Essaouira

There were several guys we met in our trip to Sahara who by coincidence were londoners. Another coincidence was that all of them were planning on going to Essauouira the next day just like us, a little relaxing town by the ocean. It was good to have a nice company for the rest of the trip.

Essauouira was nothing like busy Marrakech and we found it very surprising that nobody bothered to drag us into their shops to sell us their goods. We did however some souvenir "shopping" before leaving the town. I even got myself a bracelet for which I was bargaining for almost 30 minutes. I had a fixed price in my head and I didn't wanna go above, so I had to really push the seller to sell it for the price I wanted. I think the seller did enjoy bargaining even though he said I was making a cous-cous in his head. This is apparently a widely-used expression in Morroco about people who give you some trouble. For me all this bargaining process was really exhausting and stressful and funny thing is that I don't even wear that bracelet as it doesn't match any of my cloths.

In couple of hours we pretty much saw all the main attractions the town had to offer. In the evening we ended up in a small restaurant that was ran by a French woman who was as well too relaxed about her clients and joined some tables for a drink. She kept drinking and talking, so it took a while until she took our order but in the end the food was very good and the atmosphere lovely. This evening we were celebrating my birthday, and I even got a piece of chocolate cake with candle accompanied by Happy Birthday song. We drank Moroccan wine. They actually do produce wine, but only for export. Wine was good and we all had plenty. And as if this wasn't enough we thought of going to some club afterwards. We stopped some young local guy to ask for directions and to our surprise he himself was going to the night club and we just followed him. When we entered the club it was all about males and just about 4-5 other females who were prostitutes. We ordered some drinks and after having some I didn't care much about the dodgy people around me and danced until the early morning. It was a good fun and another nice day to remember.

Some picture from Essaouira