This is the letter I sent to my family in March.
So, I know I’ve been pretty slack on keeping everyone updated on what’s going on around here, so this time I’m actually writing. I guess most of you know that I went to Morocco on February 8-10. It was pretty crazy. We kind of just decided to sign up with this tour group that was going (because it’s kind of dangerous to go by yourself, especially if you’re American, and extra especially if you’re a girl). The group ended up consisting mostly of kids from my university (Americans and Canadians), so we all already kind of knew each other, which gave a nice dynamic to the trip. So, we rode the bus down to Algeciras, Spain, to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to get to Ceuta. We got there a little after 5:00 in the evening. We didn’t get on the ferry until 12:00 at night because there was a huge storm that we had to wait out! That was my first time on a ferry and I’ll tell ya, it took a lot to not get seasick because the waves were so big from the storm. Anyways, we finally get to Morocco, cross the border, and get to the hotel at 2 or 3 AM. After dinner (yeah, a 3 a.m. dinner) we slept a few hours and visited the city in which we were staying, Tetuán, Morocco, a small town in the north of the country. Our tour guide, who called himself Michael Douglas (I think because it’s easier to say for Americans than Muhammedwhatcha-ma-call-it Jihabad), and was pretty funny, led us through the markets and then brought us to a bazaar. It was crazy in the bazaar, because they wanted to bargain. I’m real bad at that, but I did get one thing. After a Moroccan lunch of cous cous and some other plates, we went to Tangier, which Morocco gained not too long ago from France. Tangier was really pretty—very European. A lot of middle-eastern princes have their vacation palaces there. After a tour (and after riding camels!!) we had 45 minutes to walk around in the center at about 7:00 at night. So 5 of us girls thought that it would be good to walk around together. Not so. All the guys inside the stores kept hollering out to us and calling us the Spice Girls, haha! The people of Morocco are Muslim, so the guys think it’s crazy to see an American, especially a light-skinned one. Anyways, after that, we went back to the hotel and said our good-byes to our beloved tour guide, Michael, ate dinner, and went to bed. The next day we took a bus up to Chef-Chaouen. This city was so beautiful—completely blue and white, like a little Greek town. It was up in the mountains and very gorgeous. We toured it and then had some free time to walk around and do a little bargaining with the shop owners.
I think my favorite town was Tetuán because it was the most typically Moroccan, and my next favorite was Chef-Chaouen because it was just so beautiful. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to drive across Northern Morocco in bus versus flying or something like that because it let us see the beauty of the countryside. I never knew that there were such mountains up there. They were maybe the biggest reliefs (drops from top to bottom of the mountain) that I have seen, only possibly rivaled by the mountains in central Mexico. They were gorgeous, though, and because of the storm, they had clouds clinging to them and rolling down them. So pretty. Anyways, after Chef-Chaouen we hurried back to Ceuta to try and catch the ferry back to Spain, because they told our leader-person that they were waiting for us. That wasn’t true. We flew down the mountains for about 2 hours and around hairpin turns, which was kinda fun, haha. But we got to the ferry station and they told us that the ferry was too full and that we’d have to wait for the next. Well, the storm was still sticking around from the other day so we had to wait in the ferry port for 8 hours. Once we finally got on the ferry, I took some Dramamine (a drug that people take for car sickness) and went to sleep for the 2-hour ferry ride. When we FINALLY got back to Sevilla, it was 7 am and I had to go to class from 9 am until 3 pm so I didn’t even go to bed—I just showered and went to school having slept about 3 hours in the past 24 hours (and an intense 24 hours). Needless to say, I said some pretty crazy things in class that day!
