Sahara, Merrakech, Essaouria, and more!

   So its been a while since  I last posted thus leaving me with a lot to write about. This past week was the program's southern excursion. Our trip is on the following map and included loads of bus time! I'm just

going to mention the highlights and some of my favorite places and hopefully whoever is reading this can keep up with my scattered thoughts. :) Sorry this one's a doozy. So much to think about.  The southern excursion started early Saturday morning to Azrou which was our halfway stop for the night on our way to the Sahara. Many parts of the drive reminded me of parts of  New Mexico with long stretches of dessert leading up to tall mountains. The first place we stopped for lunch that day was called Azrou. Its a small village a couple hours south of Rabat. Before lunch we had about an hour and a half so the some of the group opted to walk through the village. The house in the village were perched up on the side of a mountain super close to each other. Walking through the village, it was easy to notice that many of the houses were falling apart, and that this was a very poor village. However,  the amazing smells of cooking food wafting out of the houses as we walked through the village told us that although many of these people are poor, they still continue on with with their lived and make do with the means that they have. It was a completely different life than that of the rest of Morocco that I've seen that is impacted by western influences. This was definitely once of those moments of realization of the fact that I was across the world on Northern Africa. I wanted to stop and talk to these people about their lives. This village seemed to be in its own little world, mostly untouched by western influence. But unfortunately, we had to get back to lunch  After arriving in Azrou and spending the night there, we traveled the Sahara desert stopping along the way to look at the Barbary Macaque monkeys before arriving in a village called Rissani in the dessert. From Rissani we had a lunch of what they called "Moroccan Pizza" which was essentially pizza minus the tomato sauce and cheese with extra bread on top of the filling made of beef, egg, and onion. We than got to take land rovers to the dessert.  Before riding to our hotel which was literally in the Merzouga desert in the Sahara, we had a site visit at a local NGO that empowered the local women in the village as well as nomads that pass through by offering language classes and work through selling crafts that they make. The embroidered clothes and crafts they made were beautiful and inspiring. After this we went to the hotel. Our land rover driver was crazy. He would race with the other drivers in the caravan, do donuts around in the dirt, and plough through sand dunes all then while with the same Arabic song on repeat for about 45 minutes.  Might have gotten the slightest bit of whip lash from that ride but it was so worth it! 

And finally, we got to the Sahara. We were only about 15 km from Algeria.  It is hard to explain what I felt during this time except to say that  I absolutely fell in love with the Sahara and the people in it. We got to ride camels from our hotel to some bigger sand dunes which we climbed and rolled down before finally settling down to watch the sunset. The feeling of the warm sand beneath my bare feet and the absolutely and final silence of the desert took my breath away and left me speechless  (those of you who know me well, know how the significance of this). Upon returning to the hotel we sat down in front of a camp fire and had mint tea while we watched a Gnawa band preform. Gnawa music is a type of African Islamic spiritual music originating from the Berber tribes that is meant to put you in a trance. It involves drums, iron castanets called krakebs, chanting, dancing, and a 3 stringed instrument similar to a lute. It is pretty incredible to hear and indeed mesmerizing.  If you ask,  I will send along a video of a song that I took.  We danced and sang songs that the musicians taught us then went on to an incredible buffet dinner at the hotel involving essentially every traditional Moroccan dinner dish at once. In a massive buffet. Talk about heaven. 

      That night after most returned to bed my friend and I went out to go see the stars.  We ended up getting invited to join some of the drivers that drove the land rovers.  They were Berber and one of them was a from a nomadic tribe. We exchanged greetings in Arabic, English and they even taught us a little Berber. They explained how the nomads in the desert travel during the night and use the starts to guide them because in the day, it is much too hot to travel. One of the guys then pointed to the circle of tents that were pitched outside the hotel and said "would you like to stay in my hotel? I have a hotel. The hotel you are staying in is 4 of 5 stars.... but in 4 or 5 star hotel, you don't see any start. In my hotel, you see 4000 stars. My hotel has 4000 stars."I wanted to camp outside so bad even if its meant giving up a bed and shower.  We laughed, talked more and said our goodbyes because we wanted to go look at the stars but they came with us. As we all walked along the sand dunes we ran into another couple of people from our program and one of the musicians from earlier and they joined us and led us to the top of a small sand dune before we all sat down.

