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.