We woke up late in our bright pink room and headed out to explore the city. We picked up some super thick floury pancakes for breakfast and wandered through the Medina to the old Kasbah. The Kasbah is the oldest part of the city and unlike most other places it's not a museum and people live in it. We had an orange juice before heading to a kind of outside public terrace which overlooked the beach and the nearby town Salé. The sky was blue, the sea was blue, surfers were out catching what looked like little waves but further down looked much bigger and dangerous.
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| From 11 Rabat |
We walked along the beach front trying to find a café to sit and use the laptop and later on watch the football. The only place we found was an enormously expensive restaurant who didn't do only drinks, which we probably couldn't have afforded anyway, so we headed back up and found a café recommended in the guidebook. There was no working power point there either, but I did have a very small, very expensive coffee which came with a lovely layer of scum on the top and was served by the grumpiest, rudest possibly most unloved man in Morocco, not the most pleasant of café stops. We decided to move on and headed straight into the formal Andalusian Gardens which were beautiful. I took loads of pictures while Djalma patiently waited getting less and less patient the longer I took snapping pictures of all the flowers so I could send them to my wife.
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| From 11 Rabat |
We moved on after D decided he couldn't take any more and strolled out of the Kasbah and to Tour Hassan which apparently is the most recognised building in Rabat. Tour Hassan is a 44m high minaret standing in front of a lot of smaller pillars, all that remains after an earthquake. It was designed to be one of the grandest Mosques of it's time and to date is the only one we've been able to set foot in.
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| From 11 Rabat |
The match between Portugal and N. Korea (7-0) called and we found a café to sit and watch the first half, moving to a second café to watch the second half – neither place had working power points which made the match quite boring as there were no pictures or diary updates to distract me. When the game eventually ended we found an internet café and killed an hour before heading out to watch the sun set. We gave up after rushing around trying to find the way to the ramparts, sat down and had a sausage sandwich instead.
After dinner we returned to the second café and Djalma watched (yet) another football game (Spain v Honduras 2-0) while I worked on pictures from our twitching outing – woohoo for battery juice! On the way back to our pink hotel we picked up some postcards, fruit and water. We continued watching The English Patient, this time until the end although Djalma didn't make it the whole way through without falling asleep – he was woken up by my sobbing (when he carries her body out of the cave crying and when the nurse gives him all that morphine). What a beautiful film, sniff sniff.
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