So 1pm found us arriving in Tangier, after a brief layover in Madrid that featured a most excellent breakfast, some pretty good walking, and more GI pain for Anna. That last bit, as I said before, was not good. In any event, we arrived at the Tangier airport and took one of the ubiquitous old-Mercedes taxis to our hotel, the Tarjan Flandria. Driving into the city felt a bit weird: almost anything we saw was familiar from some combination of Amman, Cairo, Paris, or Madrid. Arabaic, French, Spanish. Third-world apartment buildings. Sidewalk cafes. Modern Home Depot style stores. And so on.
We arrived at our hotel around 2 and found it to be perfectly respectable, if not the four star place promoted on their website. Or maybe we were just spoiled by a couple of days in the also-four-star-but-far-more-upscale Concorde El Salam. In any event, we got to the hotel, dropped our bags, and headed out to wander the city, and also to find someone to look at Anna’s stomach. Yep, after only two plus weeks of discomfort and pain, she conceded that maybe it was worth getting checked out.
We had a bit of an adventure finding a nearby medical clinic, but said adventure included a friendly and kind of fun multilingual exchange with a hotel clerk who had only a tiny bit of Spanish and tiny bit of French. I’ve got some French, Anna has some Spanish, and between the three of us we managed to communicate our needs and the location of the nearby Croissant Rouge clinic.
Once we found the place, it was only a short wait before a nurse ushered Anna and I into a consultation room. While the nurse claimed to only speak Spanish and French, she began to use English once Anna made an attempt in Spanish (it was unclear whether the nurse’s newfound willingness to use English was in appreciation of Anna’s foray into Spanish, or in horror at the quality Anna’s Spanish) . They managed to communicate the problems, and then the nurse sent in a doctor to perform an ultrasound on Anna’s abdominal area to see what was going on. Ok, re-reading this as I edit, I can already see some conclusions being jumped to. No, she was not pregnant, nor did she have an Aliens-style creature ready to burst through her stomach.
The ultrasound went on for a while, the doctor seeming to be pretty thorough. He was also going over different areas, which was encouraging, since it didn’t seem like he had found some screwdriver that she had swallowed and was just trying to get a good view. Eventually he wrapped up, and sure enough, the diagnosis was just general travel stomach issues. Anna got prescriptions for three medications, and we headed out to walk around the city. On the whole, the medical clinic was a little anticlimactic, but that’s a good thing.
For the afternoon, we walked down to the beach, which here in Tangier is absolutely huge, moderately trashy (lots of cigarette butts and broken glass), and incredibly windy. Like, visible clouds of sand blowing across the beach windy. Still, it was nice to see, and very interesting to see all of the different people and cultures represented. We walked down the beach a while before moving onto a beachfront road to avoid the blowing sand.
After a couple of miles of walking, we stopped at the cute Argentinian Grill place for a late afternoon snack/meal. Again, it took some combined French and Spanish to make communication work, especially since we were trying to order dinner food that was not yet procured. But once again, it worked out in a friendly and educational way, and we ended up with a tasty steak and bread/chevre dish. Good stuff.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to pick up Anna’s medications, and generally wandered around the city some more. Arriving back at the room around 7pm, I found that I was just exhausted. I haven’t set foot on a scale since we left, but I think I must have lost 10 pounds or so over the past three weeks, which is enough to make me kind of weak and lightheaded standing up, and stuff like that. So, while Anna’s mission is to take her medication and sort out her stomach, my plan is to greatly increase caloric intake. Ice cream and beer, here I come!