Morocco part quatre - the rest of the trip

Days 4-10 become a blur, with some highlights being:
-Son sports a Motley Crue shirt.
-Precious Peter asks Angie, out of the blue, "Did you dress up for Haloween?"
-we hear yet another quote proving we are on a seniors tour "I'd hate to lose my suitcase because I don't want to lose all my Chico's clothes!"

We see much more of the country and I realize at some point that the song "Arabian Nights" from the cartoon Aladdin has been steadily playing through my head the whole time. And I think this is because I expected Morocco to look like miles of sand dunes. And it does -- in the Sahara desert, if you drive an hour to see the sand dunes. But otherwise, Morocco can look like anywhere.  Desert, rivers, mountains, we even saw a random ski resort along the way that looked like it belonged more in Switzerland than Africa.

And it turns out, a lot of movies are filmed in Morocco for that reason - you can make it look like anything. Even, Aladdin, like here:

Ok, so maybe I don't look quite like Princess Jasmine....



But you gotta admit, this is an Arabian Nights kind of place

We see other beautiful scenes and stay in great Kasbahs like this one:

(where I have the second topless scrub down of my life in their spa. I never learn...)

<-----And see spices like this

eat tagines like this----->

see gates and walls like this:

And see more town squares filled with more snakes (you seriously have to start watching where you step!)  They keep them in bags and under boxes so you never know how many there are until you get too close and they try to put one on you, or make you pay money just for glancing their way:

There were also monkeys

and henna artists in the square. One monkey owner attempted to put one on my arm but I scurried away, hearing our tour guide's voice in my head saying "they may carry diseases!" I did succomb to henna though (in the end, I should've gone with the monkey, but more on that later):

And we learn various words like "Shukran" (Thank you) and "Insha'Allah" ("God-willing," used often for when people really don't want to do something -kinda like how someone in the South will say "well Lord willin' I'll get to your order before the end of the week..." It is also used as "I hope this works!" etc.)

And we end our trip back in Casablanca, where we learn the fine art of being Frogger in a real life video game of life or death through the craziest traffic ever like here:

And finally get settled onto our flight home just in time to hear the flight attendant spew out instructions in french and arabic and all we catch is "Insha'Allah..."

:\

which is a little disconcerting because I really don't like to hear "well, God willing!" from the people about to take me airborne. But thankfully we make it back safely to the U.S. and start washing out camel smell from our clothes....

Shukran Morocco! Great trip :) (....EXCEPT for all the health issues I had....which will have to be in yet another post. I promise we are almost done!)



Morocco part trois

Day 3: Son is wearing Iron Maiden today.
Precious Peter asks Angie: "Do you know where Alexandria is?"
then, at some point later asks me "Did you know Abraham Lincoln's parents are from Wales?".....

Today we looked around the Imperial city Fes. Fes, like a lot of other Moroccan cities, has two parts: the modern part that looks like most European big cities complete with designer shopping and cafes; and the Medina - aka the Old City - which is walled in and feels like you've stepped back into medieval times.

Fes' Medina is incredible because it's the most confusing, labrynth-like place I've ever been and to add to the drama of trying not to get lost, you constantly have to listen for "Balak! Balak!" which means -- "Get out of the way!" or, most often "There is a donkey on the loose behind you!"

Not even kidding.

We had a photographer follow us around snapping pics of us through the souk and this is one he shot of me. Note the skeptical look on my face and the fact that the donkey clearly has the right of way:

So the souk inside Fes has lots of things for sale, including animals....to be eaten. I actually saw little chickens get their throats slit in front of my eyes against my will -- I will now be known as Dana the Vegetarian. *shudder*  But before that, our tour guide saw a bunch of them in cages and for some unknown reason poked at one through the cage bars, making it squawk. I looked at Angie and said "our tour guide just sucker punched a chicken!" which was probably the first of many things our senior friends probably overheard and thought "the way kids these days talk! I don't get it!"  Another time I'm sure that happened was when we went to the tannery -

where they use PIGEON POO to dye fabric. Barf.

The smell is indescribable and we had to snort mint leaves to survive, like so:

Anyway, Angie and I were busy entertaining ourselves as usual and I may have said something like "your FACE smells like Pigeon poo!" which made us giggle but likely caught some judgement from our fellow tour-goers. Later, one of them  scolded Angie like a child for jokingly calling me an idiot. Clearly, we had some generational translation issues. (We spoke Sarcasm; They spoke ...Chico's Clothing.)

So back to the Medina. It's amazing how you walk down these narrow non-descript alleys in there thinking its all just mud walls and dirt floors, but if you actually walk into a door -- a whole other world exists on the other side! Multiple-story houses filled with gorgeous mosaics; mosques with indoor gardens and fountains - amazing. One tour guide told us Moroccans do not like to show their wealth on the outside, but rather they enjoy their nice things and gardens, etc. on the inside, where it's just for them and actually an integral part of their lives. I liked that philosophy.





