We were off to our final city, Casablanca. Before we left we found out some fun information about the tortoise in our Fez riad. For 11 years the tortoise had been named Paul. Then a friend of the owner brought over another tortoise and after it had been around for a bit they found Paul laying eggs, and so they changed her name to Paula. Oh, love. The trip to Casablanca was fine. It was another slow speed train, and we were a little mortified to discover that instead of individual seats we were in a compartment with four other people. The other people were lovely, but the mortifying part is there was no place for our large suitcases except bumping up against the knees of our fellow passengers, which to their credit were extremely nice about it (they took it all in due course). The final leg of our ride to the hotel was a taxi ride, made unfortunately exciting by our bags flying out the bag of the car as we headed down the highway. The taxi driver stopped and we recovered our bags with all their contents unharmed, though not without damage to our calm demeanors. Settled into our hotel (the Hôtel Central, which I’ll charitably say looks good for being over 100 years old), we got some dinner and settled in for the night.

The big tourist attraction in Fez is the Hassan II Mosque. And I will say it is big. This is very much its defining trait. Quoting from Wikipedia, it is the second largest functioning mosque in Africa, with a capacity of 105,000 worshippers and a minaret 60 stories high. We decided to walk to it from the hotel, because we thought we were relatively close, but we were not, it was in fact kind of far away but because it is so big it looked closer. We got a little lost trying to find the entrance, which turns out is via the museum, but once we got there someone there very kindly gave us a ride in a golf cart so we could make our designated tour time.

I enjoyed the mosque. Going in I thought it was going to be an interesting comparison to the Mezquita in Cordoba but man. I mean, it is. They are both mosques. There is a mosque style. Open floor plan, etc. But this thing was just on another level. The columns are gigantic. It has to be one of if not the largest room I have ever been in. Enormous. Colossal. Truly monumental. It is a beautiful structure. I had expected it to be rather plain, like many of the more modern cathedrals I have been in. But the mosque delivers, no expense spared. The walls and ceiling are covered in mosaics and patterns and the stalactite-mimicking ceiling in the corners. One aspect I particularly liked is that the mosque is built on landfill due to a Koran verse and the western “doors” open up into a sea view. The sea off Casablanca and the mosque was so powerful. The entire time we were there it has been nothing but heavy Atlantic rollers crashing into the reef. They come straight it off the ocean and curl over the shallows to bash themselves into the seawalls. Adjacent the mosque, the sea becomes part of the majesty of the hall.

One question that the tour guide got asked over and over is how long it took to build the mosque. When I was viewing some of the other large cathedrals and mosques that took centuries or more to put up (like the Mezquita), it made sense. It seems like you would just need that much time to stack so much stone and plaster atop other stone and plaster. But this sucker got put up in six years! With no detail lacking for the compressed timeline! We had learned over and over on this honeymoon that there are so many mosaic motifs that the mosaicists will use and when they put up this mosque it seems like they made sure to use every single one. My super amazing wife also pointed out in the more ancient mosques there is a more limited color palette but in this mosque they really expanded their repertoire given modern-day color technology. This included more pinks and purples and different hues of green.

After the main area we went down to the ablution area with the sturdy and delicate fountains that I would have liked to see in action. And after that we filed out of the titanium doors and the tour was done, but for us walking farther and farther away to finally be able to get the whole thing in frame. Before our visit I was pretty whatever about it actually but afterwards I was glad I went. My super amazing wife didn’t feel the weight of history in the Hassan II Mosque, especially as compared to the ancient sites we had seen, but I felt the weight of sheer weight in the thing. “It belongs to God,” the guide said, and it looks it.

But onto our final event. No trip to Casablanca would be complete without a trip to Rick’s Café. We went there for our final dinner of the trip. Lemme tell ya it was really great! The place doesn’t look anything like Rick’s Café from the movie in terms of layout but on the other hand they got the ambiance just right and it is in fact a really nice restaurant, and not too expensive to boot. We split some oysters and my super amazing wife got the seafood linguine and I got the duck confit and man that was to die for. Melt in your mouth. The waiters wore waistcoats and fezzes and the service was prompt. The piano player showed up as we were having dessert. He started of course with “As Time Goes By.”

