The boat

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Two days on a ferry back to Europe! We had a bit of a stress on the way on to the boat. We eventually found a check-in office, where a small sign apologised because they wouldn't be able to accept bank cards on board. As you can't take Moroccan Dirhams out of the country, we'd carefully used ours up. The banks were closed. We managed to get more Dirhams and change them back to Euros by half an hour after the ship had been supposed to leave (from the wrong fery terminal). We eventually set sail 6 hours late, although nobody explicitly announced the delay, and there was never a word of apology from the staff.

It's good to be at sea. We could see the Spanish or French coasts for quite a lot of the way (we were going to Genoa in Northern Italy, via Barcelona). There was time to relax and finish our books. Sadly the swimming pool wasn't working, the singer was out of tune and although we enjoyed a Harry Potter film in French, our language skills weren't up to another film in Spanish with Arabic subtitles. So we found ourselves twiddling our thumbs a little. But never mind. There was no haggling to be done and we were on our way to Heather's favourite part of her favourite country, Italy. And we could eat the salads at last, even if we still couldn't drink the tap water.

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