Today is Friday, the Muslim “Sunday” although almost everything seems open for business except the off licence where I was hoping to buy some beer to drink on our roof terrace during our siesta this afternoon. A quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin in a book I am reading at the moment:
“Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”
We have been curious about the obligations of the Muslims and the prayer times as we had difficulty understanding the timings of the call to prayer. We knew they had to pray five times a day but after our rude awakening at 6.30am nothing seems to happen until after lunch. Good old Goggle came to the rescue, the timings are:
Dawn, before sunrise – the call is at 6.30
Midday, after the sun passes its highest – Today that was 13.40
The late part of the afternoon – 17.00
Just after sunset – 19.30
Between sunset and midnight – 20.50
Very few people seem to take any notice so presumably not many locals are practising Muslims. We had lunch right outside the mosque and whilst most devotees walked in washed their hands in the fountain and lined up in the hall about 20 men stood outside in the street and performed their rituals there on a mat provided by the mosque. We have no idea why they were not allowed in, they were all ages so clearly not newcomers.
We walked along the beach again today, we came across a fashion photo-shoot for a Chinese company, not sure if they realised they would be working in a gale force wind. Whilst I would hate to be thought as of being race prejudiced I did make sure we were up wind just in case we caught Coronavirus! It does seem strange the a Chinese company would come all the way to Morocco for a photo shoot on a beach, there are plenty of equally nice beaches in China and they are probably less windy, the poor model was struggling to do costume changes under a big shawl in a 50mph wind.
There are more camels than tourists wanting to ride them