Morocco

We docked in Casablanca, which was a much more industrial port than Cadiz was in Spain. It looked pretty gross. We were also there one day late because our ship couldn’t get fuel on time because of rough waters so everyone was really anxious to get off the ship. (side note – watching the ship try to get fuel was the WEIRDEST thing! We didn’t realize it got the fuel from another ship so there were about 5 of us in someone’s room with a window and the conversation went something like “wow that boat is really close” “wow that boat is REALLY close” “uhhh if that boat doesn’t change direction soon it will probably hit us” “ummm really I think it’s gonna hit us” “oh my god that buoy is scraping against us!” Finally I realized that maybe this was supposed to be happening and that could be where we got our fuel from…but it was a pretty intense 5-10 mins until we made that discovery) We got right on our tour bus and immediately noticed how crazy everyone in Morocco drives. They have lanes but they might as well not have them because no one uses them. Crosswalks also don’t mean anything there. People walked whenever they felt like it but I guess it was easy for cars to avoid them since no one uses the lanes. Our bus made tighter turns than I can make in my car. The drive to Marrakech was about 3 hours so about an hour into it we stopped at a rest stop. One of the tour guides from another bus had to help 3 of us order our coffee and that was probably the first situation where I was in a place where I couldn’t even begin to guess the language. In Spain, even when a person spoke no English, I could use some minor Spanish or just point and stuff to get the point across. Not knowing the language plus the fact that all I had at the time were American dollars made a simple coffee wayyy harder than it should have been. But, the tour guide helped us and the coffee was bangin…not AS good as café con leche in Spain, but still pretty good. On the next 2 hours of the trip, we drove through beautiful rolling green hills. I don’t know if I have ever seen hills so green, which was really unexpected in Morocco. I expected cities or desert, but our tour guide explained that even though 30% of the country is the Sahara, the Atlas Mountains separate other parts of the country from the desert and that farming and agriculture are actually a huge part of Morocco and make up about 60% of the economy. There were a ton of sheep and sheep farmers and small houses and it looked like something out of a book. Later the mountains came into view which made everything even nicer looking. Because I knew Marrakech was a major city in Morocco and that it used to be its capital, I assumed that all the scenery would end when we started getting closer to the city but Marrakech really came out of nowhere. We got off the bus and I have NEVER experienced such a culture shock. It’s really impossible to describe what the scene looked like. Marrakech is divided into 2 parts, the “medina” which is enclosed in walls and is like old nasty authentic Marrakech and the “newtown” which looks more like a typical city except instead of skyscrapers and typical steel-colored or brick buildings everything is red and adobe. First we went to the medina and walked through the souks (probably spelled wrong) which are the small market-like shops. I look a ton of pictures that I won’t be able to post and I took a video or two while I was walking so that I could maybe show people something of what I was seeing because I really can’t describe it. It was total chaos but even though I felt very alert and pretty uncomfortable I loved it. It was like a scary real-life Aladdin movie. Besides the shops they had other random things like a “public bakery.” People would bring their bread dough to this building with ovens in it and they would bake their bread and let it cool there and then take it home. After we walked through the souks we went to a famous square (I can’t remember the name and can’t access google to find it haha) which was even crazier. It was full of snake charmers and people with monkeys and all kinds of people that wanted your money. After the square, we went to lunch at a Moroccan restaurant where Semester at Sea had preordered our meals for us and I was surprised that I actually really liked the food. By the end of the trip I was sick of it because it was kind of the same thing over and over, and I don’t think I’d ever seek Moroccan food out again, but for the time I liked it. After lunch, we had a tour of an old vizier’s palace. It didn’t look like what I would expect a palace to look like but it was cool to see. After the palace we went to some tombs. When I heard we were going to tombs I expected to be going underground but they were actually kind of in the ground so that was weird. Our guide took us to this supposedly famous indoor market. The prices were fixed so it sucked that you couldn’t barter at all since that’s something Marrakech is famous for, but it was cool to see and convenient that so many things were in one place. I got a few things but I thought we would have more time to shop for cheaper, which we ended up not doing much of, so looking back I wish I had gotten more. We went back to the square because it was getting dark outside and it gets even crazier at night. All of these people were selling food that looked soooo good. I wanted to try some so bad but everyone made Moroccan food sound so dangerous that I was afraid to. We went and checked in to the hotel and had dinner. Dinner was buffet style so it wasn’t as good as lunch but it was still decent. After dinner Nicky and I wandered around the hotel for a little bit and realized you could go to this rooftop place so we saw the city lit up at night which was cool. On our way back down we got a drink at the hotel bar and ran into some people who were as bored as we were so we played card games with them…we turned spoons into straws haha…and after a little we were all exhausted. I was in bed by 11:30.
