The birthday dinner at Chez Ahlen

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.

Simply pouring a glass of tea

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.

The changing room for the hammam
Lobby of the Hotel La Tangerina

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?

Coffee and juice on the roof of La Terrace