Note how these entries are getting shorter, as I have less drive to bore you all with the day-to-day details. Okayyyy so spent a lot of time in the Market, met up with Andy and her host sister and got Tajine (chicken, vegetables… kind of hard to explain, but really good) then headed to the ruins.
Ruins=really old. Growing up in such a young country (Awwww the US is such a baby), you don’t really see too often things that are REALLY REALLY REALLY OLD. Not to say that the Native Americans didn’t leave such behind, yada yada yada, but nothing like this.
After even more time at the Market, Andy and I headed to this really cool poetry slam thing. I’d never been to one before and didn’t really know what to expect. This slam was run by a 20-something American girl who received a grant to travel around the world and… errr, okay I don’t totally remember, but her goal had to do with liberating women, specifically teenage girls.
So what it was, and it was mostly in English (little bit of French, little bit of Arabic), was a poetry showcase. Girls would come up and read poems that they themselves wrote about being a woman in 21st century Morocco. They talked about the veil, crushes, harassment, family… it was really, really interesting. There was even a Moroccan hip hop artist. She sang in Arabic and I have absolutely NO idea what she was saying… but everyone else seemed to like it, so I assume it was well-written and woman-liberating... Saturday:
By this time, out numbers had dwindled to two: me and my friend Ashley. At 5am we got up and hopped on a train back to Fez. From there we headed to the airport and got our second pain au chocolat of the day. Never did I think that I’d be a pain au chocolat conaisseuse, but Morocco really has nothing on France in that department. That being said, the couscous at my university in Rennes is like eating dirt compared to Moroccan couscous. Anyway, enough about the food…
After a really short flight, we land in Madrid, where we stay for less than 24 hours. We checked into our hostel, and found our room (which we share with 15 other people). There’s also a kitchen and a living room type area… it was actually really cool. Everyone was from a different country, and the two of us spent the afternoon with a Canadian girl who’s an au pair in France for the year.
We made a quick stop at Starbucks (overpriced, claro) and decided to do a Tapas Tour.
Para que sepas, a tapas are like Spanish snacks that’re eaten with alcohol, usually. I’m not talking Lay’s Potato Chips or string cheese here, I’m talking chocolate bulls tail, peppers & sausage, potatoes, more potatoes… yeah. That’s what we got. I wasn’t kidding about the chocolate bulls tail, by the way. It was like, stewed and it looked/tasted like beef stew. You wouldn’t have even known. The ‘tour’ part of the Tapas Tour means that we paid a flat fee at the beginning of the afternoon then went from restaurant to restaurant trying all of these tapas. Kind of like a bar crawl, but with tapas, pretty much. After that we did the bar crawl.
It was great to be able to use my Spanish again. I know that I have an American accent, and an even stronger Dominican accent (which is confusing, because I'm white)… and that definitely threw a few people off. Still though, it was nice to be in a country where I could understand pretty much everything that people were saying. In Morocco, while French is widely spoken/understood, Arabic is the main language. I couldn’t even remember how to say “hello” for more than two minutes at a time.
Link to photo albums on Facebook: one & two.
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