And that, dear reader, was the last thing we did on our honeymoon and the last thing we did in Morocco. After dinner we packed our bags and went to the airport to take an overnight flight back on home. It was a beautiful country and we can’t wait to go back, hopefully when we are filthy rich so I can buy all the mosaic tables I could want.

Reading this week:

• Memories of the Slave Trade by Rosalind Shaw
• The Lake Steamers of East Africa by L.G. “Bill” Dennis

Don’t worry loyal and overextended reader, our journey through Spain and Morocco is coming to a close. The morning dawned on our last full day in Fez, and since we were now experts on the artisan scene in Fez, and since there would be no other towns after this (we go to Casablanca after this but didn’t expect to do much shopping), it was our last chance to pick up any particular souvenirs we wanted.

One thing my super amazing wife coveted was a copper tea kettle. In our artisan tour adventures the previous day we had swung by the metalworking street (the damascener was on the saddle street) and although didn’t really stop to check anything out it meant we knew where to go. Many of the things for sale were like, large copper pots, but we found a shop with a few copper teakettles. We asked after a few, got rather high-priced quotes and so walked away for the moment to go back to the leather street. I had wanted a weekender bag but after poking around I didn’t find anything that I really loved or cheap enough to settle for less. But it gave us time to gird ourselves for copper kettle negotiations. I was letting my super amazing wife do the haggling though I tried to act unenthusiastic as a foil to help her lower the price. The most entertaining part is that when I pointed out the lid of the kettle she was looking at didn’t fit (I was trying to get the price lower), the guy just took it over to the anvil to reshape it until it did. The was pretty neat to see actually. We eventually walked away with the kettle and in my recollection we paid more than we should have but what that price was I don’t remember, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

The weirdest buying interaction I had is when I noticed a stall selling wooden buckets that they use in the hammams. My dad at the time wanted a wooden bucket for his blacksmithing purposes. The one he was looking at was expensive but here was one at a very reasonable price, hand-made I assume by the two older dudes who were lounging on the floor of the shop when we stopped by. I was eventually convinced that it would be difficult to a) fit a whole bucket into my suitcase and b) ship it back home to my dad, but on the other hand they had these very cute wooden mugs made in the exact same style of the buckets with staves and copper bands and everything. That was much more doable and I did eventually buy one but the dude seemed kind of confused about me wanting one and also I couldn’t understand what he was saying but presumably eventually I handed over enough money. Dad liked it a lot.

And that was very nearly the end of our shopping. We poked around for some slippers but didn’t find any we liked, so with our two purchases in hand we head back to the riad before setting off on our next adventure. We had gotten a thorough tour of inside the medina, so now we were going outside the medina. To do this we arranged a car tour and met our driver Sadiq at one of the gates of the medina. He drove us around to look at different things while trying to explain them. It was fun but a lot of being driven around to different spots, which is suppose what we asked for. First we stopped at the Jnan Sbil Gardens, which were pretty. Sadiq had us wander around them for a bit. There was a section with guinea pigs, chickens, and pigeons in cages for reasons we were unable to determine. From there we popped over to the Jewish Quarter and looked at the cemetery. We checked out the door to the palace (or more accurately the seven doors) before it was off to a panoramic viewpoint. Sadiq had the joke of the day when he called it the “parabolic viewpoint” because of the all the satellite dishes. That was really good.

The highlight though was checking out Art Naji! Man that was really great. My super amazing wife was interested in the pottery and they have a whole factory there and they are super impressive in the way that people doing a certain thing day in and day out for years and years are. We had a little tour of the pottery making which included a guy throwing a tajine in just a few seconds entirely freehand. Then we saw them painting the things and while the main painter had some measuring tools mostly everyone was just again free-handing the things and they all looked perfect. But the most amazing part was the large-scale tile pieces they did. I was honestly blown away they so were gorgeous and intricate. Truly, very truly, poetry without words. The helical borders were the most amazing to me. Our guide from Art Naji made sure to point out their secure shipping methods but we couldn’t bring ourselves to ask the price. We did check out their gift shop but of the things in there I didn’t get any because they didn’t quite live up to the song in my heart that watching the process had inspired (it was more pottery in the shop than mosaic).

