
What better way to celebrate a birthday (aside from being in Morocco) than with lots of meat and couscous?! I still haven’t decided if my favorite dish is chicken couscous or lamb tajine, so we keep trying them both.

The waiter at Chez Ahlen made me want to learn how to pour tea, but I decided to just enjoy it rather than make the mess I know I would.


For an extra treat, I booked us a private hammam. The hammam is a public bath, where people gather, enjoy steam baths, and exfoliating rubs. It’s a sense of community as well as relaxation and personal hygiene. I’ve done public baths before, but they’re segregated by gender, so we splurged for a private hammam for just the two of us at La Tangerina, a local boutique hotel. After stripping and putting on disposable underwear, we were shown into a private ornately tiled steam bath. The attendant started showering us with buckets of crazy hot water, followed by a special black mud slathering. After that came an Olympic exfoliating session (I think I lost pounds in dried old sunscreen coming off), a massage, and a shower to finish it all off. Not bad for a birthday, eh?

Recent Comments