     On that sand dune in the Sahara desert I had  easily one of the best nights of my life. The singer called himself "Timbuktu" and he was absolutely hilarious yet incredibly inspiring at the same time. We sat in a circle and exchanged jokes, and stories. He would tell us half of a joke and then make us go around in a circle and try and guess the answer. If we didn't know the answer we had to each respond with a different animal noise. It sounds ridiculous but it had me in fits of laughter the entire night. Interspersed with the jokes he would slip in quotes. I want to share them with you and hopefully even though you are not sitting in the immensely silent and phenomenal desert you will appreciate the beauty in what he said. One of the quotes he had us guess until we completed it was "It's nice to be nice; it's important to be nice, but it's not nice to be important".  The song he had us sing every time one of us started to get sleepy sounded so light hearted and fun but when he finally at the end of the night interpreted it for us, I was moved. It goes like this: "Halle, Halle, bischeetwelle, ya habibi"I don't remember the rest of the Arabic but it means: "Make your mouth sweat, so you can come back to people. With these words you make my heart crumble in your hands". In other words, think about what you say  and work hard before you open your lips to speak. Make the words that you say mean something, so you can always return home to the people you meet. Additionally he ended the amazing evening with the somewhat paraphrased quote:"Today  I didn't know I was going to meet you all and we would end up in the Sahara tonight    
together. You may call it coincidence, you may call it destiny but to me this is what life is about:           meeting people from around the world and connecting through  songs, jokes, and laughter. Will             we see each other again?  I do not know but we had tonight in the moonlight. Inshallah (God                 willing) we will meet again."
I felt that this summed up this amazing evening perfectly. Inshallah, I will return to the Sahara to do a week excursion on camels by the end of my trip. Plans are in the making. 

     The next morning, with about 3 hours of sleep we woke up early to see the sun rise over the sand dunes and for once last glance (for now) of beautiful desert. After breakfast we hopped back into the land rovers for a hella bumpy ride. Our driver was bumping to some tunes from his mp3 player and I was blown away when a song came on that was in Hebrew, Arabic and English. It was the most amazing reggae song. It was incredible to hear Hebrew, in the middle of the desert, after such a long time of not using it besides when a few words accidentally make their way into my broken Arabic. 

   We then proceed on to Ourzazette, which everyone calls the Moroccan Hollywood because it is where many movies are filmed including Lawrence of Arabia. I'm not going to go into detail but I got pretty sick for the next couple of days. In Rabat me and some of the guys had this meat sandwich three weeks ago. We now refer to it as the infamous "Street Meat" or "Mystery Meat"  I only had one Hamdullah! (thank God) but the guys had way more than that and one even ate it continually throughout their time in Rabat. All of us got sick afterwards. To be short it kind of tore me apart unexpectedly. I was not able to eat or drink anything without stomach cramps and other like symptoms for about 3 days. Our group has become very comfortable talking about our bowel movements.  In Marrakech I was able to see a doctor and got some medicines. I am doing better but still couldn't eat much cooked food besides steamed veggies and rice along with bread and bananas for the rest of the week. Hamdullah I was able to keep the amazing cookies in Marrakech down when we returned this weekend! 

     Marrakech was pretty amazing. It was here that I fully realized the sincerity of the Moroccan people. Majority of the shop keepers in the souk wanted to just talk to us more than they wanted to sell something to us. If we said that we didnt't want something many would say in Arabic, no problem, and thank you, or God bless. People were just so kind and friendly. We were lucky enough to be led by one such shop keeper to a Berber pharmacy. This is a store that specialized in natural herb remedies, cosmetics, every spice you could think of and some you couldn't think of, and perfumes. Just about any ailment that someone has, they have an herbal cure for. I took a picture of the store but this was one wall in the entire store. We spent a day just shopping in the souk and hanging out in the square, where there are stands that sell the best fresh squeezed orange juice I've ever tasted in my life, and souvenirs of every kind. There were also snake charmers, musicians, dancers, etc. The next day we hit up the tourist sites such as the Majorelle Gardens, the leather tannery (smelly! but they hand you a bunch of fresh mint leaves to hold over your nose and mouth. They called it the Berber gas mask!), a tajine shop, and the Saadian tombs. It was a wonderful day even though I was still really sick. 

     After Marrakech, we continued on to Essaouria, which will get its own post because I need to go do all the work I put off for a week, and because it is so far my favorite place in all of Morocco! Next couple of posts will hopefully be coming pretty soon because I still have so much to write about this past week!!!