Moroccan Palace

On our second night there, our friend Touria invited us to come to a wedding at a Palace. She said it would be quite the experience and we would only have to stay a half hour or so if we wanted. The weddings there, start at around 9 pm and last until about 6 am! They have bands & dancing, food served throughout the night, and the bride doesn't even make her "appearance" until about midnight. She also changes clothes any where from 3 - 7 times- all elaborate beautiful dresses!

This is the palace during the day as they were setting up for the wedding. Each red square is an individual rug. They covered the entire area. They had several huge flat screens set up so that no matter where you were or the bride was , you didn't miss anything!

This is a shot off to the right, we didn't get to go inside these buildings on this particular day, but if you want to see more of the palace when it isn't a wedding, look at Josh and Rachels blog. One of her last recent posts was her visit to this palace and she got some beautiful pictures of it.

This is inside the building that the first photo was "aimed" at. It is a rather large room and beautiful hand carved and tiled.

This is looking up into the dome in the center of the room. You can kind of see all of the different layers of work on the jagged edges. There were a lot of layers!

This shows a little of the wood work. This looks like tile, but it is really wood, hand carved into intricate little patterns and then stained and painted to look like tile. I can't even imagine how much time and effort went into this room!

This is at the wedding that night. This is the bride. She is carried in in this carriage on the shoulders of about 6 - 8 men. They do this dance and slowly move her forwards and backwards and in circles until she has been taken around to the entire area- I guess to show her off to everyone. While they do that the husband is in front of the carriage doing his own little dance, motioning her forward towards him and different gestures. It's all symbolic of a lot of things, but to us it looked like he was "trying to lure her to him" or something like that.

After her "dance", they are seated in front of that domed building from the first photo, and they don't even smile. I don't know if she isn't supposed to or if they were just "shy" or something, but they were very serious the whole time- even though everyone around the party was dancing and laughing, like a real wedding. But they sit here for about 20 minutes and family and friends come up to them and congratulate them and take photos of them.

This isn't a very good picture, but, all the women at the party are "decked out" in their fanciest Moroccan outfits. They are all very bright and usually have sparkles or shimmer of some kind. These girls are dancing and most of the girls all danced- but not men.

This is me with Touria on the right and in the middle is the US Ambassadors wife. Touria is friends with her. She is a really nice and she is the first US Amb. wife that Moroccan people like. She is very into service and humanitarian things. Apparently all of the other wives till now were snobby and didn't really care about the public. So she is really changing their oppinions of the US for the better and they all love her.

We ended up not leaving the party until 3:30 in the morning. Every time we said we should go, there was something else that was going to happen that we needed to see or food we needed to try. They served different types of foods through out the entire night. At one point they did the traditional hand painting that is very detailed with swirls all over her hand and ring finger. We only got to see two of the dresses, but they were very beautiful and had tons of matching jewelry. It was a really unique and interesting experience. So Thank You Touria for letting us experience it!