Day 51: MISERABLE

Day 9 of our 9-day trip

Plan: Essaouira to Casablanca to Rabat to Fes

Have you ever spent 11 hours traveling by bus and 3 hours sitting on the side of the road in the desert waiting for said bus to be fixed in the same day? I HAVE.

We left paradise at 10 am. Essaouira was definitely the best city on the trip, and probably Morocco. As we re-entered the endless arid terrain and left my future retirement home in the rearview mirror, I finished up Leaving Tangier. We knew the drive was going to be a long haul (8-9 hours) so I was also planning to look out the windows for a while, catch up on blogging, and hang out with the rest of the group for the next six hours.

We stopped for lunch at 1:30 at a rest stop. It was pretty good rest stop food. Then, disaster struck. We were trying to force the windows open as w started moving again because the AC was like a sauna. When we pulled over so the driver, Said (pronounced sigh-eed) could help us get them open, he quickly ran to the hood rather than to our assistance. Our shock at the lack of help was soon replaced by grief when he told us that one of the main belts in the engine that basically connects everything together had broken in the heat. We had a new one but it would be hard for him to put it on himself. Road side assistance showed up within 15 minutes but was of little to no help. They left 15 minutes later. Two police officers showed up 45 minutes into our despair but didn't do much for us other than set up flares and cones to help keep traffic from hitting us. It's important to remember at this point that it is 2:30 in the afternoon and the police's thermometer says it is 42 degrees Celsius out or 105 miserable degrees Fahrenheit. We had a limited amount of water and I had a box of ritz crackers hidden above my seat that I was planning on sharing with no one. We had discussed before about how a "FSP Hunger Games" could work and who would be killed first, etc. Meredith and I always ended up in the top two of every poll but the winner varied. Unfortunately, given the temperature, supplies, and mirages, it didn't seem that unlikely that people would soon be throwing spears at each other, and I planned to save my crackers and Sidi Ali water for when the inevitable fall-out would occur. I tried to do some scouting up the hillside but Lla MJ wouldn't let me crest it, claiming there were "snakes and scorpions." I think she had already planned out where she would make shelter and didn't want me to get any advantages in the Hunger Games. Suspicions only grew over the course of our three hours. If no one else was thinking it, I was at least sitting there, twiddling my thumbs, and considering who would be the most valuable, and later disposable, ally. 

Dying out here

A tow truck showed up two hours and 15 minutes into our road-side sun burn. They spent a while trying to help the police officers, roadside assistance, and Said fix the engine. However, the whole situation can be described by a scene I saw when five of them were on their cell phones and Said has his head in the engine compartment aka Moroccan bureaucracy at its finest. At 5:30, they gave up and the tow truck pulled us 20 km to a Shell station. We got to sit inside and have snacks and drinks while they tried to fix the car. They couldn't fix it though, so they had to call a new van to pick us up from Casablanca. It got us at 6:45 and we resumed our trek again.

We played a fun game Meredith created where you had to wear a pair of noise canceling headphones and the iPod connected to them was on shuffle. You had to sing and dane the song until the rest of the people could guess it. It was pretty silly but tons of fun.

We had to switch buses just north of Casablanca's outskirts so that the second bus could go back to Casablanca. The bus that got us came all the way from Fes. We drove for a while but then it was dinner time. Said (sigh-eed), being a pro like usual, took us to a mall in Rabat where we got Pizza Hut! It was so tasty and even had pepperonis. I had a half pepperoni and half barbecue chicken pizza that was like heaven on a plate. We were all the happiest we had been all day.

Never been so happy!

We left dinner at 10:45 and were still over two hour from Fes. We didn't get home until 1:15 and my family didn't seem to be too happy that they had to stay up so late and wait for me. It was not a very good day.

Day 50: Surf's Up

Day 8 of our 9 day trip

Plan: Essaouira

I slept in until 10 and then went to the terrace for a gorgeous breakfast overlooking the sea. In the morning, Elle, Marissa, Ron, and I went shopping. Most people had already left, but we ended up running into them and swapping people. I got some shopping done but not nearly as much as I had planned to. At 1:15, I grabbed some chawarma and sprinted back to the hotel where Ariel was waiting for me. She was waiting because at 2,….

We were gonna go KITE SURFING!!!

We walked like 2 miles down the beach to find out that we couldn't actually go kite-surfing because there is a 10 to 12 hour certification process and we would have only been able to do the 2 hour safety and on-the-sand class today. Instead, we saved our 55 euros and rented surfboards and wet suits for the rest of the day for only 165 dhirams. We exaggerated our skill a little, especially me, so that we didn't have to buy lessons too.

We hit the water at 2:15 and stayed in it until 5:45. I discovered a sea fiend in Ariel that rivals myself. And, as much as it pains me to admit it, she was a more experienced and better surfer than me too! With some adjustments and help from her, I was riding the 4-5 foot waves all the way into the ankle deep water. We had so much fun and the water temperature didn't bother us at all. I could not have imagined a better day at the beach. We don't have any surfing pictures because neither of us brought our cameras. The next album won't have any beach pictures because I never wanted to risk getting sand in my lens.

