Whelan's Travels: Morocco Part 1

As many of you might know, the southern tip of Spain is only a hop and a skip from Morocco, land of intrigue, spices, mystery (according to Lonely Planet) and setting for the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman movie that Hopkins professor John Irwin calls the best-written film ever made. You know which one I´m talking about.

The lives of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, so Kat and I skipped down to the dark continent (--I'm going to say as many offensive, colonial-type things in this entry as possible) for 5 crazy nights, and here's what we saw.

First, we met in Algeciras on Thursday morning after I took an 11 hour bus from Salamanca, and then hopped over to Tangier on this boat...

Tangier, we heard, is pretty dangerous because of the drug trade, so we hopped straight to Rabat, the capital city...

...and is, incidentally, kind of disgusting and filthy. The air was so filthy with pollution that I could hardly breathe, all caused by little Soviet-era Peugeot motorcycles like these, which everyone was riding...

This was the main minaret at the cities biggest mosque. It was Ramadan when we were there, so the imams were particularly dilligent about calling the faithful to prayer. The chants, which come through scratchy loudspeakers from the tops of the minarets, sound like a cross between cultish droning and an air raid drill, with a melody that sounds vaguely like Fergie´s refrain in the Black Eyed Peas' ''Don't Phunk With My Heart''...

And the other side of that Plaza, flanking the Palais Royale...

After that plaza, Kat and I wandered to the Old City, the Medina, where at any godly hour there would be a flurry of commercial activity, but we were there when it was still waking up...

At this point I'd like to point out that the only way we got ourselves anywhere after I arrogantly got us lost by misreading maps and refusing, in the gender-balanced spirit of the land, to let Kat navigate, was by faking french and saying things like,

Quelle est l'nomme d'este rue? - which I think means 'What is the name of this street?' (anyone?)

So here was the sleepy medina...

And a man frying cornmeal cakes to eat later, when the sun goes down and Ramadan ends. I asked the guy the name of them, but I could neither understand nor pronounce his answer, so I don't know what they're called, honestly, but we bought one and ate it surreptitiously so as not to offend any hungry Muslims...

And some kids playing craps in the alley and trading soccer cards...

And the meat market. Look closely now...

...those are cow legs! Sawed right off the cow!

And a dreary looking art shot of a broken down bus in a parking lot.

I took the above picture sort of as an expression of the fact that Rabat was pretty uninteresting. In fact, it really sucked, and we probably could have done without visiting it, but Kat tells me that 'shoulda wouldas' are no fun to anyone, so I'll just move on to Casablanca, which is where we went that afternoon for a good meal at the replica of Rick's Café Americain, complete with fez and vest waiters...

The restaurant was an admirable recreation of the movie version, but it wasn't big enough and there was only a piano, and no bandstand. But we were there in the middle of the afternoon, so there was no piano player at all, only Ella Fitzgerald piped in on speakers. There were also not quite as many drunken, stranded French women, Czech resistance fighters requesting the Marseillaise, or stolen entrance papers, as I had anticipated. There were, however, fresh oysters...