A3-Tetuan

A few miles past the border between Spain and Morocco (Cueta is still Spain, though we are on the Continent of Africa), our tour-bus just happened to stop at a place where there were large camels to ride and small ones to pet, and Emmy enjoyed doing both.

We passed a Club Med, then stopped at a nearby resort hotel for lunch. We were the only members of our tour group, but there were members of three or four tours on the bus, and Paul and Brigitte from Nice, France, sat at the table with us, as we ate lunch. Paul was born in Algiers and said he really knows good cous-cous when he tastes it — his mother fixed it better than this restaurant. (We visited their boutique in Nice three different years, and one year we enjoyed dinner in their mountain side hi-rise Condo, high above Nice.)

In Tetuan we walked in and out of dark dank narrow walkways, with only foot traffic and an occasional donkey carrying freight. There were crowded food stalls, piles of olives, baked goods, and a variety of markets and stores. We saw mosques where we heard the Moslem chant over a PA system, and then watched them at their prayer time.

While walking through a crowded market area in Tetuan, we heard a chanting murmur and saw a crowd of people coming down the stairway street. (Many “streets” were stair steps.) When I started to take a picture, I was “told” in no uncertain terms to forget the picture. But I took one picture without aiming the camera, I just pointed my stomach and pressed the button. (Not the belly-button, the one on the camera.) We then saw a wooden coffin being carried down the stairs in Tetuan, on the shoulders of several men.

In 1986, at the World’s Fair in Vancouver, Canada, a man at the Moroccan Exhibit told us it must have been a funeral of a woman. The body was in a box so no one could see her shape, a man would just have been wrapped in a cloth.

Soon we came upon a snake charmer who just "happened" to be on the street when our group was passing by, and he charmed some money from a few of the tourists. Brigitte (our beautiful new friend from Nice, France) let the charmer put a snake around her neck, ugh! That “ugh” is for the snake, certainly not for lovely Brigitte.

Back to the bus for the long slow bumpy ride to Tanger. We found the right front tire on the bus had a huge bulge, but they had no spare. Thank goodness they drove very slowly from Tetuan to Tanger, and we made it all the way.