Long Time, No post.
So, about three weeks ago? A couple of the boys and I went to Tangier. It's about 5 hours by train on the very, very northern tip of Morocco. Tangier since forever until not so long ago has been controlled by European powers and was traditionally sin city Morocco for a long time. (I wouldn't take that history as gospel, but it'll work)
This is the city where if one wanted to take a ferry to and from Spain, you would leave/arrive from. The Spanish influence was everywhere, that combined with the overwhelming French influence of Morocco made me feel more like I was in the "Little Morocco" of some Western city rather than in a medium sized city in Morocco itself.
Interesting enough though, not too many Europeans stay in Tangier long, and to be fair, there isn't too much to see or do, and its really just a transit point for many. The residents seem pretty used to seeing foreigners all the time, so the harassment wasn't as bad as I think it is in Fez. We weren't that big of a spectacle.
The city residents seemed to be pretty European in a lot of ways. The sin city nature of the city still exists (to extents I was personally to find out all too well). There are tons of bars, several clubs, and lots of liquor stores. All of these places really are not only geared towards foreigners as they are in other Moroccan cities/Arab cities in general. I walked into more than one bar of all Moroccans, drinking away, with the bottles of Stork and Flag piling up.
The beach was really nice, too cold to swim and too polluted according to some but I did enjoy to lay out. The food was also great, some great seafood and a couple top notch swarma/sandwich places. We enjoyed the lively night life until... things kinda went wrong. How exactly they went wrong is a story for when I'm actually in the room with whoever's reading this. It wasn't the fun kind of wrong either. Malesh.
Despite that, I did like Tangier, and sitting in the old cafes where plenty of American/European artists, writers, musicians sat, smoked kif and abused locals in their orientalist ways was a blast.
Take a look at the pictures, the water ones are of the port, and it continues.
Just a look of what the streets look like
One of the main plazas facing the port
Top of the kashba (~fort) of the old city
View from outside those walls
The old city
Inside a market, for LPC people, think of an Arab version of the wet market, including the live, flopping fish.
