We took a 30 min ferry from Taifa, Spain to Tanger, Morocco and then got on our bus (which came on the boat!) and there we met our Moroccan tour guide, Amihna. She taught us how to say hello- Salaam Malikum and the response- Malikum Salaam, which means hi, praise God. We also learned lets go!- ya la, and thank you- Shukran… which, if you say it without the “sh,” as Sukran.. it means drunk.. So ya gotta be careful with that.. haha. And, we learned the word for ok- Waha. As much as I didn’t care about Arabic before, I don’t know why everytime I hear a new language I immediately feel like I want to learn it. I should have majored in World Languages.. Before I left for Spain, I had decided I wanted to learn French, then in Portugal, I thought I might add Portuguese to my list, and then Arabic.. There is no way I can learn all those when I can barely speak Spanish here..lol. Amihna also gave us a little history on the towns we would be seeing during our stay and kept emphasizing where the Jews lived in relation to where the Muslims lived. During our tours she kept saying, now remember, this is the Jewish part of town. A little strange I thought..
On the way to the hotel all you could see were clusters of white houses, fields, and what looked like construction sites. I assumed we were in the middle of nowhere, but then every so often we’d see people walking through the fields by themselves, meeting in circles at random places, or just laying down and sleeping. I kept thinking..where are these people coming from? It was like Mamma Mia, when the Greeks come swimming out of the ocean during a song. We saw tons of cattle roaming around, andddd CAMELS! In the wild! Haha Also, the construction sites, which were not blocked off in any way, had people in work clothes just walking through them as if it were a main road that just happened to be a big pile of dirt. Another thing that was a big eye opener, was watching workmen building sidewalks or stone walls by hand. They were just taking chisels and sledgehammers and breaking off pieces of big rocks to stack into a wall. It was crazy. No machine-cut tiles, to paving trucks, no backhoes digging up the ground, just men with tools. Pretty impressive..
When we arrived at the hotel, there was a band playing African music that followed us into the dining room, where we sat down for our first Moroccan meal. I was a little nervous about what the food might be like but it was absolutely Amazing! I would eat it over Mercedes’ cooking any day! Natalie and I looked like we had never eaten before because it was like we were in heaven actually eating something delicious. All of our meals were three courses, so to start we got a salad and then they brought a huge bowl of the main dish, which was shared among the entire table. It was basically a mixture of things that you would probably never think to put in a bowl together. The base was couscous with chicken, then there was squash, raisins, carrots, sweet potatoes, almonds, peppers, etc. It had a really sweet taste, almost like we were having dessert but you could taste the spices of the peppers too. For desert we had flan <3>
After dinner, we went straight to bed because we were all so exhausted from the drive, and interestingly enough, the beds in Morocco are way more comfortable than in Spain. It was a four star hotel with fancy decorations and a huge swimming pool, but four stars in Morocco still means- cockroaches, spiders, bed bugs, and of course, an abundance of stray cats. I keep seeing all these cats and immediately thinking.. Ooh! Cat! I need to pet it! But then I have to stop and remember that they might have diseases and I failed to get my hep A shot before leaving America, lol. Thankfully, our hotel DID have toilet paper… even though Natalie and I bought SIX rolls of it since that was the smallest quantity you can buy. We could not, however, drink the water there so we had to use bottled water to brush our teeth. Despite all the strange differences in Morocco, I kind of thought it was easier to adapt to than Europe, only because Everything is different and I expected everything to be completely different. In Europe, you kind of expect everything to be pretty similar, and then there are just little differences that seem annoying and inconvenient. However, I definitely wouldn’t be able to live in Morocco for much longer than we did.
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