I'm back. :)

WOW, how time has passed. I can't believe my last blog post was in April. Time really has flown by. I am going to try to catch up on everything, including my trips! I'll start with Morocco.

I was so stoked to go to Africa...a whole other continent and new place! 3 other girls and I went with a tour guide group called We Love Spain because we knew Morocco isn't the type of place you just wander around by yourself. It turned out to be a very interesting experience to say the least.

We rode to the border of Spain on a bus, then we took a ferry (which is really cool by the way) to Ceuta, which is in Africa but still considered Spanish property, and then we arrived at the Moroccan border. Kellsey and I had a minor freak-out session as the bus stopped and our tour guide Mohammad took all of our passports and walked off the bus to "take them to the officials." While he was gone we were comforted by children climbing and jumping over the border fence with black bags, large Muslim men standing around with guns, and black packages being transferred from one car to another. Thank the Lord after a good 15 min our dear friend Mohammad came back with our passports and we were off to our first stop, feeling a little unsure about Morocco.

It was pretty reasonably cheap for us to go through the tour guide company, and then we realized why. Almost everywhere they took us to on the trip was a sales pitch...a sketchy sales pitch. Over the course of the whole trip, we went to 2 rug stores, a "pharmacy," and some markets. It was still interesting because those places did give us a sense of the culture...and we met some pretty interesting people in the process, like our tour guide, Mohammad. He spoke English, Spanish and Arab and liked to joke around a lot...but sometimes too much. For example, he hid my friends passport at the border of Morocco and said he lost it....yeah not so funny at the time. And he also had apparently hired extra people to keep an eye on us, but didn't tell us...so we just thought we were being followed by some stray Moroccan men. Thanks, Mo.


Anyway, our first stop, Tetuan, was really just a dirty, unique looking town with lots of markets and signs with Arab writing. Apparently the King lives there, but they said that about everywhere we went, so who really knows.

First glance at Tetuan:


City center:


Typical:


So after walking through some markets and such we ended up at sales pitch location #1: the pharmacy. We were led into this strange looking spice store and listened while this man wearing a lab jacket tried to sell us saffron, cinnamon, color-changing lipstick, lotion, herbs, and all sorts of random things. At the end of his presentation it was like a big auction where people called out when they wanted to buy something. I only ended up with cinnamon, which turned out to be quite disgusting by the way. Some of the demonstrations were funny, and they let us sample lots of things, but I was kind of wierded out by the looks of the place.



So, onto sales pitch #2: the rug store. They took us all upstairs to this beautiful room where they had like a million rugs ready to show us. The little guy working there would tell us all about a rug and throw it out in the floor unrolled so we could marvel at it. Then, after throwing out at least 20 rugs, he asked us all to take the ones we wanted. He said they couldn't tell us the set prices because they had all the prices listed in some book. So, I picked up a pink blanket just for kicks. They took me back into this dark corner, (I am not exaggerating) and thankfully Kellsey went with me, and the guy took out a little pad of paper. He said he would give me a student discount and quoted me at 180 euros (over $200) for a blanket. I couldn't help laughing in his face. Then, he said "Why you laugh. I like your laugh, but why you laugh. This good price." It was too much to handle. I told him I didn't want it and I left. No one bought anything in that store because the prices were so ridiculous and they were so creepy.
Rug thrower man:











For lunch we went to this really touristy place to eat, but it was actually really cool. It was a pretty building and we ate soup and cous cous. They had a Moroccan band there and many entertainers dressed up in fun costumes.


We stopped in a town called Tangier and looked around, and it looked similar to Tetuan. We also stopped at the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean sea and that was pretty neat. After that went in this Hercules cave and saw the Mediterranean Sea from there. And finally we got to ride some camels!! Mohammad calls them the Moroccan Rolls Royce. haha



The camel ride was pretty short but really fun, and then we were off to the next hotel. At this hotel we encountered 2 very large cockroach friends, who unfortunately I had to conquer so everyone could sleep at night. They were HUGE but I got two glasses out of the bathroom and cupped them both. Seeeee ya, Fernie and Eddy.

On the last day we went to a town called Chefchaouen which is located in the Rif Mountains and means "town between 2 cones." The neat thing about the town is that everything is blue...and mostly Carolina blue! We had this hysterical little tour guide named Achmed who had the voice of Grover and wore a little red hat like Abu from Aladdin. Achmed claimed he was famous in the States and told us that pictures of himself were very valuable. Chefchaouen was very cute and had an excessive amount of cats. We went to a rug store sales pitch there too, bit the people were way less pushy and it was more enjoyable.
Achmed and I:






After exploring blue town, it was finally back to Sevilla!
When we got home we washed all our clothes and anything that had been with us to Morocco. We were really glad that we went and got to experience an African country, but I think if we went back I'd rather go to Casablanca or the Sahara desert or something. Ana said she would never go to Morocco even if you paid her, and thought it was hysterical that we were washing all our clothes to get the smell out. Well that about covers this trip! London's up next!