What to Say About Morocco...

Well it was completely different from anywhere I have ever been, that’s for sure. 
I wrote about my first day in Morocco and getting henna-attacked on my last blog so I’ll start after that.  The next day (Friday 9/10) I went out with some friends to walk around Casablanca and to eat lunch.  We ended up eating at a nice Moroccan restaurant called Le Fleur (I can’t spell or say anything in French so I don’t know if that is right).  It was really good food! I had chicken cous cous and my friends had beef tagine which was also amazing.  I also had a Coke and the bottle was in Arabic so I saved it!  After lunch, we walked around the city a bit more and we saw “Rick’s Café”, which is a bit tourist attraction in town (it’s a copy from the movie “Casablanca”).  It was only built about 7 or so years ago and I wanted to eat there, just to say I had, but it was expensive and you needed reservations. 

In the afternoon, I went on the Casablanca city orientation tour with SAS.  A couple of my friends went and we were lucky enough to be on the same bus as Desmond and Leah Tutu.  ☺  The tour took us first to the beautiful Hassan II mosque close to the port where we walked around outside and gawked at the details and design of the building.  Archbishop Tutu and his wife didn’t have a camera with them so my friend Krystal was their personal photographer at the mosque.  So cool!  We drove to a some fancy government buildings and then we drove through the “Beverly Hills” of Casablanca.  We saw the home that Winston Churchill had once lived in.  We stopped for milkshakes (SO good) and mint tea (also amazing!) on the shore where all of the resorts were.  After that we stopped at a church with really wonderful stained glass windows from floor to ceiling.  While we were in the church Archbishop Tutu and his wife sat down and prayed for about 5 minutes.  It was cute.  We finished the tour and headed back into Casablanca to have dinner.  We walked around the city trying to find some good Moroccan food.  In a couple of places we went into, the room was filled with only men and when we walked in they just stared at us.  We decided not to eat there, haha.  We ended up eating in a sort of “Moroccan diner”.  I had brochettes de filet (I think?), which is like a kabob with steak, French fries, and a Coke.  The kabob was excellent and I saved the glass Coke bottle because it was in Arabic. 

The following day 4 of my friends and I decided to venture to the big market city of Marrakech.  We got up and took a taxi to the train station.  We made sure to barter with the driver for the trip before getting into the cab because they will greatly increase the rates for tourists.  We got into the cab and it wasn’t 5 minutes before the cab comes to a slow stop in the middle of an intersection.  We all sat in the car wondering what was happening.  After moving the car slightly out of the way of the intersection (we were still in the middle of the street with cars barely passing us on both sides) the driver proceeded to try to start the car for 10 minutes.  Luckily we had left a good 90 minutes time for getting to the train station (which was only about a 10 minute cab ride away).  After the 10 minutes another taxi driver drives up and the two are speaking Arabic, so we don’t have a clue what they are saying.  The second driver gets out a large container of
what was hopefully fuel and pours it into the tank of our taxi.  Our driver still had a hard time starting the car, but he finally does, but I think he was driving in 5th gear the whole time and only going like 30MPH. I don’t think that anyone in the country really knew how to properly drive a stick shift vehicle.  Haha. 

Well we made it to the train station with plenty of time to spare.  We took the 10:50 train from Casablanca.  The train ride was miserable.  The train cars were set up facing each other (like the Hogwarts Express on Harry Potter, haha) and there were SO many people.  We had second-class tickets because they are so much cheaper and we were packed into the car like sardines.  There was no air conditioning and no circulation of air.  Some of my friends and other SAS students had to stand the entire 4-hour train ride.  When we made it into Marrakech, one of my friends discovered that she had somehow been pick pocketed 800 dirham. (exchange rate is 8.8 dirham = 1 USD).  Bummer. 

There was a McDonalds in the train station and we were all starving and hot so we got some food there.  It was worth it just to have a TOBLERONE MCFLURRY! So good! Haha.  In my anthropology classes we talk a lot about globalization and McDonaldization and it is always interesting to see how different countries have glocalized (taken a global commodity/ company and have adapted it for local circumstances and culture) restaurants like McDonalds.  There weren’t a lot of choices like in the US and everything was more expensive.  It was always packed with people every time we would walk by though. 

We proceeded to walk around and went past the walls into the inner-city.  Marrakech is more of a tourist destination than Casablanca and I could tell right away.  In Casablanca 90% of the women I saw on the street wore headscarves and traditional Moroccan clothing and you very rarely saw a woman out in the evening.  In Marrakech, the women were not as modest and many wore more Western clothing and did not cover their heads.  We got to the medina (market area) and we were instantly taken aback at how different it was.  I had never seen anything like it.  There was a large square with games going on in the center and booths selling orange juice.  There were also people playing instruments in funny costumes, snake charmers, and monkey handlers.  The men with the monkeys would have the monkey jump on unsuspecting passersby and would not remove the monkey unless you paid them.  The snake charmers would throw snakes onto people and also make you pay to remove them.  Luckily neither of these things happened to me because I stayed FAR away.  They even make you pay them if you take pictures of them, so I didn’t really get any good shots except for the few I took in secret. 

