In The Tangier Medina

In the Petit Socco, the typical odd-shaped Medina square (they would call it a campo in Venice), I sat around 3 pm in a street-side café, drinking a mint tea. (All tea here is green tea, unlike further in the Arab East where all tea is black; and it is stuffed full of fresh mint leaves, and sweetened with way too many clumps of sugar). I was drinking, or rather not drinking my tea (not drinking, is the essence of the art of successful café-going), watching tenacious touts touting their trundles to tourists. They were quite vicious with the tours passing by; but they did not hesitate to invade the cafes and attack the tourists sitting at the tables there; it is a hard, persistent sell, friendly but dogged. I kept imagining how I, with my many years' experience at this sort of thing, would respond to an advance, but didn't have to. No one seemed to bother me at all. Must be my leather shoes (instead of flip-flops) and the long pants (instead of baggy shorts). I don't wear the international uniform of the rich tourist: I am perfectly camouflaged. In fact, no one here has offered to sell me anything in the street, no shopkeeper has tried to shortchange me, even though I speak not Arabic but lousy French, and Tangier is famous for pretty vicious touting. Everyone but me. I am made of teflon. I am invulnerable.

At 4 I got up and slouched over to the American Legation. It is the first US Embassy abroad. It was set up in 1777, only one year after the American Declaration of Independence, in a building gifted to the young nation by the then Sultan. (It is in return for this, it is said, that the US was the first country to recognize Moroccan Independence in 1950's). The building is now a museum of Old Tangier and a lending library; the building itself is supposed to be interesting and there is a Paul Bowles room. But I only know this by hearsay. The museum opens from 10 till 1 and 3 to 5, but if the day is hot, or there is a vicious wind, or the caretaker has other business, or it has been raining, or it is a holiday somewhere -- or for any other reason at all, it may not reopen after lunch. And some days it may not open in the morning, either, which makes its continued closure after lunch -- automatic.