Better Blogger (Morocco, part 4)

Hi guys! This week I am a better blogger, but I know I still have a long way to go. With any luck I'll be posting once a week in the coming months because I'm doing ALOT of travelling. We can talk about that later though, because today, as promised, we are wrapping up Morocco. I believe I left you in the mountains...

When we descended from on high, we ended up in an absolutely beautiful little city called Chefchaouen (pronounced Chef-chow-en). It's built in much the same way as Granada, into the side of a mountain. Granada's on the Sierra Nevada, but Chefchaouen is on the Rif Mountains. They say that the city gets alot of tourism, but from the way we got stared at I don't think they get nearly enough. I know that my short hair throws them off sometimes, but I got as much attention as that baby panda in the Madrid zoo (and we all know that I'm not nearly as cute). I have hundreds of pictures from this city because I was just about as impressed with it as it was with me:

The city as a whole, from a place where we hiked on the mountain

L to R, Elsa, Miguel, Margaret, Alex, Me, and Oscar above the city

A pretty street on the way to our hostal. They do the blue/white too

This is where our hike began

That arch is just as low as it looks. Miguel has issues with it.

This is the river that keeps the city going. That building thing there is the Maroqui equivalent of a washing machine

Again from the hike, looking down on a field of cacti

Us! L to R, Colleen (our guide), Katie, Kathy, Me, Elsa, and Nick

Another view of the river area. That patio is the Maroqui equivalent of a dryer.

This is the destination of our hike. You can only really see Kathy, Miguel, and Alex in this one.

The entire Moroccan laundromat

That's from our hostal. The door next to the cool chest-thing is mine!

Another thing we thought was interesting about not only Chefchaouen, but all the cities, is that they do very interesting things with doors. Alot of them were really tiny so what we liked to do was take pictures with Miguel in front of these doors cuz he's wicked tall. After a while he got bored so most of the doors are solo, but they're still pretty cool:

This is the only picture I have of Miguel with a door

The door as a whole is way too big, but the little door in it is way too small...

I was taller than this door

This is the house of a local artist. The entire outside is painted with murals

So before we left Chefchaouen for Spain (via Ceuta), we all had dinner at a real restaurant. We had to split into 2 tables because we were 14 people in total but only one table got in the picture:

L to R, Laura, Shanie, Miguel, Alex, Oscar, Random Guy, Elsa, and Colleen

Ok, now for some random stuff that I just have pictures of and think is interesting. First up we have the Jedi. The traditional dress of Moroccan men looks like this:

Also, Morocco uses different currency. It's called the Diram and one USD is worth about 8 diram. A Euro is worth 11 diram, so we were very rich people over there. This is what Dirams looks like:

Ballin'

So, even though I know it breaks your heart, we have to leave Morocco now because we have class on Monday. We left via Ceuta, which is a Spanish city on the coast of North Africa. You must go through border control and passpost checks and all that fun stuff in order to enter the city. We were originally worried because the guards at the border weren't letting many people pass. When we got up there they let all 14 of us through with no problem once they saw our US passports. Most important thing I learned while I was in Morocco: I'm not proud to be American, but I'm really glad that I am.

This is what Ceuta looks like. Yes, this is a billboard but we couldn't really snap pictures while we were being processed through security.

That's the rock of Gibraltar. We could see it better going from Ceuta to Algeciras than from Algeciras to Tangiers.

For daddy: They have wind power in Morocco

So thanks for bearing with me through 4 pages of Morocco. I will update you on my further travels when I have time. This week is semana santa so we don't have any classes, which means that i'll be doing alot of travelling. On Sunday I go to Nerja, on Wednesday to Marbella, and on Thursday to Sardinia! Three beaches, one week. Wish me luck!

Hasta luego!

Sara

Bad Blogger (Morocco, part 3)

Dear Public: I know I have been a very bad blogger lately. Adjusting to life abroad finally caught up with me and I just needed to get all my stuff in order, which took alot longer than I thought it would. But now, for better or for worse, i'm back! I shall finish out Morocco for you and work on getting Sevilla, Malaga, and Florence up for you before I go to Sardinia for Semana Santa. No promises, just high hopes.

