A slight detour to Marrakesh

I've been yet again a terrible blog poster. But I promise this blog will make all your waiting worth while.

I just got back Saturday night from Morocco!!!!

I got to go with my best friend Cortney and Josh. It was amazing. It definitely blew my breath away. It may have been bad motivation for me to come back to Spain...hahahaha. So. Here we go. This blog I will not be sorry to write detail upon detail of this fantastic trip.

I'm also going to write this in present tense throughout the whole way. Deal with it.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012
So. I had an essay due. Josh helped me edit it an hour before we left. Our flight was at 4 and the gate closed at 3:30 but at least this time we had remembered to print off our boarding passes. No 60 Euro fee! :) We got on the metro at 2:30 and I was a little stressed about getting there so late, but all in all, it worked out fine.  We got our tickets stamped at the Ryanair booth and headed for security.  Some dude kept staring me down, it was weird. Also, when we went through security, Josh's deoderant looked like a gun. It was creepy. seriously. But it was all good. We waited in the huge line and were on our short flight to one of the greatest adventures of our lives.
There were too many clouds to see much throughout the flight, but once we were about to land, we could see the expanse of farms and little houses, and then desert. I was so excited I could hardly sit in my seat. It had been too long, far too long, since I had set foot in an Arab country.  Josh and Cortney kept thinking that they were going to have to rely solely on my little knowledge of Arabic to get us through the trip....only if the only words necessary to know were colors, foods, and body parts would that be the case! hahaha We exchanged our money for dirhams, ***SPOILER ALERT*** (it's a good thing I had withdrawn some Euros out of my account before leaving and exchanged some of my American dollars as well) and then we set off to find a taxi to our hostel!
Bartering. Ugh. I remember that being kind of the bane of my existence.  It can be kind of fun, but it seems like the first few times at least you get ripped off. Badly. Like us for our taxi. Oh well. Lesson learned. Some guy came up and gave us a "good offer" and we ended up paying 250 Dirhams for our ride to our hostel.......25 Euros. Never again. That's as expensive as it is in Valencia! Anyways. One of the first things we saw on the street was some cab driver get off and throw rocks at some kids trying to sell sweets on the street in front of us! I think it freaked Josh out quite a bit.  We went around the old town, which is walled off from the new part of town and ended up getting dropped off at some random alleyway...the taxi driver told us okay you go left then down there and then again and right and.....the worst directions ever. So we blindly commenced our journey into the alleyway labyrinth.  We ended up in a small market and figured that we had taken a wrong turn and walked back into the alleys when a guy popped out of nowhere asking if we were searching for the Riad Miassin. It was all in French, but it was a start! So he led us towards the right direction and in the end got us to the doorstep of our hostel where a guy was waiting outside for us.  (The sign for the hostel was just written on the wall instead of having a sign sticking out to make it easier to find.) We were welcomed in and the guy introduced himself as Aziz and had us go in.  We sat down and they offered us some famous Moroccan mint tea (they kept calling it Moroccan whiskey, that is what almost every single Moroccan meant to tell us). We met the other guys who would be helping us out while there, Mohamed, and Brahim (pronounced like Bryan with an m!), and also, since the tour we were going to take later on was associated with the hostel, we were able to pay for that as well right then and there so we didn't have to worry about it.  The other nice thing about that was that they had already planned to pick us up at our hostel the morning we were going to go on our safari.  One of the ladies who works there also invited us the next day to go to a traditional hammam with her and a lady that was from Switzerland, so Cort and I accepted. I was just so happy to be in Morocco. I could not wipe the smile off my face, even if Josh was doing all the talking that I wanted to do! I wanted to practice my little Arabic on the hostel workers. :) The interior of the hostel was so beautiful.  Very traditional Moroccan, and an awesome deal for the 7 euros a night we were paying per night to stay there.  They explained that the hostel consisted of 2 separate buildings and we were situated in the opposite building.  We weren't given any keys, so if we left and would like to enter our building we could just knock on the doors or something since there was always someone working 24 hours so they could open the other building for us.  They then showed us to our room where we had a 6 bed room all to ourselves! Yay! There were some creepies across the way from us, but they left the next day thank heavens.  Our building consisted of a big square.  The rooms bordered the outside, with a large square hole in the middle to look down on the bottom floor. We also had access to a terrace on the roof that had some nice couches and a shower! hahaha.  Anyways. We got settled, and then. We started our adventure! Aziz had given us a map of the city and had pointed out the main places we should see.  We had just a main road to follow to get to the Jemaa El-Fnaa square.
