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So we arrived in Marrakesh on Monday. We had gotten up very early in the morning and had had a dazed flight so we were feeling surprised to find ourselves in the beautiful North Africa sunrise . We got picked up from the airport, which is the most beautiful airport with a big white main hall crisscrossed by glass. We were driven to near our riad and dropped off at the gate were the old city startsand a brother of a cousin of the owner's wife (or something like that) walked us through the little winding streets and on through dark tunnels, across squares, up and around corners until we finally got to our riad.
We got to the riad which was lovely. It had a central living room which actually has no roof and the rest of the riad was built around it so sitting there you felt inside but could look up at the stars. Our guide the wife's brother's cousin, sent us up to our room to put our bags there while he began to make mint tea for us. But all three of us sat down on our beds and ended up falling asleep straight away, a fact he never let us forget.
I slep deeply and when I woke up and couldn't work out what was real and what was a dream. The owner of the riad gave us a map and walked us back through the maze, showing us the trick of following the direction of the street lamps, which at every twist and turn pointed you in the right direction. I still maintain the owner paid the city council to do that, there were too many for it to be a coincidence, but when I asked the owner he just smiled.
We wandered out into the souq, what had been cool tranquil streets earlier that morning had turned into hot humid chaos. Motocycles zoomed through the narrow streets and you had to jump out of the way to avoid them without jumping onto all the shopkeepers who are crammed into the souks.
We came out at Jeema el fna, the main square and 'soul' of Marrakesh. It's huge and full of vendors, beggars, woman painting henna and men with monkeys and snakes. At night it becomes a street theatre venue and Moroccans sit in groups around story tellers and acrobats.
That afternoon we ate lunch (food in Morocco was good, but oddly flavourless) and drank the delicious orange juice that was everywhere (I got about a year's worth of vitamin c in three days). Then we walked to the Saadian tombs which were full of fruit trees andfull intricate wooden carvings and French, lots and lots of French. There were French tourists everywhere in Morocco, hundreds of them, young, old pregnant, carting their children and babies. But they were much nicer and friendlier than in France and for some I reason I could understand them much better.
We walked to an old abandoned palace and sat in it's huge stone courtyard with green gardens set below ground level, then we walked back to Jeema El Fna and sat in between the steaming stalls for dinner.
The next day we walked with a group of girls from the Riad to Jeema el Fna and meet up with a tour van taking us to the Atlas mountains. On the way we stopped at a 'traditional'
berber house where we were made some of the mint tea we had fallen asleep and missed the day before. It was really good and surprisingly sweet. On the way through the house there was a cow sitting grumpily in one of the rooms. Me and Ruben both turned to each other and said at the same time "la vache qui rit!" which shows that great minds think alike and that we need to get better taste in cheese.
We got back in the van and began to become disillusioned with some of our fellow travelers. Most of them seemed nice, but three American girls in Italy began to drive us crazy. I suppose it's not their fault they had valley girl accents, but whining to our guide "Yusef, yusef, can you buy us iceream" (when we are in the middle of the mountains) did seem a bit unnecessary.
But we managed to escape them for a bit when we stopped again and went on separate camel rides ("oh my god, it's a camel"). There was the sweetest baby camel havig a nap in the sun and went up and started stroking her. Her hair (fur?) was so soft and when a little French boy joined me and I said "elle est si douce? Est-ce que c'est le bon mot?" Her laughed at correcting someone so much older than him and told me it was.
We rode our camels for about 15 mins through a pretty but rubbish strewn valley, and Jenny nearly getting knocked off her camel by a tree ("oh, c'est pas grave" said our camel driver when he realized what Jen's screams were about). Then it was back into the van and we drove to a cluster of small buildings climbing up a steep hillside next to the stream running down it. We climbed up, following the stream for about half an hour, some of it getting really steep. When we got to the waterfalls they were pretty but particularly impressive. It was fun watching the American girls (in boots with their handbags) trying to get a jumping photo. "Epic fail" Ruben kept muttering under his breath.
Yusef told us he could take us up higher in the mountains if we wanted and we made an executive decision for the whole tour that we should. Thank goodness we did, it was so beautiful once we got high up and you could see for miles, parts of it were really steep and some Yusefhad to hoist us up with the help of some locals.
Afterwards we were all energized and decided to speak French the whole way back to Marrakesh, which must have annoyed the girls sitting in front of us no end because they were finally quiet for a while, though still enjoyed rolling their eyes to each other.
That night we were exhausted ("we climbed a mountain!") but ventured out to get kebabs and buy pastries from a sweet little old man with a cart in the souq and eat them all on the roof of our riad.
