Month: April 2024

Morocco I: ‘Merica

Reading this week:

  • In The Shadow of the Cotton Tree by Jack Rillie

So we were finally here: the ancient city of Tangier. I had wanted to go for a long time, because of the usual exoticism reasons. Lots of history in the place, and a lot of that history is westerners coming in and deciding they liked the decor a whole lot. We were firmly in that milieu. Plus while back in Peace Corps I had read the book Tangerine, so I was excited to be stalked by a repressed lesbian ex-lover (that is my recollection of what the book is about but now that I am reading the New Yorker review I am very suddenly worried I am wrong in a bigoted way. I enjoyed the book!).

Breakfast at the hotel was a heavenly combination of fruit and bread and fresh cheese and butter and jam and coffee and juice and fortified us to proceed to our first destination: the American Legation Museum. This is a super neat place. It is the building that housed the U.S. diplomatic mission to Morocco and was the first American public property abroad. It has lived many lives and now is a wonderful little display of American diplomacy abroad. ‘Merica!

You wander up to the place via some narrow streets in the medina (that is redundant, all the streets are narrow), ducking into the door underneath an archway. The building spans the street which is a neat little architectural feature. The first part of the museum is a timeline of the building, and it describes the mission as being a pretty sleep place from around 1820 until 1920, and oh, to be a consulate in a sleepy legation in Tangier, sounds phenomenal. As you go upstairs the next chunk is a sort of house museum, describing life in the legation through the centuries. There are stories about lions and a big collection of furniture and very easy to imagine entertaining diplomatic guests on a sinecure from the U.S. government. I am salivating. It was sleepy until about 1920 and then you know some world wars picked up, and one section of the museum is dedicated to wartime activities and especially some spying that took place out of the building, with a recreation of the secret radio room out of which intelligence was transmitted back to the U.S. authorities. Eventually the U.S. diplomatic presence shifted on down to Rabat and left the building a little listless, so the Peace Corps moved in. I did my Peace Corps training out of a mud hut, which to be clear I very much enjoyed, but I could have also enjoyed a sunny courtyard in Morocco, you know? The most fun part of this part of the history is that the volunteers turned the cistern into a disco so they could let their hair down, and they dubbed this disco the “Cistern Chapel,” which is just a real good pun man. As a good intro into some of the modern international history of Tangier, the American Legation museum is the place to go.

When we initially went to the American Legation Museum, I managed to take us straight there through the medina’s winding streets. I mean, like I was an expert. This gave me a very false sense of confidence and every time we went anywhere else I tried to recreate the feat but we wound up twisting and turning and only ever arrived at subsequent destinations through luck and providence. But that’s fine, the medina is very cool, very nice to see how people live and very interesting to check out the shops. Plus the locals are used to it, immediately warning us every time we were headed down a dead end. One guy did actually try to lead us astray I think but honestly I can’t tell.

The destination of these wanderings was to see some Ibn Battuta sights. Maybe I knew something about Ibn Battuta before going to Tangier but probably not much. But in Tangier he is a bit of a thing. It’s his home town after all, and for a long long time he was the most well-travelled person in the world. I have subsequently bought a copy of his book (and a guide to his book) and will let you know when I manage to read them, but they seem interesting. Atlas Obscura turned me onto Ibn Battuta’s tomb, so I wanted to visit. It is right in the midst of the medina and surrounded by houses. Apparently there is some controversy over whether the man is actually buried in the mausoleum but I wasn’t able to verify. They supposedly open it up occasionally, someone who lives by has the key, but it wasn’t open when I visited so I couldn’t see if it was Ibn Battuta himself in there or not. But still pretty cool and not an unbeautiful place to be laid to rest (if he is laid to rest there).

Having seen the man himself (again, potentially) it was time to learn something about him so off we went to the museum dedicated to him, the aptly named Ibn Battouta Museum. It is a fine little museum though if you were on a tight schedule it is potentially skippable. No pictures allowed inside so you’ll have to trust me. The point of the museum is to walk you through Ibn Battuta’s life and travels, and how they show the interconnectedness of both Tangier and the Muslim world circa the 14th century. There aren’t a whole lot of actual artifacts in the museum (I don’t recall any at all but the museum website says they have some stuff), but the displays are well done and in multiple languages. You see models of like the boats he would have sailed on and maps of his destinations and neat stuff like that. Then at the end there is a little gift shop, so that’s nice. And that’s about it. After the visit to the museum we were back into the medina for the next adventure.

