Pitch N' Y'all: Morocco Revisited, Spain, and Portugal

Short hop over from Livorno, Italy to Casablanca, Morocco, then Cadiz, Spain, followed by Lisbon, Portugal. We're starting to get spoiled by easy access to the city streets outside port rather than having to trek through industrial ports or take shuttles like we did in most of the Academic Spring 2013 Voyage. Folks on the ship were grumpy that immigration took awhile in Morocco, but I guess they were expecting it to be easy like in Europe, and, well, folks, Morocco is not Europe. Since we had already been to Morocco a couple weeks ago, we hit it again on our own rather than do any ship tours. Jasper, Ellen, Sandy, and I went to the nearby train station and got our tickets for the capital city of Rabat.

Several years ago, we had next-door neighbors with two young children and we loved hanging out with them until they moved when the kids were about Jasper's age now; the Panaman kids are in their mid-teens and living in Germany. We went to visit them in Stuttgart a few years ago but never were able to see them when they were stationed in Morocco, so Jeff and Christy, we were thinking about you when we visited your old Northern African stomping grounds.

Non Sequitur for today: Perry is back aboard. It's great to see him, and today Jasper and I had sit-down lunch and Perry served our meals. Excellent.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, Morocco. So we got to Rabat around noon on Sunday and explored on foot for a few hours. There's a medina, and it was relatively small and a bit quiet. Nothing wrong with that, but it was far more sedate than the medina in Marrakech. By early afternoon, we were starving, so we ate at a cafe outside the medina. It was a little sketchy as far as sanitation goes, but I think we've all built up some good immunity, and I ignored the ship doctor's advice to not eat the salad, and I was fine. We all had fried fish, fried chicken, and french fries along with a couple dozen locals; I love being the only visitors in a foreign restaurant. The ocean was nearby, so we headed there and walked through an enormous Islamic cemetery to get there. As many cemeteries as I've been in before, I've never been in one like this with so many above-ground burial plots. After playing around in the tidepools, Jasper and I headed back to meet Ellen and her dad and tried to find the modern art museum. We eventually did, but it was closed by the time we got there, so we got a snack before calling it an early day to head back to the ship.

The first visit to Morocco, I didn't actually get to see anything of our port in Casablanca, but this trip I did get to see it We had a nice meal at a castle (yep, you read that right) after cutting our Rabat trip short, and I got to try pastilla which is a savory sweet dish that's sort of a filo pastry with powdered sugar, pigeon, nuts, and spices. The next day, we all walked out from port to the Casablanca medina, which fell in between the sizes of the gargantuan Marrakech medina and the small one in Rabat. This one was perfect–lots of veggies, grains, breads, and food for sale along with oddities such as the cluster of tambourine shops and various hardware stores selling well-used plumbing fixtures, plastic pipe, and such. As with any good medina, we got somewhat lost and had to backtrack out of some dead-ends to get out as we ventured toward the Mosque. Jasper and I toured the Mosque, third largest in the world after two in Saudi Arabia, and recently constructed in 1993 to house 25,000 worshipers inside and another 80,000+ outside. It was amazing with a 200-meter tower, huge electronic doors with titanium plating to resist the corrosive sea air, and elaborate marblework inside beneath an electronically operated roof.

That evening we ate at a restaurant that wasn't open the previous night. The menu was fish only and was entirely in French, but we managed. Had some nice Moroccan white wine which we weren't able to get the previous evening, and I'm not sure if it was because today was a Monday and wine isn't served on Sundays, or only specific restaurants serve alcohol, or what. The clientele at this restaurant was a bit more European in that most everyone was smoking and having wine with dinner. The fish was excellent, with nice vegetables. I also got an avocado salad that was the bomb.

We got back aboard a couple minutes before the 2200 onship time, and the administration seemed relieved we were aboard. Evidently we were the last aboard, and by now we know the drill and are able to maximize time in port without going over, although dock time isn't the punishment on enrichment voyage; they just leave without you and you have to catch up in the next port. The next morning we docked in Cadiz, Spain with no real plans but had a beautiful sunny day to explore after sleeping in a bit late in addition to gaining an hour of sleep as the time zone shifted. Cadiz is one of the oldest cities in Europe and is a small rectangular strip of land surrounded by the port on one side and the ocean on the other. It's very easy to stroll around and orient yourself with the church towers, fortress walls, and waterfronts. We investigated surfboard rentals but never found the shop, not to mention that the surf itself was small enough not to be surfable with only knee-high breakers. Regardless, the water was clean and clear if a bit chilly, and we played in the surf a bit and had our picnic that we picked up earlier at a Carrefour supermarket which included jamon, cheese, guacamole, chocolates, baguettes, and a couple Belgian brews. Definitely impulse buys from the three of us which made a really nice lunch. We had a few more hours to walk around the city before leaving that evening after we watched the sun set over the water.

Overnight we sailed, and again we hit a new country in the morning, this time Lisbon, Portugal. We looked out our third-deck window as the ship stopped once it was tied to the dock, and barely 50 feet outside our window was the port exit. After being used to shuttles and long walks through industrial ports at most of our stops, we are getting spoiled by quick walks off the ship to lovely little European towns. Lisbon is a bit like Cadiz or parts of Italy where you have the requisite small brightly colored shops/apartment buildings on the seaside with large churches looming overhead on the surrounding hillsides. With only about 12 hours, we walked around, grabbed our metro cards, headed off to the world's second largest aquarium (second to Osaka, so we seem to be racking up the big-time aquariums on this voyage). After that, we took a tram up to the top of the hill and wandered around a bit before walking back to the ship so Sandy could present his 8pm lecture on the History of Jazz. I hear it went well; I went out for a beer with my ornithology professor and former race opponent Charles Clarkson, and we got back after the lectures but well before the onship cutoff time.

Next up is Le Havre, France. It'll be my first visit to France, and it would be great to be there in July but alas it's too early for le Tour. The Giro is underway in Italy, but it didn't start while we were there. Lisbon looks to have some kick-ass concerts in June and July, so I'll miss Muse, Kings of Leon, Depeche Mode, and some other bands I'd love to see. Cest la vie–each country is interesting and beautiful, so you do what you can do at the time while you're there.

Ciao.