Marrakech

Marrakech is a city the color of her own walls — a red medina a thousand years old, folded into ten thousand alleys that all eventually pour into one place: Jemaa el-Fna, the square that becomes a nightly festival of storytellers, snail sellers, gnawa drummers and smoke, as it has since the Middle Ages had a different name for entertainment. The Koutoubia calls the hours above it, and on clear days the snows of the High Atlas float over the palm groves like a rumor of another season.

The sensible traveller sleeps in a riad — the courtyard-house whose whole architecture is a private sky —; gets deliberately lost in the souks in the morning and lets a mint tea recalibrate the afternoon; visits the Bahia's ceilings and the Saadian tombs' quiet; takes the square twice, at dusk for the theater and later for dinner at the numbered grills, elbow to elbow; and books one dawn beyond the walls: the Agafay desert or the Atlas valleys, an hour away and a century calmer.

The Guide's honesty: 'it is closed today, my friend, but I know another way' is the medina's oldest sentence — the square is never closed: walk on smiling —; agree prices as a game with rules and no anger; the motorbikes own the alleys: keep right and keep calm; a riad's address is a door in a wall — screenshot the map before the signal dies —; and mint tea poured from a height is not showing off. It is showing off correctly.