But Morocco was really fun, and completely different than anywhere I’ve ever, ever been. I would have felt so uncomfortable had I not been with a group, so I am very glad that we decided to do that. Morocco is beautiful, a little strange, and absolutely sketch, haha! (just kidding… but mostly serious)
The week after Morocco was crazy. I couldn’t catch up on my sleep, I had a ton to do, and I was getting a cold. Ahh! So that week is kind of lost in the abyss. But the following weekend I stayed around Seville. My host mom, Pastori, has breast cancer and on that Friday she had her 2nd chemo treatment, so I wanted to make sure she was okay because in the apartment it’s only me, her, and her 11-year-old daughter (who is adopted) although her other kids, who are all about 30-years-old come over all the time. Plus, it was a good excuse to rest. That Saturday we went to a family bar-b-que. They’re a lot different here than in the states. But the food was delicious. It was mostly steaks that were cut up, and also pork and fish. Plus, of course, olives and bread, because they eat an obscene amount of bread and olives, and then things like chips, etc. The bar-be-que was at the house of the parents of the husband of a daughter of Pastori’s (if you can follow that relationship). They live in a little town about 30 minutes outside Seville and they have two places. One is a house on the edge of the little town, and the other is a 5-minute’s walk down the street to a little one-room house in a field next to where their sheep and chickens are. They have that one-room house just to host parties, so it’s pretty nice. They also have a puppy that was SOOO cute and looked just like Buddy and Cody did when they were babies. I think it was a Mastiff? I’m not sure. I told them that we used to have a Great Pyrenees, and they said that that dog was kind of like that one, but not exactly. They knew the Pyrenees breed because it originated, of course, in those mountains, which are in Spain. Anyways, the family is really fun and I had a good time. The food was delicious, and it’s funny because the father of the husband of Pastori’s daughter calls me “La Rubia”—“The Blonde Girl.”
So after that weekend I had finally rested and gotten over Morocco and had a great week at school. I like my school—it’s kind of out in the country and I have a 10-minute bus ride out there. I met some kid that goes to the University of Sevilla and he made fun of me for going to UPO, telling me that they call the UPO kids rednecks because the school isn’t in the city. Haha.
So, that brings me to my latest trip/adventure. A little background explanation: this past Wednesday and Thursday were holidays for my province, Andalucía. Wednesday was “Puente” and Thursday was “Día de Andalucía” which translates to “we are Spaniards and so therefore we search for reasons to have ridiculous parties without having to go to work.” So we didn’t have school those days and the study abroad kids at UPO never have school Friday. So, me and 3 other girls decided to take advantage of this break. We skipped that Monday and Tuesday and left the Thursday before (February 21st) and took an 11PM bus for 6 hours from Sevilla to Madrid, the capital of Spain. At 5 AM we got to Madrid and stayed there for Friday through Monday. Madrid was so pretty. They have a ridiculous amount of palaces and huge buildings, and parks. It was really fun—we walked about 3,657,503 miles through the city and went everywhere and saw everything, I think. We didn’t experience the oh-so-famous Madrid nightlife, though, because by about 11 at night we were so beat that we just went straight to bed.
We went to some fantastic museums, in place of nightlife, which was 100% okay with me, since I’m a big nerd. We went to The National Museum of the Prado. In there was Goya, el Greco, Rebrandt, Velázquez, Ribera, Raphael, Bosch, and a hundred masterpieces. This museum wasn’t my favorite, since Renaissance art isn’t really my thing, but it was still awesome!
We also went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, (in Madrid there are 3 incredibly famous museums and this one, Prado, and the Reina Sofia are them) which had a temporary exhibit of at least 4 huge floors dedicated to Picasso. Wow. I didn’t even know he had that many works. Other than that, though, there was everything from Italian primitive paintings to Dutch paintings, impressionist to expressionist, and all in between. I liked the Thyssen, but I was definitely Picasso-ed out by the end!
The Reina Sofia was pretty cool, as well. It had Dalí, Miró, Gris, Picasso, even one by Diego Rivera, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I thought it was strange that in the museums in Madrid, we couldn’t take pictures. I can see how it might get out of hand, though. Oh, well!
We also went to a museum up there of the collections of Lázaro Galdiano, who apparently was some really rich dude that seriously loved Goya. His collection included everything from 3rd century B.C. golden earrings to 19th century English paintings—quite the diversity. The museum was actually the mansion he lived in when he was alive. It was three floors stocked full of every epoch of art.
Other than museums in Madrid, we spent a lot of time hanging out in parks and walking around. It’s a beautiful city.
Sunday night we didn’t get a hostal room because we had a 5 AM flight to Paris. We wanted to save money so we slept in the airport that night, haha! We got to Paris and it just started out hilarious. We were taking the metro to our hotel and one little old lady got on the metro after us, but her jacket got caught in the door of the train. She just kind of looked at us as if to say, “Ahh! Ugh!” and started talking to us in French, with very lipstick-covered teeth. She realized we didn’t speak French, but kept making funny faces to express her fake distress over her jacket. That was a good/really funny way to start out our visit in the City of Amour. We giggled a ridiculous amount.
