Chefchaouen

Okay we made it back to Spain completely safe, so moms you can now breathe a huuuuuge sigh of relief.

Mitch is going to write up a Sevilla post, and I was put in charge of talking about Morocco and hopefully supplying you with some pictures.

So the first place we went, not including Tangier where we arrived on the ferry, was Chefchaouen, a small town in the mountains with a beautiful maze like blue and white medina pretty much all looking like this, but with more people and shops lining the small streets:

The Medina

And this is a view of the town from a hill we climbed to the top of at sunset:

Chefchaouen

Anyways, we hung out in this place for a night, and I think it would be unanimously considered the best night we had in Morocco.

We had taken the bus to this town with two Norwegian girls(we ended up staying with them for our four days or so in Morocco and having a lot of fun with them) that we met coming out of the ferry. We all wandered around the city after finally finding our hostel, and while exploring the medina, we found an art exhibit filled with really nice paintings (you can see one in the picture above) by a guy that kind of looked like a Moroccan version of my dad when he still had his mustache. We looked around for a while not really thinking we would buy anything and he ended up inviting us to a cup of mint tea to try and sell us some paintings.

So we sat down with him for a bit and the two Norwegian girls we were with ended up getting Henna tattoos from him, and before we knew it he had invited us to dinner.

So the five of us, along with him and a few of his friends, ended up moving a little ways up the medina into this small room filled and lined with carpets and rugs to eat a home cooked Moroccan meal. The meal didn´t come for quite some time and we ended up talking and watching the artist and his friends play the drums for hours.

Here´s a picture of them, the artist is on the left:

The Drum Circle

We were with them from about 6 to 12 before the food finally came. But it was definetely worth the wait. The picture might not look too appetizing, but it was one of the best meals I have ever had.

Home cooked tajine, which they said was way better than any restaurant tajine.

Home Cooked Tajine

We used our hands and pieces of bread as our forks and thoroughly enjoyed the meal we had waited so long for. After the meal we said our goodbye´s, Marc bought a small painting, and we left the next morning for Fes, the most different place you could ever imagine from Chefchaouen. I couldnt have imagined a better way to get a feel for what the real people of Morocco are like, and no experience came close to this throughout the rest of our time in Morocco.

My time is running out in the internet cafe so I´m going to stop now, but I´ll try and post about the rest of Morocco, we ended up staying in Fes and Asilah, tomorrow or something. We saw quite a different Morocco in these places, both good and bad.

We leave for Granada tomorrow, and hopefully we´ll have a lot of good stories for you from there.

-Max