Wednesday was our last day in Morocco. We walked to Jeema El Fna and bargained hard to get a horse and carriage to take us Mederssa ben Youssef, the old Islamic school. We got the horse and carriage most of the way but once we got back to more souqs we had to walk the rest of the way. It was hard to find and a little boy tricked us into going the wrong way for a while but when we found it, it was stunning, intricate woodwork everywhere and a mosaiced courtyard with a pool of water where we sat for ages and people watched peacefully.
We walked back to our Riad for me and Jen to have our hammam. We were not quite sure what this entailed, but we knew it involved a lot of washing, but we had only spoken to people who had done the 'tourist' version. Turns out, ours was not the tourist version. A lovely girl about our age named Fatima took us to the nearby mosque where we went down under it to low lithumid underground rooms. We stripped down to our underwear but Fatima told us we had to take off our bras as well. Jenny and I looked at each other and shrugged, and started undressing some more. "C'est un peu bizarre pour nous!" we told Fatima, laughing. But clearly it isn't for Moroccoan woman we sat for ages, often in separate rooms of the hammam while Fatima washed the other one of us amoung the naked Morocccan women who barely gave us a second glance, despite the fact we obiously had no idea what we were doing. After being soaked, scrubbed, oiled, left to bake and then scrubbed again on nearly every inch of our bodies by Fatima we emerged a few hours later blinking in the sunlight, our skin glowing and with Fatima as probably a friend for life.
We rushed back to the riad to tell Ruben, who thought it was hilarious, and then got our hands henna-ed by one of the owner's cousin's sister's son's girlfriends. We spent out last night bargaining in the souqs. Jenny, who
Between the henna and the hammam we must have been doing well because that night we spent hours in the souqs bargaining and Ruben, who even Moroccans swore was Moroccan, was given a lot of attention for having two foreign girls on his arm (you've got competition Chris!). One of the sales people offered Ruben 50 000 camels for me, but I yelled back 100 000. It must have been too high, because I didn't get sold, but we did have a lot of fun laughing and bargaining with the vendors. Jenni, who had said warily that she didn't know how to bargain before we got to Morocco, turned out to be the best of all, she would convince, cajole, and if all else failed bully them into taking 10 dirham more dirhams off in a mix of English, French and Spanish while Ruben and I stood by and laughed.
The next day we had another really early morning and flew back to Madrid. We spent the next three days there, staying with Jen and Ruben's families. First we stayed with Oscar and Liesly again and on the first day Oscar walked us through the most beautiful park I'd ever seen, if I lived there I would go there everyday I think. We then wandered round some of Madrid, which is a beautiful, open , airy city, completely not what I was expecting after the way the rest of Spain is hyped up so much.
The next day we went to Toledo which is a town about two hours a small town with a lot of history. It's Spain's version, I think of an old renaissance town in France, with a lot of Moorish influence and famous apparently for a long history of Muslims, Jews and Christians living together. It was very pretty but we were constantly thwarted by the opening times of everything so we ended up just wandering rather than going inside anything.
That evening, after missing the quick bus and having to take the very slow slow bus back to Madrid, we were taken night sightseeing by Ruben's cousin (also called Ruben), and the second Ruben's cousin (confused yet?) Nights sightseeing is, I think infinitely better than day sightseeing because everything feels more exciting and there are far more locals around than tourists. We walked through lots of squares, which Europe is so good at, and to the huge Grand Palace and planned how we could break into it and live there.
The next day we said goodbye to Oscar and Liesly and spent the day at Warner Brother's Theme Park going on huge rollercoasters and dodging witches and devils everywhere (it was Halloween). But when it started raining and we got hungry (12euro chicken nuggets just aren't appealing) we went back to Madrid and then out again to the suburb where Ruben's cousin Ruben and his family life. They were absolutely lovely and his mother (the second Ruben's) made us a huge meal and his nephew, a cute clever little boy, showed us all his favourite Justin Bieber songs on youtube and sang along to them.
I had the longest hottest shower I've had in about 5 months (the water in my French flat doesn't heat up properly) and when I came out everyone was in the room me and Jen were sleeping in, talking about me in Spanish. It took me a while to figure it out but apparently Ruben's aunt had thought I was French, which I thought was pretty cool, and had just been told I was actually form New Zealand, which she thought was the coolest thing ever.
We slep for a few hours and then had to wake up for another 4am start. Ruben II drove us to the airport and we flew back to France. When we got to Paris so I was so excited to back in France and to able to talk and celebrated by buying a huge chocolate croissant. We took the bus into Paris and then a train back to Lyon and I got back to my house that afternoon, exhausted, ready to start the semester again the next day.
It's now five days until I go back to Paris for a few days, my last few days in France (this time around anyway).
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