The Good

• Although we hadn’t expected to stop at Rabat, thinking that it was largely a modern city with little to offer the tourist or traveller, we were pleasantly surprised by the charm of the old medina.
• It was Sunday, and it felt like a holiday! Crowds of people wandered the gardens and the old town, eating toffee apples and candy floss and taking lots of selfies!
• We saw a collection of people around a food stall where several men seemed to all be involved in the process of making a complicated snack of many ingredients; fried sardines, little spicy dumplings, eggs, herbs, harissa and more besides, all squashed into the cavity of a round bread. We ordered one, we should have ordered more, then stood and waited with everyone else. Whilst we hovered eagerly we asked one of the men nearby what this exotic delicacy was called. ‘Sandwich’ he replied, ‘mixed’. It remains one of the best things we’ve eaten during our entire stay in Morocco.

The Bad

• Not really bad at all and actually mostly good fun, but it got a bit squishy in the medina when it was full of folk doing their Sunday shopping. We were carried along in a sea of people, occasionally dodging carts and motorbikes or darting across the tide to get to a shop. After a while however it did get tiring for the boys who couldn’t really see a thing from between the crush of bodies, and it took us nearly an hour to get from one side of the (not enormous) medina to the other. At least three of us were a little teary by the time we sat down to dinner…

The Funny

• Driving into Rabat medina, through a gateway that was a few scant millimetres wider than our van, then reverse parking into a space assisted by approximately twenty Moroccan men was very very funny indeed. Some shouted instructions at me, some made baffling and contradictory arm signals, some reached into the window to try and grab the steering wheel and the guardien offered to get in and do the whole thing for me! Rob valiantly defended my driving ability and tried to tell them in as assertive a voice as possible that if everyone left me alone and got out of the way I’d be fine. This of course didn’t happen but it was all very good natured and gave us our first taste of the famous Moroccan helpfulness.