Tangier

Well, I wanted strange; I got strange. Tangier is only like 10 km from Spain, but at least 100 years in the past. The people are super pushy and try to hustle every dollar out of you. Not even 2 minutes into the old city, or medina, and I’m offered hashish, a guide, and a rug. The medina is crawling with these hawkers. Akiko and I picked up another Japanese guy, Ken, on the ferry from Spain. They are like the attractions here. The children stare and the peddlers yell “Sayonara” and “Arigato”. Anyone who we actually answer, whether it be to a “Hello” or a “Do you want to look?”, follows us for a while until we have sufficiently told them that we are not interested in anything. We finally take a decent and semi expensive hotel after looking at a few shitholes with actual holes to shit in down the hall.

The next day we look around. Of course, it is much less sinister by day. We keep running into people from the previous night who want to be our guides around Tangier. They are very persistent and I start getting upset. It is a little game they play where they keep badgering you until they are convinced that it won’t work. This is fine for the first 5, but soon it wears on you and you start either ignoring people or getting visibly angry.

One guy picks us up on the street. His name is Mohamed and he is a musician who works in Barcelona and Belgium amongst other places. Now, this is the same story we hear from everyone, but this guy takes us to this cool little café facing the sea that we never would have found alone. He insists that we all take pictures together (and he has some sweet poses) and then wants to take our memory cards to a printer to get copies of the pics. The whole time we think that he is going to ask us for money, but no, he is just awesome.

We argue about lunch prices with the waiters for 10 minutes and at the end of the meal we find that they still up charge for everything. We paid for the dipping sauce that came with the fish. This is when I start snapping at young kids and I realize this environment is not bringing out the best in me. We had not heard good things about this place anyways so we make plans to go to Chefchouan a few hours south.

The bus terminal is worse than the Medina, but eventually we figure out some tickets and find a café to wait for the bus to leave. I am pretty livid from the day and just use the opportunity to sit in silence and play games to try to calm down. An hour and a half later, we get on the bus. At the bus, some random guy charges me 10 dh to put my bag under the bus. I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. On the long ride to Chefchouan, I am on the verge of tears, freezing, second-guessing this trip while the Japanese sleep.