Day 36: Chimply Marvelous

Saturday, July 27

(Well, I've gotten very behind on blogs, haven't I?)

I must say that today was quite an experience. A good one, mind you. But definitely an experience.

We went to the city of Azrou, which is about an hour and half away from Meknes.

The day started with my roommate and I trying to find the house of our friend, Mary, who lives downtown. We were going to all go out on a trip today, and we needed to meet with her first so we could leave our stuff at her crib (because we decided to spend the night there). Well, the previous day I asked Mary what to tell the cab driver so he could take us there, and when I regurgitated the address, the cabbie seemed like he understood.

Tuns out he had no idea where her place was, so he dropped us off a neighborhood that we hoped was close enough, in front of Hotel DeVille.

"How perfectly wretched!"

Fortunately, it was close to Mary's house, and I called her and she was able to find us.

HER APARTMENT IS RIDICULOUS. Her host dad owns three gold shops, so they are rolling in it. 

Now, my roommate was very mesmerized by their house and was unnecessarily jealous for the rest of the day, but although I found their apartment to be lovely, I still remember going to our host-family's apartment for the first time and being mesmerized too. And anyway, we have everything we need at our house, AND we have internet and hot water, and Mary's family doesn't. 

After we dropped off our stuff, we took a small, inner-city taxi to the place where the larger, outer-city taxis could take us to Azrou. It's basically a large taxi-stop where all these dudes lay around under trees and you tell them where you want to go and how many seats you're paying for, and then you haggle for prices, and then you have to wait for more people to show up who want to go to the same town so you don't have to pay for an entire taxi's worth of seats.

Well, nobody else was taking a taxi to Azrou, and the taxi was too expensive anyway, but there just so happened to be a bus leaving at that exact moment, so we literally bought tickets while the bus was driving away and ran to it and he thankfully let us on.

There was AC on the bus! Sweet heavens, it was beautiful. It's the first vehicle I've been in since being here that had AC.

Then after an hour and a half bus ride, we got to Azrou, which is a tiny but cute little town.

From there we took another taxi out of the city to the nearby woods (it's apparently the biggest forest in Morocco? According to our host mother).

Why did we go to a forest, you ask? The reason we went was because of THESE!

IT'S A MONKEY FOREST. WHY WOULDN'T WE GO THERE?

The monkeys chill on the edge of the woods where all the tourists are and the small shops and things. After we watched the monkeys for a while, we ventured into the woods for a jaunty hike.

At the entrance to the forest, there's a bunch of dudes just hanging out that prey on unsuspecting white people and they try to berate you into riding their horses, and they'll follow you for a while, persisting, no matter how often you say no. I rode one for 30 seconds, paid the man 2 dollars, and was done.

"Oh God oh God oh God"

So, we went hiking, and... there wasn't really a path. There sort of was at times, then it would vanish, and we'd occasionally see a tire on the ground which I think indicated part of the path, but I'm not sure.

But we hiked and hiked and finally got the top of this hill to see this.

Then when we were done taking all the pictures (of which I have many more), we left and hiked around some more, very-off-and-on the "path", and looked at really large, really old trees and generally just walked around and avoided bees. In the end, we found our way back to the entrance camp without too much nail-biting.

Then, while we waited for our taxi driver to come back from town to get us, we fed the monkeys. I brought bread just for them. Good bread too. All of like 60 cents worth.

This seems familiar....

Also a video: 

Then the taxi showed up, we went back to Azrou, and waited for the next bus back to Meknes.

Immediately upon our return we obtained more taxis and went to church! (Because Mary and one other person in our group are Catholic). It was with some difficulty that we found it. Our taxi driver had no idea where the singular church was in the city (which tells you something about how many people ask taxis to take them there).

So, I went to Catholic mass for the first time. Which was in French. And in Morocco.

Outside the church.

I had no idea what was going on. I stood when everyone else stood and sat when they sat. It was the tiniest church, with maybe 15 members. But they brought us all Bibles in English, and that was lovely, and sometimes the pastor would speak in English for us, though it was rare.

After church, we were invited to dinner with the church goers! Most of the older people went home, but there was at least 6 of them that stayed, in addition to the pastor and the four of us at the dinner.

It so happens that everyone spoke Italian. I was like, "What?"

After having all of church in French, I just assumed they were native French. Nae. This particular group was Italian, and Mary was the only one of us American's who knows some Italian. So... we mostly just sat there and smiled a lot and ate this fish stuff in tomato sauce.

After dinner was over, our group of four girls went out to a French coffee shop called Le Tulip with one of the Church goers, Oscar, who was very not Italian or French and is actually from Cape Verde. Apparently he is here in Morocco to study French, English, and... something else. Management or economics or something. Or law. I think he said law. He said it's common that people come from his country to study other languages in Morocco because it makes it easier for them to find jobs if they know more languages. Obviously.

We got a lot of strange looks at the coffee shop, four very western looking girls with a very dark-skinned young male. But we were like, "whatevs." (The darkness of his skin is actually very uncommon here in Morocco. He gets a lot of looks all the time, it seems, and he doesn't like Morocco because of it.) But he seemed pretty nice, and he's going to help one of our friends with her French while she's staying here for the year long program.

After all of that, it was super late in the evening, and I and my roommate returned with Mary back to her host family's apartment. I did not hesitate to fall asleep. 

It was a good day.