D-Dog’s Blog

First of all, I would like to thank all of our readers for getting us over the 1,000 hit mark – I think this would be a good time to start selling out, so expect adverts sometime in the near future. I’m mainly writing this post in response to Jimmy’s recent criticism of my work ethic; I haven’t written a longish post recently, so I thought I’d do one now.

Tangiers is largely disappointing. The city of myth, of Burroughs, Bowles and Burgess, is dead. In it’s place has been born the bastard, unwanted love-child of European future and African past; with the coming and going of tourists and their sought after currency comes the transience of development and regression. For every shiny new building, every monument to progress, there is a vacant plot of scrubland filled with ageing rubble and mounds of waste plastic and twisted metal. But the city’s attitude to the tourists that drive it’s economy is interesting; the hustlers and pushers, as Frank has already said, are everywhere, but only very rarely are they aggressive or intimidating. It’s as though they have a certain respect for their quarry, and if you are quick with your “non non non”s (as Frank is – I just walk past oblivious) and are firm yet polite, they will back off, obviously aware that they have met their match in a visitor who is prepared for their tricks, swindles and approaches. But despite the rundown state of much of the town, I don’t want to do Tangier a disservice – the nature of it’s business and the less-than-priveliged lives it’s citizens lead all make it a rather easy target for somebody like me to attack. I’m also reigning in my criticism because I suspect the Medina is probably one of the most vibrant places we are likely to visit. The old part of the city, the real part of the city, it is all tangles and webs of intertwining paths and passages, full of stalls selling inexpensive fruit, vegetables and chickens, but also of people selling what they can to get by: old men with broken locks and mobile phones (I suspect mine might be among them, but I wouldn’t have the audacity to ask for it back if it were), people selling individual cigarettes to those passing by who are well off enough to pay more for the convenience, and jobless teens whose rugs laid out on the ground display the fruits of their scavenging. And then, of course, there are the amputees and childbearing, who ask repeatedly, politely, for “one dirham, one dirham” (about six pence). The buildings are crumbling, the vehicles spluttering, and everything feels distinctly real. And, finally, I hold nothing against Tangier because I know the best is yet to come. And also because everything is really, really cheap.

duncan