Morocco

Before I describe my time in Morocco, I just want to say that I was very hesitant in signing up before I went. I came to Granada thinking I wouldn't go after talking with various family members and other people who said that it was too dangerous and I should save my money for somewhere else. My Dad was against me going and I agreed with him that I probably shouldn't go prior to coming to Granada. At the university I am taking an Islamic Cultures class and talked with the professor, other professors, and my host parents about Morocco. Not only that, but I researched the cities in Morocco we would be traveling to, laws, crime, culture, etc, and none were on the list of dangerous cities or had crime problems. All said about the same thing. Morocco is one of the fastest developing countries and its economy is progressing rapidly. Yes, there is violence and terrorism in parts of the country, but there's violence and terrorism in many countries. I started to look at this chance a bit differently and realized it could be a great opportunity to visit an Islamic country, so different from all the other places I would see around southern Europe. No way was I going to go with a few other girls from my trip and spontaneously plan trips around Morocco alone. One of my friend's sisters studying abroad with me, went through the "We Love Spain" program through the University of Granada and loved it. Everything is prepaid for; the food, hotels, excursions, transportation, etc. One of the tour guides this program uses is so well known he was interviewed by National Geographic, so its a well known safe program. Despite knowing that it would horribly worry my parents, I decided to go. I felt guilty but I also know in the future I will be working, or volunteering, in much more dangerous countries than Morocco in Central/South America.
When we came to the border of Spain/Morocco, we waited about an hour for all of our passports to get stamped. Poor Kevin, "We Love Spain" manager, was running back and forth from the bus with bags of passports, while Pedro our bus driver was blasting music for us so we stayed sane.
After the border, we drove to our four star hotel in Tetouan, Dreams Hotel. That night we stayed in and got up nice and early for our tour of Chefchaouen. Our guide for the Moroccan part was Mohammad. As he said, in every family there is at least one person named Mohammad. He was an older man with a great sense of humor and knows Spanish, English, Arabic, French, and Berber (Moroccan dialect). Chefchaouen is a beautiful small town. All the buildings are white with bright blue doors and alleyways. Mohammad told us they paint them about 5 times a year, so everything is very fresh and bright looking. We stopped into a store where they make carpets, blankets, and scarves with a 100 year old loom. Folded blankets are lined on the walls in all sorts of colors. I wanted to buy one but knew I could get a cheaper one somewhere else, and no way was I going to try and barter with 40 other people there.
After we walked around some more, we eventually had free time to shop. In Morocco, everything is negotiable. It's part of their culture, so it's actually weird when you accept the price they give you. I got a nice orange colored carpet/blanket for 15E, which I now realize I could have got for 10 had I been stubborn enough. You can usually always get the price you ask for as long as its not ridiculous, and as long as your persistent. So I worked my magic and got a beautiful woven sweater in blue colors, the colors of Chefchaouen, for 11E. I worked him down from 20E. I was pretty happy. The trick is to claim a price before they can, but many girls did not catch on and would simply ask 'how much does this cost'? And agree with that price.
After shopping, we left for Tetouan to eat lunch at it's nicest restaurant, according to Mohammad. The tea is by far the most delicious tea I have tasted in a while. The food was good as well, but the tea is delicious and they know it. They call it "Moroccan whiskey". At the restaurant they had some entertainers who put a tray of tea and candles on it and did a dance for us while jumping and spinning. Then some would come in and play the drums and other instruments I don't know the names of.
On Saturday we also did our short camel ride. It was a tiny ride, not even 5 minutes long, around a parking lot kind of area near the beach. Of course the camel I rode was the most undisciplined of them all, and tried to stand up before I was even on it, and tried to bite the man helping me on even though it had a muzzle like thing over its mouth. Other than that the ride went smoothly, but in the end I just ended up feeling really bad for all the camels. There was a baby camel who was absolutely adorable. Two kids watching her told us her name was Sabrina. So for ten minutes we were calling her Sabrina until its owner came over and said "Sabrina?! No, its a boy! Does it look like a girl?" and pointed to its crotch, as the two boys died in laughter. Turns out they don't know any English or Spanish so they had no idea what we had been saying the whole time.
