La granadina It's the spring semester of my junior year, so I am celebrating with un gran viaje filled with classes (unfortunately) and crazy foreign fun.

I love Morocco! If you ever thought otherwise, you were wrong. Technically, I got back some weeks ago, but there was that whole food poisoning thing, then Spring Break, and time just kind of got away from me! So we’re going to rewind, and pretend that it’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend once again… So: I just got back from the most amazing trip! Morocco was incredible, the people amazing, and the food sooo, so good. Four days was not nearly enough. Day 1 began bright and early in ugly Algeciras, Spain for the boat ride across the windy, white-capped Straight of Gibraltar. I’m so lucky I’m not easily seasick, because the rest of the group was pea green while I sat and read. Even the huge boat was heaving through the swells. They actually almost cancelled, it was so rough, but I am so glad they did not. We landed in Tangier and ate at a Women’s Center to talk about women’s rights in Morocco. The Taliban gives Islam such a bad name; it’s nothing like the Middle East in Morocco. Women have got a bit of the “separate but equal” thing going, but with the new king, they can file for divorce, get child support, have pre-nups, all sorts of things they couldn’t do before. Women couldn’t even have a bank account in Spain til they got rid of Franco, so you see how fuzzy that line between Western and developing nation can be. Tangier wasn’t that special of a city, being a port city, but it did have three McDonald’s, so yeah. Gross. Moving on, we headed down the coast to Asilah, a lovely little white-washed city on the Atlantic. We rode camels on the beach and it was crazy awesome. Not nearly as treacherous as it looks! That night we met our homestay families in the old part of Rabat, and they were all sooo nice. Annie and I had a harder time than the others, as no one in our family spoke much English at all, but pretty much all Moroccans that we met spoke Arabic and French, so we figured stuff out. My French skills were obviously bad, but so much better than I had anticipated! I could almost always figure out what my homestay mom was saying, which was definitely a good thing. That night we had tea (oh yum, I wish I could drink that tea forever) and the girls took us out to see the city. One of them painted henna on our hands and we just sat around chatting with tea and other Americans til well after midnight. It was nice. Day 2 was scholarly-ish. We met with a professor at the University to talk about the social conflicts between the Islam and Western Worlds, but I was slightly disappointed: with the time crunch, it ended up being more of a summary than a discussion. It was still interesting, but could have been so much more so. After lunch with the families, we met up with University students to take us around the city and hang out with Moroccans our own age. By much crappy mathematics, everyone else shared two of the guys and Annie and I each got our own. So we double dated round the city, practiced Arabic out on the jetty, and team-bartered in the open-air markets. It was actually a really fun time, except that the Moroccans kept hitting on us, so it was probably good we rejoined with the group after some hours. Day 3 was goodbyes. I wish we could have talked more with our families because everyone else got so close with theirs, but even we felt closer to this family after two days than we do with our Spanish families after two months. Our homestay mom made us promise that if we ever come back to Morocco we’d stay with them. I think the hospitality in Morocco is the biggest thing I noticed there. Heading east, our three-hour drive to the Rif Mountains turned into six plus when our driver took a “shortcut” off the hand-drawn map he had been using. But Turkish toilets aside, we almost made it without any more problems! Almost. The van stalled out, though, about a third of the way up a huuuuge bit of mountain, and we had to get out and walk. Then the little tractor that could came by and gave us a ride far out of their way. It was a great adventure! Then there was the cute old grandpa waving us past, the little kids shouting “hello, hello” (the only English word they know), and the tiny sustenance farming village, too small to even warrant a name, to welcome us there. We had couscous at this woman’s house (her brother knows the director of the program I went with), and the grandma, speaking through a translator, was absolutely insistent we stay. With our van broken, she said, we couldn’t possibly make it, we could sleep in the living room (there were ten of us), she had enough food and eggs for everyone—she absolutely refused to let us leave before a week was up. It was so sweet (I can’t believe the hospitality we found in Morocco!) and we actually had to stage something of an escape to get her to let us leave. From there we went to Chefchaouen for a no-tour quick-get-your-shopping-in evening, thanks to our three-hour delay. The city was like a painting, though, all soft-edges and shades of white and blue. Dinner was amazing, I-miss-Moroccan-food-already amazing, and then we all curled up with our blankets and told ghost stories at the hostel. Day 4 was an early one for those of us who cared for morning hikes, so we climbed six million stairs up the hill to eat dried figs and look out over the city. Then came the long way home. Crossing the land border into Ceuta (a Spanish city on the African continent) was an experience. You walked down this narrow caged-in pathway alongside these two, equally long cages. This is where they put Moroccan men and women who try to immigrate illegally into Spain (Spain has one of the highest immigration rates in the world, second only to the United States, and they estimate some 30 cross illegally everyday). No one even cares about your passport because they know you’re American (non-US or –EU citizens have more trouble, Ojaswi’s Nepali passport actually didn’t go over so well) and all the Spanish guards want to know is whether you smoked Hashish in the Chaouen (we did not). Then you walk into Spain and there’s a big sign welcoming you in Spanish, French, English… but not Arabic. It’s rather affecting to see how cold the Spain side is after we’ve been nothing but welcomed on the Moroccan one. But the trip was amazing. It makes me so glad I’m in Spain and able to do things like this. And seriously anyone who gets the chance to go to Morocco should go because I can’t possibly do it justice here. And also, if you do, please find and take pictures of the tree-climbing goats. Because they sound exciting!