...and beyond!

...and beyond! (1/3)

By this point we were able to stay asleep until about 4am, which we did and then sat around the hotel room until 7am when our hunger drove us out in search of food. It was pretty apparent nothing in town was open at that hour, so we drove out to some sort of palace thing on the edge of town to pass the time.

The palace grounds were quite stunning in the rising sun.

After that we did locate some breakfast which Yang can be seen here giving the big thumbs up. A standard Moroccan breakfast is comprised of mint tea, bread, butter and, if you're really lucky, some jam in which to dip the bread. This morning we were really lucky.

The lobby of our hotel in Erfoud was quite ornately decorated. I thought the stained glass skylights were a stroke of genius.

More lobby. That patterned tiling was all over the place. A Moroccan specialty apparently.

We had some time to kill before our arranged "tour" of the dunes, so I wandered around. This is a street sign. Every town had a Boulevard Mohamed V which was the main street in the town. Literally every one. If a town had more than one street, chances were pretty good that the other one was called Boulevard Hassan II. Hassan II is the king of Morocco, we later discovered that Mohamed V was the king before Hassan II. Those Moroccans sure love their monarchs.

The funny thing about this street sign is not that it has a horse and buggy on it. There were donkey driven carts all over the place. The funny thing is that they actually wasted the resources to put up a traffic sign at all. Driving is such a vicious free for all in this country that if you took the time to look at the street signs you'd surely crash into someone.

Here's a close up of some standard Moroccan architecture. Run down, but with style.

I have to hand it to the Moroccans. For as broke as everyone is, they still manage to decorate their living and working spaces quite nicely.

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