Living my parents worst nightmare: Spring Break part 1

Wow-I don’t even know where to begin. Where have I been for the past week, and why does it feel like I was there for months? I did more things than I normally do in a whole month.

I went to Morocco for spring break 2012. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I still don’t truly understand. I went into the trip not planning or really thinking about anything and ended up having the most amazing experience of my life. I knew very little about Morocco and spending 8 days there taught me many things that I would have struggled to pick up if I were learning it in a course.  I am going to attempt to recount my journey and my experiences. As I’m sure everyone knows, trying to tell people about an experience is very difficult especially because the receiver of the story will never truly understand it because they are missing the key component of it: which is the actual physical experience of being in the moment. But I will do my best and bare with me while I discuss the good, the great, the interesting, and the bad (which there was not very much of considering I returned alive, with all of my possessions (minus my glasses) and healthy).

I suppose I will start at the beginning. I packed my backpack with one pair of pants (and wore another one) and two shirts (and wore one). I brought underwear, socks and one fleece. I wore my sneakers and brought one pair or flip flops. I also brought my towel (so thankful for this!!) and a small toiletry bag with my toothpaste, toothbrush, brush, and contact lenses. The point of explaining the content of my bag is very important. It is imperative to understand that I was truly roughing it. My bag weighed about 4kg (6kg under the weight it was allowed to be). In general, I am very happy with the amount of things I brought. There were many days when we had to walk around all day with our backpacks until we could meet up with our couch surfers or find a place to stay. And although I had to wear the same things nearly every day, it was so worth it to not have a broken back.

Also: I want to note that traveling is exhausting, especially in a new country (and new continent). But traveling when you’re a woman in Morocco (no matter that there were 4 of us) is 10 times harder.  I’m not going to write every time someone followed us or said something to us or grabbed us because that would be distracting and would take up the majority of the trip. But let it be known that every time we stepped outside, or inside for that matter, people stared, they made remarks at us, etc, etc. Over the course of the week I think I gained 10 pounds from growing a thicker skin alone. I’ll try to leave out the majority of the unwanted attention discussion, but some of it is too important to ignore, especially the sex divide in Morocco (more on this later).

We started our journey on Friday (Feb 24^th). We took a 4 hour train ride from Ventimiglia to Milan and arrived at about 11:30pm. We then took a one hour bus from Milan train station to Bergame airport. We arrived at around 12:30. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:20am so we decided to sleep on the airport floor (5 hours into the trip and I’m already doing something my mother would have a heart attack over). There were hundreds of people there and all of the “good” spots were taken. We found a little corner and set our alarm for 4:30. Setting an alarm was comical looking back on it-because we actually thought we were going to get sleep! HA!

 The floor was freezing so I got out my towel to cover up with (towel trick #1) and settled into a small snooze when all of a sudden I heard something that sounded like a hurricane coming straight for us. I put my glasses on and looked up to see a large zamboni (sp?) barreling down the airport floor. It went back and forth and back and forth for what seemed like an hour. What’s the point of cleaning the airport floor if the only ones who will appreciate its cleanliness are trying to SLEEP on it? About an hour later we were awoken to shouting. The cleaners were telling us to move to a different area because they were trying to clean that area. This happened a few more times-we were like cattle! At about 3:30 we were shuffled to a new area where there were benches available (LUXURY!) I think at this point I might have gotten about 45 minutes of sleep. We woke up and got all (haha) of our stuff together and checked in and went through security.  The following is an excerpt I wrote in my journal at 3:30 in the morning in the Milan airport:

“Sleeping in the airport from the hours of 12:45-4:30 is comparable to sleeping underneath the wheel of an airplane while it’s landing: loud, cold, and uncomfortable and oh yeah, relatively impossible unless you want to get squished and die.”

