Salam uaalikum!

For the last five days, I took up Arabic (I have learned all of ten words)!! I just got back to Granada yesterday after a whirlwind trip to Morocco! It was by far my favorite trip yet and I am so happy I was fortunate enough to go. The trip was through my school and was led by a program called Morocco Exchange. It was a very well put together program that showed us not just tourist sights, but it really let us live like a Moroccan for a few days! I will try and not bore everyone with all the details, but I would like to share some of my favorite parts of the trip!
We left Granada on Thursday morning and headed for Gibraltar, a city of only 30,000 people. We spent the day in Gibraltar, which is English territory, taking a bus tour all around the town and up the rock. We saw some historic caves, made from thousands of years of water dripping off of the limestone rock, and inside they had a stage set up where they would hold concerts in the summer time! This demonstrates how big these caves were! After, we went in search on the monkeys (apes actually) which was not a difficult task! There were monkeys everywhere and it was ridiculous how close you could get to them! They were sticking their hands in the pockets of everyone in search of food, fighting for crackers out of one woman’s hands, and jumping on people’s shoulders and heads looking for food!! After the monkeys, we spent the evening wandering the city, shopping, and then we had dinner at “the Clipper.” It was back to good old American style food! We ran back for the boarder at night and spent the night in a really nice hotel in Spain (I think it was a nice treat before we were subjected to our homestays!)
Friday morning we woke up early and headed for the ferry in Algeciras. We took a two hour ferry ride to Tangier and we met our tour guide for the next five days. He is from Chicago but studied in Granada like us, and then moved to Tangier to work for Moroccan Exchange. When we got into Tangier, we went to a market to look around and buy some food. There were hanging chickens with their heads cut off, intestines of every imaginable animal, hanging rabbits, huge slabs of rib meat, olives, and tons of vegetables! It was a very dirty market with lots of flies and stray cats; however this is where everyone does their shopping. There are no grocery stores to buy produce or meat!
For lunch we went to a women’s center in Tangier. It is a place where women who have lost their husbands can go to learn skills to survive and get a job. They learn to cook and sew amongst other things. We had cous cous for lunch there and then got the opportunity to speak with students about women’s rights, their life in Morocco and what they like to do for fun! After lunch we headed for Rabat, making a short stop in the town of Asilah, where we got to see the beach and wander through the town.
Along the way to Rabat, we stopped on the side of the highway and rode some camels! Haha We just pulled up on the side of the highway, got out and got on some camels that were on the beach! It was sooo much fun but also very scary!! Getting on the camel was fine, but when they stand up, you get rocked back and forth as if you are on a mechanical bull! Once up on the camel, I had to switch to another camel (he was stubborn and wouldn’t let people be on him while he stood up!). So, I side saddled and hopped onto another standing camel!! I don’t know how people used to ride camel for a long period of time. They were not comfortable whatsoever! It was a lot of fun, until I had to get down and ride that bull once again! 
After a three hour bus ride to the capital of Morocco, Rabat, we met our home stay families and headed to our new home! There were three of us that lived with this family, consisting of a mom, a brother, and three daughters. There are nine children all together and a dad who lives in another house, but we did not meet them. Two of the daughters spoke English so we could communicate with them; however the mom and brother knew nothing but Dariysha, a form of Arabic, so it was difficult to communicate with them when the two daughters left for school and work!
We ate all of our meals with the family and they all were delicious!! If you like sweets – move to Morocco! We had Moroccan mint tea (filled with sugar!) with every meal, homemade cookies before dinner every night and with breakfast everyday, and pancake-like pastries covered with honey for breakfast! The youngest daughter told us she never brushed her teeth when we asked why they didn’t have a sink in their bathroom… I don’t know how her teeth are not rotten by now!
