Gibraltar pictures
posted by Sam at
6:37 PM
|
1 comments
Friday, October 21, 2005
Gibraltar
Gibraltar is a weird place. Our program had a day trip there today so I went because it was free and I thought that Gibraltar would be interesting. Really all I saw there was a huge rock and lots of monkeys. It’s a protectorate of the United Kingdom, but they drive on the right side of the road and they use Gibraltar Sterling, not the British pound for their currency. The language spoken there is a dialect of English called “Llanto,” basically spanglish with a British accent. Everything that people said was hilarious.
To the ancient Greeks, Gibraltar marked the end of the known world. Beyond was a waterfall at the edge of the world. It was also the site of one of the ancient Pillars of Hercules. Phoenicians and Carthaginians inhabited the caves on the Rock of Gibraltar and they are still used today – one cave has a newly built auditorium. The Arabs took it over in 711 and gave the place its name – Jebel-Tarik, which means Tarik’s mountain, named after the Arab general Tarik-Ibn-Zeyad. The name evolved into Gebral-Tarik and eventually Gibraltar. The Spanish took it over in 1462 and the British took it over in 1704, built a huge military base and they still control it today. The British defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in Gibraltar 200 years ago. There were some celebrations going on for the 200th anniversary of that battle. The sovereignty of Gibraltar was a contentious issue between Spain and the UK for a long time. The border was closed completely in 1969 after disputes with Spain under Franco and it reopened in the 1980s.
Its other claim to fame is that John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married there in 1969. Their marriage was a big ordeal, they were not allowed to marry in Great Britain because they were both in the middle of divorces, they tried and failed to get married on the Channel Ferry and again in Paris so they flew to Gibraltar, got their marriage license and left in less than an hour. The song, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” tells the whole story. We stopped at the building that was the Registrar back then where they got their marriage license. The building is now a Juvenile Court. There is a famous picture of John and Yoko on Gibraltar’s airstrip, holding their up marriage license with the Rock in the background. We also went to the airstrip and took a picture in the spot where they stood.
Since it was supposed to be an educational trip, the first thing we did when we got there was go to the Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce to listen to the Secretary of Commerce talk about… commerce in Gibraltar. It’s a huge trading port for Europe and North Africa as it is the gateway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also a tax haven and as part of the EU, any business in Gibraltar has full access to the entire European market. Lots of financial, shipping and internet businesses are based there. And of course tourism and the British military base are a big part of the economy. Gibraltar is only six square kilometers and has 28,000 residents but there is a lot of money and goods going through there. There is no sales tax and cigarettes and booze are really cheap. The most interesting thing that the Commerce guy talked about was how his office is trying to build up Gibraltar’s economic reputation by cracking down on smuggling and money laundering and promoting legitimate businesses.
Besides all the illegal and seedy things that go on in Gibraltar, the only other interesting thing there is all the monkeys. There are tons of monkeys. The British imported them from North Africa in the 18th century as pets and they found their home on the limestone cliffs of the Rock.
We had some pizza after the talk at the Chamber of Commerce. And then we walked down the main street where there were tons of tourist shops and lots of booze and tobacco. We took the tram up to the top of the Rock. We had to wait in line for a while, a huge cruise ship landed that day so there was an invasion of American tourists. The tram ride was cool, the cliff was really steep and there was a monkey waiting for us right outside the tram when we got off at the top. There is a big building and terraces and a nice restaurant at the top of the Rock. It was an amazing view. You could see the Spanish port-city Algeciras, miles and miles of blue Mediterranean Sea, dozens of huge ships, and the northern coast of Africa. There were monkeys walking around everywhere, hardly noticing all the people. It was a little unnerving at first. So many monkeys and so much monkey poop. Sometimes the monkeys jump on you or play with your backpack. But most of them were pretty well behaved. They do snatch plastic bags because they know they usually have food inside – we were warned about this. There were signs saying that there is a £500 fine for feeding the monkeys, but some people were feeding them anyways.
The monkeys seem to have a good time, they are comfortable with all the humans and they sit on the railings and play on the telescopes as if they are sea-saws. The only close encounter I had with one was when a female monkey hit me in the leg when I tried to take a picture of a baby monkey. I didn’t know that she was the mom and that she was going to get so mad at me. It was like a zoo without cages. One of the monkeys was sitting on a little wall, with his hands crossed in his lap. He just sat there looking at us; I got a picture next to him and pet him briefly. At first it was very strange to see monkeys everywhere and you had to be careful to step on one. They just sit up there looking at the views of Africa and Spain like everyone else. After a while it’s not so strange anymore.
We went back down on the tram and got off at the stop at the halfway point. There were some caves nearby but we didn’t have time to go in. We just saw some monkeys lying around, combing each other for fleas and eating scraps of food. Some of them looked like poor homeless monkeys, lying motionless in piles of food wrappers, kinda sad. At the bottom we walked through a botanical gardens. There were lots of beautiful trees and flowers. And then we walked back across the border and headed back to Sevilla. They didn’t stamp our passports, I’ll have to fly to London sometime in order to a British stamp in my passport.
Next weekend: Lisbon.
To the ancient Greeks, Gibraltar marked the end of the known world. Beyond was a waterfall at the edge of the world. It was also the site of one of the ancient Pillars of Hercules. Phoenicians and Carthaginians inhabited the caves on the Rock of Gibraltar and they are still used today – one cave has a newly built auditorium. The Arabs took it over in 711 and gave the place its name – Jebel-Tarik, which means Tarik’s mountain, named after the Arab general Tarik-Ibn-Zeyad. The name evolved into Gebral-Tarik and eventually Gibraltar. The Spanish took it over in 1462 and the British took it over in 1704, built a huge military base and they still control it today. The British defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in Gibraltar 200 years ago. There were some celebrations going on for the 200th anniversary of that battle. The sovereignty of Gibraltar was a contentious issue between Spain and the UK for a long time. The border was closed completely in 1969 after disputes with Spain under Franco and it reopened in the 1980s.
Its other claim to fame is that John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married there in 1969. Their marriage was a big ordeal, they were not allowed to marry in Great Britain because they were both in the middle of divorces, they tried and failed to get married on the Channel Ferry and again in Paris so they flew to Gibraltar, got their marriage license and left in less than an hour. The song, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” tells the whole story. We stopped at the building that was the Registrar back then where they got their marriage license. The building is now a Juvenile Court. There is a famous picture of John and Yoko on Gibraltar’s airstrip, holding their up marriage license with the Rock in the background. We also went to the airstrip and took a picture in the spot where they stood.
Since it was supposed to be an educational trip, the first thing we did when we got there was go to the Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce to listen to the Secretary of Commerce talk about… commerce in Gibraltar. It’s a huge trading port for Europe and North Africa as it is the gateway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also a tax haven and as part of the EU, any business in Gibraltar has full access to the entire European market. Lots of financial, shipping and internet businesses are based there. And of course tourism and the British military base are a big part of the economy. Gibraltar is only six square kilometers and has 28,000 residents but there is a lot of money and goods going through there. There is no sales tax and cigarettes and booze are really cheap. The most interesting thing that the Commerce guy talked about was how his office is trying to build up Gibraltar’s economic reputation by cracking down on smuggling and money laundering and promoting legitimate businesses.
Besides all the illegal and seedy things that go on in Gibraltar, the only other interesting thing there is all the monkeys. There are tons of monkeys. The British imported them from North Africa in the 18th century as pets and they found their home on the limestone cliffs of the Rock.
We had some pizza after the talk at the Chamber of Commerce. And then we walked down the main street where there were tons of tourist shops and lots of booze and tobacco. We took the tram up to the top of the Rock. We had to wait in line for a while, a huge cruise ship landed that day so there was an invasion of American tourists. The tram ride was cool, the cliff was really steep and there was a monkey waiting for us right outside the tram when we got off at the top. There is a big building and terraces and a nice restaurant at the top of the Rock. It was an amazing view. You could see the Spanish port-city Algeciras, miles and miles of blue Mediterranean Sea, dozens of huge ships, and the northern coast of Africa. There were monkeys walking around everywhere, hardly noticing all the people. It was a little unnerving at first. So many monkeys and so much monkey poop. Sometimes the monkeys jump on you or play with your backpack. But most of them were pretty well behaved. They do snatch plastic bags because they know they usually have food inside – we were warned about this. There were signs saying that there is a £500 fine for feeding the monkeys, but some people were feeding them anyways.
The monkeys seem to have a good time, they are comfortable with all the humans and they sit on the railings and play on the telescopes as if they are sea-saws. The only close encounter I had with one was when a female monkey hit me in the leg when I tried to take a picture of a baby monkey. I didn’t know that she was the mom and that she was going to get so mad at me. It was like a zoo without cages. One of the monkeys was sitting on a little wall, with his hands crossed in his lap. He just sat there looking at us; I got a picture next to him and pet him briefly. At first it was very strange to see monkeys everywhere and you had to be careful to step on one. They just sit up there looking at the views of Africa and Spain like everyone else. After a while it’s not so strange anymore.
We went back down on the tram and got off at the stop at the halfway point. There were some caves nearby but we didn’t have time to go in. We just saw some monkeys lying around, combing each other for fleas and eating scraps of food. Some of them looked like poor homeless monkeys, lying motionless in piles of food wrappers, kinda sad. At the bottom we walked through a botanical gardens. There were lots of beautiful trees and flowers. And then we walked back across the border and headed back to Sevilla. They didn’t stamp our passports, I’ll have to fly to London sometime in order to a British stamp in my passport.