The square was surrounded with little shops with various souvenirs for sale.  Many of the shops were selling the same things like teapots, cups, bags, watches, stools, jewelry, clothing, and postcards.  I bartered for a nice outfit in one of the shops and the shopkeepers original offer was 450 dirham and I got the price down to 110 dirham.  ☺  I bought a couple of cheap leather bracelets, that I love, and some postcards.  We also got some fresh squeezed orange juice and dates from the street vendors.  We walked around and admired the shops and the masses of different people.  Then we ran into 2 of my professors, who happen to be married, and talked with them for a bit.  Later in the afternoon we were all standing in the middle of the medina and all of the sudden people started parting and a man ran by and he was followed by another man yelling at him.  They stopped right next to us and started punching and kicking one another. Then one of the men picked up a big rock and he looked like he was going to throw it at the other one, so we decided that it was a good time to leave.  We went back to the train station and got on the 9PM back to Casablanca.  We arrived back at the ship around 1:30 AM and I passed out.

Sunday, the 12th, I slept in a bit and then went to the gym on board the ship.  I have never sweated so much in my life.  In CO I rarely find myself sweating at all and this was bizarre.  We went out in the afternoon and strolled around Casa and went to the market there.  Things were cheaper in the market in Casa because there are less tourists visiting.  I got a couple of tea glasses and a small mirror.  I went back to the ship early because I was really tired and hot.  I think we watched Quantum of Solace that night and went to bed. 

The 13th I did much of the same thing and went to a hookah bar with a bunch of my friends.  On the 14th, we had to be back on the ship by 6PM and I like to get there about and hour early because the line is always long.  We got a taxi to take us to the mosque for the 11 o-clock tour.  It was SO hot waiting for the tour and inside the mosque it wasn’t much better.  The mosque is less than 10 years old and it is so detailed and beautiful.  It is built over the water so that the people can feel connected to the elements during times of worship.  In some rooms there were also pools of water and fountains for people to wash in.  We ate a small lunch and returned to the ship early to swim and prepare for class the next day.  After about 2 weeks of traveling on land, it felt weird to be on the ship for good for a while. 

All in all Morocco was a learning experience, but a good one at that.  It was very hot and being in such a strict and heavily religious environment really changes your outlook on some things. 

Here is a compilation of some of the terms used on the ship that I thought you might be interested in

Semester at Sea terms:

SAShole (pronounced sass-hole, yeah it’s inappropriate, but so true)-  someone who gives all SASers a bad name, mostly those who act like freshman who have never seen alcohol before or those who don’t realize that other cultures besides the arrogant American exist

Example #1:  the 2 girls who thought it was a good idea to sunbathe in their bikinis on the square outside of the mosque during Ramadan (it’s not okay ever, but especially not during this big religious holiday)

Example #2:  the guy that was in my group on the tour of the mosque who kept putting plastic bags on his head and screaming “Morocco!!!”  He also asked the tour guide if he could play a song on his iPod speakers in one of the prayer rooms inside of the mosque.

Example #3:  I wasn’t on this tour, but I heard that on the bus back from the Berber villages in Morocco there were girls at the front of the bus talking and complaining to the bus driver that they were hot and wanted to get back to the ship ASAP.  I guess the conversation went something like this, “Ugggh it’s so hot and I’m sweaty and gross.  I want to take a shower so bad!”  [Asking the bus driver →]  “Do you know what a shower is?” 

(Apparrently the reason why we only spend 1 ½ days in Mauritius is because past SASers have given us a very bad name there by laying on the beach, getting wasted, and causing all sorts of trouble.  Also, I have heard that this voyage is the first one in ten years to stop in Singapore because we were banned from going there because of bad behavior… Hmm)

There are countless more examples of these specimens of SASers. 

Ship-goggles- This was written on the back of one of the pictures in my friends room (Side note:  each cabin has a framed picture on the wall where, at the end of each voyage, the inhabitants of the cabin write advice and things they learned so that future voyagers will have some heads-up.  We looked at our advice on the first day we arrived and it was pretty funny… I will elaborate later)  Anyway, ship-goggles (like beer-goggles) means that after 40 or 50 days into the trip, people will start to look more attractive than they actually are and some people make bad decisions under the influence.  Hahaha

Bubbles- is my new nickname given to me by some of my friends on the ship.  It stemmed from me being cheery most of the time and my random spurts of energy.  One of my friends is nicknamed Giggles and we sound like the Power Puff Girls, haha.

Drunk deck- on deck 7 at night when alcohol is served, this is where all of the “cool” kids hang out.