Travel Tuesday: Mohammed's Birthday Parade in Tangier

When I was in Tangier last month, the Muslim world was celebrating the birthday of the prophet Mohammed. While it's an important holiday, in Tangier it doesn't come with as many celebrations as New Years or Ramadan. A few shops were closed and there were groups of young men going around my neighborhood pounding on drums and singing religious songs like they do for every holiday. The main public celebration that I saw was this parade, which went down one of the main streets in the new city.

These are students from a local madrasa, a religious school. The plaques are a traditional way to practice writing out the Koran. When you graduate you get your diploma on one.

I stumbled upon the parade by accident so I only had my phone with me, not my main camera. It was hard to get good shots because Moroccans, just like Europeans, always crowd around anything interesting and start snapping pictures with their phones. Some even took selfies! Yeah, the selfie is an international phenomenon. Oh well. So I missed getting some shots of some of the marchers in the parade and the bull being led to the slaughter, later be eaten at a feast in the prophet's honor. Here are the shots I did get, in the order the parade passed me.

"Where are the women?" my wife asked. Well, there were these little girls all dolled up in the back of a pickup. They were the only ones.

These musicians were pretty cool. I'm not sure what region they were from, probably in the Atlas Mountains. I've never seen costumes like this before. There are still large sections of Morocco I need to see!