Two continents, one birthday: MOROCCO

October has been ridiculously busy. We voyaged to AFRICA this past weekend: Marrakech, Morocco to be exact. It was incredible, and definitely a trip worth doing.


Since our flight left at 6:25 am Friday, our friends Stacy and Heather and I got to the Madrid airport at approximately 1 am because the Madrid metro closes for the night at 1:30. We had some delirious conversations until Hilary and Felicia arrived a few hours later in a taxi (they were smart and well rested. and not so cheap.). Our flight went smoothly, despite being so early, and we landed in Morocco at about 6:40 am (2 hour flight- 2 hour time difference= 0 time technically spent on plane?). When we got there, we took a taxi from the airport to our hostel. This caused a little bit of confusion because we knew there were "big taxis" and "small taxis," and we thought the 5 of us would need to take a "big taxi," but a "big taxi" turned out to be the size of a small, normal, 5 seater car. I am still wondering how big a "small taxi" is. The driver was nice and put on his American girl mix, so we listened to Moroccan remixes of Mambo #5 and Genie in a Bottle on the way. 


The taxi driver dropped us off in a small parking lot and found some man to lead us to our hostel. We were staying in the old part of the city, so many of the streets were too narrow for cars. There are also no street signs, which, combined with the narrow, twisty streets, turned the city into a labyrinth. A lot of men volunteer to be guides for confused tourists and will lead you where you need to go for a price, like this man did. We followed him on a 5 minute walk to our hostel, which turned out to be awesome. Even though we arrived at about 8 am and check-in was technically not supposed to start until 12, they let us in, offered us tea, gave us a map, and eventually ended up letting us into our room anyway.

inside of our hostel. very bright!

enjoying our room

terrace lounge. One of the two hostel bathrooms was also on the terrace. I liked showering partially outside.

We decided we didn't want to waste the daylight sleeping, so we headed out immediately to explore the city. This was fairly hard, considering it was a labyrinth, but we managed to find the main plaza and the souk (GIANT marketplace) pretty easily. We spent the rest of the afternoon mostly walking around the souk. By about 3 or 4 pm, we couldn't handle the sleep deprivation anymore and tried to go back to the hostel to take a nap before dinner, but we could not find the right street for at least 30 minutes. After that we were very wary about getting lost for the rest of the weekend.

All the streets mostly look like this. Very old, very narrow.

SOUK (marketplace). Imagine an endless maze of streets looking like this filled with bags, clothes, jewelry, spices, etc.

Main plaza. Very big, open space. There were some snake charmers and guys with pet monkeys on leashes begging for money, but I think they were mosly trying to attract dumb tourists.

All the shopkeepers (all men) spoke a little bit of English, and they would unfailingly call out bizarre things to us as we walked by to get our attention to buy things. They got more and more ridiculous. Some examples/favorites:

-CHICKS! Come look!

-Beautiful girls. I like you. Come back now.

-Chillax, lady, you're in Africa, not Baghdad.

-Hey LOOK! (*points to small lizard on his leg*) FISH AND CHIPS!

We all ended up buying a few things, including some very cool (and very cheap!) leather bags. This was my first experince bargaining, and my friends all laughed at me because I was so excited to lower the price by the equivalent of about 5 euros that I conceded right away very happily. The shop owner kept eagerly pulling out a lighter and trying to light the bags on fire to demonstrate that they are real leather. I learned that real leahter does not catch fire, after being slightly alarmed by the lighter at first.

in the hostel with our new bags. They smell like cow.

We also visited a palace. It was pretty, but fairly small, and might have been built in the 1870s, which is not very impressive. None of the signs were in English and all the rooms were empty, so we didn't learn anything about it, although it was nice to see.

palace courtyard

Muslim palaces have the best ceilings

We didn't do anything else specific in Marrakech because all the other touristy places were longish walks away, and the lack of street signs was too confusing for us. We spent some time looking for a museum, but gave up after a while and decided to enjoy the center of the city. (We were only there for Friday and Saturday.)  We also couldn't leave the hostel after about 7 pm because the sun went down by 6:30 and we were told it wasn't the best idea for us to be out alone after dark. So we had fun hanging out in the hostel sharing crazy family/childhood stories and playing the dating game. This gave us a much-needed opportunity to catch up on sleep.