The next day we got up early and went to the outskirts of Marrakech where people live in adobe mud houses. Our itinerary said we were playing “Olympic games” but it was raining outside and really muddy and NO ONE felt like “playing games” so no one was all that excited. But, when we got there, they had all of these ATVs to ride together. They gave us some rain suits so we all looked so funny. The rain and the mud made it even more fun to ride the 4-wheelers. We rode through villages and when the kids would see you they would come up and give you high-5’s as you passed. We rode for awhile and then stopped so everyone could switch drivers if they wanted. I let Nicky drive first so I got on 2nd and thankfully nobody died. Haha I haven’t driven a 4-wheeler in years so I thought it would go pretty badly but it was fine. We stopped at a Moroccan family’s house and we sat in their receiving room and they gave us mint tea (mint tea is famous there and it tastes soooo good) and this weird flat bread. I used the bathroom there and it was literally a hole in the ground with some ceramic type stuff to funnel your pee into it. It also had these weird foot indents to put your feet in. We were all sooo muddy from 4-wheeling but when we left it had stopped raining. I let Nicky drive again so I could take pictures because my camera had more battery. We drove through fields and farms and saw the mountains – it was soo nice. After that was done we ate at another Moroccan restaurant. After lunch we went to a place to ride camels which was so funny. When we first got there they wrapped our heads in cloth for us. When we got there they told us we could choose whether to ride by ourselves or together. A lot of people wanted to go by themselves, including me, but by the time they got to the last group of us and the last group of camels, they asked if people would go together because the rest of the camels were sick or pregnant and they didn’t want to use them so Nicky and I ended up riding together. We got the perfect camel for us though; he was a fatass. He was always stopping to eat. At one point he bent over to eat grass and I thought at least one of us was going to fall off. The camels took us to another Moroccan house and we sat in their room, but this time it was on cushions on the floor so it felt even more authentic. They gave us more mint tea and weird snacks and the camel guides played us music. We took the camels back to the bus and then some of us wanted to go with our tour guide to this “famous” “pharmacy” in Marrakech. It was the WEIRDEST “pharmacy” I have ever been to. It looked like a creepy science lab; there were things in jars all over the place. They gave us this big demonstration of all their products. I bought a few things but some people bought A LOT of things. They told us they were discounting it for us because we are students, which I thought was a bunch of bullshit, but when we got back on the ship Nicky’s roommate had bought something similar somewhere else for way more expensive so I guess we really did get deals. When we got back to the hotel we ate dinner and then 10 or 11 of us crammed into a minivan taxi and went to a “hookah bar” which was really more like a weird bar/restaurant for this girl Kaeleigh’s 21st birthday. You could tell the bar really catered to tourists because drinking isn’t a huge thing in Morocco. 5 or 6 of us had a couple of tequila shots and when we went up to get another, they told us they were out of tequila. We thought that was hilarious that we literally cleaned them out of tequila. We stayed out for awhile and then came back and hung out in two girls’ hotel room and then around 3 we all went to bed. The next day we drove back to Casablanca and had lunch at an American café – we were kind of over Moroccan food by that time. We got back on the ship, they confiscated a spice we got from the pharmacy which was ridiculous, and now here we are for 9 straight days – I am NOT excited.
I think Nicky’s roommate at the hotel put it best when he said “I like Morocco better because, even though I love Spain, I could have done all that stuff in the USA. This stuff I wouldn’t be doing anywhere but here.” He was definitely right. This was the first country where it really hit me what I’m doing this semester, because most of what I saw was sooo poor. Morocco was amazing but in a totally different way than Spain. Spain was an all-around good time but Morocco was an experience.

I want to post a few pictures but the internet is really shitty about it and when I tried to do it it wouldn’t work and I don’t want to use unnecessary minutes so I’ll just try to do it later.