The fish I got is in the bottom left

Ariel and I walked back to the hotel at 6, stopping for ice cream on the way. Marissa, Elle, Ariel, Meredith, and I had a sunset dinner at the food stalls. I got a whole sea bass and grew three new chest hairs when I ate the whole thing. Afterwards, we did some shopping and had some fun bargaining. 

Yum

Most people wanted to stay in tonight and watch the Big Lebowski on the terrace, but Marissa and I wanted to go out. Elle was M.I.A. with a fever, but Marissa and I had some mixed drinks on the terrace before going back to Le Chrysalis at 11:45. It wasn't that crowded though so we decided to check out a bar called Taros that we had seen in Lonely Planet (official bible of the trip). It had a swanky rooftop terrace that looked like it had been transplanted from the Hamptons (never been there but it seems plausible). We sat there for an hour and talked before going back to the hotel. I crashed at like 1:30 in my comfy bed, happy to not be sweating liters like the night before. Yes, I did just embrace the Metric system.

Lastly, Happy 15th birthday, Sarah Roberts! Don't crash Mom's car on the way home from the DMV with your permit. You may be 15 now, but 15's not the new 21, so don't get your hopes up for anything fun yet! You still have three long years of high school, standardized tests, and college applications ahead of you. Welcome to Hell!

Day 49: The Sea

Day 7 of our 9 day trip

Plan: Marrakesh to Essaouira

Deaprture at 10. Woke-up, had breakfast, showered, got in the van, tried to ignore my iPhone weather app which once again said the high for the day in Marrkesh was 104. The two hour drive through the arid fields to Essaouira was painfully hot and I passed the time reading our next book, Leaving Tangier, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. It's all about a Moroccan boy who gets his sister and himself tickets to Spain by being a Spanish artist's gay lover. It's a decently explicit book, but a good read nonetheless. 

We stopped at an Argan oil co-operative on the way to Essaouira where women walked us through the whole process of shelling and grinding Argan seeds to make Argan oil. It was a more enlightening trip than the visit we made to the women's NGO with Prof. Sadiqi.

We pulled into Essaouira at 1 to a cool sea breeze. We were officially free to do as we please from this moment until Sunday morning at 10 am. Our hotel, Dar L'Oussia, is gorgeous, right inside the medina walls and a minute's walk from the huge curving beach. Essaouira is located on a point with a big protected beach stretching out to the south and a windier and more exposed beach extending north from the city. The medina strikes a perfect balance because it's walled-in, busier than Fes but not as fast as Marrakesh, open streets, and lots of shops. It's also very well maintained. 

For lunch, Marissa, Ariel, Elle, and I went to these fish stands near the beach. They put out a huge selection of the catch of the day, you choose what you want, get your hag' on, and then they grill it and serve it to you right there. They have snapper, dorado, live lobsters, prawns, sea bass, shrimp, even whole eels! So many options and all sitting there for the choosing. I got a big squid and a dorado and it tasted so good with some lemon squeezed onto it. I HIGHLY recommend checking out the fish stalls because it was one of the best meals of the trip.

Afterwards, we walked around the medina to get our bearings and climbed on the ramparts some. My inner Laura Roberts has emerged and decided that there is definitely some shopping to be done here. Hopefully, I'll knock out all the presents I need to get during the day tomorrow. 

After parting with the ramparts, we rendezvoused with everyone else on the beach. It is so flat that the high tide takes away like 200 ft of the beach's width. Everyone was playing soccer; there were so many concurrent games that I even saw one game being played long ways and another game being played across, all on the same plot of sand. The water was chilly but I took a couple dips while we were there. Christy took the quote of the day.

Meredith: "It's so cold in the water"

Christie: "It's not so bad over here"

(meredith paddles over 10 ft)

Meredith: "I don't feel any warmer…"

Christie: "What are you talking about?! You're closer to the sun!"

Unfortunately for Meredith, that's not how the Pythagorean theorem works, so she never got warmer. Swimming was also interesting because Tash doesn't know how to float or swim (or drive nor has she heard of Jack Johnson, among many other lacking features. She's currently enrolled in an "American FSP" being taught by Meredith).

Coversation 2: Tash is half swimming back to shore but getting pushed around by the waves

Meredith: "Ahhh! Tash is floating away!!!!!"

Andrew: "How? She can't even float!"

We stayed at the beach from 4 to 6:30 and then went back to the hotel to shower. For dinner, Elle, Marissa, and I got take-out chawarma and ate it on the beach. When we went back to the hotel, it was time to start getting ready to go out. We left at 12:30 for some bars right outside the medina. One of them was a really nice club that had a live band and no people. This can be attributed to the Moroccan Billy Crystal who performs nightly, whose performance didn't really lend itself to doing much besides sitting and listening to him in a space that could have been a banging club. Right next door was a bar called Le Chrysalis that had a great band with a female singer that sang American covers. We ordered a 10 shot special that had all these neon and multi-colored shots, so each person got their own color. The music was fun and we danced some. After we walked really far down the beach to another club that had a talented band but was just too far and it was too late for me. Elle, Marissa, and I went back to the hotel at 2:30 and everyone else came back at 3.