While we waited for the rest to enjoy their camel ride, me and some friends went down to the beautiful beach. The waves were huge and the sand so soft and white. All the people with houses along the coast are upper class and typically French. The day could not have been more beautiful either, sunny and 70 degrees. After everyone was done their ride, we drove up the road a little bit to a cafe to use the bathrooms and watch the sunset. It was so gorgeous. The sun set right over the Mediterranean and the sky was all sorts of oranges, reds, purples, and yellows. None of the pictures I took can give justice to the beauty of it all!
While we drove from one cite to another Mohammad described life in Morocco from the culture to religion. Many fell asleep, but always tried to stay awake for when he talked. He talked about religion and how it is an Islamic country but people have the right to take it as seriously as they want. If they don't go to the mosque on Friday and pray, no one cares. If women don't want to cover their hair, face, bodies, they don't have to. One of the reasons Morocco is progressing so fast ahead of other Islamic countries is the fact that women have more equal rights, and also the average household has 1 to 2 children. Mohammad also went over the topic of polygamy. He said most men only have one wife for many reasons. One reason he pointed out is that its very expensive. If you want to have a second wife, you need to run it by your first wife first.  If she says it is ok, he needs to by the second woman a home because 'the women don't like to live together so much'. On top of that, he needs to support any children he has, food, school, etc. Men always pay for everything, even if the woman makes a bigger income. She doesn't have to pay for anything if she doesn't want to, but the man is responsible for a dowry at the wedding, paying for the wedding, and supplying money for food, the house, clothes, etc. Another reason is that a husband needs to be equal to his first wife and for this, its almost always impossible to get a second wife. But Mohammad said he's only met one person who has two, and said the moment the man got a second wife his life became horrible and hard. Something else Mohammad said was he knows its good for women to be lean and thin than fat, "but here in Morocco its better for a woman to be fat. That way she's strong, and she provides heat in the cold winter and a nice shadow when it's hot". I got a good kick out of that.
That night we went to our hotel in Tangier, yet another very nice hotel, and got ready for our Fantasy Dinner. The restaurant was more like a huge tent. Red designed carpets covered the floor and the cloth draping from the ceiling to the walls was a designed pattern as well. There were tons of tables since all 200 people in the group were there. During dinner we had some acrobat entertainers, and a band playing throughout. For dinner the courses were soup, salad, chicken, tea and a biscuit. The salad was the most delicious salad I have had in a while! There wasn't 2 pounds of vinegar or oil on it unlike the Spanish salad I eat everyday. After we ate we returned to the hotel and passed out.
Sunday morning we woke up early, ate breakfast in the hotel, then headed for our final excursions. We toured a part of Tangiers, stopping in a pharmacy. On the walls were shelves of jars containing herbs and liquids. The owner told us they use them instead of medicines for sicknesses and proceeded to show us some of the items. For stuffy noses and sinuses they use this powder of a blackish/dark blue color and ball it up into a piece of cloth, hold it up to the nose and sniff. Nothing ends up going up your nose because of the cloth, and once you're done all you have to do is throw away the cloth and not the powder. They let us sniff it and it smells exactly like Vicks Vapor, and it did clear my semi-stuffed nose! Next they showed us ginseng, morocco oil, acne lotion, lotion for eczema, and finally some green mint tea. They gave us plastic bags and when we wanted something we'd raise our hands and they'd run it over to us and in the end we lined up to pay. I got one bag of tea but lingered around to see if I could get another for only one euro more, and I did! The tea is delicious.
Next and final stop in Morocco was Hercules' Caves. This cave was on the coast and was very big but not nearly as big as the St. Michael's caves in Gibraltar. There's a spot where the water comes into the cave and makes a pool off to the side. In the summer people go here to swim. Also, at this spot the silhouette of the rock makes the shape of a backwards African continent which looks very cool. On the opposite side of the cave is this small bowl on the side of the rock that fresh water drips into. The superstitious believe it brings good luck if you wash your face three times with the water. Naturally, we all washed our faces three times.