Interlude: Strait of Gibraltar

The Strait of Gibraltar! Oh man. As I said last time, we were now wrapping up the Spain portion of our honeymoon and it was on to Part 2: Morocco! But of course those two places are separated by one of the most storied bodies of water on the planet, the Strait of Gibraltar, the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea and boundary to the great Atlantic. I had never been before and I was pumped to go across it.

First we had to get there. There was no convenient way to take a train between Granada and Algeciras so instead of a very fun high-speed ride we took the bus. I suppose it was fine. It was from the bus that I caught the first glimpse in my life of the Mediterranean, so that was very cool. We arrived at the port rather early and were a bit confused and there was an initial mix-up with the tickets and at one point they closed off the gate and it seemed like we had missed the ferry and it was very stressful but it worked out in the end and we got on the ferry. It was much less crowded than I expected, just a smattering of people. Spanish passport control was on land but Moroccan passport control was actually on the boat, so not only did I get the “entry by ship” passport stamp that I coveted, I actually got it on a boat, which just takes the cake.And then it was time for the ferry ride! I was so excited about this. A large part was the mystique of arriving at a new continent via ship. The first and only time I ever went to Australia I went by sea. Bermuda, too, arrival by sea. It’s the best way to travel. This was not my first time in Africa of course but first time I got to arrive by ship. Just the utter magic of it, departing one place and traversing the (narrow strait of an) ocean to land upon a whole world of new experiences.

Gibraltar.
Can’t resist a sailboat.

I have actually thought about this particular Strait a lot. I used to be on submarines and a number of submarines have collided with merchant ships in the Strait. So we hear about it. The reason the Strait is a submarine-magnet is because it is a relatively narrow body of water and all the ships line up. Submarines can’t really “see” well directly behind them, which they overcome by maneuvering. Since you can’t do a whole lot of maneuvering in the strait, and because merchant ships go pretty fast actually, submarines can get pretty literally run over by merchant ships sneaking up behind them. The fact the submarine is underwater doesn’t save them, because they can get sucked up into the merchant ship via Bernoulli’s principle. And then on top of that, the Strait of Gibraltar has the ferries criss-crossing it all the time, and ferries themselves are kinda submarine magnets, because they go in unexpected directions and are faster than you think and if you’re worried about merchant ships sneaking up from behind and running you over then you might miss the ferry coming at you from the starboard quarter. All that to explain that I was very excited to keep an eye out for submarines and maybe crash into one, which I think would have been a lot of fun for me, personally.

So while we were on the ship I spent as much time as possible up on the deck checking everything out. It was a gorgeous day and an easy crossing. The line for the passport stamp was a bit long and I was longing to look out a window. I did get to look out a window for a little bit while in that line and during that time I saw a dolphin jumping about which was just magnifique (a challenge of this part of the journey is we had to switch over from Spanish to French, and while I have been taught both languages I have learned neither and kept mixing them up, though really the whole time we got away with English and just peppered in some poorly pronounced phrases from each other language). Up on deck I was just dazzled. I suppose I knew the Strait was narrow (you know, like a strait), but I had imagined that you might be able to glimpse the distant shores of one continent from the other, not like, you had a really nice clear view of TWO CONTINENTS, each imbued with their own mystery and history, from your comfy viewpoint atop a ferry. I mean wow! I had a blast. I was taking so many different pictures of boats and looking up the AIS data and verifying that the ship I was clearly seeing with my own eyes really was a ship and now that I look at the pictures they look silly because the ships are tiny little dots on a vast horizon but again man! The Strait of Gibraltar! History! And not to mention it was cool seeing Gibraltar itself! Now we want to go someday. It was a great boat ride and took a little longer than expected but really a very luxurious way to travel, in my opinion!

Ferries that sadly didn’t run over any submarines.
Merchant ships that didn’t run over any submarines, either.

