Greetings from Morocco.
There are three big plus points in our view of Morocco; firstly it is culturally completely different from home, the smells, noise atmosphere is Arabic so you feel your are slightly outside your comfort zone which is great, second the French influence means the food is very good, dare I say better than in France and certainly better value. And as only one case of coronavirus has been reported in Morocco as yet this seems to be a safe place to be so another plus point.
Today is my birthday (67 in case your interested). Gill has kindly bought me a new fangled smart phone which I have been playing with. My first mobile phone (in 1986) was the size of a house brick, cost several thousand pounds and the battery lasted 30 minutes maximum. By the time I worked for Ericsson in the mid 90’s I of course had the latest Ericsson phone and also linked it to a Psion organiser (Piss On as the children called it) and could do emails on the move so I was definitely an early adopter of technology. Since then I have moved backwards, partly as I have a great aversion to people who use their mobiles when in company of others (as rude as rude can be in my book) but also because I, like most people if they are honest enough to admit it, have no need to be contactable 24 hours a day.
For my 60th birthday Gill bought me an iPad which although I found a bit frustrating to use it had a great app on which to do my banking and credit card management. Move on seven years and Apple won’t or can’t update the software so it no longer supports banking!
That together with a few other things that need an app (our robot vacuum cleaners for example) I have decided to take the plunge. So I have had a happy few hours loading on music and playing with the phones features, I have even managed to work out how to make a phone call!
I was going to use it for my boarding pass home next week but apparently airports in Morocco insist on paper, I suspect they have a rubber stamp they need to use.
I have had a relaxing birthday doing very little just wandering around the narrow alleyways of the souk watching the world go by and taking pictures with the new phone but I will resist the temptation to take photographs of our dinner, that would be the pits in my book.
I did manage my first selfie (right) but as you can see I have a an expression of intense concentration while I worked out how to press the shutter without photographing my thumb!