Meow goes the kitty....

Saturday.

We got ourselves up and ready to go by 10 the next morning. We found a place that was supposed to be awesome to go and visit for awhile called the Cave of Hercules, or the G´rotte d´Hercule. Something like that. Anyway, we got old frenchy to give us a ride out there and to come back and pick us up that night at the same spot around 5. We got there around 11 a.m. so that means for all you math majors out there we had 6 hours to kill.

Anyways, take a look at the pictures if you haven´t by now. The cave of Hercules is a cave that has the shape of Africa, more or less, carved out naturally in it. It´s really pretty down there and I think there is a nice picture of Heather Jade and I that we had some nice Spanish ladies take for us.

We went down into the cave and spent a lot of time looking at some of the little souveniers they had for sale. We then just kind of cruised around that area looking at random stuff.

That whole area, right on the coast of the Pacific was absolutely beautiful. They had a bunch of cafes/restaurants built into the sides of the caverns with a view of the ocean and it was just amazing. Around this time we decided to try and find some lunch.

We figured seeing as that between the three of us we're all very capable of speaking Spanish and more or less able to speak English, that we could find someway to get some food. But alas, all of the restaurants looking out over the ocean had waiters that only spoke french or arabic. And of course, no menus.

Eventually we found some place that had a guy that spoke a little spanish and we ordered a little bit of food. They tried to get us to buy some seafoody looking stuff but.....I wasn't sold that I wouldn't end up dead after eating it. So I got some french fries that were fantastic and the girls got a salady thing of tuna corn onion something or another. It was interesting.

After that we decided we would try to go see the lighthouse, although we didn't want to pay for a taxi. We weren't exactly sure how far away it was but we figured we'd walk it out. Oh were we mistaken.

We walked down the road in the general direction that we thought it was (we were right) for awhile. (By the way, the whole time I was just thinking, "Wow, I'm walking down a road in Africa. Neat.") We then stopped and asked a policeman for directions and he told us to cut down through a ditch more or less and walk along the ocean, it'd be faster. So that we did. It was kind of neat because it really reminded me of stuff Doug and I would do when we were younger out back at his house. We had to cut down through a slopey hill with a bunch of mud and a tiny stream at the bottom. Wasn't too bad - Jade only lost one sandal.

So we walked down the beach for awhile, played in the sand and found some seashells. Pretty nice. After about 45 minutes of this, we decided to give up on the lighthouse. We found a path back up the hill more or less. It was more like a sandy mountain that we had to hike. Thank goodness my football coaches never saw this because we would definitely be running that in the Springtime. That was a tough trek back up. But I digress....

Anyway after that we just went back to the Cave and then went up and sat at a cafe and watched the waves come into the shore. Pretty nice. Our taxista arrived right on time for us and we headed back to the hotel.

At the hotel we did some reading that our prof. had assigned (I think there are some pictures of us reading haha) and got ready to go out for dinner. We went to a cafe where yet again, no Spanish was spoken. But by this point we had learned just enough French to know what some foods were. So I ended up ordering some type of pizza...it was pretty good. The pizza is flatbread and without any tomato sauce. I had some type of sausage type beef on it and a little chicken. It was pretty good....but they gave a hot sauce as a side condiment and it was FANTASTIC. Not too hot and a nice flavor to it. The ketchup, however, leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, none of the Ketchup here is any good. I miss that.

Anyway, I think I have neglected to mention the population of cats in Morocco. I think if I had to guess I would say there are 20572509275 cats to ever 1 person. Absolutely unreal. They are everywhere. I was eating dinner at the restaurant that night and a cat came in through the window unnoticed by anyone. Sat right next to me for God knows how long. It wasn't until it's tail touched me and I nearly had a heart attack that I noticed.

Also, if you'll notice in a lot of the pictures of me, especially the ones in the museum, my hand doesn't leave my pocket. It's gripping that wallet the whole time. I wasn't trusting anybody. Even in the taxis that wallet was in my hand.

