Morocco

By the way, I'm not dead... In case you were worried. It's been a long time since I've written anything here and obviously a lot has happened since then. I spent my spring break ("Semana Santa," Holy Week, it's called here) traveling throughout Spain with friends. We saw Madrid, Segovia, Toledo, Salamanca, Barcelona and Valencia at the rate of about 1-ish cities per day. It was intense. But I'll save that for another post. I promise.

Now I want to talk about where I went last weekend while it's still semi-fresh. I left with a group of about 15 people from my program for Gibraltar last Friday. Gibraltar's a really strange place. It's a big rock in British territory at the tip of the Iberian peninsula, at something like 18 km from Africa. You have to walk across a live runway to get there. And for some reason there are monkeys there. Legend apparently says that as long the monkeys are there the British will be there. Which was apparently a big issue during WWII when there was minimal monkey mating. Churchill had made a big fuss about it. They speak a weird mix of Spanish and English. And all the architecture is British and seems really out of place in southern Spain. But, I got my first view of Africa (see picture, above left, in the distance), and had some authentically mediocre pub fare.

On Saturday we left for Tangier by ferry. It was really cool being able to see Europe and Africa at the same time. The intense waves and people vomiting around me, however, were not as cool. We spent little time in Tangier, but enough to head to a local market and a women's center to talk to some local students. It was really cool to hear Arabic around us and listen to the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosques. Later we headed towards a small town on the Atlantic coast called Asilah. But first our guide surprised us with a camel ride. After a long day, we made our way to Rabat, capital of Morocco.

Rabat was my favorite part of the trip. We stayed with Moroccan families and ate several meals with them. We also went to a Hammam, which is an Arab bath. There were three rooms with three different temperatures. It was basically like a chain of steam rooms. We were able to walk through the city with students, which was amazing. I met a kid named Amine who was a police officer in Marrakesh. He spoke English almost better than me and said he only had taken six months of classes and the rest he had learned from American music and movies. Moroccans have a ridiculous talent for language. It's unbelievable. French and Arabic are everywhere. In the north they speak Spanish as well. And every shop-owner seemed to speak English.

Next we headed to the Rif mountains, famous for their hashish, (pretty sure this is where the term "reefer" comes from). We stopped in a small village and ate couscous with a very traditional farming family and enjoyed amazing mountain views from their backyard. Then we made our way to the town of Chefchaouen, which was really cool because almost all of the houses were painted blue, but seemed a little touristy.

The last day of our trip, we crossed the border from Morocco to Ceuta, which is a Spanish territory in North Africa. The border crossing was insane and disorganized. Apparently a lot of Moroccans cross the border daily, buy Spanish products and then sell them in Morocco. And the government turns a blind eye because it's one of the only means of living for the very poor. When we were there, there was an enormous mass of Moroccans crossing back home with border police beating and chasing them back into Morocco. Our guide told us to flash our American passports to the Moroccan border police, and they let us go ahead of the crowd. It felt really uncomfortable. We caught a ferry from Ceuta back to Spain.

I really liked Morocco, and there is so much that happened that I don't have time/space to write about. And I was only there four days. I would highly recommend going there if you ever get the chance. It's a really interesting place. It's African and Arab, with a lot of French and Spanish influence thrown in there. It's a very poor country, but one of the richest in Africa. We drove by a lot of shanty towns. But the people there are probably the nicest people I have ever met. People would approach in the street, ask us where we from just to say "Welcome to Morocco."I can't wait to go back and explore some more.