For dinner we had traditional Moroccan soup, Herira, chicken pastel, eggs, bread, cookies, Moroccan candies, and tea. The second night we had a meatball dish that we ate with our hands and bread and sweet cous cous covered in cinnamon and sugar. For lunch we had salad, cucumber soup, and chicken tangine (a curry type of chicken with olives and lemon). We had to use our bread to pull off the chicken from the bone! It was a fun experience! The daughters would keep saying “kool!” and “eat” even after they had stopped eating! We were stuffed to the brim!! Once I said “Shabbat ihmdullan” (I am full, thanks be to God) to the mother, she would let me stop eating! One daughter even told us if we didn’t keep eating she wouldn’t show us photos of her wedding!! Haha They took it as a personal insult if we didn’t eat everything in sight!
I was really struck by their hospitality and instant kindness. The first night we were there, they were asking us when we would come back and telling us that we could stay in their house for as long as we wanted! They kept asking us “WHY WHY” we couldn’t come back in June after school got out! They didn’t see why we had to go home to see family or work! Whenever my friend Sarah would tell the youngest daughter that she liked her necklace, or hair thing, she would instantly start to take it off and say “do you want it??” It was nuts how kind and giving they were! They would not let us touch a single dish or help at all. They called us the queens because we were guests in their house! On the last day, the mother came into our room and gave us some things from her house to take with us. They were the epitome of great hostesses.
In the morning, I woke to the “call to prayer.” This really stuck with me because I never thought that no separation between church and state would be any different than a separation. But the fact that they would call out for people to come to the mosque so loud (and about five times a day) that you could hear it in the homes, was such a different and hard thing for me to grasp!
The next day we visited the Roman ruins of Chellah, where there were tons of storks in every tree. It was a beautiful place that has been taken over by wildlife and plants. We went to an old pond that was once thought to make a woman fertile if she quail eggs into the pond. So, we went to the pond and threw a few quail eggs! Our tour guide told us if any of us immaculately conceived a child, he wanted to know about it! After that we went to the mausoleum of Mohamed V, the first king of Morocco. It was at the sight of what would have been the biggest Mosque in the world; however an earthquake destroyed the walls and it was never completed.
After lunch with the families (and trying on their belly dancing outfits and watching the daughters wedding video) we went to the beach and hung out for a while. We had wonderful weather while there so it was nice to slow down for a moment and just relax in the sun! After the beach we met up with some university students that live in Rabat and they took us around the Medina (city) and showed us their favorite spots. We did some shopping in the market and then went for tea and to play pool! We were expecting a café to drink tea in, but we went to this “club” where there was loud techno music and lots of pool tables. We sat down, ordered some tea and played some pool!! It was quite different than any club I have been to before! One of the guys taught us how to pour the tea, and it was quite a messy process! I didn’t think it was that hard, but the tea pots in Morocco showed me different! After a few spills, I got the hang of it!
The Moroccan people are very different than I thought they would be. I thought people would not be open to American, but everyone we saw would say “hello” or “hola” or “salam.” They all would stare at us and try to make conversation with us every chance they had! They were all very nice and hospitable to us. My host sister said it was her first time ever speaking English with an American and she was sooo excited she couldn’t take it! She was asking us all about America and saying she would move there one day and become a famous singer, like her idol, Avril Lavigne.
