Well it Thursday came and went, we went to this ancient city in Rabat called Chellah. It was founded by the Phoenicians, the Romans took it over for some time, and then Moroccan Kings. Anyway, we get in and it was pretty cool to see old Roman ruins. It was the oldest sturctures I have seen yet in my life. The problem with Chellah is it isn't taken care of very well. Most of the area is over grown, and storks have moved in everywhere leaving their crap there too. There wasn't too much restriction on where we could go in the city walls. It was nice for me because I could climb on stuff to take some good pictures.
Friday was our last day of school, and Matt and I split up from the group to go off to fez for the night and the next day. The rest of our group went with the school to Casablanca. Our train ended up being late by an hour on leaving Rabat, but we got to our destination eventually. We rode in the 1st class cabins due to more room to lay out and they had air conditioning. It cost a little more, but it was well worth it for the 3 1/2 hour ride to Fez. We went through a lot of the countryside to see large rolling hills full of fields of grain and donkeys. It looked pretty cool.
Arriving in Fes, we got our first taste of what was to come with Moroccan's trying to sell us stuff. Matt and I were talking in English to eachother while some guy on the side came up and started asking if we wanted to save money on a hotel. He was presistant and followed us a good 600 meters. Matt and I started saying no english (even though I had my University of Illinois shirt on. Then we started talking jibberish to eachother. He finally got away from us. We started to look for a hotel we found in our guide book. The plan was to get in spend 250 dirham on a room and head to a hookah bar for the night. We passed up the street we were suppose to go down by about 8 blocks, stopped at a cafe to get something to drink and look at the book. We looked again for our hotel, but all we found was a run down empty building where it was suppose to be. (C'mon Lonley Planet, y'all are suppose to be on top of this) So we figured we'd pay a little more money to stay in the same hotel the hookah bar was in. It was 200 dirham more, but at least we wouldn't have to walk far at the end of the night. We got to the desk and the woman spoke english. We had to fill out cards to get a room, and they required a passport and passport number. We'll we left those in Rabat. The only thing I had on me was a Illinois drivers license and Matt had a High school ID card that was faded and 10 years old. This didn't work. They told us we had to go talk to the police and get papers. Knowing that it was illegal for us to travel without passports we didn't want to get fined. We tried to call up some guys we meet on the plane over, but for some reason the pay phone wouldn't call a cellphone number. We figured we'd try another decent hotel we saw first before going to the police. The Hotel Grand. The front desk didn't speak a lick of English so it was fun to use our Arabic. He gave the same for to us and we explained we didn't have passports, but gave him the drivers license and high school ID. After a few minutes of examining and thinking about whether or not to let us stay, he did. All we had to do was write our repective ID numbers on the card. For about 410 dirham (7.4 dh to the USD) we had a clean room with hot water and a Roman toilet (Not a hole in the ground). We showered and headed to the hookah bar, but Matt was really feeling like crap with a bad head cold so we only stayed a bit. We were awoken in the morning to a loud call to prayer, and people screaming in Arabic. We left around 11 and headed out to find something to eat and to head to the souqe in the Old City. After reaching a small area I recognize from the map we started to get followed again (Hello my friend, I have something for you. My friend do you want a good deal). We walked around more concerned about our baggage behind us than the direction we were headed so we ended up in a dirty residential area. We were getting really dehydrated due to not stopping to eat yet so we went a cafe on the side of the road. They didn't have bottled water just tap. So we went down a block to another cafe. We sat down for a minute and sure enough a man comes up trying to figure out want we speak. We hadn't said any english, so he wansn't sure where we were from. He kept asking us in many languages "how are you and what do you speak" We reverted back to jibberish and they couldn't figure it out. We decided it was best to leave. we walked farther up the road to be harrested 3 more times by Moroccans. We hailed a cab and went back to the new city. In the car our cabby asked us why we were there in that neighborhood. He said it wasn't safe at all for westerners to be in there and would could have gotten hurt.
He took us to a cafe and we guzzled down some water because we were so dehydrated. After lunch we went by cab to the old medina. We walked in and started to get followed immediatly. We must have been screaming that we were American's by the way the we dressed because they all kept screaming it out at us and talking to us in english. It was packed in there, but it was really cool to be walking through. It felt like i was walking through the movie Aladdin. I bought a few things, but the constant hassling of these Moroccans was too much and you couldn't do anything about it. We finally just got out of there and headed back to Rabat.
Now were back in Rabat, we had a quick bite to eat downtown and waited for the protest against unemployment to begin near their parliment building. We saw it last week, and we were told it last only 5 minutes before the police come out and beat them because they don't have the freedom of speech in Morocco. Anyway it must only be a weekday thing. Now back at our house, our Moroccan Mom stuffed us with food once again. Tomorrow we'll be traveling with school to Meknes. Until than. More thumbnails ...
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