Morocco 

We left Europe from Tarifa, Spain, to get to Morocco.  Tarifa is the southern most city in Europe and is located where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean meet.  We went to Tarifa solely for a ferry ride across the Straits of Gibraltar, but we are happy to have visited this southernmost city.

Once we departed the ferry in Tangiers, we knew we were in a different world and not one we were well prepared for.  Morocco has their own currency and we didn’t have any of theirs.  Booking train tickets at the train station with a credit card didn’t work, so we improvised a walking discovery tour to find a bank to use an ATM.  Spanish is not even a third language of the people of Morocco, but French is (remember the movie Casablanca?).  Our linguist Jan fortunately lived for a few months in France 40 years ago and knew enough French to get us by.

We got our tickets and waited for our train to Fez, the place in Morocco we’d singled out as the best destination.  Being surrounded by Muslims in a relatively poor country is a little disconcerting.  We seemed to be the only foreigners in a large train station, and we stood out due to our clothing and western luggage and probably a few other things.

It was a four and a half (4 1/2) hour train ride through some barren countryside and cities that reminded me of the Korea we lived in and knew 40 years ago - not too enticing!  We read of some of the things to beware of in this strange country, so we were not at ease.  There are several do’s and don’ts regarding food, getting help, and how to behave, and the first hours had our imaginations primed for problems.

Fortunately, Jan had booked a very good Ryad (hotel), and when we finally got there, the atmosphere was very welcoming.  

The hotel, like most, is not all that inviting from the outside, as most of the buildings are windowless on the ground floor.  But they have large and beautiful courtyards that are part sanctuary.  Add to the courtyard the very friendly and helpful owners and all of their staff, and suddenly things got much better.  We have our dinners and breakfasts at the Ryad, partly because the hygiene is trustworthy.  The food is excellent and also authentic Moroccan.

With comfort addressed by the people running the fine Ryad Mabrouka, we could focus on exploring Morocco.  Our first day was spent with a guide who showed us the old city, or Medina.  The first thing he informed us of was that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as a country after our forefathers won the Revolutionary War.  It was a little hard to believe, but I looked it up, and it’s true.  

The always prevalent thing you notice here are the minarets and mosques.  99% of the population is Muslim, and religion is part of their education as well as their day-to-day life.  We hear the calls to prayer five times each day, especially in the evenings - a call announced from every minaret.  While most mosques only allow Muslims, our guide took us to one that admits infidels, like the four of us.

Normally one takes shoes off when in a mosque and washes their hands and feet.  They are quite interesting and beautiful places.

Fez is a city of 2 million people and was once the capital of Morocco.  The Medina where we are living has no car transportation, in part because the streets are usually no more than 12 feet wide, and frequently 4-5 feet wide.  There are 9,400 such streets in the Medina, so a guide is essential if you don’t wish to get lost!

We somehow managed to arrive during the festival of the sheep, an annual holiday when a sheep is sacrificed to God, just as it was done by Abraham in the Old Testament.  There are live sheep everywhere, and transporting them is a three-ring circus.  There are people walking them, putting them in taxis, carrying them on the backs of motorcycles, and even on the tops of their vehicles.  All sheep are alive when these pictures are taken!

It is kind of like our Thanksgiving, except the sheep is the main dinner item. And, it is a bit like Christmas because the children are given new clothes and gifts.  

While on the topic of animals, one seen in Fez is the stork.  You probably know a little about the stork, and perhaps most of what you know is thanks to the fairy tales that said they delivered babies.  Storks are a sacred animal in Morocco since they eat snakes.  We didn’t see a single snake, but several storks. 

They are migratory birds and travel to and from Europe to select parts of Africa.

An animal that we more often associate with Africa is the monkey.  We didn’t think Morocco would have any, but we not only learned otherwise, we also saw them and fed some when we hired a driver to take us to the Atlas Mountains.  They are called barbary macaques and are one of the few monkey species to dwell in a cold and snowy climate. We were well armed with a bag of nuts and made a lot of good friends until the nuts ran out.

