Morocco Day 1

On Wednesday I got on a 2 1/2 hour long bus ride to Madrid and then a 5 hour long train ride to Algeciras, Spain...all in all a very uneventful trip. On Thursday morning I met with the other people in the program at 8am at the port. Unfortunately, the morning was very windy and all of the fast ferries were cancelled. We got on the 9:30 ferry at like 10am and didn't leave for another half hour and the ferry ride was something like 3 hours long. The trip over was very rocky and pretty unpleasant. There were ten people including myself in my group and another slightly smaller group. There was one leader per group. When we arrived in Tangier, Morocco we went through very lax security and then dropped over our bags in the van and changed euros for derum, 1 euro = 10 derum. After that we drove to the market to buy snacks for the first part of our trip. The market had everything from packaged goods like cookies to fresh meat (hanging from the booths of course) to olives to fruit. Any part of an animal was for sale. For example, I was some cow lungs for sale. The whole market smelled very good though because of all the spices. After loading up on food and bottled water, we went to the DARNA women's center. At the center we met a Moroccan woman who is studying for her masters in english translation and she told us about the many serivices that the center offers women. The center teaches women to read and write, if they never learned, to sew, cook, use the computer. Basically, the center gives women marketable skills so that they can find a job to support their families. We had lunch at the center and it was amazing!! It was a chicken dish with vegetables that is stewed for about an hour and it is eaten with bread. The salad had two parts these pea type vegetable that I can't remember the name of and the other was chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. Then we had amazing tea and cookies. The center also has a shop where the women can sell their products. During lunch I had a chance to talk to the women that showed us around the center and hear aobut Morocco from her point of view. After lunch we left to drive to Rabat where we would be staying with host families. On the way to Rabat we stopped to ride camals on the beach...so sterotypical but it was still amazing :) While I was sitting on my camal waiting for the ride to start one of the babies came over and started smelling and nibbling my ear and hair, it tickled a lot hehe. Then we also stopped at Asilah and walked through the old town and went near the ocean to watch the sun set. It was soo beautiful. We finally arrived in Rabat and met our host families who we stayed with for 2 nights. There were three to a family and our family lived in an appartment right above another host family. In the building where my family lived there was a square cut out over the bottom appartment's courtyard and there was no glass or roof covering. There was like a walkway that connected all the rooms but you had to walk in a square to get to the rooms on the other side. My room which I shared with two other girls was the length of the building, long and narrow, and there were coches all around the room and on one end three different sections had blankets and sheets and those were our beds. For dinner that night we had turkey meatballs in a gravey sauce, bread, and salad. There were no utencils and just one large dish. So to eat, you break off a chuck of bread and scoop up a meatball or dip it in the gravey. It was soooooo amazing!!! That is the end of day 1 :)