Finally we headed for the border. It took much less time going through than it did when we first crossed. We ended our trip with a small tour via bus through Ceuta, the Spanish city, before heading to the ferry. The tour lasted about an hour and it was a very pretty city. What makes it different from the other Spanish cities around is that the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities all live together peacefully. In Spanish there are the words coexist and 'convivir' which literally means to live with. They use this word to describe when people are not simply living alongside with others/being tolerant, living with them in the community, and this is what what the people in Ceuta do.

Gibraltar!

This past Friday me and six other girls from UNH went on a weekend trip to Gibraltar and then Morocco. It was a prepaid trip through the program "We Love Spain", and in total there were about 200 other people on the trip but we all were split up into groups of 40-50 on different buses. From Granada, it was a little less than a 4 hour drive to Gibraltar. The drive was a beautiful road alongside the coast of the Mediterranean and beautiful rich towns.
For those of us that paid for the Gibraltar tour, we simply flashed our passports at the border and walked to our tour bus which seemed too easy seeing as I didn't even have my passport out. Our guide's name for the Gibraltar tour was Mike and we all loved his British accent and sense of humor.
Gibraltar is only about 8 km squared and has around 35,000 inhabitants. It's a beautiful island with lots of palm trees and bright blue water. It's located at the point where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet.
Our first stop was at the caves of St. Michael's. The drive there was on the side of the Gibraltar rock, a very steep and windy road. Mike told us that when we got out there would be monkeys and that it's important that we don't feed them because there's a huge fine, but a second later a monkey jumps through the window because he was holding out peanuts! After we went through the caves, he said we could play with them.
The caves are vast and go very far down into the rock of Gibraltar. It used to be thought that the monkeys arrived to Gibraltar through the caves because they thought them to be never ending and connected to the top of Africa. However this isn't true, the monkey's were brought over by ships and pirates way back in the day. Stalagmites cover the ceiling and all of the caves were formed by nature and water over thousands of years. Today one of the large caves is used for classical concerts and has a nice stage and rock seats.
After we exited the caves, we got to play with the monkeys as promised. Mike would hold out a peanut and a monkey would jump up on his arm and he would pass it to the next person. I got to enjoy a nice monkey on my shoulder, but afterwards I felt a little gross because it smelled faintly of pee. There were a bunch of adorable baby monkeys as well but were not as comfortable with people unfortunately, so I did not get to hold one. We next drove to Ape's Den where we played with some more monkeys, but these ones weren't as nice. They are still wild, so it shouldn't have been that surprising. One kid had dreds and the monkeys kept chewing on his beads in his hair. Other monkeys pulled hair and ate it when they were on top of other people's shoulders which I found slightly amusing since it wasn't me. One girl was nicely posing with a monkey as it casually started to pee all over her jacket. I erupted into laughter of course, but the poor girl was mortified. It wasn't that big of a deal because her jacket is waterproof and pee is sterile, but she took it off and laid it on a rock to dry for the 5 minutes we had left. When she tried to leave a monkey, probably the same monkey that pissed on it, grabbed her jacket and made a run for it. He ran down the street a little ways and then hopped over the fence and on this very steep hill/cliff. Our bus driver and Kevin, our trip coordinator, risked their lives and hopped over the fence for this girls jacket. After 5 or so minutes they were able to lure the monkey with peanuts and grab her jacket. The day was saved.
They importance of the monkeys to Gibraltar goes back to the days Britain started its reign over the island. It was once said that when all the monkeys leave Gibraltar, so will all the British. Winston Churchill took this so seriously that he had 24 more monkeys brought to Gibraltar to ensure their existence. Today there are about 300. Churchill also wanted to protect them so he enlisted them all in the British army. The hospital that was built for soldiers on the island was built in such a way that no sunlight ever directly hit any of the windows to keep it as cool as possible. After they were enlisted, a wing of the hospital was solely for the health of the monkeys since they were able to receive the same health benefits as all the other human enlistees.