We ended up on some street with some little shops and some old guy dragged us in to his shop and kept telling us that pictures were free. I am so wary of people like that since the whole situation in Egypt.  I was very untrusting to say the least.  I knew of all the little tricks and cons that they love to pull to get some money out of you. I was ready for anything I felt like.  Eh. Well he was nicer than I thought, so that's good! We then got to the square. I don't know if I've ever seen such a sight in my life. There were so many smells and sights I had never seen before. There were snake charmers, and fortune tellers, and games, and henna artists, and singers, and dancers, etc. The first thing we ended up doing was getting sucked in to getting some pictures taken with MONKEYS! They just sat there on our shoulders, and tried to eat my camera strap.  Then another guy came with another monkey who sat on my head and picked at my hair. I felt very dirty. But seriously. I chilled with a monkey.  They also raped us for our money.  I think for taking pictures with the monkeys we paid seriously like 8 euros... it was horrible.  Then we had some snake charmers come and try to wrap some snakes around us. I wouldn't let them do so.  But they made Cortney and Josh pay a butt load again for just some pictures. Aiiiiiiii. We decided then that we wanted to go into the souks. So we entered yet another labyrinth. Woohoo! Some guy wanted to be our friend and Josh wanted to look for a shirt, so he led us to, oh wouldn't you know it, his cousin's shop or something, because his shop was a shop full of essential oils and such.  He didn't know much English, so he decided to converse with Cortney and I in a mixture of Spanish and French, so one of us would understand the beginning of his sentences, and the other would understand the other half. It was hilarious. He was funny. We ended up letting him take us to his shop and we got more yummy tea! We had some weird presentation given to us about the different things they offered in some broken Spanish and then translated into French for Cortney while our little friend just watched his friend give the "presentation".  We ended up buying some delicious smelling orange blossom stuff just cause we liked the guy and he was really nice. Yummy! After that we got back to the square and decided we were hungry. So some kid kept wanting us to go to his booth to eat. It was hilarious. He said Josh looked like Obama. He also got many other nicknames including Eminem and Denzel Washington. They must just call you whatever comes to their mind first when we say we are from the United States. We had a shmorgasboard or however you spell that, of food. We had kebabs, bread, spicey sauce, couscous and chicken, and grilled vegetables all for like 5 euros each. Maybe still overpriced, but hey, we were celebrating being in a different country! We decided to head back to the hostel since it had been said that you should'nt be outside too late. We didn't take a turn at an intersection we needed to make so we got lost a little, but with the help of a map and some random dude who wanted to help us, we figured out what went wrong.  Crossing the street was insane! Of course there was maybe just 4 or 5 working stop lights in the town, but that didn't mean that they used them at all. So we just had to kind of go and dodge the insane number of mopeds, old motorcycles, cars, and horse carriages that would come at us.
We got to the hostel and Josh wanted to smoke hookah, so Mohamed went and prepared some for the top of the roof on the main building, so we headed over there and hung out with Mohamed and 2 Spaniards. The one Spaniard was a metal singer (We later found out he also mixes opera and Christian music with that?) And we sat up on the roof in the tent telling jokes and playing Uno for a large portion of the night. We headed back to our side of the hostel and were just getting into bed when the call to prayer started. I think they are so beautiful. I had missed being woken up at the absurd hour of 3:30 a.m. to hear them. We ran up to the roof and listened while it was being played out. Mohamed came up and translated what the man was saying, prayer is more important than sleep... It was great, Mohamed was so impressed by the amount of Arabic that I knew and it was fun to tell him all the words that I had learned. Now if only I knew how to make complete sentences instead of only words!!!! One day I'll get there. The Arabic in Morocco is a lot different than any of the other dialects spoken in the Arab world.  It has mixed Spanish, French, and Berber words into it, making the Moroccan dialect a lot harder to understand for other Arabs.  We got along really well and he decided he wanted to take us to a cafe in the morning the next day to see a different view of the city. So we finally hit the sack and slept for as long as we could.

This is just a preview,
Day 2: to be continued...