Tangier is a very interesting city. Pretty much all cities are interesting in their own way, but Tangier is interesting in an interesting way. Especially having just come from Cairo, and Egypt in Jordan in general, it feels much less Arab and Moslem than we were expecting, even though there’s plenty of Arabic writing and women walking around in various degrees of hair- and face-coverage. But despite (or maybe because of) the Arab influence, the city feels very western. I’m sure this will cause offense somewhere, but it feels a bit like a Arab-flavored region of Disneyland. Not that there’s a fauxness to the Arab qualities of the city; more like, there are genuine Arab and Moslem goings on, but the underpinnings of the city are unmistakably western: we haven’t yet heard the word “baksheesh”, and there’s a formality and even officious vibe that is much more European than Middle Eastern. Heck, there’s a pseudo-Walmart, even.
We spent the morning wandering down to the Medina, or old city. The Medina is sort of half bazaar, half residential area, with a fair amount of historical stuff to boot. I was on a quest to find some kind of cheap and small digital camera, the one I’d started the trip with not having survived Egypt. Anna’s got a great camera, but it’s fairly bulky and not conducive to super quick shots. So as we wandered, my goal was to find someplace to buy a good-enough replacement. As we headed towards the Medina, we stopped at a tourist office and got a city map, since we had no other maps of the city.
Walking through the shops of the Medina was a bit of a weird experience, after Egypt. It was not uncommon to be able to linger by a window for 10, even 15 seconds without being accosted by the shopkeeper. Moving on from a store didn’t entail being chased down the street by someone shouting prices asymptotically approaching zero. And I don’t think we got shoved out of the way even once by passerby. It was different, though we still didn’t buy anything.
At one point we entered an enclosed farmers’ market type building, absolutely full of stalls selling vegetables, nuts, olives, and meat. Vendors were grouped by item, so you’d run across five olive bars in a row, or, in one case, an entire hallway of butchers’ shops. Now, I like my meat, and I like and admire raw meat. But an entire hallway, with raw meat and butchers on both sides, with plenty of entrails and tripe and tongues-in-skulls and stuff? It was, I have to admit, a little much even for me.
Anna and I agreed that if we were going to spend a few days in Tangier, the smart thing to do would be to rent a small apartment and buy and cook meals from the market. So, if you’re going to spend a few days in Tangier, consider that. The food in the city is plenty good, but you could make some amazing dishes with the highest quality ingredients.
After all of that, though, I still had no camera. I had seen a large store called Marjane on our way into the city, and some Internet research turned it up to be similar to Target or Walmart: a big box store carrying everything from food to electronics. Sure, why not? They’d have a decent selection of cameras and probably reasonable prices, right? We grabbed a taxi and negotiated a round trip price, and off we went.
Marjane’s camera selection, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment. Maybe seven cameras, most of them 75% – 100% more expensive than they’d be in the U.S. But I did pick up a small Nikon S220 for only 50% more than it would have been at home, and it was cheap enough that the 50% didn’t amount to much. You’ll see how it acquits itself in coming days, but early indications are that it’s adequate but barely above toy quality.
Anyways, cameral digression aside, we headed back into the city and to our hotel, where we hung out in the hotel bar and used its WiFi for a couple of hours. Our main goal was to figure out what we were going to do for the next few days, since we only had one more night in the hotel in Tangier, and as much as we were enjoying the city, we didn’t think we wanted to spend all of our Morocco time there. We settled on Chefchaouen (aka Chefxaouen), a city about 170km south of Tangier, described as a “blue and white” city by most websites. It promised some outdoorsy activities, which were of particular interest because I was really starting to feel the lack of exercise.
In the course of using the Internet, we also found a restaurant that was pretty much universally acclaimed as the best in Tangier, called Anna et Paolo. Sure, a good meal sounded fantastic. The concierge in our hotel thought it was near Hotel Chellah, which was on our handy tourist map. So, around 7pm or so, we headed out for the walk of unknown duration to a more or less unknown destination.
Here’s where our handy tourist map let us down: it had no scale indication. So we knew we were going to Hotel Chellah, but we had no idea if it was half a kilometer or six miles away. We weren’t in a hurry, though, so we wandered south through the city, eventually finding a likely street and turning east. We proceeded this way for a while before it became apparent that we had overshot our destination. No matter, we’d turn back north. Which we did, wandering through some clearly residential streets before happening upon the amazing Rue Mexique street, which was thronging with shoppers and walkers by this time, around 8:30pm. We turned west.
By now we were getting a feel for the map, and I had a pretty good idea that we had basically walked a huge spiral around our destination, having covered perhaps ten times the distance we needed to. Sure enough, our next few turns were more deliberate and we found the Hotel Chellah and, right next to it, with props to our concierge, Anna et Paolo.
This entry is already long enough, and I’m not a great food writer, so suffice to say that I absolutely believe Anna et Paolo to be the best restaurant in Tangier. It’s possible other places meet its quality, but I’m not sure it could be exceeded. Fantastic decor, really friendly people, tremendously good food (I had a filet au poivre, Anna had beef medallions with a brown/citron sauce), and great sangria (which sangria Anna barely got taste, still being on her stomach meds).
After dinner (and the fantastic chocolate torte dessert) we walked directly back to our hotel, confirming that we had covered maybe 8km where 1/2km would have done. No matter, we had seen more of the city and had thoroughly enjoyed the walk. We went to bed, still planning to head down to Chefchaouen in the morning, still without hotel reservations or any plans for getting there.