Next weekend: Lisbon.
posted by Sam at
6:07 PM
|
5 comments
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Madrid
I woke up at 5:30 am on Friday morning to catch a 7 am train to Madrid. I went on the AVE high-speed train. It was a €120 ticket, paid for by my program to send us to Madrid to interview the Turkish Ambassador and write an article about Turkey and the European Union (with two other students). I was wearing a shirt and tie, riding on a high-speed train through Europe, on my way to meet with an Ambassador – I felt kind of important. The train was packed with businessmen and unfortunately it was dark for a good part of the trip so all I saw for a while was a few lights. The train went through some beautiful farmland and rolling hills lit up by the sunrise. Stuff goes by really fast though when you are zipping along at 150 mph. It was really weird to get on a train and then 20 minutes later you are in Cordoba (the only stop along the way). And then about two hours later you are in Madrid. The first thing we noticed was that it was really cold, probably 50 F. I haven’t been in cold weather for about 6 months. We got right onto the metro and went to the neighborhood on the north side of the city where we found the Turkish Embassy and spent half an hour in the café across the street doing some final preparation. One of the students doing the interview, Brian, went to Madrid Thursday night and was throwing up all night, he got sick from the food or water in Morocco. He was pale and tired, but made it through the morning. The Embassy was really nice; we waited for a bit and then spent 45 minutes talking to the Ambassador, Volkan Vural. He was really nice and seemed interested in us and our questions.
As soon as that was done, I had the rest of the weekend free in Madrid. I went straight to the Prado Museum. A group of ten students took the bus to Madrid and I met them at the Prado. Another group of four girls also went on the train before mine and another group of about 10 was in Madrid for the weekend too. We spent almost three hours at the Prado but we still rushed some things and didn’t even get to the top floor. Every painting was very religious, I got sick of seeing the same Christian themes over and over. Seeing some paintings of regular people and landscapes was refreshing. My favorites were Goya’s pinturas negras – the dark and brooding paintings he did of monsters and death when he went insane at the end of his life. He went deaf near the end of his life and became sick and depressed, supposedly caused in part by the lead in his paint. The stuff he painted then is really interesting.
We got lunch and went to our hostel which was in a really good location downtown. We had six rooms for the 11 of us, five doubles and one single. I took a nap, I was really tired. At 8:30 I went out and bought a sweater because I didn’t bring any warm clothes. I wore that sweater all weekend. I grabbed a bocadillo at Pan & Company and took the metro to the San Bernabau soccer stadium where Real Madrid plays. I met up with a friend from Madison who is studying in Madrid this year. We went to the Moby Dick bar to see the band Spoon play. The place was really cool, it was like the inside of an old wooden ship. There were a lot of American students there. There was a paella party at her apartment near the University afterwards. She lives with two Americans and four foreign students in a big apartment. I took the metro back to the hostel at 1:30 am - right before it stops running.
We woke up early to start another busy day on Saturday. We went to Plaza Mayor to get coffee and churros with chocolate. I can’t believe that I had not had churros in Spain until this weekend. We always plan on getting churros in Sevilla but they are hard to find and only sold in the morning. Churros are everywhere in Madrid. Everyone else went to Palacio Real while I met up with the four other girls to go to Parque Retiro. We grabbed fresh pastry on the way. Parque Retiro is a giant park downtown with a man made lake. It was a chilly fall day and the leaves were just starting to change colors. It was nice to have Wisconsin-like weather finally. Everyone was out for a stroll in the park. We took some pictures and then rented two rowboats and went around the lake.
We ate lunch after leaving the park and then went to the Thyssen museum. We ran into the other group there. The Thyssen is a giant private collection of all kinds of art. It was nice to see a huge variety of paintings. Some of the well-known names in the collection are Degas, Pissarro, Miró, Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Leichtenstien, and Dalí. I really liked Piet Mondrian’s modern art. We had lunch, some went to the Reina Sofia museum, and some went shopping. I took a nap and walked around for a bit, the center was really crowded with people shopping.
We split up into two groups when we went out for dinner. Eleven people couldn’t fit into any place we went to. We all met up later at one restaurant and hung out for a while. A big soccer game was on tv, Real Madrid versus cross-town rival Atlético Madrid. Brian and his friend from high school joined us – he was finally getting better. We went to a jazz club nearby and caught the end of the show. We spent a lot of time in the bar next door. When everyone went back to the hostel I had churros nearby with the other group of girls.
On Sunday morning we went to the flea market were there was lots of clothes, jewelry and souvenirs and everything was super cheap. I got a Real Betis scarf and a Don Quijote t-shirt. The Reina Sofia Museum is free on Sundays and is one block from the train station so I went there before my 2 pm train. I only had just over an hour to spend inside. I saw a temporary exhibition of modern art – it was all stuff made with ordinary objects, some of it was cool. I went through one floor quickly, seeing mostly Miró, Dalí and Picasso – it was a quick tour of the great modern Spanish artists. The highlight was Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica was my most favorite of everything that I saw this weekend. It was impressive. And massive. I went by it twice, there was dozens of people crowding around it both times. I really want to go back to the Reina Sofia and spend the good part of a day there. I bought a poster of Guernica and two other posters of paintings that were only €1 before going to the train station.
It was really cool to be in a huge city. Sevilla is pretty big but doesn’t have a big ciy feel. The cool weather was also nice. I will probably spend part of next weekend in Cádiz for the beach and/or Jerez for some wine tasting.
As soon as that was done, I had the rest of the weekend free in Madrid. I went straight to the Prado Museum. A group of ten students took the bus to Madrid and I met them at the Prado. Another group of four girls also went on the train before mine and another group of about 10 was in Madrid for the weekend too. We spent almost three hours at the Prado but we still rushed some things and didn’t even get to the top floor. Every painting was very religious, I got sick of seeing the same Christian themes over and over. Seeing some paintings of regular people and landscapes was refreshing. My favorites were Goya’s pinturas negras – the dark and brooding paintings he did of monsters and death when he went insane at the end of his life. He went deaf near the end of his life and became sick and depressed, supposedly caused in part by the lead in his paint. The stuff he painted then is really interesting.
We got lunch and went to our hostel which was in a really good location downtown. We had six rooms for the 11 of us, five doubles and one single. I took a nap, I was really tired. At 8:30 I went out and bought a sweater because I didn’t bring any warm clothes. I wore that sweater all weekend. I grabbed a bocadillo at Pan & Company and took the metro to the San Bernabau soccer stadium where Real Madrid plays. I met up with a friend from Madison who is studying in Madrid this year. We went to the Moby Dick bar to see the band Spoon play. The place was really cool, it was like the inside of an old wooden ship. There were a lot of American students there. There was a paella party at her apartment near the University afterwards. She lives with two Americans and four foreign students in a big apartment. I took the metro back to the hostel at 1:30 am - right before it stops running.
We woke up early to start another busy day on Saturday. We went to Plaza Mayor to get coffee and churros with chocolate. I can’t believe that I had not had churros in Spain until this weekend. We always plan on getting churros in Sevilla but they are hard to find and only sold in the morning. Churros are everywhere in Madrid. Everyone else went to Palacio Real while I met up with the four other girls to go to Parque Retiro. We grabbed fresh pastry on the way. Parque Retiro is a giant park downtown with a man made lake. It was a chilly fall day and the leaves were just starting to change colors. It was nice to have Wisconsin-like weather finally. Everyone was out for a stroll in the park. We took some pictures and then rented two rowboats and went around the lake.
We ate lunch after leaving the park and then went to the Thyssen museum. We ran into the other group there. The Thyssen is a giant private collection of all kinds of art. It was nice to see a huge variety of paintings. Some of the well-known names in the collection are Degas, Pissarro, Miró, Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Leichtenstien, and Dalí. I really liked Piet Mondrian’s modern art. We had lunch, some went to the Reina Sofia museum, and some went shopping. I took a nap and walked around for a bit, the center was really crowded with people shopping.
We split up into two groups when we went out for dinner. Eleven people couldn’t fit into any place we went to. We all met up later at one restaurant and hung out for a while. A big soccer game was on tv, Real Madrid versus cross-town rival Atlético Madrid. Brian and his friend from high school joined us – he was finally getting better. We went to a jazz club nearby and caught the end of the show. We spent a lot of time in the bar next door. When everyone went back to the hostel I had churros nearby with the other group of girls.
On Sunday morning we went to the flea market were there was lots of clothes, jewelry and souvenirs and everything was super cheap. I got a Real Betis scarf and a Don Quijote t-shirt. The Reina Sofia Museum is free on Sundays and is one block from the train station so I went there before my 2 pm train. I only had just over an hour to spend inside. I saw a temporary exhibition of modern art – it was all stuff made with ordinary objects, some of it was cool. I went through one floor quickly, seeing mostly Miró, Dalí and Picasso – it was a quick tour of the great modern Spanish artists. The highlight was Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica was my most favorite of everything that I saw this weekend. It was impressive. And massive. I went by it twice, there was dozens of people crowding around it both times. I really want to go back to the Reina Sofia and spend the good part of a day there. I bought a poster of Guernica and two other posters of paintings that were only €1 before going to the train station.
It was really cool to be in a huge city. Sevilla is pretty big but doesn’t have a big ciy feel. The cool weather was also nice. I will probably spend part of next weekend in Cádiz for the beach and/or Jerez for some wine tasting.
posted by Sam at
2:50 PM
|
2 comments
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Morocco
Throughout the trip, I was always thinking about what I was going to write up when I got back to my computer. I was constantly thinking about blogging so I tried to keep an in depth journal by writing several times a day. If I waited more than five or six hours before writing my thoughts down I felt that I was starting to lose small details and a sense of exactly how I felt throughout the day. Most of my journal was done in less than ideal writing conditions, either on a rocking ferry or in a cramped, bumpy van. Every time we traveled or had some rare free time late at night I wrote.
