essaouira used to be portuguese (called mogador) and definitely feels quite mediterranean - interestingly, spanish is still a semi-official language (some traffic signs are in arabic french and spanish) and it's spoken by about 5 million moroccans, almost 1/5 of the population - portuguese not so much! this makes sense since the portuguese only really ruled the roost for about 150 years in the 16th and 17th centuries - just for fun here's the name of essaouira in berber (copied from wikipedia) - ⵎⵓⴳⴰⴹⵓⵔ
we really enjoyed having 2 nights in 1 place and also the relative and actual cool weather - because of the wind and of course being next to the atlantic, it really is necessary to wear a light wrap here - what a pleasure after the heat of the desert
as usual the people in our riad could not have been nicer, including letting us use their office computer to continue the battle with Air France re: checking in any luggage - just to end the suspense that i'm sure you're all feeling, the story ended well (sort of) when i asked my friend emmanuelle in paris to call the airline and she actually found someone on the phone who could process the transaction - it was a bit expensive because the airline does not want you to check more than 1 bag and we wound up paying 15 euros for kelly's first one and 45 euros each for a 2nd bag for each of us but at least we had taken care of the paperwork (but stay tuned!)
back to our riad and its general wonderfulness - our breakfast was much too lavish and we left a shameful amount of food on the table - the next day the sweet young ladies let us know how disappointing (i hope not insulting, but they were definitely hurt) that was and asked us to specify what we wanted - which actually was better and we still wound up with too much food - when we arrived the day before we had tried to get lahsen to eat with us at a cafe on the beach, but he kept saying in his charming french-berber accent 'enjoy your lanch' - we found out later that the cafe gives drivers a free meal and in any case he needed to do more wheeling and dealing
it was good friday while we were in essaouira, so we thought it would be interesting to visit the 1 (catholic) church in town - this was after eventually finding and visiting the jewish cemetery and then taking a short carriage ride - very sadly, although we got to the church shortly before 3pm, it was completely empty! as in 2 or 3 female parishioners sitting at a small table to the side, plus the priest near the altar - in my terrible french i explained that we were not catholic - he opened his hands in a welcoming gesture and tried to guess what country we came from (he went thru germany, uk, australia and sweden before i told him USA - and it's again true that there are just not many americans travelling around morocco)
for dinner we wound up going into a very very fancy hotel called l'heure bleue (the blue hour) - it was like a 4-star restaurant in the courtyard of a moroccan palace, and we were a little bit worried about the prices, but figured we would just relax and enjoy a good meal - the service was fantastic, they had a musician playing soft moroccan music on a guitar, we had 3 courses and wine - and the bill came to 500 dirhams/50 euros each! just goes to show how far a dollar (or euro) goes in morocco - so go and visit!
