Chefchaouen - Tetouan
Morocco, 2018
In the morning the rain stopped, but the heavy clouds did not retreat. They wrapped the mountains around Chefchaouen like a blanket…
We arrived in Tetouan in the afternoon. We parked by the gates of the medina and walked to the hotel.
It was overcast and somehow gloomy. And maybe it was just our mood, or maybe things simply didn’t work out somehow, but Tetouan really didn’t appeal to us at all.
Even on the way to the hotel we noticed something was off. After Chefchaouen, where everything was perfectly clean, everything here seemed shabby and dirty. All over the streets there were scraps of food, which the cats happily devoured. All the houses were worn out, and the people were gloomy.
The hotel matched the city — in the lobby, on the table, there was some kind of chaos of dirty dishes, dirty things were lying everywhere, and it generally seemed that we had ended up not in a hotel, but in someone’s very untidy home. A cheerful old man at the reception offered us hashish to lift our spirits and took us to show the rooms. There were two rooms to choose from — one on the roof, the other on the second floor. We liked the one on the roof more and chose it.
The room was small. But it did have a huge TV covering the whole wall. I don’t know what purpose they hung it here for. The TV came with speakers and even a DVD player. And there was also a very cute gray cat living here.
We drank tea on our roof and went for a walk.
Outside the medina, the town was very reminiscent of Europe. Beautiful little streets with white houses, windows with shutters, cafés with outdoor terraces
Tetouan
We wandered around these little streets for a bit. Then we went back to the medina. Everyone wrote that the medina here was “authentic, lively.” But in fact, the medina here is just a bazaar. There were crowds everywhere, impossible to push through. We bought two mangoes.
In the medina of Tetouan
The weather had completely turned bad, and a light rain started to fall.
It was very difficult to be in the medina. We decided to go get a bite to eat. I had read online about a café that made delicious tacos (Mexican shawarma :) and we headed there.
The city was not pleasing. As soon as we moved away from the center, groups of some mysterious-looking people appeared on the streets. Once again, I remembered Chefchaouen. How safe I felt there, even when we wandered around at night!
Despite its very strange location (somewhere on the outskirts of the city), the café turned out to be a very civilized place. It was fairly busy, and all the customers were clearly Moroccans. We ordered tacos and shawarma. I really liked the taco.
Taco
We made another unsuccessful attempt to stroll through the medina. But after half an hour of wandering through streets that resembled market stalls in a bazaar, we gave up.
One of the few quiet, charming streets in the medina
At every step, they sold cookies here. In Morocco, cookies are sold by the piece, not by the kilogram like at home. We bought all kinds of different cookies and went to the hotel.
We watched the movie “Deepwater Horizon” on our big TV. We ate pomegranates and drank tea with cookies.
Moroccan cookies
