Will & Kristine's Travel Adventures: Marrakech or Marrakesh?

I follow travel deal sites all the time but usually all of the good deals are during the school year which is one of the reasons a teacher schedule can stink. While I do have holidays and the summer off, those times are usually the most expensive and the hottest times of year to travel. Finally though, an amazing travel deal worked out for us! Will and I aren't super big into Thanksgiving so the holiday break, plus two personal days, wrapped around two weekends gave us over a week to head to Paris!

Being as we've both been to Paris before, we realized that maybe we didn't need such a long time there. We brainstormed cheap flights from Paris and my French class experience made me think of Morocco and BINGO, we had a side trip! Flights to Marrakech were cheap from Paris and Morocco was always been interesting to me so it was an easy decision.

Today was a travel day. We originally got our deal to Paris ($430 roundtrip! And on AirFrance who had the most chic safety video and macarons for dessert!) as roundtrip from DC so today we flew to Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport and then took a bus to the Orly airport to catch our flight to Marrakech. While at the airport, we got snacks from a little convenience store and even though it was a tiny store, their bread was fresh and delicious and paired with proscuitto and brie, made for a great airport snack!

It was just a 2 hour flight and we had arrived in Marrakech! We got picked up by a driver from our hotel because we had read that it's pretty much impossible to find hotels from inside the Medina because they can only drop you off so far in as there are not really roads within the medina walls. What we read was right! If we did not have a driver to follow, we would've never found our hotel.

Our hotel was incredible! In actuality, it isn't a hotel but a "riad" which is basically all you will find in the Medina. Marrakech is a modern city like you would expect but for a tourist, everything you'd really want to see is within the "medina" which is the old fortified city. It's so cool being in the medina because the medina looks so old and unique like you're in a movie set while outside the medina walls, there's a Starbucks and Pizza Hut. It's definitey more interesting within the medina! Within the medina, there are no big hotel chains but rather there are only riads which are basically small family owned bed and breakfasts with around 8 rooms and all have a courtyard in the middle. Staying in the riad was really cool and such a fun experience. I'm so glad we didn't stay in a hotel. We got settled in our room and then walked to the Jemaa el-Fnaa which is the main square. We got dinner at a beautiful, modern restaurant called Le Jardin (grilled meat and grilled fish which was DELICIOUS) and then went back to the riad to settle in for the day.