Morocco was absolutely amazing!!!

We left Friday afternoon after a torturous hot walk to find the tour bus on the other side of the city.  After finally loading everyone in, we began the long drive to Algeciras, which is the southernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula of Spain.  It was a 4 hour drive, and we made a stop in Málaga to rest and buy some snacks.  As luck would have it, the bathrooms weren’t working at the gas station and the prices for food were ridiculous.  We continued onwards to Algeciras with a crazy bus driver who decided to take a road full of construction, so the entire trip felt like a ride at Disney World.  We finally made it to the coast, and took the (very very cool) ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, which is still considered to be a part of Spain.  Customs was insane!  We had to sit in the bus while our guides took away our passports to be stamped and then we all got out to be checked for swine flu… this consisted of a highly technical procedure.  In other words, a man with no front teeth pointed a thermometer at our forehead and deemed that we were all healthy.  What?!  

We continued our trip to Tétouan, where our hotel was located.  We checked in, got our rooms and headed back downstairs for dinner.  More luck for me - dinner was 3 courses (yum!) but the main course was fish filet.  Katie (my hotel roomie) and I don’t eat fish, so we asked if there was another option.  The chef made us cheese omelettes!  After dinner, we showered and headed to bed… too exhausted to hang out with each other like we had planned!

On Saturday we ate a traditional Moroccan breakfast (basically tons of bread with honey and tea) and loaded up the bus to explore the city we were staying in.  We took a tour of the “medina” (the center of an Arabian city) where there were fresh markets, animals all over, and lots of vendors selling random things.  The first 15 minutes were full of really brutal smells - freshly killed chickens and fresh fish.  After the tour, we had a typical lunch inside a restaurant in the medina; we ate couscous with chicken and a hot soup.  One annoying thing about Morocco is that you can’t drink the tap water, so at every meal we had to keep buying water bottles or glass bottles of soda.  At the restaurant, a few of us got henna done on our arms for only 2 euros.

We then departed to Tánger via bus, where we explored that medina as well.  Every medina is pretty different, but this one was full of bigger stores and pushier people trying to sell you souvenirs.  After one free hour for shopping and looking around, we headed back to the hotel for dinner and showers.  Bed followed soon after - we were exhausted from such a long day!

Sunday was much shorter in terms of site seeing… we went to Chef-Chaouén after breakfast to have another guided tour through that medina.  Chef-Chaouén is very different than Tétouan and Tánger because it is more decorated in the traditional Arabian style of white and blue paintings on the buildings and blue doors.  We did more shopping - I’d had enough shopping by this point, if you can believe it - and then had lunch in a hotel nearby.  Some sketchy soup, a few pieces of vegetables, and a very tasty fruit cup later, and I was all set to go.  

The trip back took forever, between the long bus ride to the coast of Morocco, then the ferry across to Spain, then the 4 hours on a bus to Granada.  Plus we had to walk 45 minutes home at midnight.  I am so tired!    I think I say that a lot but no worries… I’m still loving Spain :)

Exactly 2 weeks till my return to Chicago!