101 ways to get ripped off in Agadir

Today was a day of total downtime. No progress on the car. So. We had a good dinner at the hotel restaurant yesterday and went to bed early. And we slept in. Sleeping for about 12hours was not a problem. We really need to recharge our batteries for the crazy drive we will have soon enough. Trying to catch up with the rest of the rally. We are looking at all the shortcuts we can get.

Today our plan was to go to the local market and try to find some small gifts we could give to people that are nice to us - but also for bribes. We took a taxi from the street outside the hotel - it just stopped and picked us up. There where already 4 people in the car, but we got stuffed in there all three of us - its important to make use of all the space one can. Once you arrive at the local market you get a guide - if you like it or not. And sure enough we got a guide. We were lucky, he was not extremely pushy and guided us to look at stuff we wanted to check. In the end he guided us to some shop for tea. We expected to be ripped off. And we got ripped off. Of course we got ripped off. They were quite nice about it. The ripoff came served with some nice tea that did not have a metric ton of sugar in it and long lectures about ointments and spices and all that. Really designed so that we could not refuse to buy expensive coffee, tea and soap afterwards.

After the shopping we walked around for a bit before we found a café. The menu was all in french and Per had great success using a pocket dictionary. Well. There was one thing on the menu that was not in french. Per asked what it was and the waiter pointed to his thigh and said 'vache'. We did not know what that was but ordered it together with some banana, avocado and unknown (was not in the dictionary) juice. Basically what we got was cow thigh knuckles and bones that had been stripped for meat and boiled for a long time - a nice rich souse was the result - together with the bones. We ate it with bread and it was quite tasty - a new experience.

Tonight we are having dinner at the hotel-resturant again. It was rather excellent and the service something you can expect at michelin-star restaurants. They truly speak a lot of languages. Trough our dinner we went trough french, english, german, polish (a big surprise to me who got rather dumbstruck) and norwegian (the guy had been to Norway for half a year). Going to bed early and hoping that tomorrow will bring us a functioning gear box - inch'allah - if god wants it so.