Chefchaouen, Morocco
Thé à la menthe, with Orange Blossom, encore.
We just can’t enough of this sh*t.
Café SW of the Chefchaouen Medina Main Square
We are learning how to slooooow down. Chefchaouen is a small town, a hamlet - if you will. And its pace is like nothing we’ve experienced. In Spain, businesses opened in the morning at 10, restaurants opened for dinner at 8 - we got it: everything later. In Chefchaouen, everything whenever.
Our only planned activity was to get more of that tasty mint tea we had yesterday. And when we arrived around lunchtime, it was closed. ☹️ We’ve figured out that kids leave school for a couple hours during the afternoon to have lunch. And their parents leave work for the same amount, too. That means the businesses close and - well, tourists are SOL.
So instead, we wandered aimlessly around the blue mazed medina and visited Ras El Maa, the river and waterfall just outside the medina’s northeast entrance. There, we saw bachelors doing their laundry in the river, taking the shirts off their backs and scrubbing them into river stones. We saw an OG refrigerator, fashioned from rocks in a circular structure in the river. We also saw a menagerie of birds: cockatoos, peacocks, and even an ostrich. Yennie took one glimpse and turned around. It was her worst nightmare, much less in a place you would least expect it: an inland hamlet in Morocco. 😳
We finally did get our mint tea around 4PM and watched a group of men assemble to play Gin Rummy, snuff tobacco and discreetly smoke splifs. Though the people watching is not as poppin’ in Chefchaouen, it certainly is much more interesting. 🌲🚬🎲 Speaking of trees, we took a hike near sunset to the Spanish Mosque, a recently restored mosque from the 1920s on the hillside overlooking Chefchaouen. While we sat waiting for the sun to melt behind the Rif Mountains, feral dogs whimpered for food and sketchy dudes offered us hashish at a good price - quels environs.
Dinner was meh. But, the folk concert we stumbled upon after dinner was precious. A girls choir in traditional dress was performing to the whole village, with about 100 brightly lit smart phones documenting their singing. Grandmothers were seated, toddlers were bouncing about. It felt like we had run into family.
N/A, “No/Alcohol”