I’ll start with some background information on the trip. I signed up to work on a magazine that is published each semester by my study abroad program. We work with Spanish students who study English-Spanish translation and interpretation to write a bilingual magazine. The theme of this semester’s issue is immigration and cross-cultural issues. We went to Morocco to learn about another culture and about the immigration to Spain and the rest of Europe through the Moroccan border. 18 American students and about a dozen Spanish students are working on the magazine this semester. 16 of the American students, including me, and five Spanish students went on this trip. For three of the Spanish students it was their first time traveling outside of Spain. Our editor/professor, Óscar, and a professor who teaches the Spanish students, Sage, came along with us too.
We took a bus from Sevilla to Algeciras (near Gibraltar) Thursday evening. We went to our hostel, which was more Moroccan than Spanish, near the port. Dinner was at a Moroccan restaurant down the street. We ate at one long table and the food came really slow but it did not disappoint. We had bread with olive oil and vinegar and salad and when the main course finally came, we chowed down on the best beef I have ever eaten. It was Moroccan style I guess – really soft, spicy and flavorful. It got us excited to eat more Moroccan food over the next four days. Since we were about 25 people sitting around a long table, we decided to try to play telephone. We played once with an english sentence and once with a spanish sentence. The spanish sentence got totally lost and came back as a completly different sentence. Luckily the hostel, restaurant and ferry station were all within four blocks and we were a big group as Algeciras is supposedly the most dangerous town in Spain. At 8 am on Friday morning we meet two of our guides outside the hostel, Arnd – German, and Allen – American, who were from a Moroccan travel program that organized the entire trip for us. We were going to pick up a third guide, Kim – American, in Tangiers. We got on a big ferry, the rows of seats were about 20 wide. It was a long and rough ride, 1 hour 40 minutes, and it was hard to walk around without stumbling or holding on to something. We ate breakfast on the ferry, which didn’t help with the queasiness. Most of us felt a little sick by the end. I got my first glimpse of Gibraltar - it’s a huge rock right on the water. We headed west through the strait, you could see Africa to the left and Spain to the right, they both looked the same. We saw the city of Tarifa on the Spanish coast. Once we arrived we all changed some euros into dirhams (Moroccan currency) and split up into two groups because our transportation in Moroccan was two big vans. We meet our driver, Ali, and my van’s guide, Kim, who was a really chill person from California. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural southern Morocco in 2001. She was evacuated after 9/11 so she only served less than half of her two-year commitment but later came back to Morocco as a Fulbright Scholar to research HIV/AIDS prevention in the country. She married a Moroccan man two months ago and has lived in the city of Féz for several years. She speaks French and Moroccan Arabic (the regional dialect which is a mix of classical Arabic, French and Berber). She was the coolest and most knowledgeable guide you could ask for.
We drove into Tangiers and stopped at a lookout spot to take pictures of the port and the city. At first I wanted to take pictures of everything that I saw, the people were dressed in traditional robes, tunics and hats. All of the cars were really old European cars and all of the signs were in both Arabic and French. We went to the American Legation, a building that was given as a gift to the United States in the late 18th century. It was the first foreign property owned by the United States. Morocco and the US have a long relationship – Morocco was the first country to recognize the US as a sovereign nation in the 1770s and the two countries have had friendly relations since then. Morocco has always been an important Arab ally. It is now a library, museum, and cultural center and it felt very American with photos of US presidents covering the walls. We meet with professor Ali Azeriah, who is Berber (the indigenous people of the mountains of Northern Africa), for a talk on cultural diversity in Morocco. It was interesting to learn the history of Jews in Morocco. Many Jews who fled Spain during the reconquista/inquisition in the 15th century followed the Muslims and settled in Morocco. Few Jews are left as many of them have moved to Israel in the last 50 years.
We then went to an NGO nearby that is a sort of battered women’s shelter. They were nice enough to serve us lunch during Ramadan. Since Ramadan had just started, eating and drinking during the day was a little tricky. 99% of Morocco is Muslim and most of those people fast from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan, although not everyone follows it strictly. Eating or drinking anything, smoking, or even swallowing saliva is prohibited. Consequently, it is very rude for tourists to eat or drink in public. That was a big adjustment at first. Every time I went to the bathroom I drank from my water bottle. As soon as we got into our van we felt safe enough to snack and drink water. It was really weird to always have to be careful about everything you did so that you didn’t offend someone’s religious values. It was also difficult for Ali and Kim. They were both fasting and unfortunately they couldn’t avoid seeing us eat and drink around them. Although it was a let down at first, and guidebooks even recommend not traveling to Muslim countries during Ramadan, I was really glad that we did make the trip during Ramadan because it was really interesting to see what it is like. Many restaurants are closed during the day and the daily schedule is shifted later because Muslims eat two dinners during Ramadan, one at 6 pm to break the fast at sunset and a second one around 10 pm. They also wake up several times in the middle of the night to drink water and eat a snack and then sleep in a little later. People are also more tired and cranky in the afternoon and traffic accidents go up as people are less safe driving home to eat for the first time each day at sunset. Anyways, we got a tour of the NGO’s classrooms and the rooms where women make crafts to sell. They served us hejira, a Moroccan soups with lentils and garbanzo beans (just like Spanish food!) and couscous. We thought the giant plates of couscous with a generous pile of vegetables and chicken were to be shared between two or three people as Moroccan meals are typically served in large communal dishes. But the plates of couscous kept coming until there was one for each person, it was so much food. And then there was chocolate cake and lemon cake for dessert. We left Tangiers and headed west along the Atlantic coast towards Rabat, the capital. It was a beautiful drive. We were on a narrow two-lane highway that ran between farmland and sandy beaches. It seemed like it was much greener than southern Spain and it didn’t feel like Africa at all.
We stopped on the beach where a man was waiting with six camels. Kim knew this guy, he makes his living taking people on camel rides. He doesn’t normally work during Ramadan but made an exception for us. It was about $2.50 USD per ride, 50 cents more than the non-Ramadan price. Camels are really cool animals, well adapted for desert life and they have a unique and funny-looking face. The saddles were just sacks of hay with a blanked draped over and a rope tied to the saddle looped around the tail and the neck to hold it in place. Simple rope harnesses were used to connect each camel to make a train as the camel guy lead us down the beach, speaking to the camels in Arabic. Getting on to and off of the camels was the most fun part, and a little scary too. The camels are lying down when you hop on the saddle. Then the camel extends its back legs, tossing you forward, you almost fall over the front of the camel. And then the camel extends its front legs and you find yourself seven or eight feet above the ground on an unstable saddle and the camel sways side-to-side a lot as it walks. It was nothing like riding a horse, camels are not as sturdy. They have amazingly soft and warm fur too. I took a lot of pictures and got some video too.
We drove further down the coast and stopped in Asila, a small town on the Atlantic coast. We had a local guide, Ahmed, show us around. He was a very nice guy who dropped out of school in order to work to help out his family. He has learned some English on his own, he had some really funny English expressions. We saw the slum next to the town that he lives in, he only accepted a tip from us though. Asilah was more of a traditional Arab town than Tangiers which is a pretty international city. It was Friday, the Islamic holy day so most people were in the mosque praying. As I was walking along in the back of the group, a man’s voice came on over some loudspeakers, chanting Arabic in sort of a sing-song way. My friend and I looked at each other and both asked, “is that the call to prayer?” That was my first “holy shit I’m in an Islamic country” moment. I had always heard that on TV but hearing it in person was really neat. Asilah hosts a famous art festival every summer and attracts lots of European tourists. There were tons of cool murals from the art festival painted on walls around the city. We saw a bakery with a wood-burning stone oven. Women take their dough to the bakery and bake it there. The bakers were working all day long baking bread but they couldn’t eat any of it (until 6 pm) – that would be hard.
Before we left we used a Turkish-style bathroom, also known as “squatters.” It was a public bathroom, but instead of toilets, the stalls had a porcelain square set in the ground with a small hole. No toilet, just a hole in the ground. You flush by filling a bucket with water that you raise from a well and then dumping the water into the hole. Kim taught the girls how to properly squat. We also found out why toilet paper was one of the items on our packing list. The place smelled bad too. Welcome to the developing world.
Before reaching Rabat, we divided up into groups of three for our stay with host families for Friday and Saturday night. I was with Brian, a student from St. Olaf, and Fran, a student from Sevilla who studies English, French, German and Chinese. He speaks English and French well, the last two languages only a little. I was glad to be with him because most Moroccans speak French. We stopped at a gas station for a bathroom break on the way. Moroccan truck stops are the same as Spanish and American ones, nothing too exciting except for the fact that they had sit-down toilets. When we got to Rabat we went to someone’s house where we were picked up by someone from our host family who speaks English – they were all college students. Zineb, a thin Moroccan women in her early 20s who studies English literature took us around the medina (city center) before taking us to her family’s home. She wore a headscarf but modern Western clothing. You see a strange mix of tradition and modernity like that everywhere. You see women dressed in a robe, headscarf and a veil covering everything but her eyes walking hand-in-hand with her little kid who is dressed like any American kid, or a modest Moroccan home with no toilet but a satellite dish on the roof. Anyways, there was lots of crap for sale in the medina, there were stores only 6 feet by 6 feet packed full of electronics or shoes or food. There were lots of street vendors too with piles of pirated cds or piles of clothes and people selling strange things like individual cigarettes. We walked down a wide, brightly lit boulevard lined with palm trees, huge hotels, banks and the national parliament building. We quickly realized that crossing streets in Morocco is really dangerous. Crosswalks or pedestrian signal lights are rare, Zineb just walked right into busy streets and made the cars stop so we just stuck close to her.
She took us home and we met the family, Abdelilah the father, Khadija the mother, Mohamed the 19-year old son, Aya the 15-year old daughter, and a one-year-old baby girl. For some reason I expected Moroccan homes to be very small and dark and full of low sofas and lots of pillows and rugs. I was right about the furniture, but very wrong about the size. The place was very spacious. It had a huge courtyard and 3 rooms that are salons/bedrooms with sofas around the entire room. Another family lived on the second floor, you could see part of their place through the courtyard. We were told that it is rude to look up because people live up there but I couldn’t help but look up every time I walked through the courtyard, there was a huge glass ceiling 50 feet above. The bathroom was down some stairs, in a little cellar type room. They had a toilet with a seat and toilet paper but it was flushed using a bucket of water. The ceiling above the toilet was about 5 feet high, making it awkward to try to pee while hunched over.
We sat in the living room with the dad and watched some TV: sports and Dr. Doolitle in English with Arabic subtitles. The dad left and a blonde girl walked in and sat down to watch TV. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. Brian and I looked at each other and looked back at her, but before we start talking about her, thinking that she wouldn’t understand English, she starts speaking to us about in perfect English about some other city in Morocco. We were thinking, “What’s going on? Who are you?” She eventually explains everything, her name is Kelly, and she is from New York and goes to Colby College. She’s living with this family for a semester and studying Arabic and Government with a small group of American students. She speaks French and very little Arabic. It was a weird surprise to run into an American this way. So the three of us ate dinner with her and we asked her a lot of questions. It was nice to be able to see her perspective on Morocco and compare our experiences. We ate little meatballs with rice and lots of spices, using bread and our right hands to pick up the food. Utensils are rarely used and you only eat with your right hand. In Arab cultures the right hand is the public hand and is used to greet people, hand over money and eat from a communal dish. The left hand is the unclean, private hand because people wipe their ass with that hand.
The mom laid out sheets and pillows on the sofas in the TV room for us. We were exhausted, we did so much that day: crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, saw two big cities, one small town, rode camels on the beach, and meet a new family. We also gained two hours in changing time zones going from Spain to Morocco so it seemed like the longest day of my life. I feel asleep listening to Islamic prayers being broadcast outside while I was thinking over and over, “I am in Africa!” We slept well.
At about 6 am it was really light out in the courtyard. We are used to darkness until almost 8 am in Sevilla. We folded the sheets, packed our bags and put them in the corner and put the sofa cushions back. Breakfast was croissants filled with chocolate, square flatbread and spongy round flatbread that was like anjara, the Ethiopian bread I’ve had before, and toast. We spread jam and warm honey on them and drank coffee and milk. We all noticed that we were buzzed on caffeine all day long in Morocco, the coffee is really strong and everyone gives you tea throughout the day. We showered in a little room next to the kitchen. As we were getting ready to leave, three girls on our trip walked through the front door and into our courtyard. Everyone was really confused at first. It turns out they were staying with the family right above us and had walked through the wrong door while trying to find their way outside. We had no idea that they were up there all along.
We saw the other group from the other van briefly before leaving for a Cross Cultural Center to meet with Professor Zaki. He talked about the stereotypes of Arabs and the Arab perception of Americans and the Western world. He explained parts of the Koran and how its interpretation has changed over centuries and how the fundamentalism that exists today started 200 years ago as a reaction to colonialism. During peaceful and prosperous times, the Islamic world was very tolerant and Muslims coexisted peacefully with Jews and Christians in Spain and France and were pioneers in philosophy, medicine, trade and science. He talked about other current issues and then we all discussed the causes of misconceptions, racism and violence and the faults of both sides - the Arab world and the West. What I got from it was the importance of looking at each side’s perspective and that many Americans live in an isolated bubble, we know very little about the rest of the world.
The guides wanted us to stay in small groups, so we rarely saw the people in the other van. We were split up after the discussion with the professor. While driving around the city we all wrote in our journals. The radio station that was playing in the van was a mix of American R&B and Arabic pop music. We went to Chellah, a Roman ruins in Rabat. The Mausoleum of King Mohammed V is there (his grandson, Mohammed VI is the current king). We were the only people at the ruins and it was like a playground with mazes of walls, arches and stairs. There was the bottom half of a white marble Roman statue. There were also lots of cats and huge bird nests. We saw cats everywhere we went. They were Mohammed’s (the prophet) favorite animal so you see lots of wild cats in Muslim countries. Some food was being grown inside the ruins and there were lots of exotic plants like bamboo. There was a pool with three eels that was full of coins and there was candle wax everywhere. The local folklore says that infertile women toss coins and hardboiled eggs (which the eels eat) and this will allow them to have children. The weird thing was that this wasn’t some ancient folklore, people still believe this and do it today.
We drove around through the administrative part of the city where we saw lots of government and royal buildings and the mosque where the king goes to pray every Friday, which is televised. They were all very new, modern complexes with lots of fountains and Moroccan flags. I got the impression that the government is fairly wealthy, they can afford some nice stuff compared to the rest of the country.
We came home for lunch and ate alone because the family was fasting. We had tajine - chicken and potatoes in oil and spices with bread and herbal tea. In the afternoon we went to the Kashba – the old castle that became a new medina (town) when the castle was no longer needed to defend the coast. We met some new Moroccan students there who speak English. We walked around with the Moroccan students in small groups to go shopping. We saw the beach from high up in the castle, people were surfing, sailing and fishing. I have the name and email of my student somewhere, I can’t remember his name. He was shy about speaking in English but was very good at it. They were a great help with shopping because they could help us bargain for a fair price. There was lots of leather goods, handmade shoes and sandals, rip-off designer clothes, wooden boxes and crafts, scarves, jewelry, rugs, candy, pottery, robes and tunics. We ran into most of the other groups while out shopping. I bought a wooden camel and a Morocco t-shirt and after looking at jewelry for a long time with the help of two female friends I got two pairs of earrings for Mom and Martha (sorry for ruining the surprise). I was overwhelmed with all the jewelry but it was cheap so I had to get something. Our Moroccan student, a 20-year old guy, got a little bored of all the jewelry shopping too.
We went home as everyone else was going home to break the fast. Kelly, the American student living with our host family, had decided to fast that day for the first time too. We had a huge meal with the whole family in the TV room around a big round table. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to eat a very special meal with a Muslim family. The 6 pm meal to break the fast is not a typical meal. They start with dates and milk – the food that Mohammed ate on his journey to some city somewhere – I don’t remember exactly. They eat several special dishes during Ramadan. The soup spoon was a special Ramadan spoon too, it was a deep round wooden cup with a long stick attached to it, it was difficult to eat with. There were 10 different dishes out, pastries, little sandwiches, fried tomatoes and peppers, figs… it was a lot of food.
That night we had a discussion in the house upstairs with all of the students. We first heard from Kelly and Sam (Samantha – another American student living with the family above us for the semester). It was pretty cool how they were both breaking stereotypes about the Arab world as young non-Muslim, Western women who decided to study in an Islamic country. And then we heard from Allen and Kim about their Peace Corps experiences. Allen spent two years in Mali in the early 1990s. He had an amazing story to tell. He lived in an extremely poor rural area. His source of water was a little well. His toilet was a hole in the ground. He had diarrhea for 18 of the 27 months he was there. His pay made him rich for Mali standards but he lived simply, with no electricity or running water. He said that the psychological difficulties of adjusting to the way of life and sticking to it was much harder than any of the physical difficulties. It was also extremely rewarding, he made many close friends and now has a Malian goddaughter. Kim also talked about the Fulbright program, I didn’t know how much variety of research is done by Fulbright scholars. Someone researched hip-hop music in Morocco, other people make documentaries. Doing the Peace Corps sometime in Central or South America would be really cool, but it would be a huge commitment. I’ll definitely look into it some more.
We watched the second half of the Morocco vs. Tunisia soccer game. It was a really physical World Cup qualifying match. Morocco had to win to have any chance of making it to the World Cup this summer. It was a 2-2 tie so Morocco is out.
We ate a second dinner around 10 pm. It was beef, zucchini, artichoke and peppers. We talked some more with Kelly and we showed the Dad some pictures and American things that we had with us. The hospitality of the families made a very big impression on all of us. Also seeing how Moroccans speak Arabic and French fluently while most also speak very good English and Spanish was impressive. Another thing that we had to adjust to is how women do not go out at night with out a male so we had to be careful that there was at least one guy with every group at night.
On Sunday morning we had breakfast at 7:30 am, packed our bags and said goodbye to the dad who was the only one up that early. We got back into the van and headed inland. Gradually, everything around us started to change. We drove through some small towns and lots of farmland. We saws lots of donkeys, people pushing little carts full of food, little old mopeds loaded down with stuff, sheep, salt farms, very old run down cars, barefoot kids playing in the street, cows grazing on grass in the town squares, women washing clothes in the river and lots and lots of garbage. In one town we stopped next to a parked bread truck to buy some fresh bread. A little boy came up to the passenger side door and started banging on the car. Kim gave him a banana and he ran off without saying anything. Two men walking buy scolded her for giving someone food during Ramadan even though the little boy probably wasn’t fasting. Luckily we could eat and drink all we wanted inside the van. Kim and Ali up in front tried not to look at the food or us while we ate.
We reached the Rif Mountains and drove up some windy narrow roads. We meet Kim’s friend Jaouad, a man in his mid 20s who took us to his sister’s home. His life story was pretty amazing. He grew up in a small mountain town. His school was 8 kilometers away. He was the first person in his town to go to college. When his class graduated at age 16, only one of his 30 classmates found a job. The unemployment rate in Morocco is 30-40%. He studied in Tangiers and earned a BA in English Literature. After all this effort and sacrifice, he could not find a good job in the city so he is back in his village working on the family farm. Successful farmers earn about 1000 dirhams a month (about $100) to support a large family (average of 7 children per family in rural areas). Half of Moroccans live on less than $1 a day. The literacy rate is only 60% - it is much lower for women. We walked through a small town of a few hundred people. We saw the two worlds of Morocco, rural and city. Rabat and Casablanca are modern, international, educated, capitalist and bustling with progress. The rural side of Morocco is extremely poor. We saw this contrast in Jaouad; he said that he struggles to reconcile his two sides, the “traditional Jaouad” at home and the educated Jaouad who lives in Tangiers.
Before our talk with Jaouad and his family, we cut up a bunch of vegetables and had a picnic of veggie, cheese and tuna sandwiches on the hillside. The mother then brought out two huge plates of couscous with vegetables. We stuffed more food down while she was telling us that it was country couscous and country vegetables, all very good for us. They showed us their outdoor, dome-shaped bread oven made of stone. The whole family: parents, grandmother, grandfather, young girl, two young boys, a neighbor and her little boy were there. We asked the family questions and Jaouad interpreted for us. The father, Mohammed, who had never gone to school, was very curious about us and asked us many questions about our lives, our freedom of choice, our education and our marriage practices. Jaouad then brought out a drum and played a long song for us while the family clapped and sang along. Then we went to the other house nearby where they sleep. They earn their income by growing olives, dates and cannabis (cannabis is a common crop in rural Morocco – its illegal but many people grow it because of the money it brings in). The electricity that they had was put in place only a few months ago. The grandpa then played a guitar-like instrument for us and they showed us pictures of groups of students who have visited them in the past. We all fell in love with the little neighbor boy, he was super cute, we took a lot of pictures of him but he was pretty shy. We played some soccer on the hill with the two sons. We said a long goodbye while it started to rain and as soon as we drove off the rain stopped.
We drove to Chefchaouen, a touristy mountain town nearby. We saw a great view of the town and the valley below as we drove in. We went by a big local soccer game with hundreds of people sitting on the wall lining the field. We walked around the town a bit before going to the hotel. It was really hilly and all of the whitewashed buildings were painted in different shades of light blue. Streets that were dead ends were painted blue from wall to wall, making it easier to avoid the dead ends and not get so lost. We stayed in a nice little hostel with a courtyard and a huge library of travel books. We had two free hours to shop before dinner, there was lots of stuff made from wool and leather. I got a wool hat for 30 dirhams, a bracelet for 40, a glass coke bottle (in Arabic) for 6 and wool pullover hoodie for 12 euros. We tried to act Spanish while shopping in order to get a better price, Americans are not as popular. Everything I bought was bargained down to ½ - 2/3 the original price. We met back in the main plaza at 8 pm to go to dinner. We ate at a very Arabic, very blue, kind of touristy restaurant. I had hejira soup, couscous with chicken and vegetables and chocolate mousse. I sampled a lot of other people’s food too. We ate on the roof of the restaurant, overlooking the main plaza. The waiters were pretty funny and they spoke to us in excellent Spanish and English. I didn’t know whether to say shokran, merci, gracias or thank you to them when they gave us our food. They speak all four languages so any one would work.
We then went back to the hostel after talking to the other group briefly as they ate. We had a final group talk and reflection time on the roof of the hostel. There were lots of cats darting around between our legs in the dark, it kind of freaked us out. We talked about the weekend and what we got out of it and how it changed us. Kim gave us all some small gifts, a little cube of musk (a common Arabic fragrance) and a piece of crystallized Saharan sand.
I woke up early on Monday with some others for an optional hike at 6:30 am. We walked through the town, up a lot of stairs and then walked beyond the old city wall and hiked up the mountainside a bit. We were above the fog clouds that covered most of the town. Roosters were everywhere making lots of noise. One friendly rooster was right outside the hostel window of three girls and gave them a rude awakening at 5:30 am. A few locals were out, including some women preparing vegetables for the morning market. We stopped at a lookout point high above the city and had a snack and took some pictures. We walked back down to the hostel, woke everyone else up, packed our bags and headed for the van. The grandmother from the family we visited the day before happened to be in town for some errands and said goodbye to us one more time. We had breakfast in the van while driving towards Ceuta.
Ceuta is a port town still owned by Spain. It is part of Spain and the European Union even though it is on the African continent. The border between Spain and Morocco there attracts a lot of Sub-Saharan Africans who try to smuggle themselves into Spain. There is a lot of crime and poverty around the border. It is the international border with the largest difference in average income in the world. It’s where Europe borders the Third World, the change we saw crossing the border was drastic. We walked down a road through several tall fences with barbed wire. The other side looked very European. It was like any Spanish resort town. We lost two hours by crossing the border (Spain is two hours ahead of Morocco). The ferry we took back to Algeciras was a really nice and really big catamaran and it only took 45 minutes this time because the distance is a lot shorter. There were lots of tables and lounge chairs, a duty free shop and several bars inside the boat and a really ugly statue of two whale’s tails underneath a ceiling with sparkling stars. It felt like a casino – full of faux luxury. Traveling down the Strait of Gibraltar was really cool once again. There were lots of ports and boat traffic. Africa and Europe are so close yet they are worlds apart in terms of religion, income and culture. It was neat to be able to see both in one day.
I would like to say that this trip has changed my life, but I will have to look back at it a few years from now and see if it has changed my thinking. It was a blast - that I know for sure. I think because it was such a short and busy trip, we never left the honeymoon stage and there was not enough time for culture shock to set in.
Today, Wednesday, there was no class because its El Día de Hispanidad – Spain’s patriotic national holiday like the Fourth of July. The three students, including me, who are going to interview the Turkish Ambassador in Madrid this weekend meet with Óscar, the professor who directs the magazine, for four hours to discuss Turkey and the European Union and come up with eight questions to ask the Ambassador. So I am already looking forward to the next trip, Madrid Friday-Sunday.
I’ll start with some background information on the trip. I signed up to work on a magazine that is published each semester by my study abroad program. We work with Spanish students who study English-Spanish translation and interpretation to write a bilingual magazine. The theme of this semester’s issue is immigration and cross-cultural issues. We went to Morocco to learn about another culture and about the immigration to Spain and the rest of Europe through the Moroccan border. 18 American students and about a dozen Spanish students are working on the magazine this semester. 16 of the American students, including me, and five Spanish students went on this trip. For three of the Spanish students it was their first time traveling outside of Spain. Our editor/professor, Óscar, and a professor who teaches the Spanish students, Sage, came along with us too.
We took a bus from Sevilla to Algeciras (near Gibraltar) Thursday evening. We went to our hostel, which was more Moroccan than Spanish, near the port. Dinner was at a Moroccan restaurant down the street. We ate at one long table and the food came really slow but it did not disappoint. We had bread with olive oil and vinegar and salad and when the main course finally came, we chowed down on the best beef I have ever eaten. It was Moroccan style I guess – really soft, spicy and flavorful. It got us excited to eat more Moroccan food over the next four days. Since we were about 25 people sitting around a long table, we decided to try to play telephone. We played once with an english sentence and once with a spanish sentence. The spanish sentence got totally lost and came back as a completly different sentence. Luckily the hostel, restaurant and ferry station were all within four blocks and we were a big group as Algeciras is supposedly the most dangerous town in Spain. At 8 am on Friday morning we meet two of our guides outside the hostel, Arnd – German, and Allen – American, who were from a Moroccan travel program that organized the entire trip for us. We were going to pick up a third guide, Kim – American, in Tangiers. We got on a big ferry, the rows of seats were about 20 wide. It was a long and rough ride, 1 hour 40 minutes, and it was hard to walk around without stumbling or holding on to something. We ate breakfast on the ferry, which didn’t help with the queasiness. Most of us felt a little sick by the end. I got my first glimpse of Gibraltar - it’s a huge rock right on the water. We headed west through the strait, you could see Africa to the left and Spain to the right, they both looked the same. We saw the city of Tarifa on the Spanish coast. Once we arrived we all changed some euros into dirhams (Moroccan currency) and split up into two groups because our transportation in Moroccan was two big vans. We meet our driver, Ali, and my van’s guide, Kim, who was a really chill person from California. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural southern Morocco in 2001. She was evacuated after 9/11 so she only served less than half of her two-year commitment but later came back to Morocco as a Fulbright Scholar to research HIV/AIDS prevention in the country. She married a Moroccan man two months ago and has lived in the city of Féz for several years. She speaks French and Moroccan Arabic (the regional dialect which is a mix of classical Arabic, French and Berber). She was the coolest and most knowledgeable guide you could ask for.
We drove into Tangiers and stopped at a lookout spot to take pictures of the port and the city. At first I wanted to take pictures of everything that I saw, the people were dressed in traditional robes, tunics and hats. All of the cars were really old European cars and all of the signs were in both Arabic and French. We went to the American Legation, a building that was given as a gift to the United States in the late 18th century. It was the first foreign property owned by the United States. Morocco and the US have a long relationship – Morocco was the first country to recognize the US as a sovereign nation in the 1770s and the two countries have had friendly relations since then. Morocco has always been an important Arab ally. It is now a library, museum, and cultural center and it felt very American with photos of US presidents covering the walls. We meet with professor Ali Azeriah, who is Berber (the indigenous people of the mountains of Northern Africa), for a talk on cultural diversity in Morocco. It was interesting to learn the history of Jews in Morocco. Many Jews who fled Spain during the reconquista/inquisition in the 15th century followed the Muslims and settled in Morocco. Few Jews are left as many of them have moved to Israel in the last 50 years.
We then went to an NGO nearby that is a sort of battered women’s shelter. They were nice enough to serve us lunch during Ramadan. Since Ramadan had just started, eating and drinking during the day was a little tricky. 99% of Morocco is Muslim and most of those people fast from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan, although not everyone follows it strictly. Eating or drinking anything, smoking, or even swallowing saliva is prohibited. Consequently, it is very rude for tourists to eat or drink in public. That was a big adjustment at first. Every time I went to the bathroom I drank from my water bottle. As soon as we got into our van we felt safe enough to snack and drink water. It was really weird to always have to be careful about everything you did so that you didn’t offend someone’s religious values. It was also difficult for Ali and Kim. They were both fasting and unfortunately they couldn’t avoid seeing us eat and drink around them. Although it was a let down at first, and guidebooks even recommend not traveling to Muslim countries during Ramadan, I was really glad that we did make the trip during Ramadan because it was really interesting to see what it is like. Many restaurants are closed during the day and the daily schedule is shifted later because Muslims eat two dinners during Ramadan, one at 6 pm to break the fast at sunset and a second one around 10 pm. They also wake up several times in the middle of the night to drink water and eat a snack and then sleep in a little later. People are also more tired and cranky in the afternoon and traffic accidents go up as people are less safe driving home to eat for the first time each day at sunset. Anyways, we got a tour of the NGO’s classrooms and the rooms where women make crafts to sell. They served us hejira, a Moroccan soups with lentils and garbanzo beans (just like Spanish food!) and couscous. We thought the giant plates of couscous with a generous pile of vegetables and chicken were to be shared between two or three people as Moroccan meals are typically served in large communal dishes. But the plates of couscous kept coming until there was one for each person, it was so much food. And then there was chocolate cake and lemon cake for dessert. We left Tangiers and headed west along the Atlantic coast towards Rabat, the capital. It was a beautiful drive. We were on a narrow two-lane highway that ran between farmland and sandy beaches. It seemed like it was much greener than southern Spain and it didn’t feel like Africa at all.
We stopped on the beach where a man was waiting with six camels. Kim knew this guy, he makes his living taking people on camel rides. He doesn’t normally work during Ramadan but made an exception for us. It was about $2.50 USD per ride, 50 cents more than the non-Ramadan price. Camels are really cool animals, well adapted for desert life and they have a unique and funny-looking face. The saddles were just sacks of hay with a blanked draped over and a rope tied to the saddle looped around the tail and the neck to hold it in place. Simple rope harnesses were used to connect each camel to make a train as the camel guy lead us down the beach, speaking to the camels in Arabic. Getting on to and off of the camels was the most fun part, and a little scary too. The camels are lying down when you hop on the saddle. Then the camel extends its back legs, tossing you forward, you almost fall over the front of the camel. And then the camel extends its front legs and you find yourself seven or eight feet above the ground on an unstable saddle and the camel sways side-to-side a lot as it walks. It was nothing like riding a horse, camels are not as sturdy. They have amazingly soft and warm fur too. I took a lot of pictures and got some video too.
We drove further down the coast and stopped in Asila, a small town on the Atlantic coast. We had a local guide, Ahmed, show us around. He was a very nice guy who dropped out of school in order to work to help out his family. He has learned some English on his own, he had some really funny English expressions. We saw the slum next to the town that he lives in, he only accepted a tip from us though. Asilah was more of a traditional Arab town than Tangiers which is a pretty international city. It was Friday, the Islamic holy day so most people were in the mosque praying. As I was walking along in the back of the group, a man’s voice came on over some loudspeakers, chanting Arabic in sort of a sing-song way. My friend and I looked at each other and both asked, “is that the call to prayer?” That was my first “holy shit I’m in an Islamic country” moment. I had always heard that on TV but hearing it in person was really neat. Asilah hosts a famous art festival every summer and attracts lots of European tourists. There were tons of cool murals from the art festival painted on walls around the city. We saw a bakery with a wood-burning stone oven. Women take their dough to the bakery and bake it there. The bakers were working all day long baking bread but they couldn’t eat any of it (until 6 pm) – that would be hard.
Before we left we used a Turkish-style bathroom, also known as “squatters.” It was a public bathroom, but instead of toilets, the stalls had a porcelain square set in the ground with a small hole. No toilet, just a hole in the ground. You flush by filling a bucket with water that you raise from a well and then dumping the water into the hole. Kim taught the girls how to properly squat. We also found out why toilet paper was one of the items on our packing list. The place smelled bad too. Welcome to the developing world.
Before reaching Rabat, we divided up into groups of three for our stay with host families for Friday and Saturday night. I was with Brian, a student from St. Olaf, and Fran, a student from Sevilla who studies English, French, German and Chinese. He speaks English and French well, the last two languages only a little. I was glad to be with him because most Moroccans speak French. We stopped at a gas station for a bathroom break on the way. Moroccan truck stops are the same as Spanish and American ones, nothing too exciting except for the fact that they had sit-down toilets. When we got to Rabat we went to someone’s house where we were picked up by someone from our host family who speaks English – they were all college students. Zineb, a thin Moroccan women in her early 20s who studies English literature took us around the medina (city center) before taking us to her family’s home. She wore a headscarf but modern Western clothing. You see a strange mix of tradition and modernity like that everywhere. You see women dressed in a robe, headscarf and a veil covering everything but her eyes walking hand-in-hand with her little kid who is dressed like any American kid, or a modest Moroccan home with no toilet but a satellite dish on the roof. Anyways, there was lots of crap for sale in the medina, there were stores only 6 feet by 6 feet packed full of electronics or shoes or food. There were lots of street vendors too with piles of pirated cds or piles of clothes and people selling strange things like individual cigarettes. We walked down a wide, brightly lit boulevard lined with palm trees, huge hotels, banks and the national parliament building. We quickly realized that crossing streets in Morocco is really dangerous. Crosswalks or pedestrian signal lights are rare, Zineb just walked right into busy streets and made the cars stop so we just stuck close to her.
She took us home and we met the family, Abdelilah the father, Khadija the mother, Mohamed the 19-year old son, Aya the 15-year old daughter, and a one-year-old baby girl. For some reason I expected Moroccan homes to be very small and dark and full of low sofas and lots of pillows and rugs. I was right about the furniture, but very wrong about the size. The place was very spacious. It had a huge courtyard and 3 rooms that are salons/bedrooms with sofas around the entire room. Another family lived on the second floor, you could see part of their place through the courtyard. We were told that it is rude to look up because people live up there but I couldn’t help but look up every time I walked through the courtyard, there was a huge glass ceiling 50 feet above. The bathroom was down some stairs, in a little cellar type room. They had a toilet with a seat and toilet paper but it was flushed using a bucket of water. The ceiling above the toilet was about 5 feet high, making it awkward to try to pee while hunched over.
We sat in the living room with the dad and watched some TV: sports and Dr. Doolitle in English with Arabic subtitles. The dad left and a blonde girl walked in and sat down to watch TV. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. Brian and I looked at each other and looked back at her, but before we start talking about her, thinking that she wouldn’t understand English, she starts speaking to us about in perfect English about some other city in Morocco. We were thinking, “What’s going on? Who are you?” She eventually explains everything, her name is Kelly, and she is from New York and goes to Colby College. She’s living with this family for a semester and studying Arabic and Government with a small group of American students. She speaks French and very little Arabic. It was a weird surprise to run into an American this way. So the three of us ate dinner with her and we asked her a lot of questions. It was nice to be able to see her perspective on Morocco and compare our experiences. We ate little meatballs with rice and lots of spices, using bread and our right hands to pick up the food. Utensils are rarely used and you only eat with your right hand. In Arab cultures the right hand is the public hand and is used to greet people, hand over money and eat from a communal dish. The left hand is the unclean, private hand because people wipe their ass with that hand.
The mom laid out sheets and pillows on the sofas in the TV room for us. We were exhausted, we did so much that day: crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, saw two big cities, one small town, rode camels on the beach, and meet a new family. We also gained two hours in changing time zones going from Spain to Morocco so it seemed like the longest day of my life. I feel asleep listening to Islamic prayers being broadcast outside while I was thinking over and over, “I am in Africa!” We slept well.
At about 6 am it was really light out in the courtyard. We are used to darkness until almost 8 am in Sevilla. We folded the sheets, packed our bags and put them in the corner and put the sofa cushions back. Breakfast was croissants filled with chocolate, square flatbread and spongy round flatbread that was like anjara, the Ethiopian bread I’ve had before, and toast. We spread jam and warm honey on them and drank coffee and milk. We all noticed that we were buzzed on caffeine all day long in Morocco, the coffee is really strong and everyone gives you tea throughout the day. We showered in a little room next to the kitchen. As we were getting ready to leave, three girls on our trip walked through the front door and into our courtyard. Everyone was really confused at first. It turns out they were staying with the family right above us and had walked through the wrong door while trying to find their way outside. We had no idea that they were up there all along.
We saw the other group from the other van briefly before leaving for a Cross Cultural Center to meet with Professor Zaki. He talked about the stereotypes of Arabs and the Arab perception of Americans and the Western world. He explained parts of the Koran and how its interpretation has changed over centuries and how the fundamentalism that exists today started 200 years ago as a reaction to colonialism. During peaceful and prosperous times, the Islamic world was very tolerant and Muslims coexisted peacefully with Jews and Christians in Spain and France and were pioneers in philosophy, medicine, trade and science. He talked about other current issues and then we all discussed the causes of misconceptions, racism and violence and the faults of both sides - the Arab world and the West. What I got from it was the importance of looking at each side’s perspective and that many Americans live in an isolated bubble, we know very little about the rest of the world.
