The Old, The New, And Our Home, All In Rabat
It’s easy to get lost in the winding, narrow maze of the medina of Rabat…
… and then, after passing through a gate of the city wall, find yourself on wide boulevards lined with cafes, shops, and an excellent modern art museum. Continue reading “The Old, The New, And Our Home, All In Rabat”
Connectivity
Our one big gripe with Morocco has been the state of the Internet – and for us, because of our work, the state of the Internet is a huge deal. The DSL at our home was unreliable with glacial upload speeds. Voice-over-IP is banned in the country – for practical purposes, this means we need to use VPN when making calls or screen-sharing, which throttles the already slow speed. We couldn’t get a local cellular dongle to work with our Macs, and the T-mobile international plan that we’ve used to tether in other places isn’t available in Morocco.
Sigh.
After much experimenting and several French-practice sessions at the local telecom shop, the best solution we found was to get a local sim card for Brian’s unlocked iPhone, tether it to our computers, and take turns using the quicker connection. We’ve found the cellular Internet impressively, shockingly faster than our home WIFI… but it can still be dicier than ideal, usually during important calls.
Anyway, just to say – sometimes working remotely (especially working closely with others remotely) is challenging.
(This was still not even close to our hardest Internet month, which was definitely spent in Costa Rica.)
Delicate Tourist Noses
We visited a tannery as part of a tour of the Fes medina. Upon entering, we were each given bunches mint to sniff, so as to not offend our delicate tourist noses. (The people who worked at the tannery, much closer to the smells than us, were not holding mint.)
Cavorting Around Fez
Fez’s winding, extensive medina is a UNESCO world heritage site. Because we were staying in the city for just two nights on our way out of Morocco, we arranged for a guide, Adbul, to show us around.
Adbul explained that each district within the medina has a mosque, hamam (public bath), school, market, and water fountain, so theoretically, someone might live within a district without ever needing to leave it. While this probably doesn’t happen so often anymore, Abdul’s grandfather apparently didn’t leave the larger Fez medina until he was buried. Continue reading “Cavorting Around Fez”
Between Fes And Tanger
Tanger to Barcelona By Ship
We acknowledge that our carbon footprint hasn’t been great during our almost two years of travel. Still, when possible, we’ve been trying to avoid planes, and instead default to trains or ships.
To travel between Tanger and Barcelona, we booked a cabin on a Grandi Navi Veloci ship. When the vessel was originally constructed, it was probably designed to feel like a cruise. However, most of the cruise elements seem to have been gutted, at least for this journey. The two pools were empty, aside from cigarettes butts. The beauty salon had been converted into storage. Many other rooms were just blocked off and closed, or converted to prayer rooms. Continue reading “Tanger to Barcelona By Ship”
