2 posts tagged “tangiers”
The next day we went to Tangiers, drove by the strip where all of the movie stars used to live, like Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson and whoever. Tangiers is GORGEOUS.
It's so weird, we went to this beach and looking at the sunset, it looked like the sky in the Lion King. So bizarre, because we were like not that many miles away from Spain, but somehow the sky just looked so African.
Another view, these are obviously outside the city on the coast. Um, duh. But the city is really big. I think I have a picture of it somewhere...
Well, that's Tangiers but it doesn't really show what it's like.
Need! Photographer!
Anyway, the reason we drove out to the beach near Tangiers was to see where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea "hug" each other, as Jamal said. You can't really see it in the picture, but there was actually a little ridge in the water where they kind of hit up against each other, and the water was a little bit different colors.
The African sunset.
We went to this really cool restaurant in Tangiers, where I got the "vegetarian" option, which naturally was chicken. Evidently, to people in at least Morocco, Spain, Italy, and France, it has to be red and bleeding to be considered meat. Who knew.
It was amazing, couscous and vegetables and an entire chicken, but it made me SO sick that night.
These are some of the only pictures I have of Cynthia from the whole semester. How sad is that?
Chefchouan will be later. Running out of time.
Part 2 of my world travels.
I went to Morocco either one day after I got back from Ireland, or I was back for one day before I went to Ireland. I think I went to Morocco first.
Anyway, my roommate Cynthia and I found the trip on the message board at our school. We were picked up by this random professor guy in Granada, and the three of us drove to Malaga in his tiny little car. When we got to Malaga, we met up with the rest of the tour group, which consisted of about seventeen Swedish and Dutch girls, all blonde except one, one more American girl, and one Dutch boy. So, all in all, twenty girls, one boy. They were all studying in Malaga. Naturally, with 18 Swedish and Dutch, 3 Americans, all studying in Spain, and visiting Africa, the entire bus spoke English the whole trip.
We got on the Gibraltar ferry, which was huge and amazingly fancy. It had like tons of snack bars and it was all solid shiny wood, with tons of seating (it wasn't very full), and lots of decks.
That's a view from the boat. I am a genius, and did not take a single picture of the boat. I always do that. It was cool though. I think what we're seeing there is Malaga (my excellent deductive skills tell me this, since it is a view of the wake of the boat.)
Our first day there we got a tour of Tetouan. It seems like most of the larger cities in Morocco, at least the ones we went to, are divided into quarters, or maybe 3 or 5 sections. Tetouan had a Jewish quarter, a Christian quarter, a Muslim quarter, and I think like a French quarter or something. I don't remember, I can't believe how little I remember from some parts of this trip.
Anyway we walked through some of the markets and stuff, and had to hold mint leaves under our noses so that we wouldn't be completely sickened by the smell. It was right after the end of Ramadan, so Cynthia and I had brought long-sleeved, muted colored, plain, loose-fitting shirts and jeans, and just to be safe we had brought no jewelry and as few gadgets as we could get away with. Pretty much every one of the Swedish and Dutch girls were about 6 feet tall, had platinum blonde hair, huge jewelry, tight-fitting, glittery tank tops, and like a million flashy phones and cameras. They were comPLETEly bombarded in all the markets by vendors, everybody either would stop and stare when they walked by or come up and try (very persistently) to sell them something. Cynthia and I and our little brown hair and boring clothes were practically left completely alone.
An unbelievably crappy picture of the end of a road in a marketplace, I'm pretty sure this was in Tetouan. I'm hiring a photographer to come on my next trip.
A paint store/stand. You mix it yourself.
Hannah from Sweden getting dressed like a local by some local ladies.
Hannah and Jamal, our tour guide. He was AWESOME.
This guy stopped and looked at us like we were the weirdest thing he'd ever seen until we were out of his sight.
We stayed in a really nice hotel that night, and all I really remember was that there was some football game on (no, not that football, the other one) that all the Europeans were FREAKING out over. We definitely didn't watch it. Oh, and we tended to get a cup of Yerba every single place we went.
While we were in Tetouan, I think, our tourguide took us to this Berber carpet factory place. I think he was getting some kind of kickback for it. It was kind of shady. We all went into this maze of a building with carpets everywhere, and they started doing this little presentation for us, showing us all of the carpets they had. When we walked in, there were like 2 guys in there. Then another guy came out with a rug, and another, and another, like just to lay them down to display, but there ended up being about 10 guys in there.
Then, once the presentation was done, (our tourguide was nowhere to be seen), they scattered, and each one of the little Berber carpetmaker guys came and took us in ones or twos to some other random corner or secluded room in the big giant house, and started pushing the whole sales pitch. I pulled my purse in and said "I don't have any money. No tengo dinero." before they even said anything. They were willing to take Visa, dirham, dollars, euros, probably even pesos. Cynthia and I swore up and down that we had no money at all until they let us go.
When we got back to the bus, all of these other girls had these rugs that they had bought for like 200 euros or something, just scared of the guys. Sketchy!
Tangiers in another post -- this one's getting too big.
