The only way to describe how I felt at the end of my first day in Marrakech was overwhelmed. I had not had a busy day, quite the opposite, but I came to a crashing halt late in the afternoon and spent the evening lying on the bed not doing much at all. The recession that had to happen (thank you Paul Keating).I flew from Madrid to Marrakech in the morning and first impressions were that the colours, landscape and buildings were different from anything that I have experienced previously. A driver, Abdul, collected me at the airport and we got talking food in the car which made us both hungry so we detoured en route to the hotel for lunch. Even though I have travelled and worked through the Middle East and parts of Asia, I was taken aback by Morocco. I am not entirely sure whether it is a genuine difference or a symptom of my age, lifestyle and how long it since I ventured to an equivalent country. There is an edginess here that is unsettling. Abdul and my guide the following day spoke of how much change, good and bad, has happened here since the Arab Spring which had a cascading effect here despite a lack of direct involvement. The streets and building exteriors are concrete and austere and the dust and heat make it feel gritty. As I had read beforehand though, when you walk through a door it is like entering another world with quiet, colour, wood and fabric softening everything.Lunch stretched out to coffee which was a learning experience in itself: Abdul ordered us the Moroccan equivalent of espressos and I downed mine in five minutes and was ready to move on to the next thing. He blissfully ignored my expectant look and proceeded to take the smallest sips possible as we chatted and watched traffic go by. He had time where I felt stressed by having to sit there.On arrival at the hotel I was told that I had missed a massage they had booked for me earlier (damn), but they would fit me in for a harram (Moroccan bath) instead. The bath was the start of my crash, but in a good way. It was like a cross between Jimmy the wonder massage therapist and someone washing a horse. This woman takes no prisoners and let me know that a) I needed to lie still and RELAX for 10 minutes every time she left the room and b) that I should do this every week when I got home having not tried it for the previous 50 years. I think she may be right. I swear she took 5 years at least of the age of my neck and I realised as I lay (as instructed) for AGES on a lounge afterwards doing nothing that I was feeling really wired. At this point I think I stopped functioning. After a tour of the hotel and a mint tea, I retired to my room, skipped dinner and stopped thinking about what the next thing was that I should be doing.I woke early and the hotel staff (who are lovely) showed me down to the pool and let me have an early morning dip. The hotel is a combination of 6 traditional riads (large houses centred around a courtyard) and has been lavishly restored with doors that are hundreds of years old and beautiful mosaics and fittings. It is also like a maze with the previous houses now forming zones connected by stairways and courtyards. The reception staff are used to me appearing and automatically point the way to my room so they knew that I needed to be escorted. They warned me that the water was cold and seemed to think that I was a bit odd (I don't need 50 comments confirming that), so again an image of Jimmy appeared telling me to just stop complaining and get into the ice bath. Harsh. It wasn’t too bad, but I paced back and forth on the third step calculating how many degrees it was below bath temperature until another of the lovely staff chirped up with an encouraging “Une, deux, trois!” as they went past. How could I not get in?Anyway, the swim was just what I needed, breakfast was lovely and I was then collected by Abdul and a local guide to visit parts of the city. A day of contradictions.We visited the Bahia Palace with beautiful mosaics and intricate carved wood ceilings then walked through the Medina (old city) to the Saadian Tombs. The mosque and tombs were buried under sand until discovered by aircraft flying over after the first World War. There are photos showing the condition of the rooms and buildings before restoration commenced and it is striking how faithfully they have rebuilt tiled floors and the tiny wooden tombstones that mark some graves. The rooms housing the tombs are beautiful with stone columns, intricate mosaics and carved wooden ceilings and only one, where children were buried, had a feeling of sadness about it.Walking through the Medina and later through the city’s main square was a mixed experience. We went into one of the public bakeries, where women bring bread to be cooked in communal ovens, and just sat and talked to the owner and baker for a little while. Similarly the stall holders making pastries were chatty and happy, but the intensity of the crowds and site of the surrounding shops with chickens, rabbits and pigeons was really unsettling as were the snake charmers and monkey handlers. None of them were too pushy, but I was really conscious that tourism is the main economy here and for many that doesn’t come through the hotel bill. We also went to two women’s cooperatives, one making products from a fruit like an olive and the other selling locally made rugs. I was less comfortable in the latter as the rugs were made by women, but sold by men and no matter how much I’d like to support the initiative I am just not in the market for a carpet.After lunch in a local cafe, we went to the Menara gardens, a government owned olive grove that in its own quiet way was really striking. The buildings are 500 years old and they say that the trees are too – they cut them at the base when they are aging to stimulate new trunks and they have beautiful knarled bases that you can climb into. Like the rest of the city, water comes from the mountains through a centuries old aqueduct system and there is a massive irrigation pond that began life as a swimming pool for soldiers in the 1200s. There is no grass under the trees, but there are outdoor tables and chairs as if it was someone’s back garden and people just sit at the base of the trees.Returning to the hotel was the briefest, but most confronting site of the day. The traffic here is similar to that is Asian cities – lots of motorbikes and people weaving between cars and trucks, but it is more casual, possibly because it is a smaller city and there are horse drawn carriages everywhere carrying tourists. There was no drama, no flashing lights or traffic diversions, just a couple of policemen standing by the road with a small motorbike next to them. On the ground lay a bearded man with his hands casually lying on his chest and a baseball cap resting on his head. He could have been sleeping off lunch, but he wasn’t. My driver tells me that it is rare that there are such accidents, but people don’t wear helmets and the proximity between people and vehicles is much less than we are used to. We hear of road accidents daily on the news at home and I am pretty pragmatic about death; it is just sobering to be reminded of how easily it can happen and with such little fuss. My lovely guide’s mantra every time we crossed a road was “No hurry, no worry, no stop” which I think applies more broadly than to just managing the traffic. I was glad to be back inside the peace of the hotel and had a quiet night digesting the experiences of the day.Normal transmission will resume tomorrow.