Tag Archives: Sidi Ifni

Date Night in Sidi Ifni, Morocco

Michael and I have been traveling now for 37 weeks, 19 of which have been living and traveling in our van. We’ve been spending a lot of time together. We eat every meal together, we plan activities together, and we spend our downtime together. We have learned a lot about each other too, how grumpy Michael gets if he’s hungry, how emotional I am when I’m tired, and which foods make us gassy. At the beginning of our trip, when we were in Italy, we went for sushi (yes, you can get something other than pizza and pasta in Italy!). That evening I wore lipstick, and we talked about everything under the sun except plans for our trip. It was lovely! We called it date night. And since then, every three or four weeks, we go on a date night. There are a few rules to date night: I wear lipstick, we go out for dinner, and we don’t talk about poop.

We were in Sidi Ifni and decided to have a date night. We were told by a friend about a restaurant called Suerte Loca, reasonably priced, with great Moroccan food. I donned my lipstick and we left the van. Suerte Loca is a cute little restaurant at the end of the main street in Sidi Ifni. It boasts a huge menu, with so many different tagines. A tagine is a ceramic dish, that one fills with vegetables and/or meat, and places on hot coals. It creates a steamy, oven-type environment and cooks the food beautifully. Suerte Loca boasts an impressive list of meat, chicken, seafood, and veggie tagines. But, even with a menu as expansive as this, they are known for the menu of the day. Today, was a Moroccan salad, an octopus tagine, and a chocolate caramel flan cake. Sounds good to us! We ordered it all, and two mint teas. Moroccan mint tea is sickenenly sweet, and if you ever order it ‘sans sucre’ you’ll understand why. It’s nickname is Berber Whiskey. They say you can’t get drunk off it, but you sure can get sugar high!

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We sat and drank our tea as the empty tables in the restaurant began to fill. Three young Moroccan boys took to the stage. By stage, I mean an empty corner of the restaurant. Two guitars and a drum. The drummer kept rhythm, the guitarist impressively picked the strings, and the one who sang had the voice of a pubescent angel. They sang Moroccan songs, they sang French songs, they sang Jason Mraz! We clapped as each song ended, they smiled and nodded and would quickly discuss amongst themselves which song to play next.

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Our food came. The salad was fresh and delicious, but the tagine was the star of the show. The huge dish was placed in front of us, and with the perfect amount of flare, the woman lifted the top to reveal a beautiful meal. Octopus cooked with onions and tomatoes, and rubbed down with about a million spices. We took the pieces of fresh bread from the basket on the table and, using the bread like a claw, picked up bits of octopus and sauce. Oh boy, it was delicious. Our conversation ceased as we ate — that’s how you know it’s good. The chocolate cake with caramel flan on top was out of this world. We paid our bill and rolled ourselves out of Suerte Loca. By the door was a tip jar for the boys playing music. We left them a hefty tip — they deserve it.

We walked back to the van, and shared an exuberant high five — another successful date night!

 

Shopping the Sunday Souk in Sidi Ifni, Morocco

We left the van and went to the Sunday Souk in Sidi Ifni (try saying that three times fast!). The souk is a big marketplace, which boasts vendors from near and far, selling all sorts of things. There are so many stalls, and each one is very specialized; there’s the veggie guy, the olive guy, the spice guy, the clothes guy, the miscellaneous kitchenware guy, the jewellery guy… We prepared ourselves for many stops on this grocery shop.

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We stopped at a veggie man and began! The vendor handed us a plastic bin. The idea is that you fill the bin, then you pay by weight of everything together. Cool! We bought 2 potatoes, 3 zucchini, 4 beets, 2 tomatoes, and 3 carrots. Phew! Veggies, done! We continued our walk. We found a chicken man, and figured we would find eggs here, but realized that the chicken man only sells chicken — you choose one from the pen of live chickens, he weighs it, and then takes it behinda tarp, kills it, and prepares it for you. Huh. We didn’t buy any chicken today. We DID however find a fruit guy at the neighbouring stall! We bought 1 mango, 3 oranges, 4 kiwis, and 3 avocados. We walked on and found an olive guy. I like the olive guy because he lets you, nay, encourages you to taste all the different varieties of olives. We did! And we bought 250g of a beautiful preserved lemon and parsley marinated green olive, and 250g of crazy flavourful, and shrivelled up black olives.

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Next stop: the spice man. The spice man sells many spices in many forms. For example, here you can buy turmeric roots, turmeric seeds, or ground turmeric. Here, you can buy full henna leaves, henna seeds, ground henna, or henna paste. Here, you can also buy garlic bulbs! We bought 3. Then, we finally found the egg guy — that’s all he sells — and bought 12 beautiful fresh eggs.

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We found a banana man, who sells bananas by the kilo. In order to make up a kilo, we had to buy 10 bananas. They aren’t big, but 10 seems like an awful lot of bananas for two people. We walked past the preserves guy and he let us try some Moroccan figs, and natural almonds. Oh man, we just had to buy some! They sure are good salesmen at this souk. We walked past another spice man, and asked if he sold salt. A man buying spices told us we would be better off just going to a grocery store and buying a bag of saltfor 10dh. We thanked him for the advice and chatted with him a bit. He is Berber, from the mountains, and comes in every week for the souk with his friend. He insisted we come to their table. We did. His friend, an old, weathered mountain man, makes rings out of Euro coins and cedar wood. They were stunning pieces of jewellery. We asked how long it takes to drive in from the mountains. The men laughed. “It takes one day on the camel…”We laughed too. We explained to the old man we did not want to buy anything. He assured us that he was just happy to have met us, two young Canadians. He thanked us for saying hello and gave us a gracious welcome to Morocco.

I took to my spreadsheet, the beautiful one I made to keep track of our day-to-day spending (I call myself a highly organized cheapskate), input all the spending we did at the souk today, and took a look at the total. We spent 47dh, which is about €4.19, which is about $6.34 CAD. For all those veggies, fruits, eggs, and preserves, not to mention a kilo of bananas. My goodness. I do LOVE the Sunday souk!

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Update: We ate the entire kilo of bananas in three days.