We also had the opportunity to enjoy delicious Moroccan food. We were very careful about drinking the water and luckily none of us got sick. One of the most common meals we ate was variations of cous cous. very yummy. We also tried tanjine, a way to cook meat that was kind of similar to a stew. also very good. My favorite was chicken pastilla, which was kind of like a sweet version of a pot pie with almonds and cinnamon.

pastilla

chicken tanjine

Moroccan mint tea- our new absolute favorite drink. so sweet. so delicious. so comforting. need to find a way to replicate this in the US.

On a restaurant terrace overlooking the plaza after Saturday's dinner. Kudos to Stacy for the excellent camera work.

Sunday was MY 20TH BIRTHDAY. Unfortunately we had to wake up at 3:30 am for another early flight out. One of the guys who works at the hostel, Ali, was nice enough to walk us out to the parking lot to catch our taxi at 4 am. After another smooth flight back to Madrid, I spent the rest of my birthday afternoon studying for a final and frantically writing a paper to accompany it (my human rights mini course ended- THANK GOD...it was an awful experience), with a quick ice cream break. We are going to have extra birthday celebrations this weekend, when we're all in Madrid and Greg, Julia, and Liz are visiting!

In other recent news, today was the first day of my volunteer job. It's at an afterschool program for kids with "bajos recursos" (literally low resources...I'm bad at eloquently translating things back into English). Most of them are immigrants from Central/South America. The kids in my class are all between 6 and 8. So cute. I was really proud that I set this up for myself and had enough courage not to run away at the last minute. But I am so excited to be working and in a community again instead of spending more useless hours on the Carlos III campus. Overall I understood much less of what the kids said than I thought I would, although I can understand the teachers fine. (The kids have such squeaky high-pitched voices and asked me lots of rapid-fire style questions.) Some humorous miscommunications:

-One girl asked me a question that I didn't understand, so I just responded with "I don't know," and then she asked me, "Why didn't your parents ever tell you?" This led to a confusing conversation, and I figured out that she originally asked me where I am from. fail.

-I was convinced that one boy's name was Alice for about 2 hours, and was very confused by this, but eventually realized that it was Alex.

-One girl needed help with subtraction, and I learned that it is REALLY HARD to explain math in Spanish. This is probably a combination of my liberal arts education not preparing me adequately for simple math as well as me failing at Spanish. I need to brush up on my Spanish math terms before next Tuesday. I don't even know how to say subtraction.

-I am embarrassingly bad at commands in Spanish. I completely blanked and didn't know how to say: "Stop doing that- it's not safe," so instead I just let some kids jump on tables for a little while. oops. They were fine.

Despite all this, I had a really fun time and was overall successful at my first day. At the end I'm pretty sure one of the teachers told me I did a phenomenal job, although, for all I know, my brain could have just been filling in the Spanish words I wanted to hear. I played escondite (hide and seek) and helped make vampire costumes for their Halloween party on Friday. It was a fun time. I'm going every Tuesday from 3:30-7.

Things with my host family are still going well too. My host mom and I bonded tonight over loving peas. I had a delicious peas and chorizo dish for dinner (as well as a whole other plate of Argentinian empanadas and french fries...still being overfed). My host brother left this weekend to go back home to Mexico. He lives somewhere in Yucatan, but has been visiting Madrid for the past two months. He talked to me the most, so it's kind of sad to have him gone, but since he left my host mom has been extra friendly and talkative. I'm very excited because GREG COMES TOMORROW and this is obviously going to be a great weekend. Claro.

Hasta la vista,

Raquel