Chefchaouen

I haven't had any Moroccan food this week as Kasey and John wanted food from home.  Beside the roast beef and yorkshire pudding, I made challah by hand for the first time in thirty years, press cookies without a press, challah french toast, and chocolate chip cookies.  I can't cook here without google.  Half of the packages have only French labels.  I type in the label to find out if it is really baking soda or baking powder or whatever.  Then I look up equivalents from cups to grams, not to mention converting the oven temperature from fahrenheit to celsius.  And then I bake without a microwave, mixer, or the right size pots and pans.  It is all an adventure.

On Friday we rented a car from a different man.  Kasey and John were still upset about the car being delivered an hour late when they had to pick me up at the airport.  We were supposed to get the car at 11 but the guy never showed up or called.  When we finally reached him, whoever had the car was not returning it until 4.  So we called the first guy and he had a car, but John had to get a friend to drive him half an hour to pick it up.  So we left over two hours late for our weekend excursion to Chefchaouen.  Morocco is not a very efficient country.

We had directions from Google with highway numbers, but none of the roads have signs on them.  We had also borrowed a GPS but it seemed to want to send us in the wrong direction.  The "major" roads are two lanes and there is always someone driving ridiculously slow, so you have to pass frequently.  People and donkeys walk along the side of the roads, and occasionally cross with little warning.  Sheep graze right next to the highways with shepherds watching them, and they occasionally run the whole flock across the road.

Ifrane is in the Atlas mountains at an altitude of about 5,200 feet.  It is snow covered now, but even under the snow, it is just scrub land with a lot of rock outcroppings.  I had only been on the road to and from Fez which is not very interesting or pretty.  Once we got north of Fez, however, the land was lush and green with fields of crops and olive orchards for as far as we could see.  It was quite beautiful.  Chefchaouen is in the Rif Mountains south of Tangier (which is on the Mediterranean).  Because of our late start, we couldn't see the countryside as we climbed up the switchbacks, but we drove back today in daylight and it was quite beautiful as well.

Chefchaouen is a very pretty old town with narrow, winding streets nestled in the hills.  What makes it unusual, however, is that most of the buildings are painted various shades of blue.  Supposedly Jewish refugees in the the 1930's introduced the blue paint which is unique in Morocco.  We just wandered randomly up and down streets; the blue paint is surprisingly peaceful.

We had a lovely day in Chefchaouen.  On Saturday night we went to the restaurant that the guidebook said was the best in town.  It was absolutely the best meal we have had since I have been in Morocco and we were the only ones in the restaurant.

From the sublime to the ridiculous ... we drove back to Fez today where I am staying overnight to get a train tomorrow to Marrakech.  We picked an Italian restaurant from the guidebook, but it was 3:30 by the time we got here, and the restaurant closed between lunch and dinner.  Kasey and John wanted to go to the big grocery store in the mall before they went back up the hill to Ifrane, so we ate at the food court in the mall.  John got a pepperoni pizza at Pizza Hut, but bear in mind that there is no pork in Morocco.  The pepperoni is beef, but he said it tasted real.  Kasey was in the mood for Asian, so at the food court in the mall in Fez we had something that approximated hot and sour soup, something called pad thai that wasn't very close, and sushi.  Of course.  The mall was absolutely packed.

I haven't mentioned Ruby in this post.  She is still cute.