Filled with beauty though we left for another viewpoint, across from our parabolic view and beside the Merenid Tombs. We had been ensconced in the city but to see it from above was a different experience. The view really is stunning. A whole medieval city full of people and life and you are looking down upon it from the Atlas Mountains and it becomes mysterious and distant and a mass of puzzle pieces to pictures you’ll never see. Perfect.

Reading this week:

• Living’s the Strange Thing by Carmen Martín Gaite, translated by Anne McLean
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Having rested well in the riad, it was time for our first full day in Fez. Fez is a phenomenal city because of, among its other charms, all the artisans that live and work there. Derek Guy at Put This On talks about the whole like, tailoring interconnected universe, where there is a whole ecosystem of people who specialize in different crafts that all operate in the background of any particular piece of clothing you wear. He worries about this system dying because people just aren’t buying the kinds of quality clothes that they used to. But man, it is alive and well in Fez. Everywhere you turn in the city, in storefronts and in little workshops down side alleys, there are artisans working on something or another, scraping leather or weaving cloth or sewing together shoes or chipping tiles or hammering metal. So of course we had to go see them. To do that we went on a Fez Artisans Tour that I can highly recommend (TripAdvisor here). When you arrange the tour they ask you the sort of stuff you’d like to see, and day-of meet you where you’re staying to take you around the city. After a little low-down in the comfort of our riad we were off!

One of the other notable things about Fez is that it is a car-free city (though occasionally you get some people on motorcycles), and so one of the first things our guide discussed was the logistics of the place. We had set off on our tour around 10am, when the city was still waking up, and thus we were treated to the wonderous sight of a garbage donkey. That is, there was a man going around picking up the garbage, and he was putting it into bags that were being carried by a donkey. A garbage donkey! It was great. As we wandered around we saw a good number of very well-behaved donkeys and mules so that was very cool.

The first artisan we visited was Said Akessbi, apparently the last person to make damascene in Fez. He may very well be the last ever, because, as he told us, he has only daughters and no sons. And all his daughters are in school, too. This was a little bit of a theme on our tour and was conveyed with some sense of sadness. Said was at least a third-generation damascener, having learned from his father and grandfather to take over the family business. To step back a couple seconds, damascening is the art of inlaying one metal on top of another to create patterns or pictures. We were told that he used to inlay gold into the steel objects, but that got too pricey so now he focuses on silver. He was working on a piece when we arrived (I assume he is always working on a piece). He scored the metal to help the silver stick, and then takes silver wire and hammers it into place. There is also a finishing and polishing process and creates just absolutely beautiful stuff, all in this tiny little alcove of a workshop. I bought a plate and my super amazing wife got some earrings and then we popped along to the next artisan.

The most famous sights in Fez are the leather tanneries. They are in the far end of the medina, tucked through doorways along a street of shops selling, of course, leather goods. As you enter they hand you a complimentary sprig of mint to try to cover up the smell. That smell is of rotting flesh and pigeon poop. The pigeon poop is used as an ammonia source to clean off the hides. I made good use of the mint sprig though my super amazing wife said it “wasn’t that bad.” The tannery is quite the sight indeed. The central feature are the tanning vats, but our guide told us the whole system is a co-op, instead of one specific company. A family might own a couple vats in which they process their own leather. Around the vats were arrayed other leather-related workshops and tanning steps. The whole thing was so very old-school. Besides the electric motor running the gigantic washing machine, you could have been transported there at any point from the centuries and not noticed. All of the work was done by hand, down to the man we spotted in an alcove scraping leather using a gigantic knife he pushed with his chest and sharpened every few cuts. Although most of the leather is tanned in the vats, to achieve a yellow color they use turmeric (they used to use saffron but that’s too pricey now), and this is done by spreading the turmeric mixture over the leather by hand. The yellow leather is used for slippers, and every day there is apparently a 1-hour auction where the slipper makers buy the leather they need. They later auction of the slippers they make as well.