Outside in the alley

Inside -- taken from 2nd floor in a carpet store

Also inside - restaurant (complete with belly dancer, of course)

Another guide told us that it is customary for people to spend a lot of time together and how things like making tea for each other take hours because that shows you care for each other. He said he could see how that might not make a lot of sense for people who work all the time, but then he said something profound:

"Some people have nice watches. Other people have time."

Snap. Americans may be focused on the wrong kind of wealth most of the time, you think?

More in the next post...

Morocco Part Deux: Snakes, Seniors, Socks and Sandals

I mentioned before that there are a lot of different languages flying around that country. And because of my "ethnic ambiguousness" it quickly became hilarious letting the salesmen in the souks (markets) guess where I might be from as I walked by: "Bonjour!...Hola!...Merhaba?....Buongiorno?...Hello!?...."

(At one point I also got "Konichiwa!" but that was just because I accidentally got mixed in with a crowd of Japanese tourists which completely confused the poor locals...)

I realize most of these salesmen just know one word in several languages, but a lot of people in Morocco do speak several languages, typically Arabic, French and a tribe dialect. But the Arabic there is a strange hybrid of spanish and Arabic. And for whatever reason, when Angie and I first arrived and couldn't find a taxi that understood where our hotel was (because there are THREE Ibis' in Casablanca and we definitely were taken to the wrong one right off the bat), we were asked if we could speak Arabic, French, Italian or Russian. So, perhaps some people in Morocco speak everything but English. (Sadly, Angie only speaks some German and I only speak some Spanish so we ended up asking several cab drivers, more loudly each time, "DO YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS?" as if volume helps with translation. We finally jumped in a cab and hoped for the best). We eventually got to our hotel but the Fun With Ethnic Backgrounds didn't end there.  

I was asked more than once if I was Arab or Berber (the native Moroccan people). Angie, who looks very Irish, was actually told by a native "You -- definitely American," which made her point out the humor in the fact that my features are actually Native American -- natively American -- yet American is the last thing people guess for me, go figure.

But back to the trip.

Day One: We meet part of our tour group and realize – we are likely on a Senior Citizens tour by accident. Perfect.

We also tour around Casablanca a bit which sounds romantic but really is just a giant, dirty city like most giant cities. Though there is a nice waterfront area with palm trees and nice houses akin to Beverly Hills. And the World’s third largest Mosque is there which was a pretty spectacular building:

Day Two: It is confirmed that the majority of people on our trip are, in fact, retirees and Angie and I take this in stride because it is just so typical for both of us to have our dreams of travelling around Morocco with hot men shattered in an instant.

We tour around the Capital city Rabat (walled city, King's palace, old ruins) and Meknes, which was the site of my first unsettling encounter with a snake charmer, as seen here:

I went from being intrigued, to annoyed when the guy really didn’t “charm” anything, especially not me since he insisted that we pay him more to watch and then nearly forced a snake around my neck. I’ve had a snake around my neck before, but I knew its loving owner. I did not trust this man or his snakes.

It was also on this day that Angie and I started getting a feel for Peter, a quirky little English man who typically sat in front of us on the bus. Precious Peter was very sweet and we eventually found him endearing but it took a bit. He would out of nowhere turn around to look at us and ask things like “Are you going to London for Jubilee?” or “Do you have insurance?”  I couldn’t even arrange my features into the slightest resemblance of anything but complete surprised confusion every dang time and Angie and I spent many hours giggling later over whatever new question out of left field he came up with. It became almost a game.

Kind of like the game where we guessed the next Band T-shirt another Brit would be wearing. One of the few non-retiree people on the tour was a father/son duo from England. They were very quiet and the only reason I noticed them at all was because Son was sporting a Pink Floyd shirt through mosques and ancient city gates. I instantly liked him. (I also could not judge him when he began wearing the same band shirt on more than one day. As part of my "I'm not really planning for this trip at all" boycott, I didn't fully think through how chilly it might be and brought short sleeved-shirts and one blue hoodie that I essentially wore every day of the trip, making my photos appear like my entire 10 days occured on the same day and making my hoodie smell less than desirable by the time we finally headed back to America.)

There were several other characters on the tour and many other quotes overheard among them, like this gem while we were taking our shoes off to enter a Mosque -

Older lady one, to older lady two, without a trace of sarcasm: 

"You are so smart to wear socks with sandals!"

Things you don't hear among the young professionals in D.C., well, ever.

On to Day 3 next post...

Morocco Part Un

Hello Internet, I'm back from my latest African adventure! I figure this will take a few posts so we'll just start with Un (they speak French there...or Arabic...or Spanish ...or Italian....we'll get to that later but we'll go with French for now).

So, for anyone who does not know, Morocco is here:

                                                www.worldatlas.com

And We. Went. Everywhere in it. Like so:

But let's start at the beginning, when we were leaving. Because, like my trip to Miami last year (here), quite a bit happened before I even got off the ground.

