The big event for our second day in Tangier was to do a cooking lesson! But that was a dinnertime thing so we spent the rest of the day doing other stuff. The first of these was visiting the Punic Necropolis. That was really cool, actually. The Punic Necropolis was of course originally full of dead Phoenicians from the 4th century BC, but according to the sign in the first century the Romans cleared out all the dead Phoenicians so they could put dead Romans there instead (tip to the wise, on Google Maps there is a site “Nécropole Punico-Romaine” but I don’t know what that is and never found it; you want the “Tombeaux Phéniciens” instead). The tombs themselves are actually a little bit underwhelming. They are at this point just sorta holes carved into the rocks which are now filled with water with some trash floating around in it; if you want to see what used to be in the tombs (I mean like, the coffins, not just dead people), they got one in the Kasbah museum we had gone to the previous day. But the site! It is amazing that this very spot has been significant to human kind for millennia, and you can see why. Those views are gorgeous. Fantastic. Phenomenal. Great place to be dead, lemme tell ya. We stood there for a while just admiring it. Besides us there were several other couples enjoying the majesty of the sea from above on that glorious February day. Definitely swing by.

From there it was onto some shopping. The funny thing that happened on the way to the forum was that as we were walking along the sidewalk this woman tossed out the dregs of her tea right into the street from her alcove office. I strode into her view at nearly the same instant and she was mortified that she almost dumped tea all over me (she looked suitably embarrassed), but I thought it was funny. Our first destination was the Librarie des Colonnes. My super amazing wife and I both really like bookshops so we of course like to visit them. The Librarie des Colonnes was really neat, a beautiful space, full of history, and with a friendly shopkeeper, but man I didn’t know what to do with those books. They focused on a brand of art and intellectualism that I just don’t have the training to deal with. Nice to hang out there though. Next we went to Les Insolites, which was slightly more our style. They even had a cookbook my super amazing wife had been contemplating. Fortuitously, they also had a short book on Moroccan handicrafts which finally let us know what we were looking at in all the shops.

I said last time that we were running out of museums, but there was another: the Musée Dar Niaba. It took a bit to find it because we blew past it on the first time around. It is a nice little space, recently renovated, and we were there for diplomatic history (the place used to be…) but they didn’t have much. What they had instead were a good number of paintings of Tangier done by foreign artists, which were interesting to see. Again they also had a lovely courtyard, and then on top of that some sections on Tangier history.

With that over we went tea set shopping. This was a fun little experience, and another instance of me contradicting myself from what I said last time. We were looking for a tea set because my super amazing wife wanted one. After wandering a bit we finally poked into a shop. The shopkeeper was of course very attentive. My super amazing wife asked about the price of a tea set and the guy said “800” which was insanely high (like $80 in USD) and as an opening gambit for the haggling to ensue she just turned him down. Except the guy seemed really thrown off? He then set about giving her a lesson in negotiating, explaining that here in Morocco we haggle and suggested she name a price. She eventually got down I think to 350MAD for the tea set which was probably too much but it was a fun haggling experience. She kept going to walk away which had him lower the offer a bit. It is a pretty nice little tea set.

The next experience was lunch. I had suggested one place but the reviews said the wait times were long, so we went to a different place. That different place also took an hour to serve us any food (good kebabs though) and I was in the sun the whole time so I was grumpy my suggestion hadn’t been taken, BUT what it did mean is that as we were departing we ran into a tiny shop displaying the artwork of Hafida Zizi. This was really cool, so the kebabs had a silver lining. I had initially been drawn in by the pottery but she also had these paintings of Moroccan women doing traditional handicrafts. My super amazing wife was most interested in the paintings of women doing textile work. We eventually settled on a painting of a woman spinning yarn. My super amazing wife really loved it. She loved it so much that we actually went back later in the day to pick up a second painting, which means we went from admirers of Zizi’s work to collectors all in one day. They are now in pride of place in our house so that was a really really neat souvenir of Tangier.

And then, finally, we were onto cooking! But I’ll cover that next entry.