Later that night we went to the Hammam, or Arab Bath. It was completely different than anything I have ever experienced in my life! I have learned so much about Arab baths in my art and architecture class that it was really cool to see one in action and understand how it really works. There are three rooms, one cold, one warm and one hot. It is traditionally done that you go to the hot room to open your pores, the warm room to scrub up, and the cold one to wash off. However, my host sister (who took all 15 of us girls) kept us in the hot room for the whole time (one hour!) (Later, her husband shrieked at the thought of being in the hot room for one hour…he said usually you stay in there 10 minutes max!!) We went in, laid out our mats and got to work. With in ten seconds of being in the room my hair was completely soaked with sweat and steam. It was ten times hotter than a sauna and I think I lost about ten pounds from sweating so much. We lathered up in a special brown soap they gave us, rinsed off, lathered up with body soap, rinsed off, and did that a few times. Then we got a scrub glove that literally took off ten layers of my skin! It was ridiculous! We filled up big buckets of water to have with us to rinse off, and I didn’t know we were to mix hot water and cold water. I only had hot water in my bucket – and by hot, I mean SCALDING!! A lady who worked there came up to me and said “cold, cold.” I thought she meant my water was cold, and I told her no, my water was nothing near cold! She didn’t understand obviously because I don’t speak Arabic, so she thought she would demonstrate it for me. She splashed scalding water on my lap, burning my legs, to tell me I needed cold water!! After that, I understood clearly and went to get some cold water! Haha
It was very different to see women be so comfortable with themselves around people they don’t know. For women who are so covered in public, with the veils and long dresses, they were very open in the bath, with only bottoms on. You could pay a woman 50 dirham, about 50 cents, to get a full scrub down. It was quite a different experience to bathe with 50 women all together in a room. Nothing like a little bonding time! Haha After the bath, we were served tea outside the Hammam on the street, and then we went for henna tattoos.
The next day, Sunday, we drove to the Riff Mountains, where we went to a little village and had lunch at a house there. This family only speaks Daryisha, so we brought a translator with us. To give a little perspective on how far out we were in the mountains, I’ll tell you a story we were told about the family. This family was a mother, father, four kids (three boys and a girl) and the grandmother. The father was married once before, however his wife died while giving birth to his second child, the daughter. The mother went into labor at the house, and the doctor could not get there in time to help deliver the baby. There were no roads in the Riff Mountains and it would have taken the doctor six hours by donkey to get to their house. The grandmother fought very hard afterwards to get roads built in the village and a doctor’s office put in the village too. Now, there are roads that cars can travel by, and there is a doctor in town twice a week. The father got remarried, and had two more children.
We went to the village and had hand made cous cous for lunch. Afterward, we were meant to have a discussion about their farm and their way of living. However, we ended up in the hills near their house, singing with drums and dancing amongst the fields of dandelions. It was such a cool experience, to have such a fun time with people you have absolutely nothing in common with, don’t even know, and can’t speak the same language as. They would sing songs in Arabic, and then they asked us to sing English songs for them! We were definitely in need of practice compared to them! Their little 12 year old boy got up and pulled us up to dance. Their neighbors were there, and we had a wedding ceremony between the neighbor lady and one of the guys in our group! It was fun to see them joke around and poke fun at our stereotypes of people being in arranged marriages. At first we all thought they were serious when they asked our friend to marry their older neighbor, who had a little daughter. But then after a while, we caught on and all had a great time “celebrating the wedding” up in the field by singing, dancing and making sunflower crowns! These people were so hospitable, and it was truly sad to leave at the end of the day!
We then headed into the town of Chefchouen, a village in the Atlas Mountains. It was a cute and cold little town. We wandered around, went shopping and then had our last dinner together at one of the two little restaurants in town. I became quite the bargainer in Chefchouen, getting some good deals on tea, pashminas and saffron for my mom!! We spent the night in a cute hostel, where our room was on the terrace and we woke to a wonderful view of the whole town! At 7 am, we hiked up the mountain to look out on the town and enjoy the sunrise! We promptly left for home at 8 and spent the day in many busses and a ferry!
We crossed the boarder from Morocco into Ceuta (Spanish territory in Africa) and that was quite an experience. It was scary because there were many people running and all sorts of disorder around us. People were being shooed away from the boarder and I felt very un-liked for being an American citizen.
One thing that struck me in Morocco was how well versed everyone was in many languages. The official languages are Arabic and French, and almost everyone else knew English and Spanish. My host sister asked me what languages I spoke, and I was ashamed to say only English and a bit of Spanish! I feel poorly cultured after being in Morocco. However as I said, I picked up a few Arabic words, so who knows – maybe one day I will have the guts to pick up another language, perhaps Arabic!

B’Salama (goodbye, with peace)

وداعا للالآن!
ويأمل الجميع على ما يرام!
(Goodbye for now, hope everyone is doing well!)

Oxox
Julia