I LOVED Paris. I felt a little guilty because I felt obligated to like a Spanish city more than a French city since I speak Spanish, but Paris definitely rated over Madrid. It was so gorgeous and I’ve never seen such buildings. It was a little awkward sometimes because none of us speak French past the basic—hello, how are you, thank you, good-bye, do you speak English, and I don’t speak French—plus a few random but essential words like, toilet. But we got by since a lot of people speak at least a little English, and sometimes we’d find someone that could speak only French and Spanish. If none of that worked, we just used the tried-and-true pointing and grunting. Plus, in the group of us 4 girls, two are more flirty, so these French guys would always try and talk to those two, but every time they would talk to some guy, our sides were hurting from laughing so hard since the language barrier served for such a comic relief.
Anyways, Paris was gorgeous. I’m sure I’ll forget something, but I’ll try and list all we saw on Monday morning through Thursday morning. We saw: Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame (our hotel was basically right next to the Notre Dame), the Pantheon, the Louvre, the d’Orsay, the Arc de Triumph, a thousand centuries-old churches, Montmarte (which is the highest point in Paris), the Madeline, the Opera house, Moulin Rogue, and so many little areas of Paris. Although it was rainy every day except for one, it was still just absolutely gorgeous. I would love to return any day.
The Louvre: we decided to go to the Louvre from 6:00-9:00 one day because it was way cheaper to get in. Bad decision. Well, bad decision for me because I’m a museum nerd—good decision for two of the other girls in our group. It is called the Louvre Palace, and for good reason. It’s SOOOOOO big, with an awesome amount of every type of art. It took 30 minutes just to figure out how to get around in there! But, I saw some fantastic art, and some of the most famous works of art in the world—the Mona Lisa, some of Michelangelo’s most famous sculptures, including The Dying Slave, and, by other artists: Venus de Milo, Psyche and Cupid, and 372,894 other sculptures. Also, something that really, really impressed me was Napoleon’s apartments. I guess he lived in the Louvre Palace for a while and he had one hell of an interior decorator because the apartments are insane and so gorgeous. I saw so many paintings in the Louvre, but I don’t want to bore you with just listing them off—all I can say is that I really want to return one day to see everything I missed because I was so rushed.
In the d’Orsay, I saw every impressionist painter, I think, which means I was pretty much in heaven for a few hours. Van Gogh, Corot, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gaudí, Munch, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Pissarro, Sisley—just to name a few. I really loved the d’Orsay, but I also love impressionist paintings.
Oh man, and let me tell you that the reputation that French food has is so true. Everything we had was ridiculously delicious. Expensive, but worth every penny. We tried to have the typical French food, so I had croissants, one girl had ratatouille, I had crème brulee, we had baguettes, crepes, which I thought were only for putting sugar and fruit in, but they use crepes for everything, like a sandwich. We also had the best tartes in the world, delicious French onion soup, and a ton of other things. The gustatory opportunities are endless.
The other girls really enjoyed the shopping opportunity, but while they went shopping I went to a park to write a little in my journal, but mostly I went to people watch. That was a good decision, since I’m not really big on shopping. I ended up in a park in front of a church that I’m sure was at least 200 or 300 years old (a baby in terms of French architecture). The most interesting part was when I happened to look up from my journal at one point and saw a man crossing the park with his dog and we happened to make eye contact. Well, I looked back down, since I was just chillin, and not looking to have philosophical conversations with some random old French guy, but he came over to talk… in French. I said, “Bonjour,” but, clearly, after that I was lost. So he started talking in French, but I just said, uhhhm… sorry. So he switched to English. He was an interesting person, and explained to me that “I am I” and “you are you” and that I must modify myself to achieve a future. Haha! That was quite the conversation. His dog was nice and he told me about 3 times that he spoke 6 languages, and just because I am learning Spanish it isn’t enough and that I must modify myself! That is just one example of a crazy encounter I had with a Frenchman. They’re silly over there. I don’t know where the stereotype comes from that French people are rude and smelly. Everyone we encountered was so kind and helpful, and no one smelled worse than any American :).
So Thursday afternoon we reluctantly left our hotel and flew back to Madrid. From Madrid we took another 1 AM bus back to Seville and I finally crawled into my flannel-sheet bed at 8 AM and didn’t get up until 2 PM when I ate lunch and then hung out for the rest of the day. It was difficult switching back to thinking and speaking in Spanish when I had been around only my American friends for a week.
