Showering as a challenge...

We are in Tata. We are not allowed to leave. According to the instructions of the police until Sunday. After the heavy rains, it is simply too dangerous on the roads.

Time for me to do all the things that are usually too short on normal days. For example, taking a long shower. What is a daily routine at home becomes a small feat here. First the water. Always check first how hot - or rather, how little cold - it is. Then the second point. Since the showers here in Morocco apparently are all open, meaning there is no door at the shower building, it is usually terribly cold inside in the morning and evening.

I came prepared for this trip as a warm showerer, brought a large hanging toiletry bag with me in which I can store my utensils. I still remember my first shower here. I didn't bring a bathrobe because I find them silly and they would be too cold at these temperatures anyway. So after getting up at around 8 o'clock at -5 degrees Celsius, I strutted to the sanitary building in jogging pants and a jacket with a hood, along with slippers, a towel, and a toiletry bag. Okay. The showers were all free. I took the first one. It was maybe two meters by two meters and had half-height swing doors. It looked pretty good.

Now the problems began... There were no hooks. Well, I undressed and hung my things, including my toiletry bag, over the swing doors and swapped my rubber slippers - I think they're called Crocs or something like that - for the slippers. I was ready. I turned on the warm water tap with pleasure. Only cold water came out. Okay, that just took a little while. I waited. The cold wind slowly crept in from outside. I believed I could feel that the water jet was slowly getting warmer under my hands and waited further. After all, we are in Morocco! In Africa!

Meanwhile, the temperatures in my shower and outside had equalized - not as slowly as the water got warmer. My hand, with which I checked the water, slowly turned blue. In my shower, which had a tub, the water was ankle-deep. I shivered all over. In the midst of all the excitement, I had made my jogging pants wet up to the pockets with my shower stream. My plastic slippers began to sink in the murky water. What to do? Dry off, get dressed quickly, and go through the middle. Everything in me screamed for it. But then the camping professional spoke up! No way! We won't give in! So we'll just shower with the water we have, you wimp.

I clenched my teeth. I quickly soaped up everything, including my hair, went under the water, one, two, three, and quickly came out again. Coming out again was fast, a bit too fast. In doing so, I bumped into the swing doors and whoosh, my pants and jacket ended up in the water with the slippers. The pants weren't so bad because they were already wet enough to wring out. The jacket wasn't such a big problem either, it had to be able to withstand it, otherwise it wouldn't have been allowed to be a jacket. But in its side pockets were my underwear - the old and the new - and my socks - yes, that's right: the old and the new. My towel was only half wet, I had managed to grab one corner of it in a hurry. Only my t-shirt was still hanging there, with the word "CHAMPION" in large letters.

Now every step had to be carefully considered. First, I saved everything I found from the ultimate sinking and threw it over the open top of my shower cabin. As the first ice crystals formed at the tip of my nose, I dried myself off with the dry end of my towel as best I could. Then came the most difficult part: I generously gave up underwear and focused on the jogging pants. That took a while. Today, I wonder why I even bothered to dry off. After getting dressed, I felt like I had just come out of the shower. I quickly gave up on "carefully considering every step," slipped into my t-shirt, tied the jacket around my waist with the sleeves, dove after my plastic slippers, grabbed everything I could grab, and ran off.

On the way to my motorhome, the owner of the campsite came towards me. I quickly checked the sleeves of my jacket to make sure nothing was slipping and told the gentleman that the showers didn't get warm. He walked on, laughed, waved to the sky, and said, "Solar. Solar!" Since then, I always shower in the evening.