touts, thy days are numbered

View of the medina from our the Hotel Continental

I had mixed impressions of Tangier before we arrived, not really knowing what to expect. On the one hand, it was the Interzone, the safe haven for past beatniks to hide and get high, full of drugs and gambling and prostitution, but on the other hand, it had had stable rule for years now, and the King had recently infused large amounts of cash into the economy to help fix things. I had an image of the former burned in my mind, of a crumbling medina full of dirty street beggars, snake charmers in small squares distracting people while they were as charmed as the snakes while boys in rags pilfered the contents of tourists' pockets. Travel sites with reviews by travelers from the States and Europe are overwhelmingly negative on the city, saying that it was the worst in Morocco and that touts - guys who make it their business to lead you places and then charge you money - abound and everyone is trying to scam you. So it's with this mentality we entered, and one might ask, why on Earth would I go to a place if that was my preconception of it? But then I would answer back, why wouldn't I, sounds amazing!

Interior of the Hotel Continental

We were staying at the Hotel Continental, which itself is like a museum of architecture. It sits on an overlook of the bay, where you can sip your morning coffee on the balcony, looking across the Tangerine resorts and apartments stacked along the shore and watch the huge cruise ships sitting at wait, unloading or loading passengers into rows of buses and taxis. The breakfast was more than expected - a continental breakfast, but also with fresh pancakes, jam and lots of tangerines - hence the name of the fruit.

After breakfast, we went out to explore the medina. I had three goals in mind - to relax at some coffee shops and soak it all in, to see the Kasbah and the American Legation museums, and maybe perhaps to see a place where the American beatniks had hung out, like the Tangerine Bar, the walls of which are now adorned with the pictures of the famous writers who had once imbibed and found their pleasures there. It would have been nice to see some of the nearby villages and the Hercules Caves - said to be the place where Hercules rested from his travels upon reaching the pillars - but one can't see too much. If you see it all then you have nothing left for mystery and all is left for disappointment.

City street in the medina

The medina itself was beyond my expectation. It was the medieval center of town, buildings crammed together and surrounded by a wall, exactly how European towns had been before the days of the more established empires of Napoleon and the Hapsburgs, when they started clearing out ghettos and creating wide boulevards. Though it was much cleaner than I thought it would be. All the walks were paved and there were few pieces of trash in sight. In fact, the lack of trash throughout the Moroccan cities were a constant thing of wonder to me, given how crowded the living conditions in the medinas were and hence the impossibility of a decent sanitation system. But the locals were constantly cleaning - sweeping, gathering trash, etc. so that things wouldn't pile up - habits that themselves piled up over thousands of years. I can't imagine how things could be carried out, sense the medina tends only to be accessible by car through one road, and that one tightly so - vendors, shoppers, tourists, residents, holy men, and merchants all scrabbling out of the way when an automotive passes.

For the most part, we were left at ease while browsing through goods in various shops. Mostly, you can buy lamps, light covers, stained glass goods, tea and coffee pots, traditional clothes, and traditional shoes. And for the most part, outside of the younger generation who tend to wear blue jeans and white shirts, most Moroccans are still wearing their traditional garbs, which look something like what Jedis from Star Wars would wear, long robes with pointy hoods. The shopkeeper would come to us and stay a respectable distance, which was normal. None of the hassle that I had read about. We were only approached once by a tout, who kept insisting that he could take us to a square - which we had already visited and knew the way to. As we walked past him, he followed us and kept acting as though he were giving us a service.

Le Petit Socco, the main square of the medina

"La shukron," I kept repeating. "No thanks," in Arabic, in response to his constant offers of assistance to show us the way. Part of the magic of the medina is to get lost, and really, the Tangier medina isn't so huge to get terribly lost in. It's a perfect introduction to medina life if one is headed to Fez or Marrakech, both much more maddening and hectic. But with the modern smartphone and GPS, the tout's days are numbered even with the most ignorant of tourists.

With enough persistence, however, the tout caught my eyes. "Why are you so paranoid, man?" he said. 
"With reason, now excuse us."