Tangier & Tetuan, Morocco (2002)

At one point when we were contemplating where to go, Carmel actually looked at a map. She made the clever observation that Morocco is actually amazingly close to Spain and suggested it would be interesting to visit Africa. But given the dicey political times, we thought it best to avoid going to Arab countries this summer, and tabled the discussion. But when we made our very last minute decision to skip Majorca and Ibiza and relax at Marbella instead, we decided to throw Morocco back into the mix. After all, how could turn up the opportunity to go to Africa when it was right there? So we headed to Algeciras and from there took a day trip to Morocco. We went with a group since we had no idea where to go and didn't want to cross the border alone given the Israeli stamps in our passports. Our group took a ferry to Ceuta, then a bus with stops in Tetuan and Tangier. We found it rather reminiscent of Israel and a welcome change of pace from Spain. Unbeknownst to us, there was an international incident that day between Spain and Morocco; fortunately, we were blissfully ignorant until we turned on CNN back in Spain.

Rock of Gibraltar at sunrise. This was the view from our hotel.

Our cool boat from Algeciras (tip of Spain) to Morocco, by way of Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa (the Moroccans aren't too thrilled about the Spanish presence).

A dried out lake typical of an African scene (left) and a camel (right) that wasn't too happy about getting pulled around. They had one camel that was just for pictures and it was rather happy to get fed and hang out and smile for the camera.

Moroccan marketplace.

Entrance to a mosque.

The Water Guy. In the marketplace they don't have water fountains so they have this guy with a bunch of cups who will give you a drink of water (we did not try any).

Snake charmer!

Josh confidently playing with harmless snake.

http://nature.berkeley.edu/~jfisher/movies/Snake%20charmer.mov

A video clip of the snake charmer in action.

A store.

The entrance to a good restaurant.

Some of the neat Andalusian architecture of the restaurant.

Our meal of couscous with chicken, really good bread, soup, mint tea for dessert, and coke that tasted slightly different.

This band played behind us while we ate.

http://nature.berkeley.edu/~jfisher/movies/Carmel%20in%20band.mov

A 15 second video clip of the band.

View of Tetuan from a store rooftop. We thought it was rather nice of the store to let us use their rooftop until we came back downstairs and were hassled to buy thousand dollar rugs. We told them what our exact income is as graduate students and offered them $50 for a $3000 rug. We were removed from the store soon thereafter.

The trees along the roadside often had bases painted white. We couldn't figure out why, although we thought it could either be as a roadside reflector thing or so that the torros didn't eat them.