Pictures:
1. This is the new city of Agadir. Its beach continues around the corner all the way out of the picture.
2. The dark boats in the harbor is the sardine fleet. The larger red and blue boats near the top are the larger trawlers for tuna, etc.
3. The wall of the reconstructed kasbah at the site of the destroyed city of Agadir.
4. The Muslim women are dressed in about the medium level of modesty. There are very few of the Yemeni style at the one extreme and a lot of women in western dress.
5. Olive stall in the traditional souk. You really can't get far enough away for perspective, the aisles are two narrow and crowded. My favorite olives, the beldi, are the purplish ones second from the left.
6. Souk fruit stand. Those very large (as long as the vendor's forearm) bananas are nevertheless very sweet.
7. The girl on the right sold me my Berber baboshes. The girl on the right is stitching beads on a pair of Arabic baboshes. They are both Berbers.
April 1 – Agadir, Morocco. Agadir is a very modern, coastal tourist city in central Morocco. It has a long, wide arcing beach lined with hotels and resorts with a large condo development surrounding a large marina at one end. It still has some undeveloped open space so it doesn't look like Waikiki. That's a good thing. European tourists as well as Africans come here for vacation.
The reason it's so new is that in the 1960s an earthquake completely destroyed the town. 15,000 people were killed, about half the city's population. Bulldozers finished the job and the new city was located a little way south along the beach. Driving in town we passed some large and very neat looking apartment or condo developments. They looked well maintained and I didn't really see any poor areas. Maybe there aren't any or maybe we just didn't see them. There is lots of new construction underway, both housing and businesses. KIA Motors has a large facility along the road just out of town.
Our first stop was atop a hill to the site of an ancient Kasbah (fort). (On that same subject 'medina' is city and 'souk' is market.) They decided to build a replica of the Kasbah to commemorate where the old town had been. It had a great view of Agadir, the beach, the marina and the port. There were camels there for riding and photo ops. It was early enough in the morning to have the sun at our backs, always a plus when you are taking photographs. The only teenager on the ship decided to ride one of the camels. She's a small girl with long hair and it was blowing everywhere as the guide ran down the parking lot urging her camel to go faster. Looked like she was having fun.
Morocco is the world's leading exporter of sardines and the fleet must have been in because the small boat harbor was full of them. Our ship is docked next door in the large ship harbor.
Street signs are a little funny here. They are all printed in Arabic and French. Where the French have the habit of only pronouncing some of the letters in the word, Arabic pronounces them all. Actually everything written in our alphabet from Arabic has to be transliterated, not translated. Arabic doesn't have an alphabet in the same way we do. It's more like the Japanese Kanji, phonetic in nature. Each of the curls has a certain sound associated with it and they are always the same. So it's a matter of finding the letters in English that sound the most like the Arabic and then that's how it's spelled. Takes some getting used to but after hearing the guide say it a few times I started catching on.
Historical Note: In hearing and reading about this area I have come face to face with the fact that Western education is totally lacking when it comes to this area of the world and my personal studies have not improved on that situation. The books here talk about The Fatimids of Ifrukuiya (although when I sound it out, I can see how this word may have spawned our word Africa but I'm not sure that's true), the Almoravids, the Almohad Period, etc. as if everyone knows about these people and eras. I am totally clueless. I'm fairly conversant with the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Vandals, Huns, Mongols, Minoans, Philistines, Cushites, Moabites, Jebusites Vikings, Saxons, Angles, etc. but I've never heard of the people that lived in this area and their history. I've got some reading to do when I get home.
We drove a little way out of town to go to a more traditional souk. Our guide says that the one in downtown Agadir is too new and more modern in style. He wants us to experience the real thing.
The souk there were stalls selling clothing, both traditional and western, shoes, leather goods, all kinds of produce, spices, dates, nuts, vegetables, fruit, olives, oils and wooden and iron products. The walkways were narrow and lined on both sides with vendor's booths. The light was difficult because there was a mix of very dim natural sunlight, florescent and incandescent light. I didn't see any meat or seafood here and that's a good thing because it's hot and stuffy inside.
