Boom Boom Feliz Ramadan

These are the theme songs for my weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNfwInxcqoo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGJ9S3Is6lY

I just returned by train from Tangiers to Meknes. Three friends and I spent an incredible and exhausting weekend in Tetouan exploring northern Morocco and swimming in the Mediterranean. The region of Tetouan and Tangiers is remarkably different in some ways. Mainly, the Spanish influence is much more pronounced. Here in Meknes, everyone tries to speak to me in French. In Tetouan, there were more attempts at Spanish. Even when speaking to people in Arabic, they would respond with "Si, si." The architecture looks very Spanish, but I was reminded a number of times that what we consider to be Spanish design is in fact Islamic and Arab in origin.

We arrived in Tangiers around 10pm on Friday and took an hour long cab ride to Tetouan. The cabbie was young and reckless and sped through the mountain roads at an unnerving speed. When we finally found our hotel on the third floor of a bank it was close to midnight. Here are some of the views from our $10 hotel room:

The brownish building in the second picture is a nice church located right on the circle. It is the third or fourth church I have seen in Morocco. They are all well-maintained but I don't know how populated they are. 

Tetouan is easily my favorite Moroccan city so far. It is beautiful, has yet to be discovered by tourists, and it is surrounded by crooked mountains and farmland. It has wide streets and fountains every few blocks along with the narrow, white passageways typical of Arab old cities. It is set back from the sea by about thirty minutes, but it was easy to get a cab to take us there and we spent most of Saturday laying on the beach.

If you look closely as the second picture, you can see a man shooting up out of the water on a type of jet ski that I've never seen before. He would get 20+ feet up in the air on a small, water-propelled platform before diving back into the sea. The water was the perfect temperature and when the sun started to set we had the beach to ourselves. Other than hearing the call to prayer off in the distance, everything was silent. 

The next day we walked around Tetouan and found one of the few restaurants that stays open during Ramadan, El Reducto. It is an old riad repurposed as a hotel by a Spanish family. 

After enjoying fried eggplant and potatoes, fresh-squeezed orange juice and some of the best mint tea I've had yet, we headed upstairs to explore and relax on the roof until we had to head back to Tangiers to catch our train. Here are some more pictures of the trip: