Thursday, April 15, 2010

Past Due

So I haven't blogged in a long time. Spring break was way fun. My parents and I met in Italy, which was awesome. If you wanna hear all the details, ask me about it because I don't feel like typing all of that out.

After Italy my mom and dad came back to Sevilla to see where I've been living this whole time, see some of sevilla and the end of semana santa. We came back saturday and did some laundry and walked around sevilla and saw some of the pasos through the streets. This town was PACKED with people. It was nuts. You couldn't even walk through the streets and you had to take all the back roads.

On easter sunday, we went to church for about 5 minutes in the cathedral and walked around Sevilla again. It was just nice to be with my parents in Sevilla and it made me even more homesick being with them here instead of in chicago like usual. After a few days and a lot of Tapas with my mom and dad, they headed for Barcelona and I headed for Morocco!

Morocco....what t o write about you. First off, this was a school trip. We had rules and had to be up at the crack of dawn (5am 1 day and 6 the other 2) so it wasn't the most exciting trip. We started off with a bus ride to the south of spain to take a ferry across the straits of gibraltar. The seas decided not to cooperate with the boat and it was the roughest boat ride I had ever been on in my life. A lot of people were feeling a bit queasy and were ready to get off the boat.

After the 1 hour long boat ride we had another 40 minutes to Tetuan where our hotel was for the weekend and where we started our tour of morocco. We walked through a medina (which i don't have a clue what this word means in spanish but i would say "neighborhood" would be appropriate.) After walking around the most foul smelling market and seeing some stuff that I really couldn't tell you what the hell it was, we went for some COUS COUS! YUM!! we also had some orange mint tea that we soon figured out is served 16 times a day in morocco and got sick of very quickly.

After lunch we went to the Coca-Cola factory in Tetuan! That was really cool to see! We walked through the whole factory, got a tour, got some souvenirs and got some samples! They have this apple soda called POMS in morocco that was very tasty. It was crazy to think that they had state-of-the-art machines in the factory but outside, some people don't even have running water in their houses. A very surreal feeling to think about.

day 2 we went to Tanger, one of the largest cities in Morocco. It was pretty sweet but the most exciting thing was the market in which we didn't get sufficient time and I only ended up buying 1 thing, maybe a good idea seeing as how i'm living on a tight budget! After Tanger we went back to the hotel and had dinner and got a short nights sleep before waking up at 5AM the final day. YUCK!

Our final day we drove through the mountains to Chef Chahouen, a blue city in the hills of the mountains. They paint all of their buildings blue to help deal with the heat that can become sooo hot in the summer. They paint their houses 6-7 times a year and the only color is blue. It costs less than 10 euros to paint the whole house, very cheap! They also fit about 30 people inside 1 house consisting of 5-6 families!! crazy! After getting a tour of the whole town we had some more free time at another market and we just kind of wasted time until it was time to leave and head back to spain.

When we got to the port, we were told that the ocean was so rough all the smaller boats had been cancelled and just 1 big one was running so we had to wait for that one. Worth the wait! We all got these baller 1st class seats that were like on an airplane that went down and stuff. It was good because the big boat made it so you couldn't even feel the waves and saved a lot of people from getting sick. After the boat, we still had another 2 long hours on the bus and a lot of jokes and riddles were told on the bus to make time go by faster.

After a lot of busses, boats, and walking we finally made it back to sevilla. It was nice to be back in civilization where you can drink the tap water and don't have to buy bottles of water to brush your teeth with!!

All in all, cool to see morocco and i got to ride a camel! So i've been to africa, but it wasn't realy africa, just northern morocco!


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