I tend to run in extremes and either I'm over prepared or not prepared at all for things. So when my friend Angie found a tour group who does tours of Morocco, I completely sat back and did basically nothing, figuring I'd land somewhere in Africa, meet up with this tour group of people I don't know, and they'd just tell me where to go each day. Which is basically what happened, except I also let my brain go when it came to packing, checking to see if I needed shots, checking to see if I needed....a Visa. (Fortunately, I did not.) You know, little details.

But I did finally book my bus up to New York where my flight was leaving.

.....I just didn't make it on that bus. Sigh.

This time it was not my fault! I called a taxi in plenty of time, waited the requisite 20 minutes that they said it could take, and -- still no cab. So I call the company, and what do they tell me?

Oh a cab hasn't been assigned to you yet, we'll dispatch one now.

Now? Now you will "dispatch one"? Now, like the exact time I need to be on my way to the place where I catch my bus? Thanks cab company. You are now dead to me.

So here's what makes all this even worse. I had given my access key to my cat sitter so I couldn't even get back into my building after realizing there was no cab to retrieve me, and

it was raining.

And one thing I didn't think to pack? An umbrella.

This is starting out well.

So now I'm starting to panic because the bus up to NYC is prompt and does not wait for people and I'm still a good 10-15 min drive to the pick up point. And I don't live in an area where you just hail down a cab.

But that's exactly what I did anyway.

I put my GIANT suitcase under cover, walked out in the rain (and I may or may not have been whimpering) to the corner by my apartment, and started yelling at taxi's that drove by. Even though the odds of one of them being empty and/or stopping for me there were low. (Of course the odds of someone I used to work with and/or date driving by and seeing me on a street corner in the rain yelling at traffic for no apparent reason are unreasonably high. Probably happened. We'll never know.)

But it finally worked! Except the cab was going the other way. And I still had to run back and grab my GIANT suitcase. So, fail.

But then it worked again! This time, I actually get in the cab and ask the man to please go quickly.

Which he does not. Sigh.

By some miracle, we do get to my bus pick up spot just about 1 or 2 minutes late and I think maybe, just maybe, I'll still make it.

I was wrong.

So I have to sheepishly text Angie (who is coming from a different city and is a generally organized person who, understandably, is already worried about travelling with me) that I've already messed up the very first leg of our journey and that I'd find another bus.

Then I proceeded to text her each time I got to a new exit on the Jersey Turnpike once on the new bus. Lesson Learned: this game is not as funny to others as it is to me.

I finally get to NYC in time to grab lunch and get on yet another mode of transportation - train this time - to get to the airport. And we meet a loud New Yorker who makes fun of how heavy my GIANT suitcase is and inexplicably asks if I have Bin Laden in it, then basically says he hopes my parents are in it so they can protect us in Morocco.

That was a recurring theme -- everyone who Angie and I told where we were going warned us that it wasn't safe. Everyone, that is, who had never been there. Don't listen to these people, Morocco is fine. Sheesh.

And that's how we started our trip. Next post we can discuss actually being in Morocco :)

Gone To Lunch...

....in MOROCCO!

I keep meaning to post something here, like about the awesome weapons/driving course I just completed (where I accidentally shot a hostage), or about boys (like my latest BUB aka Break Up Blocker), or just random incidents (like when that stranger came across the room at that birthday event tonight to tell me she'd been staring at my butt and had to know where I bought my pants - yep, that just happened.),

BUT

I haven't been able to sit down and write about any of those things because:

A. I have the attention span of a humming bird on crack cocaine
B. I'm trying to get everything done before my trip to

MOROCCO!

so I have no time.

But, I haven't forgotten you, Internet (and all you readers who stumble on my blog while searching for things like "zombie lagoon" -- seriously, what are you people LOOKING for out there??) So, if you come back by here in the next couple weeks, just consider me out to lunch. ...And lunch happens to be on a different continent.

Hopefully I'll have more fun stories to share after my trip. :)

Insight Into My Mother's Obliviously Happy World

Conversation with my parents while looking at a bird in a nest this weekend:

Mom: Oh look at its little head! It looks like a kitten!
Me/My dad: Kittens aren't in nests.
Mom, ignoring us: Look at its markings! It looks like a Panda!
Us: We guarantee it is not a Panda ...in a nest.
Mom, still ignoring us: Just look at its little head though! It looks like a monkey!
Us: I think its time to teach you which animals build nests.....

Turkey Pics

Just so you don't think all I did in Turkey was get loofa'd by topless women, below are some pics of some of our other adventures there:

Turkish Coffee on the beach

In the Cisterns

Our walk from our flat to the city center

Our commute over the Bosphorus every day



View of the rest of Istanbul from the Asian side



We visited one of the Princes Islands off Istanbul and had the choice of transportation -- the girls chose horse-drawn carriages, the boys chose....bikes.

Us looking out of our lovely carriage at the Other Goldfish Poodle on his bike



The streets pretty much always were this full, day and night



Whirling Dervish!

Overlooking the Black Sea







And some from Greece - here the view of the Acropolis in the distance down an Athens street




Relaxing on the Acropolis