Also, in the airport, I met a bunch of kids from Syracuse. One of them is good friends with a kid I met back in Young Scholars Program in seventh grade. Crazy. What a small world it is...

Well, sorry to be so anti-climactic but there really wasn't much action after that first day. However, I am alive and that is what matters. I'm glad I went to Morocco.....but I'll manage if my live travels don't bring me back there again for a long, long, long, long time.

Next update....Rugby game???

Hola Coca Cola

Ok so to make up for not making the second part of my Moroccan adventures quick enough, I stole a bunch of pictures from Heather.


http://community.webshots.com/user/tugboat424?vhost=community

My hand is finally out of my pocket....

Holy cow. So where to begin?

Well, as I think I have stated before, I spent Most of Friday, all Saturday, and half of Sunday in Morocco. I knew it was gonna be different from Madrid, not only because it's a different country, but because it 's a different continent as well. Morocco is an African/Arab country. Very, very different.

I went to Morocco with two friends from my school, Jade and Heather, and we met up with a couple of other kids from the Suffolk program that we knew as well along the trip, however we stayed in different hotels. We got to Morocco at like, 1ish or 12ish on friday, and had to hail down a taxi to go to our hotel.

First off I guess it is important to mention that we had to exchange our money to their currency, which is durkham (sp?). 10 dh is roughly equivalent to 1 euro. So that was all fine and dandy, I exchanged 5o euro to start with and went from there.

Anyways, we hailed down a taxi driver, who spoke english/spanish for the most part and had him take us to our hotel (we had no idea how lucky we were at that point to have found an english/spanish speaking driver). He charged us 100 dh (10 euro) for the ride. We figured that sounded fine, plopped over the money, and then let him take us allllll the way to our hotel, all of about 3km to our hotel. That was when we realized that we had been had. We had no idea how close the hotel was to the airport...that sly taxista!! Taking advantage of us poor Americans like that. But don't worry...there were plenty more opportunities still for the Moroccans to have their way with us.

Speaking of taxi's....first off, none of the seatbelts worked. Second off, every front seat that I sat in throughout the time was broken. Third off...what the heck are the rules of the road there?????? Our initial taxi driver thought it seemed like a good idea to travel at about 10000 kilometers per hovering over the median about 2 feet behind a truck that was loaded down with logs, without it's back end up and none of the logs strapped in. Remember, please, that seatbelts were not an option. I thought people were kind of crazy driving in Madrid but Moroccans put them to shame...I really didn't see much rhyme or reason as to how the roads wee put together or what the rules of the road were there. Pretty much every car for themselves. I saw everything on the roads in Morocco as well...all types of vehicles/animals. You were about as likely to find someone staying in there lane and driving like a sane person as you were to see a truck with it's back loaded with logs 2 feet in front of your face, another car hurtling at you in the same lane, a pack of camels hogging up the shoulder of the road, taxi drivers stopping in the middle of the road to yell at each other (all taxistas know each other in morocco too...kind of bizarre), a backhoe speeding down the freeway, and a tricked out beige colored car that looked like it belongs in the fast and the furious. I saw all sorts of things on those roads. In fact, I think I saw some transformers as well.

But anyway, we got to the hotel (really nice) and found some nice, english speaking ladies at the front desk. Got checked in and everything, and decided to go check out an arabic museum there, rock the casbah, and check out the market. So we had the hotel call a taxi for us to bring us to the museum area.

Our Taxi driver seemed like a nice guy...except I have no idea what he was saying or who he was because he only spoke Arabic and French.French is the dominant second language there behind Arabic. Not a whole lot of Spanish going on there or English for that matter. So we had the hotel receptionist tell him where to take us. And the price we paid was 150 dh to get to the museum We figured everything would be alright....but oh, we were mistaken.

