At the edge of the old city, or medina, or Marrakech, we look down into a street that represents a kind of mix between the old and the new: the street accomodates all kinds of traffic and shops are bigger here than some of the others we have seen. Horse-drawn coaches, cars, motorbikes, donkeys, and pedestrians share the street, which narrows as it penetrates into the narrow streets of the medina. Many of the shops along this street were originally banks--back before the French colonization of Morocco in 1912 and the creation of an entirely new, European-designed city alongside the medina. When the French came and established their own city, the banks (which they controlled) moved to the new town.