The World Examining Works

Vegetables/Morocco

 

These first few photos are of the veggie market in the souks on the way to the Musee de Marrakesh. It's a pretty humble market where everything is laid out on the ground. Note the woman on the right with her toddler on her back --from the size of the shoes probably almost three....

Tagine dishes on the left.

Artichokes! beets, eggplant, beans, cauliflower. What a feast and all grown quite nearby.

How much chopping and peeling to be done and how delicious.

Mint and herbs to be added.

And maybe a parsnip says the pregnant cat....

who would rather look about her than pod peas.

Up by the Mellah market the strawberries are in season. I think they are resting in clover.

 

All photos taken March 2013.

The Outer Garden of the Bahia Palace and Some Fruit and Flowers Too...

 

The two previous posts were about fish and flowers and I sort of wanted to post veggies and got sidetracked. Herewith the garden of the Bahia (Beautiful) Palace in Marrakesh.

The garden itself is rather a mishmash of tended and untended but was lovely in February...

There were

 

yellow daisy type things and 

a yellow bush.

I always imagine restoring these outer buildings

 and living there with the cats

 and the banana tree.

Ah! rose petals in a fountain in Essouira

where lemons abounded at Dar Baba

and oranges lounged in a nice ceramic dish.

The oranges are so much sweeter than here

and so many of them....!

 

 

Fish

 

Hm....fish

the fruits of the sea and madly picturesque and jolie laide...

so beautifully laid out here in Essouria where they'll cook one up for you just caught from the ocean.

They set out in little blue boats

full of important equipment

and mend nets.

The sea, like the fish, is beautiful and

frightening at the same time. Here a poor dead fish in Sidi Ifni.

and more strange creatures on the ground.

Here a silver of sardines -- much bigger than the horrid little canned ones we were forced to eat as children.

More silver creatures in Ifni

and pink ones too.

 

A rather different life from Rupert Brooke's philosophical English river dwellers:

Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!

 

 

 

 

Flowers at the Mellah Market, Marrakesh

 

The very end of February in Marrakesh

such flowers!

stocks and broom and mimosa, lilies and irises

birds of paradise and roses galore

calla lilies

and everything jumbled together

I buy mimosa for the smell alone and am given three blue iris.

Spring indeed.

 

Things I could Buy/Morocco

 

In Tiznit, south of Agadir

I discover a very elaborate headdress of Berber design. 

And pretty headscarves on the ends of posts.

I think this mannequin is waiting for the shop keeper to return from lunch.

 

In Marrakesh the clothes themselves are OK --though almost certainly made in China. It's the dummies I find alarming.

 

In Essouira, something right out of JAWS...

A bus ride from Tiznit......

and very beautiful melons...

 

Sfumato

 

Earlier this week the weather was misty and English --quite unlike the clear piercing light we usually get.

On Monday morning the tall buildings were shrouded in fog. (Shrouded always sounds a bit melancholy and romantic.)

Even the tree by the Midtown Tunnel managed to look picturesque.

Billowing something or other between the buildings of Penn South.

Dusk looking towards 23rd Street.

All these bare trees remind me of photos I took several Decembers ago on the beach in Morocco

where magic forests were created by the tide pulling dark sand over light sand or viceversa. I have always kept these pictures when much else has been lost.

Such trees, or coral, or roots of teeth 

Here trees reflected in water on 24th Street.

But back to the old misty business --Cold Spring Harbor on LI on misty Monday with the Hipstamatic filter

and the plain version.

Lastly Miss Gretchen -- like Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son John/One shoe off and one shoe on.

 

And the winner of the Novica gift code was commenter #6 DCW. I will send the code via email so you can buy someone a present from their  new gift finder.

 

 

About Nothing in Particular/Domestic

Nice billowy clouds after a night of storms. 

Two kinds of salvia and some oregano snipped on the roof where the tubs are running rampant. Beach basket awaiting an outing. It came from Essouira by the seaside in Morocco.

Breakfast and a jug from where we used to go to the beach when I was six.

Absurd yellow breakfast from the other day (on top of a drawing block).

Lemons for iced tea --the ideal summer drink -- on a napkin again from Maroc.

Same lemons before in a bowl......

which sits near the desk and the chair..... and so it all circles around: the past and the present and the idea of home. And the TV blares something silly about aging skin  -- then shows us people in Syria whose homes are blown up -- so the trivial seems sweeter than ever.

 

 

Marrakesh comes to New York

 

D+D Building on Lexington --all sorts of little black and white squares --even in the curtains (right). New York is tall and gray and white. Marrakesh is pink not a bit tall except for the Kotubia.

Rather elegantly dressed people with one splendid hat. Splendid hats aplenty in Marrakesh.

A lovely middle-Eastern feast: dried fruit and little pastries with almonds --it all makes me quite homesick for Morocco.

I think the little red decorative bits are lentils.....

And Maryam signing her lovely new book! How worlds collide.

Metropolitan Museum

 

Walked across the park in the warm morning

with the leaves at their giddy yellow best

to the quite different palatte of the museum.

New Islamic galleries awash with treasures.

Reminded me of John Masefield's 

I must go down to the sea again

to the lonely sea and the sky

And all I ask is a tall ship

and a star to steer her by.....

For me it's not remotely the sea, but the idea of longing awakened by art  and books

Just imagine living in the Damascus Room when one can't possibly go to real Damascus just now.

No good wandering round the museum taking pictures of stuff

except I couldn't resist this luster glass cup. Abbasid Period 9th or 10th century. Iran or Iraq

A good place to go to study things

and talk about them with friends.

 

 

New and Old

 

 

A new development, using traditional design on the road between Marrakesh and Essouira at the seaside.

Lots of Moroccan flags.

 As a contrast.......

A humble, patient donkey.

Happy weekend.

 

 

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