Day 35: The Streets of Assilah

My early morning did not begin as early as it should have. We decided to meet at Batha at 6:30, but that was when I woke up. Sleepy Andrew woke up at 6, turned off the beeping alarm, and fell back asleep until Lla Fatima came in to check on me and found me still asleep! I hurried down to Batha and got there at 6:50, so we still had plenty of time to get to the train station and catch our 7:10 train. 

Elle, Marissa, and I made it and began our journey to Assilah. We talked for the whole four hour train ride. We had to switch trains at one point too, something we didn't know ahead of time. Luckily, Elle noticed, so we didn't miss our switch. We pulled into Assilah at 11:45 to a very sunny and windy day.

Ramparts by the coast

Rather than pay 40 dh for a cab to drive us the two kilometers from the train station to the medina, we walked along the beach-side boulevard to the walls of the medina. We stopped along the way at a restaurant called Casa Garcia for some lunch. They imported ham from Spain, sold wine, and served delicious seafood. We walked around the walled-in medina some before a faux guide walked us to our hostel which was actually in the Ville Nouvelle. We stayed in a place called Christina's House, owned by a British ex-pat in her 60's. As we later would find out, though the hostel was very nice, Christina was, what we would call in American slang, a bit "cray-cray." 

A wall of murals in Assilah

In the afternoon, we walked around the medina and checked out the cool murals. Every August, Assilah has a festival where they invite artists to paint murals on certain walls. It creates a medina that is a neat combination of white houses and colorful houses, interspersed with crazy murals, all right on the Atlantic coast. We checked out some galleries and went to some spots where you could climb on the old ramparts. We took so many pictures and went to a cool art-shop where Elle and I each negotiated buying paintings. The artist was super nice and spoke better Spanish than English, so I got to practice my Spanish with him. Being only 50 kilometers from Tangiers, almost everyone spoke Spanish in addition to French and Dirija, so Marissa and I spoke a lot of Spanish this weekend. After walking around the medina, we walked down to the waters edge and hung out on some big rocks where there were tide pools because of the low tide.

Man at Work

At 5, it dawned on us that it was 5 o'clock somewhere, and that somewhere was in Assilah, so we went back to the hostel and split a bottle of wine while sitting on the roof. We went to dinner on the main boulevard that draws the line between the Medina's ramparts and the Ville Nouvelle. I had some delicious calamari. After dinner, it was about 8 o'clock, which meant it was approaching 5 o'clock in Argentina, Brazil, and Greenland, so we brought out a small bottle of vodka, made mixed drinks, and played a fun card game called Kings, where you take turns drawing cards and each card represents a different sort of activity such as having to rhyme words, point up, or all the guys/girls have to take a sip. Drawing a Jack allows you to make up a new rule for the duration of the game, such as you must refer to each other only by last name or you can only hold your drink with your left hand. An infraction result in a penalty of sips. The three of us had a blast playing Kings and ended up laughing for two to three hours straight. Elle laughed so hard at one point that she threw up a little on the floor! We ended up falling asleep all snuggled up together in the queen bed after a very successful Friday.