Spain!!

We just left Spain, the very last port of this voyage. I’ve got really mixed feelings, because its sad that its over, but I’m very excited to be headed home, back to friends and family and all that good stuff. I’m looking forward to the stability of being in one place for more than a week. But Spain was good, really really good.

The first day in Cadiz, it was a little cold and rainy, so I just explored the city with two of my friends, and we visited lots of churches and cathedrals to try and stay dry. We also went into a convent, which was sortof cool. We walked to the shore and admired the Atlantic for a little while, each of us trying to figure out how long it had been since we had last seen that ocean and then the rain got a lot harder and we ended up spending the next two and a half hours sitting under a playground in the park, just talking and eating all the Spanish chocolate we had bought earlier that day. When the rain finally went away, we found a big stone fort that had been turned partially into a museum that was displaying lots of very weird contemporary art, and that was fun to look at. Then we had lunch at a random little street corner café where I had the most amazing thing. According to the menu, they were shrimp tortillas, but they weren’t shrimp wrapped up in tortillas they were crispy fried tortilla type things that had teeny little shrimps in the batter itself. They were awesome. Then we walked back to the ship because ewe all had tickets to see Flamenco that night as an SAS trip. The Flamenco night was a lot of fun. The first stop we went to was outside (and cold!) a bull ring where we saw a dancing horse and a cow who was in training to become a fighting bull. The mini bull fighting session was actually really weird and sortof sad. It seemed like the guys were just being mean to the little calf by tiring him out making him run at a stupid waving cape. We never found out if he had passed the test to become a real bull. Then we went inside to watch flamenco, drink sangria, and eat tapas, and that was altogether lots and lots of fun. The flamenco dancers were amazing, and after the show they opened up a dance floor and we all had the chance to dance for ourselves.

The second day in Spain was when things got exciting. Three of my friends had made last minute plans the night before we got to Spain to go to Paris, and I was really jealous of them for getting to do something really exciting like that. So my friend Erin and I decided that we wanted to go somewhere cool too (that would hopefully be cheaper to get to than Paris). And so…. Bright and early the second day we hopped a bus that took us down to the southern tip of Spain and then we took a ferry to….

(drumroll please…..)

MOROCCO!

I went to Morocco!!!! It was so much fun!!! It was an absolutely ridiculous, spur of the moment decision, but we went and it was amazing. It was incredibly simple to just take a ferry to Africa. A stamp on our passports and filling out a little form and we were there, in Tangiers! Erin had been to other parts of Morocco before, so we had some idea of what to expect, but not really a whole lot. It rained the entire first day we were there, so we spent the morning trying to dodge the rain (but not really minding it because it was Moroccan rain and that is cooler than normal rain). We shopped a little bit and found a cheap hotel where we could leave our stuff and know we actually would have a place to sleep once it got dark. We had lunch in a restaurant that was really good. Erin ate pizza and I had tangine-cooked chicken in vegetables. Ordering lunch was really funny, we were expecting everybody to speak Arabic, (and neither of us really know much more than please and thank you in that language) but Erin had a little bit of Spanish and since we were right across from Spain we figured that might come in handy, but when it came to the restaurants and the shopping, it was actually mostly my high school French that came in handy, since Morocco used to be a French colony. So they entire time we were in Tangiers, we spent speaking a very strange combination of French, English, Spanish, and Arabic, and eventually, I think we got everything figured out. So lunch was awesome, then we spent the afternoon getting soaking wet wandering around, stopped in a men’s only gambling type place (I don’t think real gambling is legal, so they all played with bottle caps) to escape the rain and drink delicious Moroccan tea (super sweet and minty, and miraculous even better than Turkish apple tea had been) and then the sun started to go down and we realized we were soaking wet and horribly lost and had no idea where our hotel with all our stuff in it was. It probably took us more than two hours to find the hotel, getting wetter and wetter as we searched. We finally had to walk all the way back to where the ferry had dropped us off to retrace our steps. We we so happy to find the hotel, and we immediately got inside changed into the small amount of dry clothes we had, pulled all the blankets off one bed and put them on the other (the room wasn’t heated – turns out that’s why it was so cheap) and we curled up in bed, playing cards, until we warmed up enough to go out again. We never did manage to go out again that night because we ended up falling asleep.

We woke up the next morning to much nicer weather, put on our still soaking wet clothes and found breakfast of tea and croissants at a nearby café. Then we did basically the same thing we had done the day before of wandering around, looking at stores, and laughing over the absolute craziness of our presence in Morocco. We walked along the beach for a while. We ate delicious bread in the marketplace. We almost got talked into buying expensive carpets (they were lovely) but had to resist. And then, in the midafternoon when it started to rain again, we took the ferry back across to Spain. We met a guy from Indiana on the ferry who had been backpacking around Europe for the past three months and we all made friends and shared travel stories. When we got back to Tarifa (Spain) we decided to hang around there for the night and the three of us found a hostel to stay in and spent the evening exploring Tarifa, walking through the old city, playing on the beach, and climbing up a steep hill to an old abandoned castle were that evenings big entertainments.

The next morning our new friend left for a kitesurfing lesson and Erin and I spent the morning looking around some of the parts of Tarifa that hadn’t been open the day before (it had been Sunday). Early that afternoon we took the bus back to Cadiz and it was really nice to get back to the ship and put on actually dry clothes – my shoes had been sopping wet for the past two days.

The last day in Spain I spent in and around Cadiz. I hung out with a bigger group of friends, and we walked around in search of a shopping mall for people who needed last minute suitcases to pack up everything they had bought over the past three months and shared stories about our adventures in Morocco, Paris, Sevilla, Barcelona, Madrid, etc. We spent our last afternoon drinking Sangria in the park, enjoying the sunlight. It was quite lovely.

It was a little bit sad to get back onto the ship, knowing that it mean this trip is essentially over (aside from finals). But I really am very excited about coming home. I miss lots of people, and things and all that. And its really awesome that I’ll be getting home during the Christmas season, because that’s one of my favorite times of year. For those of you out there that are really excited for me to get back, I’ll be in Miami on Friday December 7th, then I’m spending the weekend down in Florida with Kate and I’ll be flying back into Delaware late on Sunday night. I’ll spend a couple days in Ohio and then I think I’ll drive to Pittsburgh maybe on Thursday and spend a long weekend helping all my friends from school study for their finals (ha!). So if you want to get a hold of me, I’ll be back in the country in a little over a week! Yay!!