ShAgadir

First of all, let me explain the title of this blog.

Agadir is no cultural oasis. The old city was detroyed in an earthquake in the 60s (cue Ellie "oh dear, are they due another one soon?" Simpson). Since then it has been rebuilt as a beach resort and has certainly lost all of the "medina" charm characteristic of Moroccan cities.

It has been tailored to all the needs of tourists and our beloved "Brits abroad". It even has an English pub. Enough said. And so we have affectionately renamed it ShAgadir and we are very grateful to it for our week of lying down, sunning ourselves, burning ourselves and generally being very lazy. It even resulted in a ShAgadir photo shoot triggered by some dodgy tanlines.

But rather than start with what we have been doing, maybe I should begin with how we got here. In an attempt to save money we laughed at the prices of Moroccos official bus company and boarded a bus packed with locals and some less obvious passengers in the hold. But more on that later. It took double the length of time it should (we appeared to have boarded the local stopping service), a bad smell eeked along the coach as a woman near me began to change her daughters nappy and an albino man enjoyed sitting next to me a little too much. We got off at Agadir and found that our bags had the company of a bag of chickens, a box of sardines and a tied up turkey. Crossing the road we saw a dead kitten. Welcome to Agadir.

We eventually made it to our hotel and since lying down that afternoon it is fair to say that not much has happened, we havent really moved, but our tans are looking cracking. Ellie has changed race. We are getting fed up with men leering at us and have been heckled for days by the builders opposite (nothing changes). The first tactic was to ignore them, until Ellie jumped, unexpectantly to the next extreme and shouted "Fuck off!" Sunbathing was over for that day. A fair few debates have been had around "what tattoo/ who/ what would you rather?" and the Klondike (Solitaire on the Ipod) convention was held until the small hours. Party animals.

This comes in stark contrast to what has been happening at home. We went out for dinner one night and came back to a new prime minister, a new coalition government, the realisation that we miss Newsnight and that we all fancy Nick Clegg, the winner of "Who would you rather? The Politics Edition". Unsurprisingly, William Hague did not fair as well.

Now I have started a new paragraph because what I am about to say deserves it. I had a cup of tea. Now, for anyone that knows me will understand the gravity of this. Admittedly it was with some "dont smell it when you taste it" milk so wasnt quite up to scratch but having gone more than two weeks without one (mint tea is lovely, but its no substitute) it tasted much more golden than it looked.

So as you can see we have been very busy debating important political matters, moving our sun loungers around and changing rooms so that we could have BBC World News. But we are getting a bit boried now so we are going to move on to the dessert to quench our cultural thirst. Time to tackle the camels which, in my imagination, will make for some great blogging.