Morocco

Okay I'm sorry it's taken me way longer to get around to posting this than I'd of liked. But nevertheless I am here. So I'll get right in to it.

Morocco was great. It was extremely different than Spain and the USA. We visited the cities of Nador, Midelt, Ait Benhaddou and Merzouga, which was in the desert. On the 27th of December we headed to Almeria, which is in the south of Spain, to catch the ferry to Nador, Morocco. This trip also helped me learn I have bad seasickness so shout out to the French tourists who were nice enough to share their dramamine on the ferry. Unfortunately on the way back even with the dramamine I bought I still got super seasick and basically needed to go to the hospital the same day when we got home to Elche because not only was I super nauseous but I was in a lot of pain... But I made it.

This is what the ferry looked like. You'd park your car on the bottom and then go up to a lounge area that had cafes and restaurants and there were a section of recliner chairs for those who wanted to sleep, or for those who wanted to sleep but not in the recliners could just sleep on the floor or my favorite the guy who slept in the kids play pen (like mini version of a McDonald's one) because the floor was the type of soft plastic... now that I think about it I have no idea what those types of floors are called... I'm going with soft plastic is not the right word.

So after the ferry you have to go through customs which took like an hour. The guy behind the desk got confused when I handed him my passport. An American boy with a large group of Spaniards. He started speaking to me in English and my host mom in French cause she could translate French to Spanish as he didn't speak Spanish (which was my first indication that unless you speak English, French or Arabic it's gonna be harder to communicate with people throughout the country, although there was the occasional Spanish speaker) So Morocco was my first time where I HAD to translate from English to Spanish because the guy only spoke English and Arabic so I felt pretty important at that one moment in time. 

Anyways once I got to our hotel in Nador we went out to dinner at a little restaurant and I had pizza which was pretty good.

The next day early morning we piled into the car, our car has 7 seats and we were seven people with luggage.

My host brother and host mom's friend trying to load our car before we left Elche.

Needless to say it was a squished ride. So we left early morning and didn't get to Midelt until around 7 p.m. it was easily 10 hours of driving in one day (we'd later have about three more days like that) 

 Restaurant where we stopped for Tea in Midelt 

 Where we spent the night in Midelt with my host family's family friends. He used to live in Spain but has now returned to Morocco.

Midelt Market. Was super cool. We were 100% the only tourists there, everyone stares as you walk by.

So after Midelt came the desert! We stayed at a pretty touristy hotel which was fine with me because there were people from tons of other countries there, Germany, France, the UK, South Africa, the USA, Canada and I think Italy. So everyone would talk to people in the dinning hall or just where ever... the universal language seemed to be English or French there among the tourists. 

oh yea we stayed in tents... in the middle of the Sahara Desert. 

About the desert, it's amazing. Climbing up the dunes is super hard but the views are great. Nothing I would've expected before I went there and I think it's because pictures do the magnitude of these dunes no justice at all.

That's me! See that dune looks small but its massive.

Misc. Pictures from Desert.

Anyways on NYE I did two things really cool. 

1. Rode a Camel through the Sahara Desert.

2. Ate 12 grapes to ring in the New Year per Spain tradition.

It was actually really cool because everyone from all the countries were in the same room for this and every country kinda has there own tradition so seeing everyone else doing it was pretty cool. Then everyone just started dancing. 

The day after this, so the 1st of January we drove to a Kasbah in the center of Morocco. Where we spent two nights before essentially meaning to go back to Midelt but after getting pulled over twice, the cops bribing us to give them money in exchange for not giving us a ticket, our car breaking down and detouring an hour out of the way, we just stopped and never made it there a second time. But heres pictures of the Kasbah

 ATTENTION: Souvenir shopping at the many stores in Morocco like these you will find there is fun but you have to be careful. They, store men, will at first tell you the price is 200 dirhams (18 euros, 30ish dollars) and in the end be completely content with taking like 50 dirhams (4ish euros, 7ish dollars) they know you're a tourist and you have to be careful. Also sometimes they won't speak anything more than just the numbers in any given language so you can't ask questions you just have to say a number and keep doing that until either you call them crazy for asking for so much or they call you crazy for thinking it's not worth as much as they do. 

But other random pics from the Kasbah.

After this we headed back to Northern Morocco to catch our 8-hour ferry to Almeria and head back to Elche. I have no pictures really from the rest of the trip except for here where we stopped on the way: 

This was pretty cool. I have no idea what it's called but it was basically just a long path in between two huge rocks with a river through it. We stopped for Lunch here one day on the trek back.

Well after this we got our ferry and we were back in Spain. 

Almeria, Andalucia in the south of Spain.

Well this about ends it. I hope you enjoyed as much as I enjoyed being there! Sorry for the delay, I'll try to be more punctual in the coming weeks. But in other news in 5 days I'll be at the halfway point which is CRAZY. Wasn't I at ABIA yesterday saying goodbye to my family? 

Til Next Time!