España: Morocco 2

Our entire group at a rest stop on the way to Chef Chaouen.

nice view

So our first day of touring was in Chef Chaouen. We had to get up and leave at 6:45am! So much for getting to sleep in on the weekends. Amihna took us all around the city, where all the houses are painted light blue.

tower for calling prayer

It was a really beautiful city but very confusing to navigate. We saw tons of mosques, and the tower where they call everyone to pray five times a day, though we only heard it once. Not everyone was dressed in Muslim coverings but most were. Interestingly, even young people there seemed very unhealthy and sickly. They all had wrinkles, no teeth, or problems walking and it was such a shock to see that as the majority since they don’t have the healthcare we get in the US. We saw women taking their clothes to wash in the stream that was running off the mountains and then hanging them on the trees to dry. lovely view of women doing laundry

We learned that the fountains (aka water faucets) in the streets were a place to socialize and we saw a Moroccan bakery that makes bread for all the families. Also, a woman that’s a good cook is an “unforgettable treasure.” I guess I wouldn’t do so well in Morocco.. lol. All the stores, businesses, etc were literally about the size of a walk-in closet. I have no idea how they do it. The clothing shops were a man sitting in a closet room with a sewing machine and surrounded by clothes. Talk about claustrophobic.. Our guide told us that the hand sewn garments take up to four days to make. The houses are somehow packed into the walls of the city but Aminha said they are big inside. We also passed a school where the teacher said a phrase from the Koran and we heard all the kids yell it back to her over and over. Amihna told us that that’s how they teach the kids, just make them blindly repeat pieces of information with no idea of what it means.

Pottery store..

Arabic writing
Moroccans playing a violin like a cello for money

The shops throughout the streets reminded me of the marketplace in the movie Aladdin, how people pass by and the vendors say hey, come look at my store! I have jewelry! You don’t like jewelry? I have pistachios! I have pottery! I give you good price! You literally cannot even look at something or touch something without them swarming you and saying, you want that? It’s very, very nice. I give it to you for good price. And I expected that from stores, but even restaurants have people standing outside saying, come sit down! Come sit down! Try some of our food! And…. Somehow, everyone in Morocco speaks about twenty languages so when you walk into the store, they just try all of them out on you until they find the right one. They just say, Salaam, Hola, Hi, Bonjour all at once so they have mostly everyone covered. We also got.. hey you want some….Moroccan boyfriend? .. umm..how bout No! lol

goat cheese

nuts and grains

woven baskets

For lunch, we went to an awesome restaurant that also had amazing food. All of the places we went inside were so intricately decorated as you can see.. One of our tour guides said that we could spend the whole day just taking pictures of the doors there and he was right!

decorated doors!

Natalie, Arturo, y yo <3 Penn Staters <3

Around 1pm our tour guides took us to the city square where there were a ton of streets with shops surrounding the area. They said just go down one street and come back and then go down the next street so you don’t get lost because all the streets curve and twist around and never lead back to the same place. 11 dirhams is equal to 1 euro so things were a lot cheaper there. The problem was that you had to bargain for everything you wanted to buy and there was no set price. I definitely got ripped off because I’m not good at being mean, but I paid about as much for things as I would at home and those people definitely need the money way more than I do.

I did manage to get a henna tattoo when I was there J But it was quite an adventure. I went into a shop that sold henna kits, but I told them I just wanted a tattoo done by someone there and some guy insisted we follow him and these two kids to a lady who does henna. So we are following and following and following and finally get to this lady who does the tattoo. Then after all that, we were lost, and had to tip those kids for leading us to the house! Thank you, here’s a tip for getting me lost. So Natalie and I were panicking until we found our tour guide from earlier and he took us to the square, which actually wasn’t that far away. After the day in Chef Chaouen, we returned to the hotel for dinner and watched the USA world cup game and hung out in the lounge for the night.

Dinner music..