 So where were we? I believe we had not quite left Rabat. I know this because I haven't posted the 39934587 pictures that I have of the gardens yet. What gardens, you ask? Some royal gardens, to begin with, and some roman ruins to end with! The first section of the garden is your typical stone-path, honey-bee, don't-step-on-the-grass type place:

And after that it gets interesting. This is one of the only parts of Rabat where they preserve ruins from their roman era. The roman empire was just so freakin' big that it reached into Africa and they set up colonies in this area. It's obviously been several hundred years since then, so the ruins are...pretty ruinous, but they're still beautiful and much older than anything in the US:

This is what you see first, coming out of the lovely garden paths

Yes, that's a tree...or it was

This is the inside of the ruins of the mosque. Even though the territory was roman, the inhabitants were still muslim and the empire didn't have enough resources to change that, so naturally they had a mosque in the city.

The tower of said mosque

I wish someone had told me these were graves before I stepped on the little one...

They don't like you to climb the rocks but...

The old city wall. This picture was taken from the ground, right where the last one was, because I'm too lazy to hike up there and get a closer one

...or am I?

Yes, i know it looks like the first one but i liked them both, ok?

In the Islamic tradition, storks are a sign of good luck/prosperity. This must be literally the luckiest site in the world because the storks were all over it. The trees and the tower of the old mosque were full of nests:

creepy

As usual, I have saved the best for last. In these particular gardens there is a tradition that revolves around an eel of fertility. No, there were no typos there: eel of fertility. Bear with me, because I literally couldn't make this up if I tried. Said eel lives in a little, tiny pond in the back corner of the gardens. The pond is surrounded by cats and guarded by an old man who only speaks arabic. What you must do is buy a hard-boiled egg from this man (don't worry, they're already peeled). You must then break it open and feed the yolk to your favorite cats. Then, you go to the pond and wait for the eel to come out. When it does, you throw your egg in to see if he will eat it. If your egg is eaten, you're going to get pregnant. Now, to prove that I'm not lying, I have pictoral evidence:

The pond, complete with eel

The old man (also our guide Colleen, Kathy, and Elsa)

Kitty!

obviously my favorite kitty. He got most of my yolk :)



I'm sorry to drag you away from the fascinating fertility eel, but we really must get moving. We have to see the most beautiful building in the world before it gets dark. The most beautiful building in the world happens to be a mausoleum, specifically the Mausoleum of King Mohammed V. Every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling is covered in decoration, all hand-carved in gold or cut from tile. There's not much that I can say that pictures can't say better, so here you go!

Each door (there are 4) is guarded by a guard. You can tell they're nice people, they just aren't allowed to show it.

This is it from a distance

There's a balcony running around the top, which is the only part tourists are allowed on, so this is looking down from there.

The middle of the ceiling

Again, because it's beautiful

The entire perimeter of the lower room is lined with Moroccan flags

One of the doors, from the inside

Margaret and me in front of the door



So that rounded out day 2 and we stayed with the families for one more night, hitting the road at about 7am the nest morning. We drove about 2 hours up a mountain and then stopped for breakfast, which comes with the most delicious tea I've ever had (pictured below). It includes a whole mint plant with a little bit of lemon and loooots of sugar.

So after that little up of heaven, we continued an hour to a remote village in the middle of nowhere. "Village" is definitely not the right word for it, it was more like half of a hamlet, or a hermitage site. A grand total of about 35 people (which means maybe 6 houses) lived within about 2 miles of each other on one little dirt road. Each family had a farm-like thing where they grew fruit and vegetables and kept cows, chickens, and donkeys. We met a family who lived in a mud-brick house (which is a surprisingly nice building material). There was a father figure and a relatively young wife (maybe 30). They had 6 children (from 2 to 8) and two older girls (18 and 22) living with them. They spoke absolutely no english, so we used an interpreter to talk to them about rural life, running a farm, when they were married, education, etc. They cooked us couscous for lunch and then they all took us on a hike to a peak overlooking hundreds of little farms and wild countryside. The kids were ADORABLE. They wanted to climb everything and throw rocks off the top of the cliff. Once they figured out that it was nice to bring people flowers they picked every living thing off the ground and gave it to one of us. Anyway, enough talking; pictures!

This is from the bus on the way up. Those houses are made of wood and scrap sheets of tin.

From the mountaintop

That is indeed a sea of cacti, Lion King style

again from the bus, apparently these didn't load in any order

from the top of the mountain. It's just farmland, but it's one of my favorite pics

bus-side

Again, I think I am about to overload the server with the amount of picture I've posted. There will have to be one more chapter of Morocco before we move on to more recent trips. I promise to be more punctual this time! Hasta luego,

Sara