The Morocco post (events of Fabruary 28-March 2)

*I have been quite a busy lady for the past 2-3 weeks, so, as a result, I am quite behind with my bloggings! I am going to break it up by major events, so don't be confused by conflicting dates. Today ( March 13th, the actaul date) is by first day of "spring break" or Semana Santa as they call it here. But I will update on more current events in a later post, as to stay in cronological order.*

Morocco

We set out to explore a new continent on Thursday and althought Morocco is a relative hopskip from Spain, it was still a pretty long journey. First we (my roommates Maggie and Jennifer, Lydia and myself) caught about a 3 hour bus from Sevilla to Algeciras and met up with our other travel companions to catch the 1 hour fast ferry to Tangier, Morocco.

Now let's pause for a moment to talk about preconceptions. Pretty much everyone we talked to warned us about the dangers of Morocco and told to keep our wits about us, make sure to use the buddy system, not to go out at night, etc. We were also told that between Spanish and English, we should have been able to communicate with everyone there. The latter statement turned out to be highly untrue (the population of Morocco mostly speaking Arabic and the only Western European language being French... by the way which none of us speak), so between these two factors we were a little jumpy when we first arrived. For example: After we discovered that we would not be able to lock our bags and would thus have to lug them around all day thus making us stick our even more as stupid tourists, we decided to take the proverbial bull by the horns and take a taxi to some point in the city that our tiny guidebook said was sightworthy and go explore. Six of us piled into one taxi (they do not seem to be very uptight about seatbelts in Morocco) and we pointed on our map(our driver only knew french) to the written out place where we wanted to go. Now in HINDSIGHT we were very unnecissarily silly... but as the taxi approached a dark, narrow ally, with no tourists in sight and children started jumping on the trunk of the car (which didnt close, they could have snatched our bags) and then the alley ended in a dead end with a huge pile or particularly jagged looking rocks... and as the taxi pulled up there were about 20 men outside staring at us... we basically freaked out. Now, the poor taxi guy- he took us exactly where we said we wanted to go, we only had to walk around and there was an opening to the beach where we wanted to go to take scenic pictures. But, in that moment of panic, we lost sight of calm reasoning. I think it was Lydia, who only knew a few words of French that took charge of telling the man to keep driving and that our journey would NOT be ending in a dead end ally with a huge pile of rocks. We all started making motions wanting to go to a restaurant to eat something (ie somewhere populated where no one could stone us to death). Finally we found the common word sandwich, and we all started desperatly saying "WEI, WEI, SAN-WISH!!!!!" He was very confused but indulged us and took us to hi sfavorite sandwich shop, all the way back in the center of town. We all payed him double what we orginally agreed on and practically fell into this sandwich place.

There, in our sandwich haven, we took a deep breath collected ourselves, and laughed at how silly we had been. From that point on, half of the group decided to relax in the train station with the bags and Lydia, Hayley and I decided to explore Tangier a little bit. We found the market, which was very cool. Hayley flexed haggling muscles and bought herself a carpet!!! I was so proud, for the rest of the weekend she was our haggling, ball-bustin secret weapon. At 9pm it was time to board the night train for Marakesh! I had never taken a sleeper train before, it was fun! There are these teeny rooms with 2 bunk beds each. there were six of us so we split up 3 and 3 and in our little cabin we had an interesting character. She was an Irish artist that decided to move to a town ourside Marakesh to inspire her painting. She calmed alot of our nerves about Morocco and laughed at our taxi story. She said that it was actaully much safer in Morocco then in a lot of places in the US or in Europe. I always seem to be the one that the crazies like to keep talking to (haha, christ, what does that say about me...) and let's just say by the time that I pretended to have fallen asleep so she would stop talking I figured it was best to take any of her advice with a grain of salt.

We arrived in Marakesh about 8am, and set out to finish of riad (hostal). This proved to be a little challenging, considering our cabbie kinda knew where it was sort of, but not exactly. We found it, even though it was labeled as a restuarant and not as a hotel. A genius undercover operative, Jennifer pointed out. By the afternoon we all all figured out the showers and were ready to see the sights of Marakesh. Let's note here that Lydia picked up two stray Germans on the way that were having some bad luck (ie didn't plan ahead ie didnt book anywhere to stay... how very un-german of them) and luckily for them, even though our hostal was technically our place was booked, they let them stay on a few couches. So then there were 8 of us. The Americans decided to go check out the Souks market (proportedly the largest market in all of Africa) and the Germans took a bus tour. The market was really cool, complete with snake charmers, carpet sellers, spices, pick-pockets, aladdin-style shoes and pants... the wonders went on and on. That night we decided to error on the side of caution and went to eat at a place right next to our hostal (which was REALLY nice, a little out of our bidget but we figured what the hell) and then hung out on the rooftop terrace of our riad for the remainder of the evening.

The next day we went on a excursion outside of town which was SO AWESOME. Hayley signed us up and the deal was 45 euro for an all day trip which included a camel ride, a trip to a typica-berber (a nomadic people, or which many have settled outside of marakesh and still live in a very tradictional way) house, a hike up the atlas mountains to see waterfalls, and lunch. The drive itself was made it worht it, the scenery was amazing. I think the best way to describe this day is just to show the pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mclauerman/Morocco

Basically after than we started out long journey back to Sevilla.
Ok, I will continue blogging later!
beso,
mc