Morocco!: An Open Letter to Alex and Sammy

Dear Alex and Sammy: I wrote this once already and the stinkin computer erased it. Because I have STILL not been to bed since we said goodbye to you, I will have to make it brief. This first picture is our first glimpse of Tangiers. You can see Africa from Tarifa, Spain, the port we sailed from, so I guess it does not count as our first glimpse of Africa.

This picture is the port/town of Tarifa, Spain, where we caught our boat. All of our connections went very smoothly, except for finding the bus to Tarifa from Algeciras–Mommy has a sunburn and we are both VERY tired after hunting all over town for the bus we needed! The boat ride was fabulous though, very windy and cool after all that heat, and dolphins played in the wake of the boat!

This tree is one of the coolest things we have seen. It is a rubber tree and it is over 700 years old. As you can see from the picture of Daddy, the tree is GINOURMOUS!

This kind gentleman let me take his picture–you can imagine how excited I was to see the communal ovens. Lunch is the bigger meal of the day, so earlier in the day these ovens would have tagines in them (clay pots for braising fish, meat and poultry). When we were there they were baking bread–many (most?) of the homes in the medina do not have ovens so the people still use these communal ovens for all of their baking. The smell was heavenly.

This is not the greatest picture, but it will have to do. This is our first meal in Morocco and it was awesome. Alex, I actually loved the olives! If olives tasted like this back home I would eat the darn things! We had 6 courses (including fruit at the end) plus 5 different kinds of flatbread. Oddly–yet wonderfully because truly these people are SO friendly–the proprietor gave me a djellaba when I left so I could be properly Moroccan. It was wonderful to get such fresh seafood because we are heading inland and leaving Tangiers tomorrow.

A typical medina alleyway. Our guide told us there are over 1,200 streets in the Tangiers medina and having walked for about an hour on our tour, I believe it! Surprisingly, the tiny streets do not feel claustrophobic or dangerous, they just feel natural.