sardines

today is the 31st of july. bad keyboard. we are in tangeir and leaving for barcelona tomorrow morning. lots to write about. by the way, the s,qll brozn fox ju,ps over the lqwy dog: that is what happens when i type the small brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. anyway, we trekked for two days and it was lovely. we really needed a break from cities and noise and it was so good to be surrounded by nature and trees for a few days. chefchouen was really pretty and i liked it better than fes. and hiking was good. it was hot but still lovely. when we had some shade, it was great, and when we weren,t going uphill it was great but really it was all great. on the second day we walked through a little village and qte some ripe figs and there were olive trees everyzhere and creeks to cross and water to swim in at one point. and the most amazing feeling was when we got a little hand towel wet in the creek or miniwaterfall and put it on my head. amazing. it was so hot out but having cold water drip down your face and chest and back... sooooo nice. and we saw blackberries too! so great. we stayed in a little hostel thing with grapes growing above us: so nice. the best part of our trip.

i think i walked too much and my ankle is now hurting a little. wah. random and a strange precursor of what was to come was that on our hike we kept seeing ababndoned lone shoes. after 10 i stopped counting. ill write more later about barbary apes and soap and toilet paper and sardines. well about sardines; that is what we ate on our trek. nutella and bread and sardines and a crab apple and we tried some fresh walnuts but i didnt like them. okay more later.

yona

Trekking in Chefchaouen

We are back from a couple of days trekking in the mountains near Chefchaouen.

Chefchaouen is a little outpost at the edge of the Rif moutains, kind of forgotten by the governtment - a fact that is reflected in the poor roads and lack of infrastructure. The town was a very welcome change from the hustle and bustle of Fez and Marakkesh.

Cities have colors here, earthy red for Marakesh, yellow for Fez. For Chefchaouen, it is baby blue - probably introduced by Jewish residents less than a century ago. In any case, it stuck. Walls, floors, alleys, often have a blue tint. We even watched some paint specked girls freshening up a coat at almost 10 pm.

It is a pretty town overall, with mountains in the background and many women decked out in red and white striped table clothes (or so they appeared) the other traditional colors.

The trek was great. There are a series of guest houses in the moutains, connected by dirt roads and trails. For about $25, you get a bed, a great place to relax, meals (with local honey and other fresh ingrediantes) and a very welcoming host. Throughout this trip I never felt that Morocco was as friendly as Turkey, but this was not true in the Rif mountains. People were happy to chat or have us sit, even if language was not so conducive.

The region is full or marijuana, like I have never seen! Tons of mountainsides were terraced and planted with nothing but. All the, um, herb being grown meant lots of irrigation water being piped from up high. This was a god send as the days were still hot hot hot and the hills steep. Yona took to wearing a magic talisman of energy aka a water soaked towel to get through the hikes.

We were hoping to see the barbary apes, but the closest we came was hearing the hoot hoot hoot of a boy pretending to be a monkey.

Tomorrow it is off to Barcelona. There is more to write about Morocco, but it will have to wait. We will probably get another post or two in before getting home, but with no internet at my aunts house in S France, you never know.

Chefchaouen

We are in the moutains in a beautiful little town called Chefchaouen. It is blessedly slightly cooler. The town, walls, paths, and everything in between is colored light blue. It is just the traditional color of the town and it gives everything a peaceful, greek feel. It is a small town so everything is a little slower. We are about to head out on a couple day trek and then north to the beach before Tangiers. We might not post again until Barcelona, in a week so dont get worried.

food items

Random food items we did not have:
Spakite with saisge
Lets see if people can come up with some more interesting interpretations rather then the standard italian inspired dish.

