I am the perennial “travel bug”!! Personally, I do not believe in “Love At First Sight” but I fell headlong in love with Morocco! It has been my dream since I was a little girl, reading the “Arabian Fairy Tales.” I was so engrossed in so many of the stories told in “1001 Arabian Nights” and thrilled by the stories of “Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor” and so taken by the genie in a bottle in “Aladdin.” When I finally arrived in Marrakech, I find myself so immersed in those tales which I had read as a child. In later years, I have found out that these “1001 Arabian Nights” were actually stories told by Scheherazade. So, Scheherazade – who is she? Once upon a time, a sultan of a big and powerful empire left his castle for a hunting trip. When he returned, he found out that his wife was unfaithful to him. Enraged, he beheaded his wife and those who were with her. He found the same thing had happened to his sister in law who was also unfaithful to his brother. He came to the conclusion that all women were deceitful and cannot be trusted. To exact vengeance on all women, he will have an innocent woman every night and then will have her executed the next day. All the fathers were worried about the safety of their daughters. One woman, Scheherazade refused to cower and run but stayed and was chosen by the Sultan to spend one night with him. In order to delay his execution the very next morning, she regales him with exciting stories every night with a cliff hanger so that she can continue each story the next day and the next day to delay the inevitable. By the time she had reached 1000 stories, the Sultan had fallen deeply in love with her and he married her on the 1001 day. Of course it is just a fairy tale and I do love all fairy tales with happy endings!!
I have found that those “1001 stories” come alive when I was walking along those ancient cobblestoned steps in the old medina of Fez. It sparked my imagination to ‘see’ Alladin or Ali Baba running from the authorities by jumping from one roof to another in the closed confined quartered houses in the medina. I even bought a pair of “Aladdin shoes” to remember my journey through the old cities of Fez and Chefchaouen.
