Southern Spain and Morocco
Hello to all from Madrid, where I have just arrived at the Cat's Hostel (unofficially known as the Cat's Party Hostel - wooooo!) after nearly nonstop travel from Marrakech a few days ago. I've been with my Uncle Chris and stepfather Rick since Porto in late January and just left them behind, although I will see them for a few days in Barcelona. It's back to the hostel life for me! It's been nice to stay in AirBnBs (sometimes with my own bedroom!), have a few expenses covered, and spend some quality time with those two, but I'm ready to travel alone again. Here's what I've been up to in the past few weeks.
CADIZ: FEBRUARY 4-5
I spent a night in Cadiz as a stopover between Seville and Morocco. After the bus travel we only had a few hours to explore the town.
Highlights include:
- Walking past a bar and hearing live music. I stopped in to record a bit and the men playing at the table noticed me and my microphone. They invited me over to the table and played song after song for me. They were singing in three part harmony and one man was using a napkin dispenser as a kind of mini-cajon, played only with the fingers. At the end they had me play a song too!
CHEFCHAOUEN: FEBRUARY 5-7
We took a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tarifa, Spain, to Tangier, Morocco. It was incredible to see Europe receding behind me and Africa appearing in front, seeing both continents at the same time. We spent our first few nights in Chefchaouen, a small town nestled in the mountains. It is called "The Blue City" because nearly every building in the medina (old city) is painted blue. The story is that it should remind you of the sky and devotion to God.
Highlights include:
- Walking to the Spanish Mosque nearby. On the way there, I was crossing a bridge and liked the sound of the water, so I stopped to record it. At that moment, it started hailing for about five minutes. The sound of the hail hitting the rushing water was something I'm not sure I've ever heard before. Also, I had no idea it hailed at all in Morocco.
- Walking by a mosque in the medina and hearing children recite verses.
- On the way from Chefchaouen to Fez we stopped in the ruins of the city of Volubilis. It was the largest complex of Roman ruins I have ever seen. Hard to imagine it was once a bustling city when all you can see is footprints and columns and mosaics.
FEZ: FEBRUARY 7-10
We stayed in a riad in the medina in Fez for three nights. Fez was busier than Chefchaouen but much more laid back than Marrakech. Being in the medina is pretty wild because all the buildings look like they did hundreds of years ago and the people haggling over the price of food are like they were hundreds of years ago, but there are a few anachronistic elements, like the telephone wires and satellite dishes on every building and the fact that the donkeys being led through the streets are laden not with firewood but with propane tanks.
Highlights include:
- The dinners made for us every night by Nabila, the sister of the man who owned the riad. Her cooking was better than any of the restaurants we ate at in all of Morocco.
- Seeing the famous tannery on our tour of the medina. There are pools and pools of different colored liquids all next to each other to dye the leather, all made from natural ingredients. It was recently restored by Unesco to the way it was hundred of years ago. The techniques are still the same, and now the tannery pools are the same as well.
- Learning how to make Moroccan mint tea.
- Walking in to the new city. Its modernity exists in stark contrast to the medina. I stopped in a shopping mall, which had restaurants and coffee shops and electronics stores and clothing stores and lingerie stores (I was kind of surprised by that). It even had the same pop music and cloyingly sweet perfume smell of shopping malls in the States. It was just like a mall in the western world, only with more headscarves.
- Meeting the people in our compartment during the eight hour train ride to Marrakech. They discovered I was a musician traveling with a guitar and had me play for them for about an hour. I took requests for covers and played some of my originals. There was a three-year-old girl who loved it and was smiling and clapping along with every song. That made it all worth it.
MARRAKECH: FEBRUARY 10-14
We stayed four nights in two riads in the medina in Marrakech. There were a good number of people who tried to hustle you for money in Fez; that number was about tripled in Marrakech. I found it hard to walk ten meters without someone calling to me "my brother, my brother!" and then trying to give me directions for money or take me to their cousins's restaurant. It was funny at first but after a few days became mildly infuriating. My American sensibilities and ideas of rudeness had to be sacrificed for my own sanity, as I finally discovered that the easiest way to make them stop following me was not a polite "no, thank you" but simply ignoring them altogether. I did the same thing to someone when I got back to Spain and then a few minutes later realized I had acted like an asshole. Different cultural norms.
Highlights include:
- Haggling someone down from 700dh (70 euro) to 250dh for the jallaba that I bought. (It's a traditional Moroccan coat/pullover).
- Getting snakes put on my shoulders and monkeys put on my head in the main square.
- Eating tangia, a dish made of beef slow cooked in saffron. Saffron is much cheaper in Morocco than the USA so they can use a lot more in a single dish. I had never experienced that intense of a saffron flavor before.
- Finding the places that had the local prices, not the tourist prices. This became a game for me and Uncle Chris. We found an amazing spice and perfume shop that allowed us to get many gifts for the price of one "tourist price" gift!
- Talking a man down from 200dh to 20dh for a monkey show in the square.
- Seeing the Jewish cemetery. I was walking around for a while and then realized I had made my way into the children's section. That was pretty heavy.
- A sidenote: it took us 21 hours to get from our place in Marrakech to our place in Granada. We took 3 taxis, 2 buses, 2 trains (one of them was the 11 hour night train), and a ferry. (Here's the order, if you're curious: Walk, taxi, train, taxi, ferry, bus, walk, train, bus, taxi).
GRANADA: FEBRUARY 15-16
We got in to Granada in the mid-afternoon and only had a few hours to look around before we all fell asleep - the night train the night before didn't allow for a whole lot of rest so we all had some catching up to do.
Highlights include:
- The view of the Alhambra from the AirBnB window.
- Having a beer directly under the Alhambra as the sun set.
- Sleeping for 10 hours. That was the first night I had slept more than eight hours in weeks.
And now I'm in Madrid! More to come later.