Arriving in the coastal city of Tangiers, the ferryboat unceremoniously dumped us on the pavement of what appeared to be another dirty dock in the industrial area. No gangplanks, no skybridge, and certainly no sidewalks... we walked past the freight trucks and and out to the fractured street in the hopes of finding a taxicab.
We had been aground for not more than 5 minutes when the "call to prayer" went out. It was dusk, and the minarets around us wailed like sirens: "allaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHH! AKBAR!" The atmosphere was more than a little alien. A nearby worker knelt on a scrap of cardboard and bowed toward Mecca. No one else seemed to mind, as they went about their work.
The seven of us - myself, Kevin, his parents Skip and Sandy, his very pregnant Polish girlfriend Ania, and two American friends (Michael Foltz and Will) piled into 2 nearby taxis and headed downtown.
Since Kevin was the self-appointed leader of this trip, and the only one of us who had been to Morocco before, he led us to a decent, antiquated hotel in the older section of downtown Tangiers. As the streets became progressively smaller, the taxis stopped in a square to help us unload. We walked about 2 blocks to the hotel and found the rooms to be incredibly spacious. However, there was no restaurant, so after a brief repose, we hit the streets again.
By this time, even at the peak of the June daylight hours, all was dark.
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