The next things we looked at were what my super amazing wife was most excited for: textiles! Earlier we had actually poked into a store where a man on a loom was making cloth; he showed us some looming. My super amazing wife was impressed by a rope system he had to shoot the shuttle back and forth. We inspected some of his beautiful cloth and learned about agave silk, which I hadn’t known was a thing (I thought they had been talking about rayon when they said “vegetable silk”). Also I don’t have a great place to mention this but as we were walking through the city we saw some other cool sights, such as a store selling songbirds (which seemed popular in Fez), and most amusingly a chicken stand with a bunch of live chickens out front along with two cats very intently watching the chickens. But that journey brought us to Abdelkader Ouazzani, the last man in the city doing brocade. Alas, this poor man also had no sons, but he did have at least one apprentice. The fabric was so beautiful and vastly outside our price range. To make it, the master sat at the head of the loom doing the shuttle work and working the pedals. Meanwhile, the apprentice controlled the patterns (I think). There was an elaborate system of strings he pulled, which in turn would tug on a series of overhead cords. These cords controlled the particular loom arms (probably not the right term) which came up as the shuttle went through, weaving the threads in a particular way. I could see behind the apprentice whole different sets of strings, which must have been the different “programs” for the different versions of the brocade. You can see why someone got around to inventing punch cards eventually for the whole thing. His fabrics are very popular for wedding dresses, though not really very many people buy their wedding dress, instead renting them because it would be so very very expensive to actually own one of these outfits outright. I was very jealous and wish I could man.

The tour was not over at that point and sorry to fake you out on like a Part II of something that is already Part VI, but to be continued!

Our time in Tangier had drawn to a close and we were off to the second-to-last city on this trip: Fez! To get there we again took the train, though this one was not high-speed. The title is “slow speed” but that’s just to contrast with my other blog post, it was really a regular-speed train, I don’t want to demean the trains in Morocco. They also have high speed trains! But we didn’t take those ones.

To take the train we of course had to first get to the train station. The hotel was nice enough to arrange for us a taxi. I asked the front desk lady how much we should pay and she told me 60-70 (this is in Moroccan dirhams). When we arrived at the station he asked for 100, which I gave him because I didn’t feel like arguing and also he tried to give us a little tour of Tangier on the way (he didn’t go out of the way) and also also I was feeling guilty about if I had been tipping properly in Tangier so I was fine with giving him 100. In my notes I wrote that the train station was “beautiful,” though really I just meant like, it resembled a modern shopping mall. Still, nice!

Safely at the station we settled into our train. Since I’m American and my best frame of reference for trains is Harry Potter, it was a Harry Potter-style train. In that, there were different compartments with six seats each and no place to put our luggage. We had big ole’ suitcases for all the souvenirs so this put us in a bind and we spent the train journey with our suitcases between our news. The other people in the compartment didn’t seem to mind, I guess this is pretty standard. Later on a Harry Potter-style snack cart also came wheeling by, though I didn’t get anything.

I spent the train ride admiring the view. Most of the land between Tangier and Fez (we took a dog-legged route) was farmland. I was surprised by that. I know I had this same revelation when we were arriving in Tangier, but I guess I was still expecting desert. Though in Fez you look out over the landscape, and like, yeah, that’s what I expected. Maybe it’s just the particular face of the hills you see from the rooftops in Fez but they are brown and gorgeous and resemble the American southwest (especially the sky at sunset, the blue and pinks and oranges running together in bands across the sky as the sun goes down on the opposite horizon, just peering over the medina roofs and the hills and, man, this is why all those painters came to Morocco) and like that was what I was expecting.

But on the way to Fez it was farmland. There were a couple of men fishing in the little river that went under the train tracks, and lots of sheep and cows and sheep mixed in with cows. I saw people herding sheep over the rolling green hills and we drove by mudflats I didn’t understand, like maybe they were fish ponds or salt ponds or rice paddies? Seeing them I realized we were still near the ocean on the other side of the train and I could see if I looked over, but just barely in the distance. We also saw a lot of donkeys and multiple people actually riding along on donkeys which was fun to see. As we got farther south the land started to remind me of Florida with orange groves and palms and pine trees and the roads cutting through it. Also a good chunk of the land I think they were growing sugarcane but I couldn’t really be sure.

Eventually the land flattened out (though with hills in the distance) and I saw “ACAB” graffiti, which, solidarity, exciting. There were olive trees as well here and I looked it up on the map so I know south of Sidi Kacem we started to get back into hills. The houses seemed nice and we passed through clusters of towns with little train stations with tiled exteriors and one house I saw had a big solar setup on top despite being wired into power lines.

