Rock the Kasbah

Welcome to Morocco! This has been a very interesting week, to say the least. We have a smaller group here (there were 16 people in my group in Central America but only 12 people here). The group was 8 Australians, 2 Kiwis and 2 Americans – not a whole lot of variety! We change groups tonight so I’ll be interested to see who else shows up. Our tour leader, Jamal, is great. Here’s a picture so you can see who is keeping us safe – I absolutely love his shirt!

This part of the trip has included a lot of visiting different cities and walking around, not nearly as much activity as the Central American portion. A lot of the people were on the last leg of their trip, so we spent a lot of time shopping. The souks (shops) here have everything you could ever possibly want to buy and there are 20 different vendors next to each other shouting at you to buy from them. You get very used to saying no, No, NO! The vendors are very pushy and will try to grab you to get you to come into their shops. Or if you do buy something from them, they want you to come to the shop of their brother/cousin/friend just over this way to look at something else. You have to bargain for everything you buy and I did learn an interesting fact yesterday – they give you a different color bag based on how you bargain, to tell the other vendors in the market. If you are a sucker they will give you one color (red in Marrakech, might be different in other cities), if you drive a hard bargain they will give you black and if you’re somewhere in the middle you get green. We learned to hide our bags, especially if you happened to make a bad deal!

Also of importance, I turned 30!!! I can’t believe I’m 30 – I feel so much younger than that, but I guess age doesn’t lie. I had a wonderful day – we walked all over the medina (old city) of Fes. The group was sweet enough to get me a cake for dinner, which was really lovely. During our shopping in Fes, I bought a rug! It’s a beautiful cashmere rug and I love it – it will look amazing in my house. I’m so excited about it, here is a picture for you to see!

I have really enjoyed all the cities we have seen. I arrived in Casablanca really late and we left early the next morning so I’ll have to see that at the end of my tour. Over the course of the trip we have spent a morning in Rabat, a morning wandering around the ruins of Volubilis, a few hours exploring Meknes and an afternoon lounging on the beach in Tangier. Some of them I would have liked to see more of, but for some of the other an hour or two was plenty. I really enjoyed the night we spent in Moulay Idriss, a small village where the first King of Morocco is buried. It is a town built on two hills so the roads are tiny and narrow with hundreds of steps. I also loved the small town of Chefchaouen. It is a small laid back town with some great restaurants and it is where many Moroccans go on vacation. It is painted all blue and white and reminded me so much of Greece. In fact, many things in Morocco have reminded me of Greece – some of the tones in the music, the massive amounts of olives and olive oil found here and the colors in some of the towns. I also went to a public bath house in Chefchaouen where they put you in a sauna and scrub you from head to toe. It’s quite an experience and you leave with 8 layers less skin than you started with, but you’ve never felt cleaner in your life! Here’s a couple of pictures of Chefchaouen, so you can get a small feel for the city.

It’s also possible that I’ve become a born again vegetarian! The day after my birthday I got soooo sick – I thought my body might be giving up because I had hit the big 3-0 and it just didn’t want to live anymore. I had a horrible fever and didn’t get out of bed for 24 hours, it was so awful! Anyhow, once I did start to feel better, I wasn’t hungry at all. I would eat a bite or two and be completely full. One of the days I swore I was going to actually eat, but then we walked into a market and saw a camel head (see below if you dare). They eat camel here and this happened to be 10 minutes after some of our group went for a camel ride, so that was the end of food for that day. Yesterday I was going to try to eat some chicken, but as I was walking out of a shop, a man carrying a dead goat hit me in the shoulder with it’s dead body, leaving blood all over my white shirt from where it’s head used to be……ewwwww. There are no words to describe how disgusted I was, I wasn’t sure whether to cry or throw up. Goat blood all over my white shirt from it’s decapitated body – makes me sick just to think about it. After dead camels and dead goats, and seeing how meat is treated here, I just don’t think I can bring myself to eat it again. Guess we’ll see how the next 2 weeks in Morocco turn out!