top of page

Al-maghreb

After a winter break spent working at Walmart and visiting my family, I'm back in Spain! I closed last semester with two more international trips: Morocco and Vienna, Austria.

My trip to Morocco was with my program. We went to various cities in the North, a lot for just one weekend, but a good introduction to Morocco I suppose. I enjoyed my time in Jordan better, just because I was living with a family there for six weeks, plus I liked the food better. Still, I can't fairly judge Morocco after only one weekend, and since I study both Spanish and Arabic, I could see myself spending more time there and enjoying it.

I was mostly excited to be in an Arabic-speaking country again. Plus, their second language is French, so when I didn't know something in Arabic, I switched to French, then Spanish, then English as a last resort. Everyone was surprised with my Arabic, and since I had gotten myself into the habit of speaking dialect (Jordanian/Syrian is the dialect I'm most familiar with) and writing standard, a lot of Jordanian sentences came out. I was still mostly understood, because Syrian dramas are famous amongst Arabic speakers, and I could tell they were responding to me in standard Arabic, since Darija, their dialect, isn't as commonly known.

We took a ferry from Spain to Morocco, and I remember so many passengers were vomiting because of sea sickness. That is when I tried to strike up a conversation with the people next to me in Arabic, saying (in Jordanian) "ma btHeb assfr" "She doesn't like the travel ( I didn't know how to say 'boat ride'). They didn't understand me, because they were thrown off that I was speaking Arabic and because the verb for "to like" is different in Darija, but then their little 10-year-old girl started talking to me in Spanish. She was very sweet, telling me about how she lives in Spain with her family but she has relatives in Morocco, and that one day when she is older she wants to go to Paris. She was shocked that I was from the US and not England, because the US is so far away. At the end, she gave me her mom's Whatsapp number and told her mom that I'm her new friend. She even wished me Happy New Year! I really hope that one day she gets to Paris.

In Tetuan, we were brought to markets to go shopping. I saw rugs, and I would've maybe bought one, but the man selling them kept making a 'joke' that we could pay with beautiful girls, so I refrained. I still managed to spend too much money on souvenirs that trip. I bought some black cumin that supposedly cure headaches if you sniff it, argan oil for the hair, saffron (which is expensive everywhere else), plus, probably the most impulsive purchase I have ever made: a djallaba and matching slippers.

We also made a stop in "The Blue City," Chefchouen, which means, in Arabic, "Look at the two horns" because it sits between two mountains. I thought it was the prettiest city we saw that weekend.

On the last day, we stopped to meet some camels, which I was pumped for since we weren't allowed to touch animals in Jordan. I think these were happier camels than the ones we saw at Petra in Jordan, because unlike those, these camels didn't have marks on their heads from wearing their ropes for too long.

We also visited the Caves of Hercules, where, according to legend, Hercules slept on his way to completing the 11th of the 12 Labors of Hercules: stealing three golden apples.

Those are the main highlights I remember from Morocco. I am going to try really hard to write regularly this semester, and I should also dedicate a post to Vienna, where we almost ended up sleeping on park benches due to our Airbnb's last minute cancellation.

bottom of page