First off, this was when we realized how hard we had been had on our initial taxi ride. The ride that ole no Spanglish gave us was about 30 minutes. So from our two taxi rides, we had no idea where to begin haggling at. 150 for 30 minutes, and 100 for about 5 minutes. We had no idea WHERE They were coming from now.

But anyways, we get to the area we are supposed to, and our taxista stops someone and asks for specific directions. This is when we met our best buddy Abdul, and this is also the point where my hand didn't let go of my wallet or leave my pocket for that matter (more on that laterish)

Anyway, Abdul told the taxista not to worry and that he'd take us there (this is what I'm guessing they were saying since I'm only partially fluent in Arabic now). We thought when we got out of the taxi that the museum was right there, but we were sadly mistaken. We found out Abdul wanted to be our tour guide, and by that point, our taxista was gone, and we had no idea where we were. So basically, we were in Abduls grimy hands from that point on. He gave us a nice tour of the casbah I guess, although I couldn't enjoy any of it because I just kept thinking, "sweet, we're lost in Morocco with this Abdul who is missing most of his teeth, yet seems to be chewing something because food keeps flying out of his mouth...at least I hope it's food and not tooth decay...I wonder how much he is gonna try to charge us". Anyway, we eventually got to the museum and told us his magical student price for us....only 10 euro per person! Oh Abdul, you SWEETHEART! 10 euoro only!? FANTASTIC! Heather, Jade and I had a little powow, and seeing as we wouldn't have made it to the museum without him (although later we did realize that he made the taxi driver stop, and then forced us to use him to get to the museum) we decided to give him 5 euro altogether. He wasn't too happy about that. I should've told him he can go and complain to the "tourism office" that he told us he worked for...but that probably wouldn't have been a great idea so I'm glad I didn't.

Anywho, we were all kind of shaken up after that. My hand was clenching my wallet from then on out because I officially didn't trust a soul in the country after that point. I was about to throw a right hook at an old lady who was looking at me funny in the museum cause I thought she was gonna try and pickpocket me. Needless to say, I was a tad paranoid.

Anywho, we had a new gameplan. We knew that we were gonna run into people who were gonna try to be our "guides" like Abdul, so we were gonna either say nothing, so they couldn't figure out where we were from or anything and just ignore them, or else we were gonna say we spoke German, because we were fairly confident none of them would speak German. So we went to these cliffs to take pictures and there were some really young, cute boys who kept saying hello in all these different languages to try and get us to speak to them. I mean these kids had to be like 5 years old. It was tough not to talk to them. At one point they thought it might work if they started calling Jade and Heather beautiful "Hello madame, you are very beautifulll". So funny. Then on the way back the girls got heckled in Spanish, but we kept to our guns and just kept walking.

We went down to the marketplace next and looked around. We were pretty dejected at this point and wanted to just leave, but then an early Christmas miracle happened. We haggled with some street vendors and got some really good deals on things. For example, Jade saw a really pretty necklace, but it was marked up to 650 dh (65 euro). Now, we already knew that things were marked up crazy and you had to haggle in the market, but this was an epic job done by Jade. She got that 650 dh necklace for 10o dh (1o euro). I got some things, Heather got some things (all bargained down) and we left the market and took a taxi ride home. Our taxi driver on the way home was interesting I guess....although I'm not sure he spoke any language. We gesticulated a lot like cavemen trying to come to a price for the ride back, lots of grunts took place. But eventually it worked out, and he brought us back to our hotel.

We didn't really eat anything out the first day there, we all had brought plenty of little snack things that we didn't need to at least the first night. So we went to bed that night feeling ok about ourselves...we knew now how to haggle and were determined not to be taken advantage of again.

However...we still had a day and a half left in Morocco? Would everything work out ok, or would we be had again?

(this has been a long post, I'll update tomorrow about the rest)

TO BE CONTINUED

Cave of Hercules, pictures, food, sneaky kitties, beach.

So hopefully next update, I can talk some more Rugby, maybe another thing or two about Barcelona, and then some things about Milk, Bathrooms, Cereal and Light switches.

