We stayed in Riads in Marrakech and there wasn’t much English used: got by with very basic French. Very basic!
On arrival into RAK we just jumped into a local taxi and give the name of our riad in the old town, which in hindsight was probably not too smart. It was night time and the taxi wasn’t allowed to access the centre (walled old town) so after paying the driver at one of the main entry points we figured we’d walk. This was before ubiquitous smart phones and cheap data so didn’t know the exact route, but I’m a male with the usual exaggerated sense of direction so there wasn’t going to be an issue!
What I didn’t foresee was the pack of kids who had snatched up our luggage and had briskly moved off down some dark alley before you could even say boo! I’m pretty certain the driver had told them the name of our riad, so I figured they were ‘helping us’ rather than robbing us. We tried to follow but lost sight of them at some point. From my superior geographical sense
I had figured it would be a five minute walk from the city gate to the riad. At the ten minute point and still travelling through dark alleys I was starting to get somewhat nervous, but istr we came to a door after some back and forth walking and were directed to our riad close by. Kids had delivered our bags and wanted some exorbitant amount of money: I gave them maybe the equivalent of a couple of dollars and indicated that was that. I recall there was some commotion, but I just told (maybe intimated might be more correct) the staff member who’d let us in that was all they were getting and he could tell the kids whatever he wanted and we walked inside. I figure it was probably a routine scam of taking you on some circuitous and longer route to make it seem like you should pay more…
Also, we had a meal on the balcony of a cafe overlooking Jamaa-el-Fnaa square which was blown up about a month after we were sitting exactly there, soooo, whilst a nice place to wander about with cheap food, good golf courses, and spectacular Atlas Mountains to visit and walk around, it’s not all roses.
Oh and another thing, we were booked to go on a dawn hot air balloon ride over the city and Palmeraie, but it got cancelled the afternoon before because the King was going to be flying in and the airspace around the city was closed.