salad which I didn't expect much of but was really interesting and she loved it - I'll attach a picture. I got the chicken burger with guac and curry but it was actually 4 mini fresh pitta breads with a sort of coronation chicken and guac inside with fresh cut chips. It was incredibly tasty. We also had a couple of drinks and it came to little more than a tenner. We went across the square and booked at table for dinner tomorrow at Nomad - it looks amazing.

We wound our way through more souks til we came to the quite frankly amazing Medersa Ben Youssef. It is an old Islamic College from the 14th century and the intricate design is amazingly beautiful. Our final piece of culture for the day was the Museum of Marrakesh which was similarly designed in traditional morrocan style. The art was great, particularly the contemporary art section.

We sat outside afterwards and I had a delicious lurid non-European fanta and Gem had an espresso. We walked back through the souks and the square to the Riad because we were totally exhausted. It started to rain a bit when we were almost back but it remains warm.

We're currently chilling in the room and Gem is clearly in agony unfortunately. Hopefully it'll ease off before we head out for dinner later.