As we headed towards the main part of the city, we saw the courts where John Lennon and Yoko Ono married as well as Sean Connery, twice. We drove down the same narrow windy roads that were filmed for the car racing scenes in James Bond when Sean Connery played 007. Many of the roads are very narrow and some used to be two way streets until a few years ago. This seemed ridiculous since cars park on both sides of the street leaving just enough room for a car to get by; our bus barely made it through, but to them it's no big deal of course. A common saying in Gibraltar is "bumpers are for bumping".
For an two hours we had some free time to wonder around the beautiful city. It was weird being in a native English speaking country, and several times we would ask questions in Spanish. Thousands of Spanish workers cross the border daily to work so it was fine when it was someone Spanish but I thought it was more weird when people would come up and talk to us in Spanish since me and my friends talk in English to each other and don't look Spanish.
We walked back to the buses to continue on our way to the ferry for Morocco. The main road into/out of Gibraltar also serves as a part of the airport's runway. Because of this, there was lots of traffic coming into Gibraltar but exiting was fine. Two hours later we had boarded the ferry and landed in the city of Ceuta, a Spanish city at the tip top part of Africa. Once on the bus we made our way towards the border of Spain/Morocco to continue our trip to Tetouan.

La Alpujarra

This past weekend the UNH group had a few group activities. On Friday, we went to a concert, "El Barrio", which is a popular flamenco rock/pop group. The ticket said it started at 10:00, but a lot of us assumed it'd start later like most concerts. My host mother told me at 8 o'clock that I wasn't going to get a seat because people would be waiting for hours before the doors opened. Well, I didn't take heed of her advice so me and a few others showed up to the venue ten or fifteen minutes after ten. We had no idea that all of the tickets were general admission tickets, so needless to say we sat in the very last row. The crowd was very outgoing and I don't think I stopped clapping for two hours.
Sunday morning we left for our trip to La Alpujarra which is a mountain area that stretches south from the Sierra Nevadas. It was about a two hour drive from Granada. On the way we stopped at two small towns before reaching our destination. In the first town (I forget the name) were lots of fountains that had natural potable water springing out of them. Our guide, also one of my professors, told us elderly people used to come and drink the water because legend says it has healing powers and would heal and strengthen their organs. Some fountains had poems on them going along with the healing power legend, but they were all over the place, and I couldn't stop thinking that it would be a great place to run since fresh flowing water is everywhere.
While waiting for the bus to pick us up we went to a cafe to get coffee and use the bathrooms. Before walking in, an elderly man outside the cafe smiled and managed to say "good morning" to all of us through the 5 teeth he had. However, soon enough he was in the cafe striking up a conversation with me and a friend. He was telling us how he learned English and French growing up but only really remembered French because they emphasized it during the war. The only English he said he remembers is "Good morning! Hello, how are you? You are very nice. Will you be my wife?" and I told him those are the most important things to know in case he finds a nice Englishwoman he wants to marry. I thought he would leave after but then he was talking to all the other girls in the group, and when we took pictures he just said "my wifes". It was hysterical. He waved to the bus as we drove away.
The next stop we had was in yet another town i forget the name of. The main reason we stopped was to stretch our legs and give all the nauseated people a break. The road leading to our destination was very steep, very windy and narrow, and two feet away from a cliff. My professor told us to yell for a plastic bag if we needed it and she would sprint it back to us on the bus. I don't believe anyone needed it in the end, but if someone had it would've been a chain reaction and the definition of a struggle bus. The town is a traditional looking town from La Alpujarra, white, flat roofed, and narrow streets.
Our final destination was the town at the highest altitude in the E.U. until 2005. Before lunch, my professor explained to us for half an hour the differences in ham between black, pink/red, and white pigs, since ham is the most popular meat in Spain. Two of the pigs' meat is cholesterol free, but I forget which colors because I was slightly dozing off. The lunch consisted of a soup, sausage, fried egg, ham, sliced potatoes, and a pepper- a typical meal from La Alpujarra. I managed to spill not only my soup everywhere but the wine as well. After we ate, we went for a hike on a trial from the town. After maybe 25 minutes of hiking, the guide/my professor refused to go past a certain point because she said it was very dangerous and urged us not to go. During the winter, its very common for the rocks on the mountainside to break, fall off, then tumble down the mountain, which can leave huge gouges in the land. One guide died last year from getting hit by a rock, so she refused to go. All the people from the UNH group continued with our professor, Marco, because we wanted to see the river and better views. The area of where the rocks were was about 20 meters long and we all survived. Most of us were not prepared for this small hike. I thought we were only doing a street excursion in the town so I wore jeans, a peacoat, and a sweatshirt (both of which ended up around my waist). Even though we were at such a high altitude it was still very warm. I know for a fact it was very warm outside because it was the first time I didn't hear someone in my host family mention how cold it was that day.

