Morocco, Montsurrot and Riots

(At the time I wrote this, I was) exactly ten weeks into the trip, and (had) exactly five weeks to go. It’s nice to be able to say I’m comfortable living in not just a city (something I’ve never really done), but a city in another country. My parents visited last weekend (Nov. 9-11) and I knew where we were and where we needed to go (just about) the entire time, including handling the metro and just walking the streets, even with places we hadn’t been. Another example of this was when I was flying back into Barcelona from Sevilla after the Morocco trip. I found the Mapfre building, the Torre Agbar and the Sagrada Familia, and used these landmarks to triangulate the location of my residencia. The first thing I thought was “it’s gonna feel really good to get back to my room and sleep.” This is important because it’s the exact same thing I feel when I fly into Milwaukee. Barcelona really is starting to feel like home.

Luckily, any routine I’ve established is about to get destroyed in the next five weeks. This is my upcoming schedule:

Nov 22 - Nov 25: Amsterdam

Nov 29 - Dec 2: London

Dec 5 - Dec 9: Paris

(Exams, or something)

Dec 16: These seats for the Barcelona vs. Atletico Madrid game

(Some more exams I guess)
Dec 18: 21st birthday.
 Dec 21: Return to America

This makes it seem like exams will be a total afterthought, which isn’t completely true. They’re relatively spread out and some of them are papers/projects that I can get done leisurely in the weeks before they’re due, so hopefully the ones sandwiched in between Paris and the soccer game, and the soccer game and my 21^st birthday don’t put too much of a damper on the greatest 29 days ever put together by anyone ever.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That starting rant about the dangers of routines makes it sound like the last three or four weeks haven’t been interesting, which is not true at all. The week after Madrid was focused on the midterms everyone had the following week, but we still managed to do something interesting over the weekend. About an hour outside of Barcelona is a huge mountain called Montsurrot. We spent most of the day hiking, nay, parkouring our way up it...

... Which got us (me)...

into some cool...

... but precarious situations, once we (I) realized I took a running start to get over the pond and didn't have enough room to run back...

... Which culminated into the following...

Pardon the french. It was a stressful time.

That week of exams was tough, not because of the classes, but because I knew that as soon as they were over we would be taking our first trip independent of the program: Sevilla, then Morocco. Since our flight was so early (6 AM), we decided not to sleep that night. Instead, we went to a mojito bar and waited until 2 AM to get a cab to the airport. After about an hour of sleep on the airport floor and an extremely uncomfortable RyanAir flight (that shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did), we touched down in Sevilla and made our way to our 9 euro/night hostel.

It was about exactly what you’d expect in a 9 euro/night hostel. We got there and the guy at the desk didn’t even pause his YouTube documentary to tell us that we couldn’t check in until 11 but that we were welcome to have breakfast upstairs. I use the term “breakfast” loosely. There was jam, cornflakes, milk (which I didn’t trust at all), and bread. Also the kitchen was filthy. Our intention when we arrived was to take a nap to make up for not sleeping that night and then tour the city, but our situation prevented that, so we found our way to the Plaza Espanya and walked around a cathedral that I knew I’d been to before. Turns out we toured it when I was in Spain like eight years go.

So that was kinda cool.

Later that day, after a much needed (but completely insufficient) two hour nap, we met up with one of my friends studying abroad in Sevilla and did a little more sightseeing.

Assassins Creed anyone?

 After another (completely insufficient) hour nap that night, we got dinner with Kelsey and her friends at this park that had food from all over the world (think like Kangaroo burgers) and then went to a club, something that was not in the cards earlier that day when we realized how little we’d be sleeping and knowing we had a walking tour of the city the next morning at 10:30. We made the tour, but I was completely useless and couldn’t pay attention for the first half. But I was able to perk up enough get this picture:

Chris and I at Plaza Espanya, where the capital city of Taboo was filmed in Star Wars.

After the tour we found our bus and took the three drive to the ferry, improved by the fact that they played Superbad on the TV’s, a trend of great movies and shows they showed throughout the trip that included Catch Me If You Can, Aladdin, Zoolander and Entourage.

We needed every bit of those movies for the trip. Morocco is cool…

  … But it’s spread out.

And the weather wasn't always cooperative.

The ride from the ferry to our hotel in Morocco was uneventful, up until we got to the King’s house (or something) which was right next to our hotel, that had huge machine gun-wielding guards every fifty feet for like a mile outside of a huge wall. The discomfort this brought was assuaged by the meal we had at the hotel that night; chicken, this rice-like stuff, other stuff… I don’t remember what it all was but it was delicious, and it also started a trend of delicious meals everywhere we went. You prepaid for meals with the program we did, so they covered all of them. Real breakfasts and (what I think was) traditional and very much delicious Moroccan food was a welcome change from grilled cheese, chicken and mashed potatoes 6-7 days a week.

Our first stop (of note) was Chefchaouen (pronounced chef-chao-uen) where we took a walking tour.

Literally in the foothills of the mountains.

 

After the tour, we wandered through the multitude of little shops and bartered with the shopkeeps (which Great Britain-prejudiced Microsoft Word does not recognize as a word), which was a lot of fun. This is the product of that bartering:

11 Euros. THAT is a deal.

The next day we did roughly the same thing in Assilah, which boasted much cooler graffiti than even Barcelona.

It was merely a pitstop though, on our way to the coolest part of the trip; camels.

The camel rides were not quite what I was expecting. We basically walked in a circle on our camels for like a minute and then got off. That being said, it was still really cool. First of all, camels are huge, so they have to be on their knees for you to get on. For those of you who know anything about camels, you’ll know that they’re the least graceful animals on the face of the earth. This is me getting off it.

Step 1

Step 2. You really feel like you're gonna get rocked right off it.

After an uneventful week, my parents and the brother visited the next weekend. We did one of those double decker, hop-on-hop-off bus tours. It was nice to hit all of the touristy stuff that I hadn’t gotten around to doing/didn’t want to pay for, like the Poble Espanyol or the Sagrada Familia

It was also nice getting free fancy dinners for a weekend. Actually make that two weekends, since they came back the weekend after. In between their visits, however, was where the action happened. In case you don't read the news, Spain isn't doing so hot economically. To reduce their deficits, the Government is making huge budget cuts, which as you can imagine, are not going over particularly well with most of the people here. This culminated into a general strike on November, a fact Spanish people advertised in what seems to be the only way they know how...

... Graffiti.

As cheesy as it sounds, the tension was palpable that morning. Classes were cancelled after 2 PM and there were riot police preparing on my walk from class for the 6 PM scheduled strike at 10 AM. They were in the wrong place, though, since rioters started early, right at our residencia.

Apparently, Melon District exploits its workers.

Between this and the Graffiti (of course), you'd be amazed how quickly they cleaned all this up.

Later in the day a few of us decided to ignore numerous warnings not to attend the strikes (probably because this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq1e4TR13UM&feature=related... happened last year) and mosey on over to Plaza Catalunya to see what was what. (Un?)fortunately, nothing too interesting happened. the plaza was packed and the slow march started down the street, but other than the occasional flash bang bomb (not an actual flash bang, just like a small step up from a firework that did make a loud bang and bright flash, so I don't know how else to describe it), it didn't live up to the hype the last one built.

With that, the three weeks of traveling begins, intermittently interrupted by class (or something). Wish me luck.