Eventually we arrived at the train station and a man gave us advice on how to avoid getting scammed on taxis and when buying things in the market. We thought he was going to scam us but he was in fact just nice. We exited the train station and found the guy the hotel sent to pick us up. He drove us to the nearest door of the medina and then handed us off to a luggage cart guy. Since there are no cars in the medina there are men with carts who haul stuff around, and besides not having to carry our own bags hiring the guy came with two advantages. One, we had no idea how to get to our hotel and two, and this is the real nice one, no one bothered us. Like everyone knew we already had a guy so we were just on our way.

The walk from medina entrance to our hotel, the Riad Laaroussa, was surprisingly long. We turned into a kinda grimy looking passageway off the main thoroughfare and through the door which opened up into a stunning courtyard. There wee tall orange trees and so many tiles and lovely fountains. Later we discovered they had not one but two tortoises. The front desk was expecting us and sent us up for mint tea on the roof as they shuttled our luggage up into the room. Tea finished, we were shown the room, which had a lot of character because the house itself is 300 years old but recently renovated. Unpacked, we could finally relax from the journey, and spent some more time one the roof reading and enjoying a fantastic dinner. While my super amazing wife took a call I ducked out to find an ATM. As I was exiting the Riad a guy with a small stand outside the door found out my name and tried to convince me to buy something. When we were there he posted up right outside the Riad (“we are neighbors,” he said), and so was our constant greeter during our entire time in Fez. Eventually I had almost decided to buy something from him but when I had reached that conclusion he was for once not sitting there. And so that was our introduction to Fez!

Reading this week:

• Captives and Voyagers by Alexander X. Byrd

As I teased in my last entry my super amazing wife had signed us up for a cooking class while we were in Tangier. This was with Blue Door Cuisine and was a lot of fun! As part of the cooking class you can go on a market tour, which we opted to do. We met up with our guide Lena in the Grand Socco (we were easy to spot) and she took us off around the market. We went to spice shops and vegetable stands and a meat place and she pointed out all the traditional stuff they cook with as she bantered with the shop keepers. She also took us by the communal ovens which were neat. Back in the day it was a hassle to have your own oven so for bread baking they had these big communal ovens where you could bring your stuff to be baked. Communal ovens are going out of fashion these days but not entirely; they are fired with orange and olive woods which provide a special flavor you just don’t get at home. After the market tour it was off to the cooking class itself.

The class took place in the proprietor’s house, though the first floor is laid out for cooking classes with different work stations. In addition to Lena we met her two accomplices. First they walked us through making the bread to go with dinner, specifically khobz. It’s not a flatbread but it is a pretty flat bread. After we prepared the dough they were whisked off to the communal ovens to get that authentic flavor.

Then it was on to the main course, of course literally. The point of the class was to learn how to cook with the tagine, which is that ceramic oven thingy you see all over Tangier. We spent the rest of the trip trying to find one we liked to buy but never really did. Plus that is a lot of luggage space to commit to. A lot of the cooking was handed to us, i.e. we mostly just sliced and arrange vegetables and didn’t even have to clean the fish, but that of course was to make it more fun. They taught us how to arrange the vegetables in the bottom of the tagine so the meat doesn’t stick, and then we mixed together the marinade for the fish itself. We slathered the fish up with the sauce and arranged it just so and proudly stood by our creations which were then cooked over the stove as the tagine worked as an oven.

A note on our teachers there. They were phenomenal. Like Lena there not only teaches at blue Door, but also teaches English, is getting her Masters’, and takes care of her dad and brother. Women! They work too much and are underappreciated. But what I did especially appreciate is that when you are taking a class from homemakers they give you the real down-to-earth tips, like “a metal sponge is best for cleaning tagines” and the non-stick veggies tip above. The women also kept hinting to me that a man doing the cooking is very appreciated and I should remember to do it sometimes at home. I’ll try!

As we waited for our dinner creations to cook we had a lesson on tea. We had been enjoying mint tea our entire time in Tangier, including even at Café Baba, but here is where we really learned about it. Turns out there are a lot more spices in it than we thought. Well sometimes. Normally it’s just tea and mint but for special occasions there are like ten spices including cinnamon and cloves and all sorts of stuff. The women described their heirloom tea sets at home and how it really connected them with their families and were a tad disappointed at how little sugar we asked to get added. And then you boil it all together in the pot for a while instead of just like pouring already boiling water over the spices? That’s an important technique I wouldn’t have guessed. When it was ready we drank tea for a while and admired the items in the little shop they have (we got a beautiful embroidered, um, I guess like a pad for the teapot and a oven mitt except not a mitt thing so you can pick up your metal teapot without it burning your hand, beautiful at any rate, and also we got some tea). And then eventually it was time for dinner!