pretty little artsy details

it's so hot. did i say that already? well. we found quite a spot here, in fez at a cyber place that is relatively air conditioned and there's even! a ! keyboard! that ! has! the! letters! in the! right places!!!!! makes it much easier to write. fez is lovely. i like it a lot. i like it better than merrakesh in some ways; we are staying in the old city and it really feels different from anything. sometimes there are little tiny/narrow passages and when a horse or donkey comes by, we are smushing ourselves against the walls and still get brushed. a lot of the walkways are really narrow. and lots of cobblestoney narrow little walkways and it's really a maze. such a maze. it makes no sense and we are often getting lost and we think we know where we are and no, we don't. we ask many people many questions and they usually have different answers. anyway. so i like fez because it's very different, and it's all one color basically. merrakesh was also a tan/orange/earthy color, and fez is a sandy color. all the buildings. all of it. also i like fez because we're not seeing tons of tourists. not a lot of tourists. AND fez is great because we are staying in a hotel with a pool!!!! and air conditioning. it's lovely. really really lovely.

so i want to write a few things. about artsy little pretty details, and about what we did today. and maybe about the train yesterday and what we did yesterday. can't upload or download or whatever pictures right now but maybe i will later to illustrate my point about the artsy pretty little details.

so. america is very plain. plain jane and boring, really. here, everything is pretty. the sidewalks are pretty. the railings on all the windows are pretty. there are mosaics on basically all the walls. and they are pretty and intricate and detailed. and geometric. everything is geometric. there are so many arsty patterns everywhere. like in our hotel there is a fountain which is a cool geometric shape, and totally mosaicked. pattern upon pattern, and then the ground around it is also mosaicked and patterned. and then there are railings around that courtyard, and they are kind of intricate patterns, and the stairs to our room are mosaicked and match my table outside on the porch which is made of mosaic stones and i got it at peir 1 or someplace but apparently it's moroccan because we are seeing identical tables and things all over morocco. today we went to a place where they make the mosaics and pottery also and we saw how they put together all the little pieces to make a mosaic. really lovely and cool.



what else. we went to a synagogue this morning and that was really cool. we saw the mikveh and even the torah which shouldn't have been visible, i feel, but it was. it's a sephardi temple so it's a different model than most (ashkenazi temples). yesterday we walked aorund for hours and hours and hours. two hours or more after we left the hotel, looking for dinner, we sat down for dinner. it was really close to the hotel but we got superflouously lost and saw the whole old town many times over before we got there.

then we were so hot and thirsty we had to buy a melon and ask to borrow a shopkeepers knife and cut it open but not open enough so we got melon goo on our faces, arms and hands. but boy was it yummie.

okay more later

yona

What worked on Friday

Things that Worked:
1) Majorelle Garden - very pretty. calm. relaxing. bamboo. succulents. water elements. good ideas.
2) Shops in "New Town" (built several hundred years ago) - Amazing buildings and equally amazing antiques
3) Ensemble Artisinal - Government run arts center. No haggling. Lots of different artists at work. Source of felt balls mentioned earlier. (the only drawback was learning that we overpayed for Yona's carpet)
4) Shower - It was good and cold
5) Synagogue according to Yona - She got to talk to rabbi in Hebrew and interesting design
6) Watching kids - Playing soccer and one girl who was inspired to have an extended session of jump rope, only problem she lacked the rope
7) Phone call try seven - scored us a good hotel in Fez with a pool!!

Things that did not work so well:
1) "Air conditioning" in room
2) Hotel Mamuonia for lunch - Denied refreshing lunch by pool and imacullate gardens for dress code reasons
3) lunch at Hotel Ali - Guidebook-promised lunch overlooking Medina only served at dinner. learned after 6 flights of stairs.
4) Internet cafe one - No English keyboards, enough with the a's and q's problem
5) Internet cafe two - No internet, 900 degrees
6) Spice market - just for tourists, not too exciting
7) Cemetary - closed for shabbat
8) Yona's inspiration to jump off the bus early - led to long walk for number 9
9) Al Fassia restaurant for dinner - Daniel recommended it and book confirmed it. Turns out it is in Fez, not Marrakesh! (blame goes to guidebook, not Daniel)
10) Phone calls try 1-6 - Wrong number and area code in book!
11) Synagogue acconding to Josh - didn't speak hebrew so I was left out and it is a little sad to see how so many once vibrant communities are dying

garden

We went to q pretty gqrden. The computer is slow loqding these pictures qnd i qm sweating to death. This is the lqmest blog post ever. what do those felt marbles we got hqve to do with the gqrden. where is the question mqrk qnd is the q where the q should be. question mqrk. weird.