Eventually of course we docked in Morocco, the second country in our honeymoon trip. Since we left from Algeciras we arrived in Tangier Med, requiring us to somehow get to Tangier Proper (this was our next destination). We could have taken the bus but decided to live a little and take a taxi. Being experienced travelers we were going to ensure we had agreed upon a fair price before getting in, but that simply did not happen because the man loaded up our bags and off we went. He charged us a fair price in the end so no harm no foul I guess. And then we got to enjoy the ride to Tangier.

As I got my first glimpse of Morocco my overriding thought was that it was greener than I expected, which is stupid. Clearly I had thought you cross the Strait and suddenly it is men on camels in the Sahara. Instead it was grass and shrubland and a few trees, or maybe big shrubs, I couldn’t tell. There were rolling hills and as we drove along the coastline there were gorgeous views of Spain. I also realized I had seen a couple setups where people had like, espresso machines installed in the back of their cars where they were selling espresso, and, like, neat I guess. We passed a Navy base along the way and the Poste Connexion Electrique Maroc-Espagne, which was really just over-the-top as far as stuffing in all the things I like into one day. We also saw a good number of cows, a horse, and a whole herd of wooly goats so that was neat. And a donkey! Then, finally, after a long day of travel we approached Tangier. Arriving the way we did my first impression is that it resembled more Sarasota than anything else, seeing modern high-rises abutting the water. That impression faded away as we entered the old city to arrive at our hotel, and I guess I also don’t recall people offering pony rides on the beach in Sarasota, as they were doing on the beach in Tangier. For dinner instead of going out we enjoyed a to-die-for I think French fusion restaurant in the hotel and then pretty much collapsed asleep.

Spain XIII: Shop ’til You Drop

Fear not, loyal readers, after three months’ worth of blogposts (all backdated) we are nearing the end of our Spanish adventure. Not our honeymoon adventure! But our Spanish adventure. Our last full day in Granada was our last full day in Spain. And we spent a large chunk of it shopping.

The first thing we bought was donuts. Actually now that I am thinking about it we might have ducked into a little cute random shop we saw and gotten like a pomegranate thing? I don’t recall, which leaves the first memorable thing we bought being donuts. The place we went was called Odeimos and appeared to be run by a couple and they made fantastic somewhat elaborate donuts. I say “somewhat” because they were elaborate but not gimmicky. Back in New Haven we used to go to Donut Crazy, which was good, but gimmicky. These were not that. Nothing is ever as good as the donut shack in your home town of course, but for Granada I recommend Odeimos. I got cheesecake donut and a lemon meringue donut and a coffee to boot. But enough about donuts (there’s never enough donuts). We were fueled up so shopping we went! My super amazing wife got a scarf for her mom and we got a big colorful tile for a trivet and then my super amazing wife also got some tea. Later in the day I got the print I told you about last time.

Okay I mean I titled this “shop til you drop” but we had to have interludes and the first of those was the Casa de los Tiros museum! The museum is named that because it has guns sticking out the top because it used to belong to some army dude. I suppose I admire a particular decorating theme. Inside is a bunch of different Andalusia stuff. It was actually pretty cool. They got a nice little courtyard and when we went there was a whole special exhibit on Washington Irving. Upstairs they had popular art and then some fine art and conveniently a picture of the chapel that I wasn’t able to show you in our first post on Granada:

The next part of our whirlwind final full day was to get a full belly via lunch (for shopping, on our way we popped into another gallery of shops and bought some jamón). Granada is a city of tea and while others are extremely good (I am referencing our first day again, when we went to the Teteria del Bañuelo), none of the tea houses we went to were as soaring in their achievement as Abaco Té. The joke I am making here is that it was way up the hill and we had to hike up there. Also there are like three stories to the place and we had lunch way up in the tippy top with just amazing vistas of the city as it sprawled out below with the mountains in the background and the Cathedral as the solid counterpoint to the domineering Alhambra. Plus the food and tea was really good.

The Alhambra is off to the left, you can see both from the place I promise.

