When I was a child and adults talked about “a Berber”, “a real Berber”, it always had the undertone of value, price and rarity. Having a “real Berber” in your house was something you could brag about! When I was a little older I realized that “a Berber“ was a rug or a carpet, but I didn’t know if it referred to the quality, the material, the size, the pattern or the color. Now I’m an adult myself and I know that “a real Berber” is a person who lives in the Atlas mountains in Morocco. And I also know that many Berbers a shepherds, they produce wool and they make rugs (and jewelry and leather goods and many other products! And yesterday we visited a small museum where the arts and crafts of the Berber were displayed: Tiskiwin. It started as a private collection of artifacts and fills a Riad up the roof with interesting pieces of Berber craftsmanship.

Our next stop, right next to Tiskiwin is the Dar Si Said Museum, dedicated to carpets and weaving. This museum without any artifacts would be worth a visit on its own, because it is the most extraordinarily decorated building we’ve seen so far.

The carpets on display along with the fabulous samples and explanations of weaving were so interesting, we had a hard time leaving! A few other artifacts of metal work were also on display that rounded up the collection in a beautiful way.

We discovered the Mandala Society, a restaurant that is owned by an Icelandic-Moroccan couple and enjoyed lunch there, we floated through the streets of the Medina, dinner at our Riad and off we went to our nighttime adventure: the Marrakesh International Filmfestival, that screened a movie at the Jemaa El Fna, the big marketplace. We watched an Indian romance-drama-action movie with French subtitles, which was ok; the plot didn’t need a lot of words…