shopping

Shopping is different here. It goes like this, you kind of want to go shopping so you wander in the direction of the market (souq) and someone says do you want to see a factory, and you say no, and he says, why no, and you say, because no, and then you are following him because it is only 2 minutes away, and 10 minutes later you are following him down a series of small and smaller alleyways and soon they are kind of even underground and left and right and right and blind corner, and right and left and kind of left before a quick right and now curving and dont hit your head, and then there are less and less tourists and 10 is not 2, and now the guide seems to be gone and now you are going to die, oh well, and this is what you get for not listening to Yonas father and getting a registered guide instead listening to someone with a rumpled shirt and bad hair, and whats worse you cant even remember what he looks like aside from he looks moroccan with bad hair and rumpled shirt, and here comes the loud motor bike too quickly down the alley that is too narrow for three to walk across, and you decide you will just give the motorbike robberman your money in your pocket and if you are lucky he will not know about the money belt, and then motor cycle man passes and the guide reappears and opens a random door and, deep breathe, you find yourself in an amazing house that is now a shop but it could be a museum because it there are so many amazing antiques, and the rumpled man vanishes and a well manicured shopkeeper appears, and the only dying will be the beautifully dyed leather, but forget the antiques maybe you should buy the whole house because of the tile work and the bath that is so big that it would make a perfect jacuzzi, but you cant ship a house back to america and for that matter you probably cant even ship the massive metal table either, so you compliment and try to leave, but the shop keeper knows another place and you are off...

PS - If you are Yona's father reading this, please disregard the part about going to die because we would never do anything like that and would only use a licensed guide and we take our emergency C, echinacha and cold snap three times a day the second we sense anything wrong, so there is nothing to worry about.

souks and shopping

something else we did yesterday was walk more around the souks. it was interesting, of course. i don't remember how this started, but someone invited us to see a shop, and it was really incredible and amazing, and like a museum. then someone there invited us to follow him down somewhere and we followed and followed and ended up in another crazy museum-like shop. one had tons of antiquey furniture, and another had clothes, and then shoes, and then all kinds of stuff. some of the places had amazing detailed architecture and they were just amazing. old huge inlaid doors with wood and marble... all kinds of crazy stuff. we were somewhere in the souk and people always are/were calling out to us and saying bonjour or whatever, trying to get us to start talking to them and go in their shop. josh said at some point that he's tired, or his eyes are tired, and that made the person laugh. we see cats everywhere, wandering the streets and today josh saw one with a freshly caught mouse in its mouth. we saw someone yestrerday carving wood with his feet in some interesting fancy method. tomorrow we're going to fez and we have to figure out how to get there and where we'll stay, so i'm gonna do some of that research right now.
yona

i dont know what to call this post says yona

today is friday the 23 of august. we're in a little tiny room/internet cafe thing which is hot and has weird slanty chairs but i'm not complaining because we were able to do something so that keyboard is ignoring the letters it says on the keys and we can type normally. yesterday it was so impossible and i was going to write ...the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ... and see what funny thing it wrote instead. but it doesn't matter. anyway. it's hot today. we walked to the new town and went to a really cool garden called majorelle. it was really really lovely. beatuiful with lots of bamboo that was really thick, and lilly pads, and tons of cacti and succulents. really lovely. then we walked around a lot. then we walked around more. and we walked and walked. then we took a taxi to a hotel we read about that said there would be a nice lunch buffet and la di da. but they turned us away at the door because we 're not guests there and we aren't dressed up enough. we've been mostly dressed up, with josh in a nice button down every day and me in a skirt every day but today i'm wearing long shorts and josh is in a tshirt. alas. it's so hot here. last night we went to the jmaa el fna again which is the cool crazy market place. we like getting orange juice there and it's just a funny crazy place. people charming snakes, with monkeys doing tricks, fortune telling, story telling in a performing way, and sometimes to music... it's really interesting. last night we saw someone with some gerbils and birds and a hedge hog thing, and he kept putting the hedge hog thing under a hat and we'd all watch the hat crawl away bouncing up and down. i had a yougurt drink yesterday that i liked and it was called yogo. and last night at dinner i had another one that was really really good. it was called yourt. it was with a spoon and kind of sweet. yum-my.
Yona