I'm not a big fan of olives in the US. I like some of the imported Greek olives but the standard green and black are not my favorite. Here they have beldi olives (reddish-purple with a slightly nut like flavor) and they're fantastic. They're great to snack on but really excel when used in cooking, especially in a tajine.
Gustatory Note: A traditional tajine is a heavy clay cooking pot that has two parts. The base is a shallow, round, flat-bottomed bowl and the top is cone shaped and fits inside the short sides of the base during cooking. The cone shape insures that the moisture from cooking will be efficiently returned to the food, sort of a self-basting lid. The dish is cooked at low temperatures, much like a Crock-pot, so the meats are very tender and infused with the flavors of the vegetables with which they were cooked.
On our trip through the souk we lost two people. You have to pay attention or it's easy to get turned around. From most places you can only see a few yards through the maze of stalls. Oddly, one of the people we lost is the largest guy on the ship. I've got to ask him if he played football. He's a very large, and as large me often are, very friendly black man. He had on a bright blue shirt and baseball cap. He wanted to find a VC and the guide found a man to take him there and back. We ran into the man about 10 minutes later and our fellow traveler was not with him. He told the guide he took him outside but when we got to our assembly place he wasn't there. Because he's tall and large it should be easy to find him and it was. Unfortunately the other man to get lost is an older, gray haired, thin, small man. It took longer to find him but eventually the guide showed up with him in tow. This souk is not that large. If this had been Fez or Marrakech the story would have been different.
After the 'Adventure in the Souk' (that should have been a Poriot mystery title) we headed down to the Agadir beach to have a drink at a seaside café. There's a wide paved walkway on the ocean side of the beach road. The inland side is lined with cafes and shops. We had about 30 minutes to enjoy a drink of our choice (as long as your choice was Fanta Orange, Coke, Schwepp's Citron, a Moroccan soda I couldn't identify or a bottle of mineral water) and soak up the scenery. It's windy so the beach is not very busy today.
From the beach we went to a Berber craft store. 70% of Moroccans are Berbers, a nomadic people much like the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula, but they are not Arabs. The remaining 30% is mostly Arabic. They are much softer featured that Arabic people and have a very pretty coffee and cream skin tone. I can't really judge the men but the women are generally very attractive, if not classically beautiful. Some are outright stunning of course, but I'm talking in general. Might have something to do with their dark riveting eyes.
Here in Morocco you see all sorts of dress styles on women. They range from the Yemeni women, covered from head to toe in black robes, gloves and shoes with only a 1x4 inch slit to see out of and that's covered by a mesh screen that makes it impossible to see in, to women that would fit right in on the street of any American city. Most dress somewhere in between. Teenage girls have the best looking style for the most part. Fitted jeans, not too tight but definitely no excess room, a fitted white blouse that ends just below the belt loops on the jeans and a colorful headscarf that only allows their faces and perhaps a little of their hair at the forehead to be seen. A very attractive look.
Diana wanted to see if she could get some shoes at the Berber market. I decided to try some on and found a very comfortable pair of hand made Berber baboshes. Baboshes are a slide in shoe with no back whatsoever and closed front with a rounded toe. I found out that babosh come in two styles, Arabic (pointed toes) and Berber (rounded toes). I much preferred the Berber even before I knew that's what they were. The very cute salesgirl, who was Berber, seemed very pleased that I liked their style best.
From the market it was back to the ship. The evening's entertainer was Marty Brill. I used to see him a lot on the Tonight show when Carson was the host. He's a great storyteller and gagman. He wrote for several TV comedies and movies in the 60-70s. He never really has a routine; he just goes out on stage and starts talking. Most of his humor is topical and related to odd incidents he's had or observed. Sometimes he talks about the shows he wrote for and the people he's worked with. Tonight it was all topical, airlines, banks and the US culture in general. Anyone who's even half awake knows that last topic's humor almost writes itself. We are one screwed up people. Problem is that every other place seems to be even more screwed up than we are. That's why I love to travel, you see things that boggle the mind.
Tomorrow we invade Casablanca. That's really a big city.
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