Friday, April 13, 2007

6th April - day in Tangier















Woke up at 6 am after a very restless night. Like in Madrid and Lisbon, the hotels have not yet turned on their A/C's as it is still cool and spring like, so with the windows closed its too warm and with them open its too noisy. And here in Tangier, esp being on the beach, it was noisy till way past midnight. And starting about 4 am you could hear street sweepers and garbage collectors clanking around...so all in all sleepless night!!! Had a very interesting breakfast.....strange looking items. There were those paratha sort of breads like we had had the evening before, there was something that was a cross between pancakes, dosas and crepes with a jar of honey next to it, a huge silver pot of mint tea, a hundred varieties of sweet rolls, baklava.....! Since we were up early and it being a Sunday we were told nothing would open before 11am, we decided to walk to the beach and dip our feet in the Mediterranean! Interestingly, there were a lot of men and young boys playing football, not a woman in sight! I looked extremely out of place and since we had to dodge football playing guys to get to the water, I chickened out. So R went ahead and did the mandatory foot dipping and came back.


Since we were sort of sleepy and still had time, we took a quick one hour nap and then headed to the bazaar.

Our first purchase was a duffel bag for 6 euros since we were short on space for all the things we had planned to buy.Then we went to a bazaar we had seen the previous evening and I bought a pair of Moroccan shoes for my mom. I had taken the outline of her foot and it seemed right, but as it turns out when I got to the room and tried them against my foot, they fit me perfectly and ended up being too big for her! The next store had some beautiful thin cotton floor rugs but language was still a problem, so with great difficulty and sign language, she agreed - or so we thought - to selling a 10 dirham rug for 5 dirhams. When we gave her the 5 dirhams, she almost threw it back at us. It turned out she dropped the price from 100 to 50!!!! All we knew was that there was a 5 somewhere in there! She glared at us and we scooted!

We went back to the casbah and the maze of narrow streets and bought a bunch of stuff. I bought a tagine at the old market for 4 euros (which was a great deal cos I found out later that the new modern souvenier shops sell them for as much as 10!!) , a prayer rug for mom. We checked out an interesting vegetable market and I really wanted a picture of the women vendors with their old wrinkled faces, but they kept covering their face every time I tried to take a pic! Not wanting to offend them, I gave up. R bought a leather pouf ( a low moodah sort of thing you sit on, which can be stuffed with old clothes etc) for his dad and a t-shirt and some odd knick knacks. It was 1pm by now and we had pretty much exhausted all of the old city and Medina. So we bought some exotic fruits - mangos and cherimoya, sort of like custard apple, and some dates - for lunch and came back to our room and ate them.

After a 2 hour siesta and some time on the Internet, we headed out towards the new part of town by the beach. Again I was fascinated to see mostly men on the beach. We happened to catch some fishermen bringing in their haul for the day like they do in Kerala. Very cool! We walked all along the waterfront, saw a very Moroccan looking McD. There was nothing more left to see in Tangier, we had walked the entire city so we stopped at a supermarket and bought some packaged dates to take back and then for dinner at AliBaba again! I tried the tabbouleh salad and R stuck to tried and tested falafels. The owner had given us finger chips free w/dinner the night before, but our waiter this time didn't, so I asked him and he said he would bring it. We waited and waited and actually finished dinner before he came by and apologized for having forgotten. To make up for it, he offered us free mint tea...we weren't sure exactly what it would be like, but we accepted! Well.....believe it or not, he forgot that too and after a while came back and apologized again and offered us free cake for forgetting the mint tea which was for forgetting the chips!!! Poor guy returned soon after with both mint tea and some sort of orange cake...both were fabulous! He said this was his last working day for the week and he was excited at seeing his family after so long and was distracted!
Walked back to the hotel, packed up for our early departure the next morning!

No comments: