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.