We landed on Saturday morning in the beautiful city of Marrakesh. We arrived in the Jemma el fnaa, which is the central square of the old city. There were juice stands selling fresh squeezed juice for 4DH (about .40 cents), monkeys doing tricks, people playing with LIVE snakes, donkeys and camels and hundreds of people approaching us and asking us to their restaurant or their cab, etc. We walked around the square a little and then found a yummy little “local” (or at least that’s what we think because we were the only tourists there) restaurant. I ordered my first tagine avec legumes (essentially cooked vegetables with spices), and mint tea, and some bread.

 It was absolutely delicious and the whole meal ended up being only 30 DH (3 euros) a person! They put olives, bread, and bottled water on the table even if you don’t order it, and then if you touch it, you get charged for it. So we had to be careful!

We then did the tourist-y things of Marrakesh like the Bahia Palace which is a beautiful Riad that I want to live in when I grow up, and the Saadian tombs (where I saw an owl!) and a few museums.

 Then we went to the royal palace and attempted to take pictures (and got yelled out). So instead we laid down on the royal fountain and took a little snooze. At this point I think we were all delirious and we thought it was HILARIOUS that we were lying on the king’s fountain and no one was saying anything (we learned later that there is a royal palace in every city-hence-not that big of a deal).

We hailed a taxi (another adventure) and took it into the more modern part of town. It was big and industrialized and where most of the rich tourists were staying. We found a ritzy café and ordered some coffee that cost about the same as our entire lunch.  We washed our hands with SOAP about 25 times each and stole some toilet paper (the usual) and used their wifi to let our families know we were alive and well.

We walked around the city a little bit more but we were really tired from carrying our backpacks and it was starting to get dark so we stopped in at a little restaurant to eat and rest. Our bus for Fes was leaving at 11pm so we started making our way on foot to the station.

After getting lost and stopping to ask to directions a few times, we finally found the bus station. Warning: this is probably the scariest part of the whole trip.  As we approached the train station- there were several warning buzzers going off in my head, but they had been going off pretty much all day, being in a new country and all. There were tons and tons of men outside the train station (homeless and sleeping and talking, etc) and as we crossed the threshold into the train station, there were more men and no one official behind any of the counters.  A group of about 10-15 men started to surround us and talk to us in French and English and ask us where we were going and if we needed help. We all tried to stay together but we got separated and it was terrifying. We all found each other and Thea was explaining that they were a bus company and wanted our business. I automatically refused to get on any bus of theirs and wanted to leave the bus station and find the official bus that we had found online. Moroccan busses are very strange. I guess the headquarters of the bus we were taking had its own office-but no one bothered to tell us that online. We tried to walk out but they just followed us and wouldn’t stop, they wouldn’t let us go. Me and Claire thought the best idea was just to get away, but Caitlin and Thea wanted to explain to them that we had others plans. This made it very irritating and we all got angry at each other-which didn’t help our case of trying to escape. I was so tempted to just walk away but traveling in a group has its responsibilities of not walking away. It was seriously irritating. No matter how much they explained to them that we didn’t want to take their bus, they wouldn’t stop. Finally Claire and I told Caitlin and Thea that we were NOT getting on their bus and we wanted to leave RIGHT THEN. They agreed and we all crossed the street to a big, nice looking hotel. They followed us (of course). We entered the hotel and asked the concierge where we could catch our bus. He was super helpful and even volunteered to have his friend drive us to the station (looking back on that-it seems a little sketch-but it all worked out). We were so frazzled so they let us use their bathroom and relax a little before driving us to the REAL bus station. They were all really nice and the guy who drove us (we thought he was a cab driver-definitely wasn’t) just charged us “whatever we wanted”. So that was good. We all discussed the past events and decided on a new protocol in case anything like that happened again. That’s the funny thing about traveling, you can’t really prepare for things like that, you just have to experience them and then learn.

We arrived at the station and bought our tickets and boarded our eight hour bus ride to Fes.

Night number two of spring break: sleeping on a bus (mom and dad: aren’t you proud?). The bus was relatively empty so we all got our own 2 seats and were all exhausted, so we conked out. Unfortunately the bus was freezing, so towel-to-the-rescue strikes again J Eight hours later on a bumpy and loud bus, we arrived in Fes!