9-20-10 and Morocco

Blog entry for 9-20-10 and Morocco

Howdy peeps, another week has passed, and I think even faster than the last week.  Time is FLYING here with all the stuff that is going on to keep me busy.  This last week for school we had several small quizzes, had to watch a Spanish movie, had an oral exam where we had to act out scenes from pictures, I started my internship finally, a big presentation that each student has to do once each semester, and then the regular school stuff on top of that.  The movie I watched was called Lope.  It is a movie about Lope de Vega, a famous poet and playwright.  Everyone in our entire class ended up seeing this movie because it was the only movie that wasn’t dubbed over from another language and that was a requirement.  I understood the storyline of the movie but not the details.  Also, I volunteered to do my newspaper presentation first so I could get it over with for the semester.  I gave a presentation over an article that talked about psychology as a treatment for cancer.  It was pretty interesting, and I feel like my presentation went pretty well.  Overall, I think most of the stuff from this past week dealing with school, except one vocabulary quiz that I forgot about and did terribly on. 

I also started my Spanish internship finally.  I am working at a sports complex that has tennis, padel (a game kind of between tennis and racquetball), and a weightlifting gym.  I have just so far been doing stuff with tennis, and I think that is where I’m going to be staying.  Basically, my job is to help the tennis instructors that are there with whatever they want me to do.  I’ve been feeding balls to people that are having lessons.  I hope to maybe meet some people through this internship and obviously learn a lot of Spanish.  I’ll be working Monday – Thursday as it is scheduled now, and I think it will end up working out pretty well.  I have a sore arm already after just two days of working there because it has been so long since I’ve held a racket for that period of time.  I hope I end up getting to play some tennis while I’m working there.  My Achilles seems to be doing pretty good.  I’ve been trying to do some distance running; I still feel like the muscle and Achilles need more time to do full out sprints. 

This past weekend I was in AFRICA.  I went to Morocco with a tour group and 7 other students from my school.  I was a little worried about the trip at first because I didn’t know what to expect or much about the other students from my school, but it all went really great.  We had a great time in Morocco and saw some really awesome things.  It is like a whole different world there than most anything I’ve seen before.  There are similarities but also many differences.  The cities of Morocco, from what I experienced, had some similarities to Mexico City but…. That’s not a good comparison really.

We left on Friday from Sevilla on a bus, went to Cadiz, Spain to pick up some other people.  From there we went directly to the coast so that we could cross between the two continents.  We crossed on a big ferry.  The two continents are actually close enough in place to see from on to another.  You may not be able to see a city or something like that, but we were able to see some mountains in the distance on the African continent.  We were on the ferry for about 45 minutes.  We arrived to the port of the Spanish city Cueta.  I had no idea before this trip that Spain has two cities/regions on the African continent.  It was very cool to be able to say that I was in Spain but also in Africa at the same time.  From there we drove to the border between Morocco and Spain.  We had to sit at the border for over an hour while all the people and buses passed.  Our passports had to be stamped then a Moroccan official had to come aboard the bus and check the passports.  It was a little scary I thought, but we made it through without any problems.  From there we went to our hotel for the night which happened to be directly on the ocean and was very nice.

Ok I can already see that this blog could be a little TOO long so I’m going to cut a lot of detail from this point on. 

We left the next morning to go to the city of Tetuan.  We had a walking tour of Tetuan.  We walked through markets and plazas and many things.  I have pictures of everything so check them out when I get them online.  The center of Tetuan has over 3000 small streets and everything is written in Arabic so we paid close attention to not get lost.  Some of the little paths were small enough that you would have problems getting a bike though them!  The center of the city was a great experience.  We had our tour guide at the front of our group, a native at the end of our group and another guy kind of in the middle keeping people away from us.  He also would sometimes run ahead and check the next street/path we would turn on to and signal to our guide to come or not to come.  I’m not sure if this was for safety or what it was for exactly but….. I could see how it could be a very dangerous place if you were to get separated or not be with locals.  After the tour we ate at a typical Moroccan restaurant that was very good with music and even a belly dancer.  We then boarded the bus again and headed to Tangier (Tanger, I’m not sure I’ve seen it written both ways many times now), one of the larger cities especially in the northern part of Morocco.  We were able to go out and about in Tangier kind of on our own.  Which by this time, it was already approaching night.  All 8 of us from my school went out and saw some local market areas.  Some of us bought some stuff, but mainly we just walked around and tried to experience as much as we could.  It was really really cool, and I took some video and a ton of pictures.  We then had to wake up the next morning at 6 to leave for a mountain city called, ChefChaouen.  It was a very pretty city with most of the buildings and walls painted blue.  We had a very entertaining tour guide in this city.  I have some good pictures from this town also that I think will be interesting to look at.  We left the mountain city and started our decent.  It was a ROUGH ride back down the mountain.  It was hot, the tour guide said because we were close to the sun on the mountain and we were all a little confuse by this statement, but we turned and spiraled down the mountain eventually.  We headed back the boarder and boarded out ferry to head back to Spain.  We then boarded our bus and headed back to Spain. 

A few quick things I didn’t put up there:  I rode a camel right on the coast, you can see the ocean in the back ground.  I bought a handmade small carpet that is very pretty.  And I saw the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean and took a picture where you can see both at the same time. 

That pretty much concludes this entry.  I hope it wasn’t TOO long.  I tried to keep it kind readable.  Until next post!