They brought over our tagines full of food and the bread we had made and some more tea and let us chow down in a lovely little dining room. It was of course too much food and they offered to pack up our leftovers. We insisted we didn’t have a fridge (this was fish we’re talking about here) but they insisted in turn we pack it up so we wouldn’t go hungry and so we set off with our food and eventually gave the leftover fish to a cat with some kittens near our hotel. So that was a lot of fun and if you’re even in Tangier you should do it too!

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.

Having already learned so much about world travelers already in Tangier, we were all set to keep visiting more museums but then we got distracted by lunch. We by happenstance ran across Le Salon Bleu and decided to stop in. It was fantastic. We got seven small bowls of various things and each and every one was great, and the biggest discovery of the day was that putting cinnamon on orange slices is the way to go, dessert-wise. The café is perched up on the top of the building so you got these great views of the harbor and off in the distance Spain. There were also some funny seagulls which was cool and all, but my super amazing wife had been excited by the reviews which noted “heaps of cats.” We didn’t see any while we were there so they must have all been off doing something. In Tangier though there were certainly a whole bunch of cats, which seemed mostly well cared for and were definitely extremely cute. There was also a snake charmer outside, charming a snake, which is a thing I thought they only did in movies.

Anyways after lunch we then popped across the courtyard to our original destination, the Kasbah Museum! Even when lunch distracts us you can’t keep us away from museums for long. It is not technically the Kasbah museum (I have resisted calling this entry “Rock the Kasbah,” by the way, for your benefit), it is technically the Museum of Mediterranean Cultures, but it’s in the Kasbah so it’s the Kasbah museum. It’s a cute little museum at that. It proceeds lightly through the many many cultures that have called Tangier home, with a few interesting artifacts. Since it is built into the Sultan of Morocco’s old palace, it continues the theme we had been seeing of beautiful ceilings and peaceful courtyards. And there is a big ole’ Roman mural to boot with a boat in it. So that is neat.

Speaking of courtyards, this is where we first noticed Morocco’s fondness for tortoises. In one of the several courtyards of the Kasbah museum I noticed there was a tortoise wandering around, and then noticed there were a bunch of tortoises wandering around, including cute little baby tortoises. We took lots and lots of pictures. Maybe in some ways not as cute as cats but much more unique. Thinking back, there had been a tortoise at the American Legation Museum too and then as we proceeded through the rest of our trip in Morocco it seemed like every courtyard had one. I guess it is just the thing to do in Morocco. Where do they come from? Hard to tell, but a nice feature and keep an eye out for it.

After the delight in meeting the tortoises, the next thing we set out to do was visit the Contemporary Art Museum that was supposed to be nearby the Kasbah Museum. Turns out it is in the same compound as the Kasbah Museum, like you didn’t have to even go outside to get to it, so we wandered on through. They had some interesting works, and a lot of works at the time by Palestinian artists. Nice stuff!

At this point, we were unfortunately running a bit low on museums we could visit in Tangier, leaving us only able to enjoy the ambiance and culture of our surroundings. This meant wandering through the medina and trying to do some light haggling as a warm-up. We are not very good at haggling, and furthermore we were a little paralyzed in our souvenir buying because we weren’t sure if there was going to be nicer stuff elsewhere in Morocco. But one place our medina wanderings did bring us to was Cafe Baba. If you’ve never heard of Cafe Baba I hadn’t either, but my super amazing wife had. It is famed as being a place that the Rolling Stones hung out. There is little my super amazing wife loves more than a good cafe, and if Cafe Baba was good enough for the Rolling Stones it was good enough for us. Or so we thought. I can see why they liked it! It was not a place for us. The tea was good and the views pretty but the best part about the table they sat us at is that the window was broken so fresh air came in to displace the cigarette smoke. So we enjoyed our tea and departed, having been a little closer to rock n’ roll history and a little happier for having subsequently gotten farther away from rock n’ roll history. And with that our first full day in Morocco largely came to a close.

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.