Marakkesh

We are in Marrakesh nowand at an internet place where the keyboard can be set to English. Most places just give you the option of French, which slows down the process a huuuge amount because a few keys are in the wrong place.
Marrakesh is a great city, though a little hot and dusty. Next time we would definitly choose a hotel with a pool, because all we want to do several times a day is jump in water. Still, our hotel, Hotel Sherazade, is very nice. It is an old Riad, or house, built around a couple of central of central courtyards with fountans and plantings. We switched to a room with ac but the ac is so weak that it is hardly any better than the fan.
We are staying in the old city, which is a maze of alleyways with tons of stalls selling everything. Lots of the vendors sell things like anise or jasmine or olive soap and the people keep trying to get Yona to smell things. One time she got busted because she did not hold it close enough to her nose (because it was a very mild smell but she did not know it) so she kind of sniffed and went oh, very nice, but the guy was like, no really smell it, and pushed it closer to her nose.
We are a couple of hundred feet from the central square in the old part of town, El Jamafna, which comes alive every evening with story tellers and snake charmers and food stands (snails, sheeps heads, fried everythings, salads, and most importantly fresh orange juice for 40 cents), dancers, you name it. It is mostly moroccans so we cant understand the story tellers but the arabic speakers sure seem to enjoy it. One storey went like this, a guy dressed weird got the crowd to yell something and he ran away. Then they yelled something else and he came back. This happened four times and then we left. There are also games where you have to roll a soccer ball through two pins that are two close for the soccer ball to fit. You know the ball does not fit because the person in charge pushes the soccer ball up to it from the front and "shows" it fits and then rolls it around back to shows it "fits" but he never rolls it through. Are moroccans gullibale or something? If by some miracle you get it you win something but no one everyone wins and it seems pretty obvious that you could not win so I am not sure why they keep playing.

just got here

we are in an internet place and it?s so hard to type b:c a lot of the keys are in different order on this keyboard. it,s really hot here. it is like an extreme sport to walk around because the walkways are so skinny and there are bicycles and donkey pushcarts and even some cars and trucks driving through the alleys. today we saw some lovely painted ceilings at a museum and had a yummy yogurt drink and then we took a nap back at our hotel. it is soooo hot. cold shower was necessary and very very nice: we;ll go next to the souk area to souk it up. that is like a little area with market-like stalls - tons and tons of little stalls with people selling things. we have alreqdy passed a bunch and people call to us to come look at their stuff: i think it is best if we don,t answer them or say no thank you, because then they know we speak english and they keep talking to us. i think it is best if we don,t answer at all. tomorrow we will go early to walk to majorelle gardens. this morning we walked around at around 930 or 10 and things were very very quiet. i guess the city gets a late start. T
thats all for now.
yona

Long Plane; Not First Class

For those of you who remember my Turkey trip know that I used frequent flier miles to go first class, complete with gourmet meals and my personal pod. Well, the France Air trip, while direct from SFO to Paris, was not so nice. It was kind of dirty and a little worn out. For example, the headphone jack did not work properly and i could only listen to music or the movie from one the left side or the right side, not both. Also, we got chewed out by the air frqnce check in person because she said we were soooo late, 1:15 minutes before depqrture, and she said, in great exasperation, she had to change screens on the conputer because of it. But we made it.

On the next leg, to marakesh we had to be rescreened by security and got busted for sunscreen and toothpaste, under the legql amount for liquids but in too big a container, a tiny pocket knife that i suspected might get busted, and an epi pen, for bee stings, which had to be escalated to two supervisors before it was allowed through.

But as i said we arrived more or less in one piece.