Plus plus they had a super cute and super friendly grey cat snoozing comfortably atop a cushion:

After hiking up a hill and then getting very full on a rather large lunch actually my next suggestion was even more hiking. We went out to the absolutely fantastic Museo Cuevas del Sacromonte. Sacromonte is the neighborhood on the eastern edge of Granada and used to be where a variety of marginalized communities lived. A unique part of the neighborhood out there is that many people constructed homes by digging caves out of the hill. These days some people still live in caves but not so many, so the museum is there to document and preserve some of that way of life. I suppose you can take the bus or a taxi but we hiked out there and then hiked up the hill to the museum but once we got there it was all worth it. It was really cool! Neither of us really knew what to expect (despite the fact that I suggested it), but along the way the views were gorgeous and the dwellings were super cool. They had various caves set up for various functions, including a bedroom and a barn and a ceramics studio and even a blacksmith shop with an elaborate chimney. My super amazing wife would have been satisfied with just the ceramics but they also had a whole textiles cave so she was just in heaven. It’s a real gem of Granada so if you’re in town you gotta make a beeline for it.

The caves are all next to each other along the base of the hilltop.
Cozy bedroom/living room area.
Blacksmith shop!
The outside of the blacksmith shop; check out the chimney jutting out from the hill.
Textile heaven.

We were shopping, museum, shopping, museum, and so now back to shopping. And another hill. Like I just said my super amazing wife loves ceramics so another thing I spotted in the guidebook is that there was a ceramics place that had been in business since 1640. We were hesitant to go at first because it is on top of another hill but it was a cool walk there by and through the old city walls and the views and the shops and the streets remained very pretty so why not take the walk. The place is called Fajalauza and they have a factory somewhere but the place we went into is “just” the shop but they have tons of cool ceramics stuff. I got a tiny little ceramic pitcher thing and some small tiles and my super amazing wife got a mug stamped “since 1640” on the bottom which is just neat.

By this time we were really actually starting to lose steam. Good thing we were at the top of the hill so it was downhill all the way back to the hotel. We just had one final task which was to pick up some convent cookies. In addition to the tapas, this is another thing you can do in Granada (and elsewhere), which is support a convent by buying some of their sweets. The Convento de Santa Catalina de Zafra was right near our hotel and we had tried on our first day to buy some stuff from them but no one answered the bell when we rang. But we gave it another go this day. I know this sounds lame but the thing about these convent treats is so the nuns don’t have to look at your ugly mug you do the whole transaction via this rotating door thing, where you put money down and then the nuns spin you around some treats. We got tea pastries, which were really good, and a lifesaver the next day when we didn’t have an opportunity for lunch. Neat to buy some cookies in a unique way and they were pretty delicious to boot! And that, besides dinner, wrapped up our final full day in Granada and Spain. A nice country! I recommend visiting.

The nuns’ finest.

Spain XII: The Alhambra

Reading this week:

  • On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World by Philip Gooding
  • Weyward by Emilia Hart

When you’re in Granada, of course the biggest thing you gotta do is go see the Alhambra. And so we did! We dedicated the whole day to it.

First we had to get there of course, which we did by hiking on up the hill. You would think you couldn’t get lost on the way to the Alhambra, it is right there on top of the hill you can see it from everywhere in Granada, but we couldn’t even quite figure out where the front door was. We wound up entering via the Puerta de la Justicia, which felt like we were sneaking in the back. We had tickets for the Alhambra, which all the guide books recommend you get well in advance, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the whole complex worked. We had thought like you just have a ticket for the complex and then wander around. Turns out you can just walk into the Alhambra itself, but if you want to see the various compounds within the Alhambra, that’s what requires tickets and your one ticket lets you into all of them, but like once. That eventually became clear but in the meantime we were confusedly peripatetic.

The first place we wandered into were the Generalife, which despite the name is much more specifically a complex of gardens (and a palace). And then even more specifically it is apparently a summer palace, which confuses me. Like it was a countryside retreat for the Sultan, but it is like a five-minute walk from the court? This is like the US president having a summer home over in Foggy Bottom, isn’t it? I don’t get it. Very pretty though! I loved all the water features and fountains and everything. I liked that water would flow out of fountains and then into little channels before finally emptying into pool surrounded by bushes and trees and flowers. To get water to the Alhambra they had a canal running from way upstream on the Darro which I find super cool and apparently which you can still see remnants of, though we didn’t manage to hike all the way out there. They had other stuff that must have been designed to impress me, specifically, including espaliered orange trees, which I didn’t even know you could do to orange trees. The palace of the Generalife was also our first taste in the Alhambra of the absolutely luscious ceilings we would see throughout the Alhambra. I know I raved about the Mezquita but the farther south we went the more intense these ceilings got. They are meant to inspire a recollection of the cave of Hira. I think I might have a lot more revelations too if I got to hang out in such a palace all day.