Huevos

On January 12th I arrived here excited, nervous, and ready to learn mucho español. I'm studying abroad in the beautiful city of Granada, Spain at the University of Granada in the Center of Modern Languages. There I take five classes, all in Spanish, Monday through Thursday with an occasional class on Friday. I'm living with very nice host family. I have a host mom and dad, and two host sisters (22 &16). As far as meals go, breakfasts are tiny or non-existent for the most part, lunch is the largest meal of the day, then dinner late at night around 9:00 or 10:00. Lunch is eaten during 'siesta' hours, 2-5, and all stores/banks/companies close during these hours so people can eat with their families. My host mom is an excellent cook and I can only think of one food I haven't really liked since being here and that is 'morcilla', or blood sausage. Besides the taste, the fact that sausage itself is mystery meat made it hard for me to eat while thinking I could've been eating mashed up eyes/nose/other unappetizing body parts.
Other basic things about here is that for people in Granada it's always 'cold'. It's 50-55 degrees F and sunny just about everyday this time of the year. If I walk out of my room in just a sweatshirt or light jacket they look at me and say "loca!" or "que frio!" and proceed to ask if I'm sure I don't want gloves or another scarf to wear. The same also goes for when I run but the reactions are worse because I'm typically in shorts.
In the past month my Spanish has improved a good amount and I'm happy I can understand (for the most part) the thick Andalusian accent. It's so different from most Spanish accents that when one of the host moms tried talking with a phone company, whose teller was Latin American, they couldn't understand what the other was saying.  Obviously I have mixed up some words here and there, but there's one word I used that my host mom still finds hilarious whenever the topic of shoes comes up. When we were going to the outdoor market I told her i needed to buy heels. Well, that's what I meant to tell her but instead of saying 'tacones' I said 'tacaños' meaning I wanted to buy stingy people.
Many cognates and words we use for dual meanings in English do not translate to the same meaning in Spanish. For example, when someone says "constipado they are not telling you they are constipated, just that their nose is stuffy. Yesterday in my culture of peace class, the professor divided us into groups and had us brainstorm ways to better the employment rate and the economy of Spain. We were having some difficulty since the economy here is terrible and is continuing to drop and there's not even enough money to finish any construction work in the streets (21% unemployment rate). We wrote down two points about increasing incentives to go to college, especially for women and whatever our teacher told us, but we couldn't think of a third so we decided to throw something down as a joke. Before coming to Spain, my friend jokingly told me I should sell my eggs to make more money for traveling while abroad. So, I told my group this and they said if I presented that part to the class we could put it down. Naturally I agreed. Now when it was our group's turn to present, one girl read off the first two points and handed the paper to me. I started talking about how women could sell their eggs to make money since it can bring in tens of thousands of dollars with each procedure, and how women doesn't have to work since it's all natural... etc. And my teacher just looked at me after I finished with no smile whatsoever. I started to think well this is awkward.. he didn't even think it was funny a tiny bit. My confusion began when he asked me and why can't men sell their eggs?" then proceeded to talk about the agriculture industry and how women aren't working in agricultural jobs.. etc. Finally, he said, "Also, in Spanish we don't say their eggs, it's the eggs". And that's when it dawned on me and the rest of the class... he thought I was talking about chicken eggs the whole time! After I managed to control my laughter, I  explained to him what type of egg I was referring to. He started to laugh and wrote "óvulos" on the board, the word I should have used, and said he was going to write this one down in his journal. I would call it a successful class.