Morocco

Morocckin it!! First stop Asilah, a coast town on the Atlantic 30 miles south of Tangier. Our taxi takes us right to the middle of the main street...creeps for a bout five seconds....and just stops. The junkies start slowly making their way to us and crowding the taxi... but who to the rescue but Hisham!! HIsham comes to the window "Hey dude it's me Hisham... let's get out of here!" Thank you couchsurfing. The junkies get scared away and Hisham takes us to his auntie's place where we rent out the entire second floor for two nights. It's a really nice place and hot tea and cookies are waiting for us. Hisham makes us comfortable in no time and takes us on a tour of the old city and new. It's a truly amazing place.

Jimi Hendrix Cafe!

Beached pirate ship

There is a yearly festival called Eid that is happening when we are in Morocco. In each family, sheep are gathered and butchered for the celebration and we see sheep and rams being unloaded and transported everywhere during our stay here. We have a chance encounter with one of the street celebrations too, check it out:

Now to Tangier! We start walking out of Asilah and hitch a ride on the "communal taxi" which is just a bunch of people in a car going to about the same place. We get to Tangier and try to find the phone number and address of our next contact Clare who works at the American school there. We finally find her number, but no answer. We can't find a taxi to the address to save our lives, so we just wander around the city for two hours. When all hope is lost and I turn down a random street because it's down hill, wouldn't you know it we stumble across the American School. I drop Claire's name to the guard who let's us in. We talk to the receptionist who calls Clare, and we finally get in touch with her! Wow life!

Clare sets us up at a real nice and real cheap hotel called the Tangier Inn. It happens to be where all the beatniks hung out in the fifties when they were in Tangier. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs holed up here and Burroughs wrote "Naked Lunch" in this building. The sight from the hotel room was really surreal with the rooftops of Tangier and the Mediterranean Sea in the background. We chill at the bar right next door and get cheeseburgers at a 24 hour place and sleep happy.

The next day we go to the Medina which is the old part of the city. It's walled off, and the narrow streets give a really human feeling as you walk. It's like your face to face with your neighbor and are forced to interact with them, a far cry from how things are in the states I think.

We wander the narrow streets and again stumble across an elderly Moroccan man who calls out to us. We keep walking because everybody is a hustler in Morocco and we don't want to be fooled again. Something tells me to go back though, and we do. He leads us past a pile of wooden planks, three locked doors, and into a synagogue. It must have been three hundred years old, huge, the walls covered with ornate Hebrew lettering. A balcony for the women, wooden seats for the men. Beautiful lighting and really clean. We are awestruck and stay there for a good while praying and giving thanks. It was a remarkable experience and I am so glad I had the opportunity to see it!

We then find gifts for all our loved ones back home: Great fabrics, cool boxes, nice hats, and some other trinkets. Dave looks good in his new hat!

Off to the airport, I mean seaport, I mean airport we go, but we realize that our flight was at twelve that afternoon and we are already eight hours late for it! We're glad we got to do the things we did that last day in Tangier, but the next two days in airports are a tough price to pay for it!