Beatific Tanja

Today marks the beginning of Ramadan in Morocco, the monthlong holiday where Muslims around the world fast from sunrise to sunset. As if to signal the start of the holiday, I was abruptly woken at 6 am by an insistent, loud metallic clanging just outside my hotel room's window. When I got out of bed and went over to the window I saw a man on the sidewalk below talking to himself while repeatedly slamming onto the front wall of the hotel an old piece of sheet metal with a wire handle attached. From my vantage point above I could see no reason why the man might be doing this, other than maybe pure madness. When I arrived here in Tangier (Tanja in Arabic) I'd considered checking into the Hotel Muniria (above photo), where Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac stayed when visiting Tangier, and where William Burroughs wrote his seminal work, Naked Lunch. When I went to have a look, though, the hotel had a sort of forlorn, desolate air about it, so I opted instead for the Hotel de Paris on a major boulevard here in the middle of the city.