Fish, ports, and resorts

Despite our original plans, we are still in El Jadida for the time being.  It looks like we will be leaving here on Thursday and just pushing our original schedule back by a few days (cutting time off of Tetouan, which I've actually already visited).  The past few days have been very fishy, in a very literal sense.  Yesterday we watched some of the boats bringing fish into the city to sell - including some very large squid and crabs.  There were a whole bunch of young boys jumping off the piers and climbing back up the wooden ladders back to the port. 

From there, Wadih showed me a place (a restaurant, sort of) where you choose your fresh, whole fish right off of the grill and eat them.  Not only am I not really a fish lover in the first place, but the whole atmosphere was rather unappealing.  There were fish heads on the ground, fish spines all over the place, and a light dusting of fish scales on most visible surfaces.  People were very happily munching down on whole sardines and sucking the parts out of fish heads, though, and they seemed to do just fine with the heavy cloud of smoke from the fish grill.

I offered to try it out, but I'm sure Wadih could sense that my attempt to act adventurous was only thinly veiling a deep-seated gastronomical horror at the scene in front of us.  SO we went to a "real" restaurant across the street and got fried fish (no heads, no bones, no eyes) and pizza with calamari and shrimp.  Let it be known that I have indeed eaten a very large fish eyeball - once, at a dinner in D.C. - and I have absolutely no desire to ever repeat that experience as long as I live.

So that was my true local culinary experience.  Not quite Long John Silvers, but fun to see anyhow.

Last night we went to Mazagan, which is an enormous resort a few kilometers outside of El Jadida.  It's so huge, in fact, that it has its own helipad (and helicopter), movie theatre, golf course, spa, beach, night club, casino, and assortment of restaurants.  The actual resort was gorgeous - really beautiful - but also seemed rather removed from the actualities of life in Morocco.  It's a double-edged sword in many ways: gambling and alcohol are technically both prohibited in Islam, but both are abundant at Mazagan.  On the other hand, the resort provides hundreds of jobs for locals who might otherwise not have many employment opportunities.  Nonetheless, it felt good to get back to the hotel and "normal" life.