Morocco!

Wheeeee, Annie, Christine, and I went to Agadir, Morocco for spring break! We wanted to go somewhere to enjoy some nice hot beach weather, work on our tans (yeah right), and just relax! We got this really great deal through a student travel agency, sooo we packed up our bags and flew to Morocco (how cool is it that we can travel so easily to a different continent? Especially a crazy continent like Africa!)

We stayed for one week in Agadir. In 1960, Agadir was completely destroyed by an earthquake that killed 18,000 people. So, needless to say, the city itself is rather modern looking, and there isn’t really any nice architecture to look at. And it’s a very popular French tourist destination, so the city is very “tourist friendly”. The first day, Saturday, we enjoyed some great beach weather. To avoid a lot of harassing on the public beach, we opted to rent these comfy beach chairs and umbrellas on a private beach. It was awesome! For 20 dirham (about $2) we could sit in peace and be super comfortable while enjoying the beach! Then Sunday, the weather was kind of bad (go figure, like the only rain all year comes when we are there!) so we went horseback riding! We went through some brushy, deserty areas and some woods, and then we got out to the beach and ran along the beach! It was just like a movie. Especially when it started pouring rain (and hailing!) and it turned into a wet t-shirt contest on horseback. Neat. But still an awesome time!

Monday, it was rainy again, so we went to the Medina d’Agadir. A medina is traditionally the old part of an Arab city, but since Agadir was destroyed in 1960, this is a replica of what a traditional medina would be like. It was still pretty cool, despite the fakeness of it all, because they did a really good job with making it seem real! And you could watch artisans work at making sandals, tunics, jewelry, etc.

Monday evening we went to a “soirée berber”, which was organized through our tour company. We drove about an hour to this old Kasbah, where we would have a delicious traditional Berber (tribe in Morocco) dinner and enjoy some entertainment! The dinner was great; we ate everything with our hands and used this homemade flat bread as silver wear/plates/napkins! The French people were not into that, and looked at us three Americans like we were crazy as we dug in! Then after our first course and second courses (flat bread dipped in butter and honey followed by a tagine with fish in a delicious sauce!) we were called out to “watch” the entertainment, which actually mean participating, which we didn’t realize. So we get grabbed into this dancing circle, and at first we were all kind of like “umm…we look stupid! Bah!” but then we were like “oh, who cares!” and really got into it! And since most of the other people there were families or couples, we three young American girls got a lot of attention! We kept getting pulled into the circle to dance with the men, even when no one else was! Needless to say, it was a hilarious and fun experience. And the food was DELICIOUS! After the first round of dancing, we went back in to enjoy our third course (another tagine, of chicken this time) before we were called out to dance again! Crazy Berbers. And we met this one “native” guy who had worked at Colonial Williamsburg for a long time. (Funny story, we saw him the next day when we were driving around in a cab in Agadir!) Then we had dessert of couscous with cinnamon and sugar, and oranges.

Tuesday was finally another good beach day! We went to the public beach in the morning, and it wasn’t that bad! We had people coming up asking us to buy crap, but we weren’t bothered that much, which made us happy. Then in the afternoon, we headed to the souk! The souk of Agadir has 2500 sellers and is like a little city! Some sections were really cool, which lots of handmade leather good, spices, clothing, etc, but then other sections looked like rip-off land in China or something, with lots of fakes and stuff. So I ended up buying these handmade leather sandals and a white embroidered tunic! The prices were crazy good too. I like Morocco.



Wednesday, we did beach again. Yay! Then in the afternoon, we were going to try to go to a hammam, which is a Moroccan bath/sauna type thing, and we had read about a “good” one in Lonely Planet, but apparently LP hadn’t been there recently, because the place looked like sketch land. So we went back to our hotel and made appointments for massages and sauna-ing at our tourist-friendly hotel hammam! What an experience! So turns out that a hammam is actually a very wet version of a sauna. So we’re sitting in there just getting hot, trying to avoid getting our underwear wet (it was rather puddle-y in there) and wondering if anything else would happen when this large Moroccan woman comes in and proceeds to throw buckets of water on us! So much for trying to keep dry! And then we got all this mud/clay/apparently good for your skin stuff all over us, and then we got massages, manicures, and henna!

We did discover that pretty much every man in Morocco was interested in either: a) selling us something, b) killing us (for not buying their stuff and/or not stopping to talk to them…?), or c) giving us 5 million camels. We definitely got some interesting offers (and yes, the 5 million camel offer was really said), and everyone called us “les gazelles”, which at first we thought was a kind of cat-call thing, which it definitely was in some cases, but nice guys who worked at our hotel called us it too! So I guess it’s just a Moroccan guy thing.

So yay for spring break in Morocco!