Morocco Friday Oct 1

Well, I'm skipping all of last week since really nothing important happened. The weekend was infinitely better and will be a much more pleasurable reading experience.

On Friday (October 1, already) Katie and I "skipped" classes and took the highspeed train (the AVE) down to Seville to meet our tour group to go to Morocco. Yes, it is possible to decide to go to Africa for the weekend when you're in Spain. Thank goodness for the straight of Gibraltar. So we got into Seville at 1:30 pm and had two hours to figure out how to get to our meeting place, el Torre de Oro.  We thought we might be able to walk, but when we asked the woman at the tourist info station how long the walk would be she said 45 minutes. 45 minutes of hauling luggage? No thanks. So we opted for the Seville city bus.  We made friends with an a welsh guy (he was 28) who took advantage of my awesome map reading and direction skills to get to where he needed to be.

Drinking some yummy lemonade thing
whilst trying to find our group.

So after a sweaty bus ride we finally arrived at our meeting point. We were about 45 minutes early, but we saw a group of students sitting around talking in English so we decided to ask them if they were going to Morocco as well to see if they might be part of our group. They were going to Morocco, but told us that they were with some group that wasn't ours. So we left them and walked around a bit. As it got closer to our meeting time, we began to worry because we couldn't find anyone from our tour group anywhere around our meeting place. We called my Dad, called the numbers given to us on the email and all without success. So we just waited near that same group of students, hoping that somehow they would be the right ones anyway. Finally a woman approached us with a list and asked us our names... we were on the list!! Apparently there were multiple tour groups going to Morocco that day and all together. Sweet relief.

So we got on the tour bus and headed down to Cadiz to pick up other people who were part of our tour, then made our way over to Algeciras. We took an 8:30 ferry over to Ceuta which is Spanish owned. If you've ever taken the CAT ferry, this is what our ferry was like. Not some silly old boat with no space to move around. In reality it was like a mini cruise ship, minus the swimming pool and rockwall but you get the picture. Once we got to Ceuta we jumped on another bus that brought us to the Moroccan border. We had to wait a while since there was a lot of traffic at the boarder but finally we got our Moroccan stamps on our passports (which means I've officially been to 3 continents!) The bus took us to our first hotel in Tetouan.  The hotel was "4 star" Moroccan style, complete with dirty floor and questionable bathroom. Thank goodness it was only for one night. We ate some yummy chicken and lemon dish in the hotel restaurant before heading off to bed (since by this time it was past 11 and we had been traveling all day).