Dinner in the Rabat Medina

Final photos--

A "medina" in Morocco is basically the "Old City"--in Arabic it means "town" and as we saw in several different cities, the medina is so often the medieval part, a warren of narrow streets that snake between tall buildings. Since the residences are designed around central courtyards, there is nothing that Westerners call "street appeal." In many cases walls are are featureless--no windows, at best tiny doors. Sometimes even in the middle of the day the median is dark because the close quarters and covered walks block out what light there is.

This is a feature, not a bug, for the hot climate. For those of us unaccustomed to this architecture, it is disorienting!

So when it came time to venture back to the medina for dinner, there was no question of an address, or directions on how to get there.

Instead, we got the Lantern Man!

In his striped djellaba and yellow leather slippers, he was frankly almost nondescript in the medina--that's just how people dress everyday in much of the country! But his lantern was the symbol of his office and was EXTREMELY useful when we came out of the restaurant and it was nighttime!

The job of the Lantern Man is another of those Moroccan roles that is so foreign to Westerners. As far as I could tell, he was not employed by the restaurant, but was more of a free-lance guide, and we were expected to each tip him for leading us out of the maze. It's a tipping and haggling society--which my Scottish ancestry did not prepare me for!

The restaurant was gorgeous inside, and we were serenaded by a musicians playing Andalusian music. This is apparently very old music--so old that only about 12 songs remain, the rest of them lost in time.  The music was originally keyed to times of the day, in that some songs were designed for the morning, other for meals.

Andalusian music is related to Al Andalus, which was Moorish Spain, dating back to probably the 12th century or earlier. It's a little hard to comprehend, given that it's easy to compartmentalize Europe and Africa as entirely separate from each other. But the distance between Tangiers and Gibraltar is only about 9 miles, and the Roman Empire encompassed both.

Anyway, look at the gorgeous tile, the beautiful fountain.

One of the songs--which was repeated during our time at dinner--sounded oddly familiar. It took us over an hour to place why some of the chord progressions sounded familiar. And once we got it, we were deeply sorry. Nobody want to have "Jingle Bells" running through their heads.**

At the end of most Moroccan meals--and really at any time--you are offered mint tea. Traditionally served in small glasses, it is supposed to be poured into the glass from a great height, to aerate the tea and create small bubbles. "Tea without bubbles is like a man without a turban," said our guide.

This guy turns tea service into an art!

Sorry for the terrible exposure. He was literally behind my shoulder and I had to twist around to catch him at all.

(**Although we discussed whether "Jingle Bells" could have been lifted from the Andalusian tunes, none of us researched it. I did a quick search, and while it appears to have been written by a Calvinist from Massachusetts in the 1850s, there is some speculation that parts of the tune might have been lifted from a Stephen Foster minstrel tune. It is not impossible that Andalusian music had reached America through slave music. Culture is much more complicated and interwoven than we often acknowledge.)