Friday in Morocco is couscous day. Many people have a large and delicious couscous lunch, take a rest, and maybe return to work, or call it a day, depending on their situation. For my birthday dinner, we decided to shift to a special lunch (see note re: couscous above). When we first arrived in town, Abdellatif pointed out La Scala as a great traditional Moroccan restaurant. Our guide reiterated this suggestion so we set out toward the ocean in search of this restaurant. We got a bit turned around and it put us into a lengthy search that quickly eroded to more of a death march. Remember Chevy Chase wandering the desert looking for car help in National Lampoon's Family Vacation? That is how I felt by the end.
Another cultural note is not many streets are labeled here, and Moroccans are better with locations or landmarks instead of street names. Often the petit-taxi drivers only know the name in Arabic too (learned the hard way, another story). So, stopping and asking isn't always that productive, hence the wandering the desert feeling. After finally finding it, we discovered they shifted to only serving Italian food and fish. Major couscous fail! It wasn't entirely disappointing because we knew we had this luscious homemade vanilla cake with raspberry jam filling and hand whipped cream (over 10 minutes by hand with a whisk just like our ancestors). Another blip was the Supermarche only had the numbers 2, 4, 5, and 7. We decided 32nd birthday=3+2=5, so 5 it is! The cake was enjoyed with a simultaneous viewing of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and while set in Tokyo, it still had a familiar theme.