The Water Garden Courtyard of the Generalife palace.

Having wandered the Generalife and subsequently picked up a guidebook in one of the several gift shops in the complex, we had gotten our feet under us, Alhambra-touristing-wise. Although you could go into the other compounds at any point on your general Alhambra ticket, we had timed tickets for the Nasrid Palaces, and it was now that time, so off we went. Running out of words to describe the result of centuries of accumulated majestic architecture, I noted in my journal that it was “again stunning, over the top, beautiful, out of this world.” This is where mosaic tiling really shines and my super amazing wife later bought a whole book about it. There were so many different motifs and later we were to see the labor that goes into it and I can barely believe it. I think they worked really hard at the Alhambra to stick in every type of tile work imaginable. I think my particular favorite were interlacing star wheels based around what I think is a zellij pattern. But really it’s impossible to pick a favorite and that’s why they try to stick in every single type I assume. We were also overwhelmed by more and more and more fantastical ceilings and various mind-bogglingly complex stucco’d walls. I think the most famous space in the Alhambra is the Court of the Lions, which is neat and all, but as you can see in my picture of it below my neck was craned firmly up. Not to say the palace didn’t have some absolutely rocking courtyards; although I bought a print of the famous lions it was the courtyards full of trees that I enjoyed the most in-person. Oh, to be the less-important son of a sultan, lounging in courtyards writing absolutely execrable poetry.

Ceiling envy.
Court of the Lindaraja

After the palaces we visited the next most exciting place in the Alhambra, which was the wonderful wine stand fittingly near the Puerta del Vino. A wine stand! In a national park! The Spanish are wonderful. We actually forewent the wine but had some bocadillos for lunch as we perused that guidebook we had purchased. Fortified we went on into the Alcazaba, which was also fortified, being a fort and all. The experience in this section of the Alhambra was damped (and dampened) by the fact that just as we reached the tippy-top of the tower with the gorgeous views of both the city of Granada and the Sierra Nevada it started to rain. A cold rain too! Fitting for February. But we scurried back down into the tower and huddled there with some other tourists. We hadn’t brought any raingear or an umbrella, which made wandering around the Alhambra less desirable. So we decided to at this point pop into the Palace of Carlos V.

Kursi used as the Nasrid throne since circa 1380.

Carlos V was the grandkid of Isabella and Ferdinand which is why he was in a position to build (or have built, he didn’t do it himself) a big imposing square palace with a round middle right in the middle of the Alhambra complex. Since he wasn’t using it anymore these days they have stuck two museums into it. The first one had artifacts from the Alhambra and also quite a lot about tilemaking. Maybe tilemaking was only a small part of it but after all the gorgeous tiles in the palaces it was what I was most interested in so it’s the bits I remember. But I was also impressed by the above chair because that sucker is like 640 years old. With the palace in Madrid I liked to imagine all the armor they had was just sitting in storage for a few centuries and I have to imagine the above chair was the same which just tickles me pink. A very nice chair! I gotta get one. The other museum in the Carlos V palace was a Museo de Bellas Artes and what I wrote down in my journal is that the Artes were indeed Bellas so that should be a good enough recommendation to visit yourself.

Courtyard of the Carlos V Palace.
Washington Irving and me (right).

At this point we were pretty pooped from seeing just centuries upon centuries of art and history and so we head out. Our last big adventure for the day (besides some souvenir shopping) was to hike up to a viewpoint so we could see the sunset over the Alhambra. This was enjoyable for the small winding and pretty streets that meandered up to the viewpoint, full of pretty tilework and with a smattering of pretty cats, though a bit of a bust sunset-wise because of the clouds. But as sunset fell upon our first full day in Granada we were looking forward to seeing even more of the sights (and eating more tapas).

Sunset over the Alhambra.