asilah: paradise city?

more cats, more camels and more garbage. this is our last day in morocco. we decided to stop on the way out, at the beach town asilah. any local we talked to on this trip assured us that asilah was beautiful, THE place to go if you want to relax and soak up some sun. the sun greeted us but it didn’t hang around for long. when we woke up the next day the weather was very hazy. i couldn’t walk down the beach without having my shirt soak through with humidity. we got to see the old medina (if there is nothing else to see there shall always be a medina) which was quite different from the ones we have already seen. this one was much smaller, we came early in the morning, nothing was open, the place was deserted, hence nobody trying to follow us and nobody trying to make a sale. asilah in general proved to be quite laid back, we could even ask for directions. i have reached my limit of haggling, i avoid buying anything anymore because i just don’t feel very compelled to go through the process. i have also reached my limit of seeing poverty. if morocco is not considered a third world country (it’s developing) i guess i should just stick to the good ol’ europe and the usa. the amounts of homeless and sick cats is mind boggling to me. i try to feed them whenever i see one, i try to give them some love, but they get younger and younger and it’s so hard for me to just leave them. there was a kitty yesterday who was crossing the road but it got so scared of the cars it stopped midway, when i picked it up to get it off the street i saw that one eye was newly missing. the poor guy hasn’t even been in this world for 6 weeks from the looks of it, and he is already missing an eye, how is he supposed to survive, who is supposed to teach him? i so much would have liked to have kept him 🙁 another kitty joined us for dinner, he was hungry and young and didn’t know what else to do so he sat there crying, i took him in my lap after to play but time came when we had to go, and of course i couldn’t say goodbye. instead i had a depressing night and now won’t be able to stop thinking about it. the town itself is very nice, it’s actually, also clean. the medina gets a new paint job every year because of its annual art festival when the walls are painted and once the winner is chosen his/her works are left until next years’ event. the beach, on the other hand, even in the haze was dirty beyond belief. people drive motorbikes on the sand and use it as a local dump, the only sand that is available to sit on is the wet sand by the water (good thing tides here are quite high) because the water cleans whatever it can everyday. once you get out of the city, like we did, to go visit the famed ‘paradise beach’ there is garbage everywhere and anywhere. ‘paradise’ is probably the last word i’d use to describe it.