After hearing the great news that my final paper for Current Spain is not due until after Christmas, I am taking the time to fully update my blog- mainly with trips that I´ve been on.
Tina, a friend from Scotland is addicted to finding cheap plane tickets, so we were so fortunate as to find round-trip tickets to Marrakesh, Morocco for 17,50€! We spent three nights in this city in central Morocco in the North of Africa, and it was incredible.
The appearance of the city in regards to the buildings and such is supposed to be close to that in the south of Spain, but I don´t know first-hand. All I can try my best to do is describe the different world that we flew into.
First of all, it was incredibly dry- not really surprising there- but I´m not kidding, my entire body felt as if it were shriveling up. That plus the fact that you couldn´t drink the water made for a very interesting experience.
The first day that we arrived in Marrakesh we spent walking around the city and seeing what we could. It´s incredible to just wander through the incredibly small streets filled with people and mopeds. The streets are filled with vendors selling anything and everything for an extreme profit (you must bargain: offer less than half and take half price). The streets are filled with the smells of spices and food- overpowering and incredible. The main square was not far from our hostel and there you could find tons of fruits and nuts as well as people shining shoes, charming snakes, and allowing people to take pictures with their monkeys. *I was convinced that the monkeys were going to steal my money* All-in- all the general appearance was a lot like Aladdin for me (sounds ridiculous, but seriously- that´s what I thought).
Being as the country is Muslim, you can always hear the Muzim from the Minarets calling for the people to stop and pray- this occurred, obviously, five times a day. It was really quite eerie especially during the night. What´s more is that on the second day when we took an excursion out of the city to the Atlas Mountains, and we weren´t around any big cities, Muzims could always be heard doing the prayer call: the resonance in the mountains of the Salat(the 5 prayer calls) was awe inspiring.
The second day, as I just mentioned, we paid 45€ and got in a bus with a group of 7 people from the US Air Force and went for an excursion that included the following: tour of a Berber house (Berbers are an indigenous people from that region) and breakfast there, a camel ride, a hike up the Atlas Mountains to a small Waterfall, finalized by lunch in a restaurant situated in the mountains- it was an incredible day. The Berber house was one of the less interesting events of the day because it was full of tourists, but the breakfast was great. The camel ride was exactly what I hoped it would be- a ton of fun (we won´t go into the fact that camel riding in the Moroccan sun should not be done without long pants). The hike was a blast. The waterfall was interesting, but not comparable to the view from those heights. We had to go slower on the way down because of our members gets bad vertigo, and we were high up. The day was filled with people crossing things off their list of things to do in a lifetime.
The third day everything was closed because that day there was the Festival of the Sacrifice: every family previously bought a sheep and on this day the families got together, sacrificed, and ate the sheep. The entire old city was filled with the smoke of burning sheep heads and legs. In order to get out of the smog of burning sheep we took a walk to the new part of Marrakesh which is literally the polar opposite of the old part. The new city is what you would expect from any large city in the world. We did a lot of walking and just looking around that day. The day was topped off with a handsome cab ride back to the Mosque and from there, we walked to the hostal.
This was one of the more influential trips I´ve been on simply because I felt like I accomplished so much in this trip: I´d seen and done things I´ve never seen or done before- the trip was unforgettable.
"Realize that from the start, every activity that comprises the journey has value and the ability to teach you something."
Bill Toomey
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