Morocco, day five: Tangier
Who needs plans anyway?
Apparently I’m not going to Fès tomorrow, as I appear to have decided to stay in Tangier until the end of the week.
I’m not really sure what possessed me to change my plans but it was over my sumptuous breakfast on the terrace that I contemplated whether I should stay a little longer and never go anywhere else ever again. The conditions of my train ticket to Fès are such that the ticket can be changed free-of-charge before the train leaves, and changing my train from tomorrow to Friday at the same time was a painless point-and-click affair on the ONCF web site. Once that was done there was no backing out.
There was accidental work in the morning, and with that out of the way I took myself back through the animated and colourful little streets to the Syrian restaurant, where I have decided I shall simply go through the menu until I die from some kind of foodgasm. Today’s lunch was lentil soup (yummy) and baba ganoush which came to about the same as yesterday and set me up nicely for the afternoon. I had a glass of water and wondered quite what it would be like to watch the Bridget Jones movie in the Cine Alcazar.
I shall never know, for on my return to the lovely Hôtel Fuentes after a leisurely stroll back through the medina looking at things nonchanantly I announced my desire to stay a little longer and found myself in room number four at the front of the hotel with a balcony and a fridge which necessitates moving the table if I want to sit at it. There is air conditioning, should I want it, and a man who occasionally walks onto his balcony at the Hôtel Becerra opposite and nods and smiles in acknowledgement and fiddles with his vest as I sit at my little table doing things on a computer.
It's all very urbane.
I chose the Hôtel Fuentes solely on the basis of some monochrome photographs of the place from 1925, while Tanger was part of the Tangier International Zone, on the booking site of choice.
The hotel was the birthplace of Antonio Fuentes, hailed the Picasso of Tangier, who was born there while it was under the ownership of his parents and it was here, I was interested to learn, that in 1874 Camille Saint-Saëns composed La Danse Macabre which has, somewhat irksomely now, been a near-perpetual earworm since I learned of this.
Anyway. How exciting; this is somewhere historic!
Guide came again in the evening, and we had a little wander around back towards the kasbah where our sunset attempts were more successful as I supped a Moroccan red as the call to prayer semi-finals got off to a slightly coughy start. Left to my own devices in the evening, I took dinner in the Gran Café Central opposite my hotel, a vegetarian couscous and mint tea ruining me at 60 dirhams. I’d have liked some harissa or something similar with my couscous, but it was delicate and perhaps it was better that I didn’t have the possibility to adulterate it after all.
By all accounts, the Manchester City vs Real Madrid game was quite the nail-biter. After dinner I had a quick coffee and a slightly less hasty passive lungful in the café before deciding it was time to go to bed in my new room, conveniently placed above the terrace from whence occasional upwards wafts of fragrant smoke thought they might try to escape. I clung to the railings and breathed deeply, then prepared myself for bed just as people started to sound very unhappy indeed before eventually becoming thunderously overjoyed towards the end.
What I learned from this experience is that the locals are overwhelmingly Real Madrid fans. As I don't follow football, I don't know what this actually means, but I wandered down to have a look and made appropriate "very good" noises as the masses filtered out of the café at the end of the game.
It rained quite heavily today.
