Espana

This is my first entry in about a month, apologies for that. After we got back from our trip around Morocco, life in Rabat was relatively uneventful. We got back into the swing of schoolwork and spending time with host families. We also spent a lot of time at the beach when we probably should have been studying – a group of us in the program are taking surf lessons, and we live right next to the beach, so it’s entirely too easy to skip studying to go swim. We’ve also made friends with all of our surf instructors and so we’ve been hanging out and going out with some of them. It’s been fun hanging out with native Moroccans because they know all the best places to go and it’s funny talking to them about Moroccan things that we don’t understand.

This past week was our semester break, so a group of six of us went up to Spain for eight days. We visited Seville, Cordoba, and Madrid. It was wonderful to get out of Morocco for a little while and get a taste of Western culture again. I can’t even express how happy I was to wear a dress above my knees and show my arms without getting strange looks from people on the street. It was fun blending in too – in Morocco I get a lot of stares and comments because I stand out as obviously European or American, but in Spain I could pass as Spanish as long as I didn’t talk. One morning I went for a walk by myself and it felt so nice to just walk without conspicuously standing out.

Unfortunately I don’t speak any Spanish, so on that front the trip was a little tough. It felt sort of disrespectful to them to not speak their language at all. Sometimes some Moroccan Arabic slipped out when I was saying basic things like hello and thank you, so that definitely got me some weird looks. A couple people in our group spoke some Spanish, so they could pretty much communicate anything we needed to figure out. I was surprised at how little English or French most Spaniards spoke. I guess I expected most Europeans to know a lot of languages because they’re so close to so many countries, but that wasn’t really the case.

Our trip started in Seville, which is a beautiful little city in southern Spain. It had such a quaint and fun atmosphere with lots of beautiful architecture and tons of tiny tapas bars and restaurants. It’s a big tourist destination, so we heard a ton of different languages on the streets. We stayed in hostels in all three cities, so we met some interesting people in each city. In Seville there were a lot of Americans, British, and French people staying there, so it was fun hearing everyone’s story. That particular hostel in Seville has a program where you can stay for free and work as part of the staff for a month. I talked to some of the Americans doing that and it seems like an awesome option for anyone looking to travel for prolonged periods of time cheaply. We spent Halloween there and the hostel hosted a little party for all the visitors in the hostel. Most Spaniards don’t dress up, but everyone at the hostel got really into it, so we had a lot of fun. (I dressed up as Courtney Love and my friend dressed up as Kurt Cobain.. it was the best we could do working from random things from our suitcases. I basically just teased my hair and put on sloppy lipstick and my friend wore a lot of flannel. Most people didn’t get it, but at least we tried.) We did a ton of walking around the city.. we saw the Cathedral and the Plaza de Espana, which were both beautiful. Our favorite things, however, were inexpensive grocery stores where we could trust the food to not give us food poisoning, and coffee to go in big American sized cups! (Coffee to go does not exist in Morocco – they will give you funny looks if you try to explain this concept to them. They also drink it in tiny glasses exclusively.) You don’t know how beautiful normal coffee is until you don’t have it for months.

Our second city was Cordoba, which was a little quieter than Seville and wasn’t as much of a tourist destination. It had really cute tiny streets with tons of shops and tapas restaurants. We did a lot of walking and exploring around the city, which has really interesting architecture. We saw a medieval castle that was built by one the Spanish kings to house other visiting kings. We saw a Catholic church that looked very Arabic, where the doors and art looked a lot like most mosques, but with a Greek style courtyard. There were also a lot of renaissance looking sculptures all over the old part of the city. The city was founded in the 7^th century, so was cool to see all the hundreds of years of different influences in one city sort of layered on each other.

Finally was Madrid! It was pretty cold and rainy there, which reminded me so much of fall in Boston and it made me a little homesick. The actual city itself reminded me a lot of New York, with crowded sidewalks and that sort of city feel. It felt so strange being back in a city after life in Morocco. Everyone looked really well dressed and stressed out basically. We all got back into the swing of city life very easily though – I didn’t know how much I missed walking on city streets until we were actually there. It was so fun getting dressed up and walking around the city with coffee (I will never take this for granted again.) While we were there we visited the gardens and the Prado, which were both wonderful. The gardens were huge and really peaceful and beautiful. We walked around there for a good amount of time. One of my friends described it as what Central Park wishes it could be. It reminded me a lot of Robert Frost poems, which is nerdy but that’s really all I could think about – it reminded me of all his descriptions of forests. The Prado was sooo cool. The art nerd in me loved that too. They have tons of Goya and a lot of other Spanish impressionists that I wasn’t that familiar with. They also have a ton of really famous Italian baroque.. I’m forgetting all the names of the artists now as I’m writing this, though. I spent three hours walking around and looking at all of it until my feet hurt and I was overwhelmed by all of it. They have so much Spanish, French, Italian, and Roman medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, impressionist, sculptures.. they have it all. (Not a lot of anything past the mid 1800s, though, so if you’re a fan of post impressionism or any modern it’s not the best place for that.) If you love art you have to go. I left there so happy and dazed from standing and looking at art for three hours I could barely even think. I think that may have been my favorite part of Spain overall. We met some funny characters in Madrid too. We were sharing a big hostel room with a bunch of Brazilian guys and a Lithuanian, so we went out with them one of the nights. We ended up in a huge two-story club dancing until six in the morning. That was probably our most authentic eurotrash moment.. we didn’t sleep that night at all, we just went straight back to the hostel, packed up, and then had to go straight to the airport to catch our flight back to Marrakesh, and then from there the train to Rabat. We got home exhausted and dirty and happy to be home. We got back the night before Aid Kabir, a very big Muslim holiday, which I think will be a theme of a new post.

All in all it was a really awesome trip. It was really nice to have a break from Arabic and Moroccan culture, and of course Spain itself was beautiful. It was really funny and weird coming back to find that it sort of felt like coming home to be coming back to Morocco and my host family. Some things about Morocco is so quirky and weird and annoying in so many ways, but it’s so fun and welcoming at the same time that you kind of have to love it.