Tangier

All our lives, we remember Tangier portrayed in the movies as a rough and secretive city. The den of thieves. Where pickpockets roamed and after grabbing your wallet, they darted into the alleyway, never to be seen again. Where pirates go to escape. Where the police always seem to be in on the take. A place to make the ‘deal’ or to catch the bad guy. Casablanca was the romantic city, but Tangier was for the bad guys. It’s hard turning off stories in our heads.

Unfortunately, we only had one day to give to Tangier to let it unfold as something different. We decided we would do a Big Bus tour of the city and see it through tourist eyes. There were two routes, and we rode both. Here are some of the things we saw and learned. As we traveled through the city, we can see that this is the melting pot of Northern Africa.

The old wall in the walled city of Tangier. The wall is the structure in red in the middle right part of the picture. Our apartment was built into that wall. Sometimes, we are getting much better at seeing than taking pictures and when we go back and look, there are few pictures of the wall. Trust us, it was a big medina.

Like the rest of Morocco, the number of buildings under construction is hard to describe. Are they in process of being built or has construction stopped?

The main mosque.

On the Atlantic side, it appears to be more lush.

Camels are still everywhere. We saw them on the beach in town.

From Roman times until Christopher Columbus' time, Tangier represented the end of the earth, the farthest outpost of the empire, the place to stop before sailing off the edge of the world. It's lighthouses, for ships on the Atlantic, are a sign that the world is bigger now.

On the Atlantic coast, west of Tangier, there is a cave that supposedly was the cave where Hercules rested before completing one of the 12 labors of his atonement.

Here's more to that story, per Google AI:

Greek Mythology and Hercules:
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According to Greek mythology, Hercules, also known as Heracles, completed 12 labors to atone for a crime he committed. One of these labors involved fetching the golden apples of the Hesperides, which were guarded by a dragon and located in the Garden of the Hesperides.
The Caves as a Resting Place:
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Legends suggest Hercules stayed in the Caves of Hercules on his way to the Garden of the Hesperides.
The Strait of Gibraltar:
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Some accounts say that Hercules, using his superhuman strength, smashed through a mountain to create the Strait of Gibraltar, connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. One part of the split mountain is believed to be Gibraltar, and the other is either Monte Hacho in Ceuta or Jebel Musa in Morocco.

Scholars have spent years trying to date Greek myths. The earliest written versions are from the 700 BCE writings of Homer and Hesiod. In addition, the Greeks borrowed a number of their myths from earlier cultures like the Minoans on the Greek island of Crete. The earliest specific writings about Hercules are about 30 BCE. Having just met some of Africa's most enterprising entrepreneurs, we think, just maybe, there has always been someone forecasting the arrival of a tourist on their soil, and taking ancient myths, creating an expanded story and giving them a setting, and then telling the new story to this gullible tourist. Voila, Malcolm and Susanne!

Later in the afternoon, Susanne was pretty tired so Malcolm attended our second cooking class of this trip. This was an instruction on how to prepare Tagine. It turned out to be schooling for Malcolm in not only the preparation of Tagine, but a better understanding of Muslim cooking and life culture.

The school was run by an expat who was born in New England, grew up in Guam, educated in Europe, married a woman from Switzerland, and now lives in Tangier. Although nowhere near as widely traveled as their boss, his team mostly came from smaller cities in Morocco and are now living their lives, if not their dreams, in Tangier. More evidence of the melting pot that is Tangier. Here's a link to the school and we highly recommend it if you find that yourself in Tangier.

Blue Door Cuisine

As fate would have it, with Susanne’s absence, the class was a class of one student with three instructors. There was a class earlier in the day of nine people and it was unusual for it to work out this way, but it was a real treat to be getting the attention of three instructors, to be the only one asking questions.,

Tagine is a dish that is cooked over an open gas flame, in a clay pot with a chimneyed-lid that serves to keep moisture in the dish while cooking.

Tagine is both the name of the dish and the name of the pot it is cooked in. It can be made with any meat, but most frequently, chicken, lamb, vegetable, or fish. During our travels we had previously eaten both chicken and lamb and for this lesson, we were cooking the Chicken Tagine. We won't bore you with all the details, but it is a dish that cooks the meat and vegetables in a favorable broth with heat from the gas flame. The vented lid serves to keep most of the moisture in and help distribute the heat. It doesn't cook well on electric cooktops.

The process:

1. Sit down and visit - this is not a cooking class, it is a cultural experience and unless we get to know each other, we're missing out on the understanding of how food, culture, and relationships are all intertwined. With a class of one it was the perfect size group. The young ladies teaching the class were all about the ages of our granddaughters, so we imagine they saw Malcolm more as a grandfather figure. But they treated him as the perfect guest. They asked him about life in the USA and about his personal life and background. You have to love it when your hosts express the same curiosity about life that you have.

All three had come from small towns and moved to Tangier. Two of them were fluent English speakers. When I asked them how they learned to speak English, they told me American TV. What I didn't realize until much later, when someone helped me make the connection, is how American TV reaches foreign shores. In larger markets such as Spain, the sound would be dubbed in Spanish without any closed captioning. The lips may not sync, but the sound coming out of the TV speaker is Spanish. In smaller markets, where you can't dub every language, the sound is left in English and the local language is closed captioned onto the screen. One of the young ladies was Berber. Rather than dub the sound in Berber, she would be listening to the sound in English while reading the words in Berber. With the incredible speed of a 12 years old mind, the assimilation was fast. The perfect language school and the results spoke for themselves.

They talked amongst themselves about cultural practices. We talked about the differences today in what women are allowed to do. The fact that they were each in Tangier on their own, with their own jobs. Societies change and this one is no different. One particular comment that I picked up had to do with Islamic weddings practices. Traditionally, the men and women were in separate groups for a wedding. These young ladies, like young people everywhere, preferred the more non-traditional weddings where intermingling of gender was allowed. It was enlightening for me.

2. Start the cooking - The first thing we did was to make the bread. I failed to catch the name of the grain that it is made from or what the bread is called. It is not wheat but is very flavorful. It is a bread made with yeast so it rises. The other interesting thing is that as soon as we made it and let it rise for a short while, someone took it to the community oven to cook it. This was a common thing we saw in Morocco. While looking into a bakery in Chefchaouen, we noticed someone walk up with bread that they had made at home and which they bring to the local bakery to bake. There are lots of practical reason why this works.

The kitchen had 5 stations for cooking. I was at a station, one of the instructors was at another cooking Susanne's dinner and one of the other instructors had a station of her own for us to emulate. First we went over all of the ingredients. Most of the items in the tagine were things I would have in the kitchen, except for the tagine seasoning itself.

Then we actually started the cooking. After getting everything in the tagine pot and cooking, we retired to the living room.

3. The Tagine cooks, undisturbed for about 34 minutes. What a perfect time for a glass of mint tea. Like coffee in Ethiopia, mint tea in northern Africa is not just a drink, it's a ritual. The preparation, the serving, and the consumption, all are part of one beautiful and meaningful process. Mint tea is served in small, decorative glasses without handles. The glasses get hot, but they seem to be able to drink the hot tea with no problem. I emulated once more. A lot more conversations, a lot more connections and again, except for the 50 year age and experience differences, we're all the same.

4. Finally, you enjoy the meal in great company with new friends. The chatter continues. Listening to them happily talking amongst themselves with parts of my thoughts spliced in between. It is a communion.

What a wonderful experience.