Ahlen Tangier

... to Tanger. I got talking to an american for a little while from California who was lovely and had a big conversation about life and religion! We arrived at Tanger after travelling all day, it was really nice to get to the coast though we have not seen the sea for weeks and its much more calm here. We got a taxi to our hotel and checked in ok. The receptionist had ...

... place, then crashed in our bed (or what deceivingly<br>looked like a bed, but was more likely a cement block with sheets on it. Moroccan<br>mattresses are very hard) We weren&#8217;t sure<br>what time the train left, so after breakfast we just wandered down to the<br>station to find out. The next train to Fez was in 2 hours, and the next to<br>Tangier was in 3 and a half. We decided not to go to Fez in the end, while<br>renown for its Medina (Morocco&#8217;s most intact, as well as ...

... of us there was an awkward silence as we stood on the roof of this dudes house. The silence was eventually broken when he said (with his morocan arabic accent) . .. . .'Spliff?'. . . . . . . you had to be there, honestly, was definately one of the funniest moments.<br><br>Anyway, feeling a little light headed from cycling in the heat all day me and Olly explored the town at night which was so mental it felt like you were in a computer game.<br><br><br>

... and we were in Africa! The kids though it was pretty cool.<br><br>We hired a guide, because Rick Steves said we should. He was very talkative and english-speaking. He seemed to know what he was doing. We quickly caught onto what exactly he was doing: getting us to buy stuff so that he could get kickbacks. We knew about the kickback system ahead of time, but it was still something to behold. We toured a carpet store, a ...

... decided to try to seek out something more traditional. We needed the inside scoop from a woman since the bathouses are gender specific but in a bit of a pickle of who to ask however for advice because the only people who will talk to us are men. In the bathroom at the hotel, elise asked the woman cleaning and she invited us to go with her that evening. We met her back at the hotel when she was finished working and she took us first to her house where we met her family, had ...

... entirely prepared for the begging children on the street or the peddlers, but we still enjoyed our time during the walking tour. They took us to a traditional Moroccan restaurant for Moroccan food and they had a little band playing there too. Afterward, the walking tour continued. They took us to a rug market, where they were essentially just trying to sell ...

... taking advantage of the internet connection of the place nextdoor, a fancier choice of accomadation called Le Patio de la Lune, far nicer but way too expensive (500DH for a single compared to the 130DH I'm paying for my double) So, my advice is, if you ever happen to be in Asilah, check in at the, and use the internet - it works absolutely fine, at least from room number 1. Look at some pictures here! and Stay Tuned.

... not, I would speak in Spanish when interacting with the locals, and a few times, I was forced to resort to what little tiny bits of French (owing to a century of French occupation, it's the second official language of Morocco) that I picked up last fall. Before landing, Diana warned me that Arabic countries are quite different.  She lived in Tunisia for a summer, so whe was pretty familiar with how the aggressive-ish male culture, the dual economies, how to ...

... of the nearby market streets outside the medina. Asilah was under Portuguese control for several hundred years during Portugal's golden age, so the architecture here was a somewhat different from other port towns where the western influence was Spanish or French. This northern part of Morocco, however, was under Spanish rather than French control in the years before independence in the 1950s, and the Iberian influence is ...

... so black from top to bottom that you could have closed the door and developed pictures in it. I ate cous cous and some meat on a stick in a restaurant and 2 beers...4.5 euros. The old part of morocco is built on old castles and ruins of old buildings. I have pics (which i cant upload on this computer either...dammit!) of the bottoms of buildings being support for the new architecture. Now back to Spain!