Ok so let's see what we have here to talk about...

One of the things I miss the most in the US is the milk. My word. One of my first days here my host mom mentioned something about how her son likes to keep milk in the fridge, and said it in a way that made it sound abnormal. Plus the milk is super thick too, although not as bad as in Germany (sorry Julia haha). And I love milk. And I miss drinking a nice cold glass of it. Andy and I are of the same opinion that Skim milk is the best because it's also the coldest. Well my dear friends, the only way to drink your milk cold here would be to drink it while standing inside a freezer. But I usually pour some milk onto my cereal, but then I dump the milk out, because it just hurts my stomach after if I drink it all. So the only real complaint about the food I have here is without a question, la leche.

Next thing on the list is bathrooms. Here, if you go into a public bathroom, all the stalls are like little rooms. They are totally surrounded and closed in. Pretty nice.

However, while I'm all for saving the environment and everything, I'm kind of sick of the lights going out on me in the middle of doing my business. It's like a button you press and the lights stay on for like 2 minutes or so, and then shut off. Well let's just say that caught me by surprise the first couple of times. Plus, being that it is it's own little room it was absolutely pitch black dark. So it took me awhile to find the lightswitch needless to say.

I'll have to take a picture of the lightswitches here too. I have seen these types back in the states, but I haven't seen a single one that is like the ones I am usually used to seeing.

Can't remember what I had to say about cereal. It's pretty good I guess.

Went to another Rugby practice. Still trying to understand what it is I am supposed to do, although we did practice something similar to kickoffs so that I knew enough of. All I know is I push when they tell me too, and I tackle the guy in the other shirt. There is a game tomorrow (Thursday) at 230. However I have class till 330, but there is a chance Ill get out in time to make it. Let's hope so.

I've been to the movie theaters a couple of times recently. I went once with my buddy Harry one weekend night to see Malditos Bastardos. We showed up at like, 945 for a 1015 showing of it to buy our tickets cause we heard we had to get there early to buy them, but we figured that it's been out since the beginning of september so there wouldn't be a big line. Well there wasn't too big a line, but there also weren't any tickets available. Unbelievable. Talk about procrastinating to see a movie, Spain.

So we went back again the next night, even more determined. This time we got there around 9 to buy our tickets. Well in Spanish movie theaters, they give you assigned seats. Pretty good idea I guess. Doesn't make for that awkward 'there aren't many seats but i don't really wanna sit right next to that guy' moment. You sit where they tell you to sit bygolly!

It was in Version Original, so it wasn't dubbed and they talked in English, and it was subtitled in Spanish. However, I forgot how much of the movie was spoken in German and French. So Harry and I were reading a lot of subtitulos. Not really a big deal, but it doesn't do the movie justice the way it was translated into Spanish. Some of the things said in English that I read in Spanish just weren't the same, something was lost in translation there.

It's nice now I can watch a movie in Spanish, as long as there are subtitles, and I can understand just about all of it. However, the next challenge would be to watch a movie in Spanish without subtitles and see how I do.

GUESS WHAT? Got an e-mail from our prof. and said he was gonna take us to the cinema for his cine class to watch Celda 211. It was a prison/drama/action movie. Pretty good. Real hard to understand though, they used a lot of slang stuff and one of the main character's voices was impossible to understand. Smoked one too many cigarettes. I understood a lot of it....but not quite all of it. Still a bit confused about parts. But we'll figure that out tomorrow.

Anyway...Life is going well. Hope America is safe without me for awhile. Take good care of it, and go enjoy a nice glass of cold milk and a PB Sandwich for me (Jelly optional). I go have a nice Bocadillo de tortilla with some nice Madrid water for all of you tomorrow.

Hasta Luego!!!

p.s. any questions you have about Spain, send me an email and ill write about it in my next blog post.

p.p.s. I'm going to Morocco this weekend. Hope I survive.