For the first time in about 2 weeks we were able to sleep in, and not have the bulk of our day spent in François. Our good friends Fred and Denise Cook had visited Asilah in the spring and their blog pictures on www.diplostrat.net convinced us to spend a day in Asilah ourselves.
We did decide to move to a campground in the city. So we packed up and shifted about 7 kilometers to a very rustic, but functional campground close to the center of town.
After we were set up we headed to town on a beautiful but nearly empty waterfront promenade. The interesting feature were probably 150 flagpoles with flags of many of the countries of the world. We entertained ourselves as we walked by identifying flags. We would have failed a test if it was a test as we were probably around 45%.
We chose to head towards the Medina which is the old fortified part of the town. The walls were largely in place and it was interesting to contrast them with European city walls. The differences were pretty minor to us.
The Medina was very well preserved, and the occupants clearly take pride in maintaining the buildings. There were a lot of interesting doors to homes and businesses that Ton loved photographing. We spent a lot of time just meandering thru the narrow streets of the Medina.
The Medina area was also full of murals by talented artists. We found several that we both admired for several minutes. It looks like this was a recent project, but they are all well done and add to the charm of the town.
As we have quickly learned this is a cash economy, so we also needed to find an ATM to get more Dirhams. We had to venture out into the modern part of the city for this. I was worried that the banks might not be open as it was Friday which is the sabbath day for Moslems. When we went by the Mosque in the Median service was going on. But when we turned up at the bank it was open for business.
With money in our wallet we set out for a late lunch. Ton picked a seafood tagine, and I went for fried seafood. Tagines are a Moroccan specialty cooked in a conical shaped earthenware pot. The result is a heavily spiced stew like dish with a mix of vegetables and meat or seafood.
After lunch we headed back to François for a rest. Ton decided to see if there was hot water in the shower (there was) which set off a rush to the showers in the campground as an eyeball check of the showers would not lead you to believe hot water was part of the package.
A couple of orange kittens have adopted us as I am a soft touch and fed them. One even climbed into my lap after feeding and demanded to be petted for a while. The promenade is only 5 minutes away so we decided to head there for sunset. It was a beautiful cool evening and the promenade was much busier than this afternoon.
Asilah was a very pleasant surprise and a great introduction to Morocco.