The guides wanted us to stay in small groups, so we rarely saw the people in the other van. We were split up after the discussion with the professor. While driving around the city we all wrote in our journals. The radio station that was playing in the van was a mix of American R&B and Arabic pop music. We went to Chellah, a Roman ruins in Rabat. The Mausoleum of King Mohammed V is there (his grandson, Mohammed VI is the current king). We were the only people at the ruins and it was like a playground with mazes of walls, arches and stairs. There was the bottom half of a white marble Roman statue. There were also lots of cats and huge bird nests. We saw cats everywhere we went. They were Mohammed’s (the prophet) favorite animal so you see lots of wild cats in Muslim countries. Some food was being grown inside the ruins and there were lots of exotic plants like bamboo. There was a pool with three eels that was full of coins and there was candle wax everywhere. The local folklore says that infertile women toss coins and hardboiled eggs (which the eels eat) and this will allow them to have children. The weird thing was that this wasn’t some ancient folklore, people still believe this and do it today.
We drove around through the administrative part of the city where we saw lots of government and royal buildings and the mosque where the king goes to pray every Friday, which is televised. They were all very new, modern complexes with lots of fountains and Moroccan flags. I got the impression that the government is fairly wealthy, they can afford some nice stuff compared to the rest of the country.
We came home for lunch and ate alone because the family was fasting. We had tajine - chicken and potatoes in oil and spices with bread and herbal tea. In the afternoon we went to the Kashba – the old castle that became a new medina (town) when the castle was no longer needed to defend the coast. We met some new Moroccan students there who speak English. We walked around with the Moroccan students in small groups to go shopping. We saw the beach from high up in the castle, people were surfing, sailing and fishing. I have the name and email of my student somewhere, I can’t remember his name. He was shy about speaking in English but was very good at it. They were a great help with shopping because they could help us bargain for a fair price. There was lots of leather goods, handmade shoes and sandals, rip-off designer clothes, wooden boxes and crafts, scarves, jewelry, rugs, candy, pottery, robes and tunics. We ran into most of the other groups while out shopping. I bought a wooden camel and a Morocco t-shirt and after looking at jewelry for a long time with the help of two female friends I got two pairs of earrings for Mom and Martha (sorry for ruining the surprise). I was overwhelmed with all the jewelry but it was cheap so I had to get something. Our Moroccan student, a 20-year old guy, got a little bored of all the jewelry shopping too.
We went home as everyone else was going home to break the fast. Kelly, the American student living with our host family, had decided to fast that day for the first time too. We had a huge meal with the whole family in the TV room around a big round table. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to eat a very special meal with a Muslim family. The 6 pm meal to break the fast is not a typical meal. They start with dates and milk – the food that Mohammed ate on his journey to some city somewhere – I don’t remember exactly. They eat several special dishes during Ramadan. The soup spoon was a special Ramadan spoon too, it was a deep round wooden cup with a long stick attached to it, it was difficult to eat with. There were 10 different dishes out, pastries, little sandwiches, fried tomatoes and peppers, figs… it was a lot of food.
That night we had a discussion in the house upstairs with all of the students. We first heard from Kelly and Sam (Samantha – another American student living with the family above us for the semester). It was pretty cool how they were both breaking stereotypes about the Arab world as young non-Muslim, Western women who decided to study in an Islamic country. And then we heard from Allen and Kim about their Peace Corps experiences. Allen spent two years in Mali in the early 1990s. He had an amazing story to tell. He lived in an extremely poor rural area. His source of water was a little well. His toilet was a hole in the ground. He had diarrhea for 18 of the 27 months he was there. His pay made him rich for Mali standards but he lived simply, with no electricity or running water. He said that the psychological difficulties of adjusting to the way of life and sticking to it was much harder than any of the physical difficulties. It was also extremely rewarding, he made many close friends and now has a Malian goddaughter. Kim also talked about the Fulbright program, I didn’t know how much variety of research is done by Fulbright scholars. Someone researched hip-hop music in Morocco, other people make documentaries. Doing the Peace Corps sometime in Central or South America would be really cool, but it would be a huge commitment. I’ll definitely look into it some more.
We watched the second half of the Morocco vs. Tunisia soccer game. It was a really physical World Cup qualifying match. Morocco had to win to have any chance of making it to the World Cup this summer. It was a 2-2 tie so Morocco is out.
We ate a second dinner around 10 pm. It was beef, zucchini, artichoke and peppers. We talked some more with Kelly and we showed the Dad some pictures and American things that we had with us. The hospitality of the families made a very big impression on all of us. Also seeing how Moroccans speak Arabic and French fluently while most also speak very good English and Spanish was impressive. Another thing that we had to adjust to is how women do not go out at night with out a male so we had to be careful that there was at least one guy with every group at night.
On Sunday morning we had breakfast at 7:30 am, packed our bags and said goodbye to the dad who was the only one up that early. We got back into the van and headed inland. Gradually, everything around us started to change. We drove through some small towns and lots of farmland. We saws lots of donkeys, people pushing little carts full of food, little old mopeds loaded down with stuff, sheep, salt farms, very old run down cars, barefoot kids playing in the street, cows grazing on grass in the town squares, women washing clothes in the river and lots and lots of garbage. In one town we stopped next to a parked bread truck to buy some fresh bread. A little boy came up to the passenger side door and started banging on the car. Kim gave him a banana and he ran off without saying anything. Two men walking buy scolded her for giving someone food during Ramadan even though the little boy probably wasn’t fasting. Luckily we could eat and drink all we wanted inside the van. Kim and Ali up in front tried not to look at the food or us while we ate.
We reached the Rif Mountains and drove up some windy narrow roads. We meet Kim’s friend Jaouad, a man in his mid 20s who took us to his sister’s home. His life story was pretty amazing. He grew up in a small mountain town. His school was 8 kilometers away. He was the first person in his town to go to college. When his class graduated at age 16, only one of his 30 classmates found a job. The unemployment rate in Morocco is 30-40%. He studied in Tangiers and earned a BA in English Literature. After all this effort and sacrifice, he could not find a good job in the city so he is back in his village working on the family farm. Successful farmers earn about 1000 dirhams a month (about $100) to support a large family (average of 7 children per family in rural areas). Half of Moroccans live on less than $1 a day. The literacy rate is only 60% - it is much lower for women. We walked through a small town of a few hundred people. We saw the two worlds of Morocco, rural and city. Rabat and Casablanca are modern, international, educated, capitalist and bustling with progress. The rural side of Morocco is extremely poor. We saw this contrast in Jaouad; he said that he struggles to reconcile his two sides, the “traditional Jaouad” at home and the educated Jaouad who lives in Tangiers.
Before our talk with Jaouad and his family, we cut up a bunch of vegetables and had a picnic of veggie, cheese and tuna sandwiches on the hillside. The mother then brought out two huge plates of couscous with vegetables. We stuffed more food down while she was telling us that it was country couscous and country vegetables, all very good for us. They showed us their outdoor, dome-shaped bread oven made of stone. The whole family: parents, grandmother, grandfather, young girl, two young boys, a neighbor and her little boy were there. We asked the family questions and Jaouad interpreted for us. The father, Mohammed, who had never gone to school, was very curious about us and asked us many questions about our lives, our freedom of choice, our education and our marriage practices. Jaouad then brought out a drum and played a long song for us while the family clapped and sang along. Then we went to the other house nearby where they sleep. They earn their income by growing olives, dates and cannabis (cannabis is a common crop in rural Morocco – its illegal but many people grow it because of the money it brings in). The electricity that they had was put in place only a few months ago. The grandpa then played a guitar-like instrument for us and they showed us pictures of groups of students who have visited them in the past. We all fell in love with the little neighbor boy, he was super cute, we took a lot of pictures of him but he was pretty shy. We played some soccer on the hill with the two sons. We said a long goodbye while it started to rain and as soon as we drove off the rain stopped.
We drove to Chefchaouen, a touristy mountain town nearby. We saw a great view of the town and the valley below as we drove in. We went by a big local soccer game with hundreds of people sitting on the wall lining the field. We walked around the town a bit before going to the hotel. It was really hilly and all of the whitewashed buildings were painted in different shades of light blue. Streets that were dead ends were painted blue from wall to wall, making it easier to avoid the dead ends and not get so lost. We stayed in a nice little hostel with a courtyard and a huge library of travel books. We had two free hours to shop before dinner, there was lots of stuff made from wool and leather. I got a wool hat for 30 dirhams, a bracelet for 40, a glass coke bottle (in Arabic) for 6 and wool pullover hoodie for 12 euros. We tried to act Spanish while shopping in order to get a better price, Americans are not as popular. Everything I bought was bargained down to ½ - 2/3 the original price. We met back in the main plaza at 8 pm to go to dinner. We ate at a very Arabic, very blue, kind of touristy restaurant. I had hejira soup, couscous with chicken and vegetables and chocolate mousse. I sampled a lot of other people’s food too. We ate on the roof of the restaurant, overlooking the main plaza. The waiters were pretty funny and they spoke to us in excellent Spanish and English. I didn’t know whether to say shokran, merci, gracias or thank you to them when they gave us our food. They speak all four languages so any one would work.
We then went back to the hostel after talking to the other group briefly as they ate. We had a final group talk and reflection time on the roof of the hostel. There were lots of cats darting around between our legs in the dark, it kind of freaked us out. We talked about the weekend and what we got out of it and how it changed us. Kim gave us all some small gifts, a little cube of musk (a common Arabic fragrance) and a piece of crystallized Saharan sand.
I woke up early on Monday with some others for an optional hike at 6:30 am. We walked through the town, up a lot of stairs and then walked beyond the old city wall and hiked up the mountainside a bit. We were above the fog clouds that covered most of the town. Roosters were everywhere making lots of noise. One friendly rooster was right outside the hostel window of three girls and gave them a rude awakening at 5:30 am. A few locals were out, including some women preparing vegetables for the morning market. We stopped at a lookout point high above the city and had a snack and took some pictures. We walked back down to the hostel, woke everyone else up, packed our bags and headed for the van. The grandmother from the family we visited the day before happened to be in town for some errands and said goodbye to us one more time. We had breakfast in the van while driving towards Ceuta.
