SO Morocco. Africa, in one word is, well....different. Going to Morocco was probably the biggest culture shock I've experienced to date. Everything about it is so different from anything I've ever seen, both in the US and Europe. A little white Christian girl is definitely out numbered in a male-dominated Islamic nation. That being said, I am so glad I went. Even though I was in Africa for less than 48 hours, I feel like I learned so much in such a short period of time.
Thursday night my friends and I took a night bus from Madrid to Malaga, a city in Southern Spain. We met at the bus station and took a 7-hour bus down there, and I have never prayed for my life more than during that 7-hour time span. Seriously, I thought our driver was going to drive us off the road. He drove probably close to 80 mph on winding roads that were on the edge of a mountain. Thankfully we all arrived in one peace. We slept a little bit at the bus station, and then moved to a cafe across the street for breakfast. We spent the rest of the day seeing the city (we weren't leaving for the ferry for Morocco until 3:30). Malaga has a beautiful beach and we had fun seeing different parts of the city.
This is me in front of the beach, with some of my friends walking towards the water.
The beach also had this really cool sign that said the name of the city, Malaga. We played here for several minutes.After we ate lunch, we walked around this park that is in the middle of the city for awhile and then made our way over to the Cathedral to get on the bus to Morocco! Our guide's name was Vito, and he works for Study-Travel Spain, the group that sponsored this trip. He was really funny :) He was also the one who was responsible for us getting across the boarder to and from Spain, as he took our passports to get stamped each time. We had to learn to trust him very quickly.
We boarded the bus in Malaga and then had a 2 hour ride to get to the ferry, where we would take an hour ferry ride to what is technically Spain in Africa. On the way, we saw the Straight of Gibralter and took some pictures in front of it.
The rock! The actual Straight of Gibralter.
My friends Maria, Emily and I with Gibralter in the background.After we got off the ferry, we had about another hour wait to get through customs and such. It was kind of a weird experience, because you end up in this "no-man" zone that neither Spain nor Morocco owns, and there are all these people just randomly milling around, but we couldn't take any pictures or else we would be arrested. After Vito came back with our passports, a Moroccan police officer came onto our bus to check that everything was stamped. Again, kind of a weird, intimidating, oh-my-god-we-are-definitely-not-in-Europe-or-America-anymore experience. We then finally got to our hotel, ate dinner, and gratefully went to bed.
The next morning we ate breakfast and left for our first city to tour (sadly enough I forget the name. I wrote it down somewhere, I'll try to find it later). It was here that I experienced the biggest culture shock of my entire weekend. It's even hard to explain. Being around such extreme poverty in some cases next to extreme wealth is a very strange sight. Plus, everything is sold in open-air markets. You have vegetables and spices right next to dead chickens for sale. Very weird. So while you're trying to see and take everything in, you still have to be careful and on high alert of where all your belongings are at all times. The entire weekend we had 5 men walking around with our group: Vito, our weekend coordinator; Abdel, the guy who runs Study-Travel Spain; Abdul, our tour guide of the city; and 2 under cover Moroccan policemen who made sure that our group stayed together. It was intense. We ate lunch at a typical Moroccan restaurant and then got on the bus to to to Tangier. Tangier is a bigger, more tourist-y city and I felt a little less culture-shocked when I arrived there. It was also on our way to Tangier where I rode a camel! (note: The change in the above picture is at the request of my mother. I though you'd appreciate that, mom) :) Abdul then took us to see the point where the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea meet.
Beautiful, yes? I think so :)We then got on our bus again and headed back to the hotel, ate dinner and went to bed. I was pretty wiped from our entire day.
Sunday took us to the city of ChefChauen, located literally in the middle of the mountains. We had another tour guide and other Moroccan police men following us around again. This city was beautiful, too. Every house was "chalk-washed" in this blue chalk-paint that made the city gorgeous. Unfortunately our tour guide spoke really softly so I don't remember a whole lot of what he said. But here are pictures to show
The city of Chef-Chauen! You can see the blue chalk-wash through the trees.
This picture is just for fun, Coca-Cola written in Arabic :)After Chef-Chauen, we boarded our bus and headed back to the ferry. After we got back into Spain, we headed to the bus station and started the long 7-hour ride back to Madrid (although we had a much smoother trip this time around, thankfully). I didn't get back to my señora's house until 7am! All in all, it was a great trip, but I'm definitely glad to be "home" :)
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