We left Madrid around 10 am, all of us on the same little flight, and arrived in Morocco around lunchtime. Our tour guide, Josef, picked us all up from the airport and took us to our hostel which was located pretty close to the center of the city. We had two rooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. After we dropped off our stuff, Josef took us to a rooftop restaurant to get lunch. The meals in morocco all consisted of a starter, main course, desert and tea for about 800 dirham (which is equivalent to about 8 euro). Morocco was definitely the cheapest place I've traveled to so far.
The view from the restaurant
Jenna, myself, and Kaity at lunch
I had vegetable couscous, and a lot of my friends had kebabs. The food was really good!
After lunch, Josef picked us back up, and took us on a tour of the palace. The most impressive part to me, was all the incredible hand carved designs in the ceilings of all the rooms. Something Josef talked about a lot was the relationship between the king and his wives. He had four wives, who each had six kids. All of the wives shared one room with their kids, except for the "favorite wife" who got her own set of rooms. The favorite wife was the one who had the first male child (the heir). If the child died, then whoever had the next male child would be the favorite wife. According to Islam, the man can have many wives as long as he treats them all equally. We obviously had a lot of questions about this.
The girls (Sofia, Jenna, me, Kaity, and Jordan) in one of the palace courtyards
There were cats literally EVERYWHERE in Morocco. They were cute, but they ate all the trash, kind of like rats. And two people in our group were deathly allergic, so that was interesting.
We toured the different religious areas of the city, because in Morocco, there are people practicing Christianity, Judaism, and most popularly Islam.
Then we went to the tombs. The tombs were intricately carved just like the palace, in a similar style. In Islam, none of the graves are marked. The only way to distinguish between graves was by the colors of the patterns on them. If it was only green, that meant it was a soldier buried there, and different combinations of colors symbolized different roles in the government or church.
Next we went to a natural pharmacy, where we took a little class on all the different kinds of natural medicines and spices. Morocco is famous for argan oil, a kind of natural oil extracted from plants that is supposed to be good for hair, skin, and cooking. Our teacher also showed us lots of different perfumes, roots for headaches, and of course we drank Berber tea. Berber tea is called "moroccan whiskey" because people will drink it in Morocco ten times a day if they can. It's basically just a mint tea with sugar but it's really yummy and thicker than most teas.
After the pharmacy, we went out to the "souk" which is the outdoor market that Morocco is famous for.
I made a monkey friend!
We also stopped to get henna tattoos. These women did our tattoos in less than 5 minutes for about 5 euro.
We ate dinner at one of the many booths near the souk. They just kept bringing out more and more small plates of different kinds of food. My favorite was a little fried potato that was so delicious.
I loved all the lanterns, but sadly I didn't get one because it would've been too hard to bring back to Madrid, let alone the United States.
Jordan and I at one of the many vendors.
After shopping through the markets for a couple hours, we were all exhausted and headed back to our beautiful hostel to sleep until our early morning with our new guide, Mohammed, the next day.
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