Ceuta is a port town still owned by Spain. It is part of Spain and the European Union even though it is on the African continent. The border between Spain and Morocco there attracts a lot of Sub-Saharan Africans who try to smuggle themselves into Spain. There is a lot of crime and poverty around the border. It is the international border with the largest difference in average income in the world. It’s where Europe borders the Third World, the change we saw crossing the border was drastic. We walked down a road through several tall fences with barbed wire. The other side looked very European. It was like any Spanish resort town. We lost two hours by crossing the border (Spain is two hours ahead of Morocco). The ferry we took back to Algeciras was a really nice and really big catamaran and it only took 45 minutes this time because the distance is a lot shorter. There were lots of tables and lounge chairs, a duty free shop and several bars inside the boat and a really ugly statue of two whale’s tails underneath a ceiling with sparkling stars. It felt like a casino – full of faux luxury. Traveling down the Strait of Gibraltar was really cool once again. There were lots of ports and boat traffic. Africa and Europe are so close yet they are worlds apart in terms of religion, income and culture. It was neat to be able to see both in one day.
I would like to say that this trip has changed my life, but I will have to look back at it a few years from now and see if it has changed my thinking. It was a blast - that I know for sure. I think because it was such a short and busy trip, we never left the honeymoon stage and there was not enough time for culture shock to set in.
Today, Wednesday, there was no class because its El Día de Hispanidad – Spain’s patriotic national holiday like the Fourth of July. The three students, including me, who are going to interview the Turkish Ambassador in Madrid this weekend meet with Óscar, the professor who directs the magazine, for four hours to discuss Turkey and the European Union and come up with eight questions to ask the Ambassador. So I am already looking forward to the next trip, Madrid Friday-Sunday.
posted by Sam at
1:00 PM
|
4 comments
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Trips
There was a solar eclipse on Monday. Western Europe was one of the best places to see it. I was in class when it happened. I saw pictures and heard about it though.
I stumbled across a political protest last week. People were marching and chanting, carrying flags and banners. I quickly figured out that it was for Western Sahara independence. Western Sahara was under Spanish control for a long time and when Franco died the Moroccan king annexed it. It has never been sovereign. I don't know that much about it but I will be writing a paper on Morocco for class so I'll find out more.
The residencia (dorms) had a party for their students last night, they could invite their friends too. It was held in one of the best clubs in Sevilla, it was really fun. On Monday night I went to a salsa lesson. Salsa is a fun and easy dance and it seems like it is about as popular as flamenco here. The first lesson is free so lots of people showed up, mostly spaniards, and mostly women. I don't have time to take lessons twice a week though, some of my friends are taking lessons, I may try to fit it in in November.
We are leaving for Algecires (right next to Gibraltar) Thursday night and staying in a hostel. Early Friday morning we will take a ferry to Tangiers. I think we are driving to Rabat, the capital, and we also have a hike in the mountains sometime. We will stay with Moroccan families, meet Moroccan college students and return on Monday.
Next weekend I am going to Madrid on the high-speed AVE train.
The weekend after that I am going to Cádiz.
Two weeks later... Copenhagen.
I will post as much as I can on this weekend as soon as I get back from AFRICA!
Hopefully lots of pictures and a video of the trip.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Ramadan started two days ago. When we eat (or even drink water) during the day we will be the only people eating.
I stumbled across a political protest last week. People were marching and chanting, carrying flags and banners. I quickly figured out that it was for Western Sahara independence. Western Sahara was under Spanish control for a long time and when Franco died the Moroccan king annexed it. It has never been sovereign. I don't know that much about it but I will be writing a paper on Morocco for class so I'll find out more.
The residencia (dorms) had a party for their students last night, they could invite their friends too. It was held in one of the best clubs in Sevilla, it was really fun. On Monday night I went to a salsa lesson. Salsa is a fun and easy dance and it seems like it is about as popular as flamenco here. The first lesson is free so lots of people showed up, mostly spaniards, and mostly women. I don't have time to take lessons twice a week though, some of my friends are taking lessons, I may try to fit it in in November.
We are leaving for Algecires (right next to Gibraltar) Thursday night and staying in a hostel. Early Friday morning we will take a ferry to Tangiers. I think we are driving to Rabat, the capital, and we also have a hike in the mountains sometime. We will stay with Moroccan families, meet Moroccan college students and return on Monday.
Next weekend I am going to Madrid on the high-speed AVE train.
The weekend after that I am going to Cádiz.
Two weeks later... Copenhagen.
I will post as much as I can on this weekend as soon as I get back from AFRICA!
Hopefully lots of pictures and a video of the trip.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Ramadan started two days ago. When we eat (or even drink water) during the day we will be the only people eating.
posted by Sam at
4:02 PM
|
1 comments
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Carrera, Beisbol, Playa
The run on Friday night started at 10 p.m. on the far north side of the city. We had to walk several miles to get there. There were lots of teams in the race and lots of serious-looking runners. The race has always been 10 kilometers but they changed the course this year. The fliers said it was going to be 11.4 km whereas the website was more up-to-date and said it was 12.06 km. We made team t-shirts for the race that said XVII Carrera Nocturna Sevilla 2005 12.06 km on the back. No one was sure about the actual distance. Minutes before the race started, it was announced that the new course was 11.4 km. Our confidence was boosted after hearing that we were going to run 0.66 km less than we thought. The start was really crowded, it was hard to move in a crowd of 6,000 runners. Lots of people were watching along the way - there was a number of people banging on drums along the route and one group of guys in drag playing random instruments. The runners were hootin’ and hollerin’ the whole time too. Our group was nine students and two young guys (one Spanish, one American) who work for our program. Four of us stuck together for most of the race, including me and a girl who runs track at Santa Clara University (I beat her) and a girl from Georgetown who runs marathons (I finished about 2 minutes behind her). We started near the back but passed a lot of people throughout the run. The route went up and down the river, crossing it several times. The race ended in a big soccer stadium called the Estadio Olímpico that was built for the 1992 Expo. It never held an Olympic event and it doesn’t seem to get any use nowadays but it was a nice stadium. My goal was 70 minutes; I finished in just under 63. There were bars set up at the finish line serving free soda, juice and beer.
We had to walk several miles again to get home, this time with sore legs. And then we all went out at 2 a.m. to celebrate. A bunch of American students from Salamanca were here for the weekend. Two of them knew one of my friends and went out with us. We went to the Mexican restaurant that is open late for some food at 5 am. I slept until the early afternoon on Saturday, of course. I bought a University of Sevilla t-shirt at the only store in the city that sells University apparel – they aren’t very big on college gear. I went to the Texas Saloon bar near the cathedral to see if they had ESPN 2, which was broadcasting the Wisconsin-Indiana football game. They didn’t, so we watched baseball and soccer instead. It was really weird to watch american television. The bar’s menu and décor was very American too and a bunch of US Marines stationed in southern Spain were there. I ate there and then went home, ate some more and then went out with my hermanas Lola and María and a friend of mine. We went to Jesus’ friend’s apartment near the university. There was about 10 Spaniards there, 3 French students and 6 Italian students, all of whom study at the University of Sevilla. It was a cool experience to hear four languages spoken. One of the Italian students did not know much Spanish so her friends translated Italian into a mix of Spanish and English for us. We talked in spanglish with most of them. My friend and I went home at 2:30 when most of them were about to head out to a discoteca.
I caught an 11 o’clock bus to Matalascañas on Sunday morning to go to the beach. I went with seven girls. My program is about 75% girls so every once in a while I end up being the only guy in the group. My Spanish classes at Madison were the same way – mostly girls. Choosing to major in Spanish was a pretty good idea. I got pretty tan today, we were on the beach for over five hours. I got some homework done and swam out to a huge rock sticking out of the water. Right now (Sunday night) I am exhausted.
We had to walk several miles again to get home, this time with sore legs. And then we all went out at 2 a.m. to celebrate. A bunch of American students from Salamanca were here for the weekend. Two of them knew one of my friends and went out with us. We went to the Mexican restaurant that is open late for some food at 5 am. I slept until the early afternoon on Saturday, of course. I bought a University of Sevilla t-shirt at the only store in the city that sells University apparel – they aren’t very big on college gear. I went to the Texas Saloon bar near the cathedral to see if they had ESPN 2, which was broadcasting the Wisconsin-Indiana football game. They didn’t, so we watched baseball and soccer instead. It was really weird to watch american television. The bar’s menu and décor was very American too and a bunch of US Marines stationed in southern Spain were there. I ate there and then went home, ate some more and then went out with my hermanas Lola and María and a friend of mine. We went to Jesus’ friend’s apartment near the university. There was about 10 Spaniards there, 3 French students and 6 Italian students, all of whom study at the University of Sevilla. It was a cool experience to hear four languages spoken. One of the Italian students did not know much Spanish so her friends translated Italian into a mix of Spanish and English for us. We talked in spanglish with most of them. My friend and I went home at 2:30 when most of them were about to head out to a discoteca.
I caught an 11 o’clock bus to Matalascañas on Sunday morning to go to the beach. I went with seven girls. My program is about 75% girls so every once in a while I end up being the only guy in the group. My Spanish classes at Madison were the same way – mostly girls. Choosing to major in Spanish was a pretty good idea. I got pretty tan today, we were on the beach for over five hours. I got some homework done and swam out to a huge rock sticking out of the water. Right now (Sunday night) I am exhausted.
posted by Sam at
4:09 PM
|
0 comments
Saturday, October 01, 2005
What I did last night
I ran 11.4 kilometers in 1 hour 2 minutes and 53 seconds. The race started at 10 pm. Then I went out with my friends who ran until 6 am.
posted by Sam at
7:43 AM
|
0 comments