We had a rich introduction to the crafts of the Moroccan culture.  Many things are handcrafted here, including wool carpets, leather goods made from lamb, and pottery.  The sales people of these goods are quite good, but they are very willing to bargain.  Jan, our language specialist, was also our queen of bargaining.  The most challenging was Abdul the rug dealer shown here at the left side of the picture.

My favorite was the pottery crafts people and how they assemble thousand of little pieces when making table tops and water fountains.  I still remember the barely recognizable clay ash tray I made in art class and know they are talented and patient.

The food has been very good, and many things were brand new to us.  The next picture shows skewers of chicken and lamb, along with a chicken cooked in a clay pot. We also had flakey-dough pot pies filled with pigeon, with the outside dusted in powdered sugar and cinnamon.

We have been in Morocco for three full days and have seen much.  We expected that we would see a different world, and we did.  We can now claim to have set foot in Africa, but it was just one of many unique parts of Africa.

Tomorrow we head to Casablanca to catch a flight to Madrid, Spain.  Our days of being tourists is coming to an end.  This last shot is of the leather tanning vats in Fez.

Days 16-17  Ronda, Spain

Not far from the Spanish Riviera in the southwest corner of the country are the white hill towns, including Ronda.  We traveled by bus instead of by car due to rumors of narrow and windy roads.  It is nice for me not to have to focus on the road, but the countryside is so pretty, I would have preferred to have a car and stop at scenic viewpoints, which were numerous.

Ronda is one of the white hill towns and is located between two of Spain’s national parks.  Among the many things it is noted for are the bridges connecting the ‘new’ part of town with the old.  The ‘new’  bridge over the magnificent gorge is about 220 years old and took almost 40 years to construct.

There is an old bridge as well.  It was rebuilt in 1616, and it still handles single lane car and truck traffic.  It is very apparent that lots of buildings and the Spanish infrastructure were built to last. 

We were fortunate to stay in a 4-star hotel (San Gabriel) in the old section of town.  One of the things Shari booked for us was a complimentary tapas experience at Casa Maria, which is a small bar where the local residents eat (versus where the tourists eat).

We didn’t really understand completely how we got this experience, but we had the best Spanish food in all the days we’ve been in Spain!  I have fallen down on my pictures of food, but here is one of the artichoke tapa that had olive oil and chopped Iberian ham plus some secret ingredients.

It was Shari’s birthday meal and one she and all of us will remember.  We treated her like a queen all day!

Ronda is the birthplace of modern bullfighting.  Their bullring was built about 300 years ago, and it is still in use.

We took a tour of the ring and discovered that bulls, and cattle in general, were wild once upon a time in Spain.  Over time, the sport evolved from indiscriminate killing of bulls by the general public to the theatre of a bullfight.  It’s an old world sport that is more respectable than we originally thought.  By the way, the color of the cape is scarlet, not red.

Ronda was definitely worth a visit.  We’d never heard of it before the trip, but we will surely remember it!

Days 14-15  Nerja, Spain

We had been to the South of France and liked it, and we heard the South of Spain is also popular.  ‘A Day at the Beach’ was seen as a change in our routine of exploring old world Spain.  

Finding our new temporary home to be something pleasing is always a good start.  I don’t think all of us understood what the Balcon de Europa meant until we arrived here from the bus station.

We thought it was a fancy name for a hotel on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.  There is a hotel with that name, but this is the balcony of Europe where the Moors entered Spain back in the 8th century.  

There now is a restaurant at the balcony, and the sea is now the attraction.

The days here were primarily for relaxation at the beach.  The views were great and the weather perfect.

There was only one really unique very old feature we pursued.  There are very unique caves near the town that we’d heard about and was well worth visiting.  The Nerja Caves have the world’s largest stalactite column, and the underground tour is large and amazing.  You’ll have to trust that the picture is oriented correctly.

The remains of an ancient people dating to 25,000 BC were found in the 1980’s along with their wall art.

The two days here were worth it, and we could easily stay longer.  It’s a very beautiful area!  However, there is still a little more of Spain to see and enjoy.  

Days 11-13  Granada

We spent a few days in the mountain city of Granada, and here is the street where we lived in the small palace of Santa Ines.

The city sits at the base of the original Sierra Nevada mountains which are nearly as tall as the California version.  Sierra Nevada translates into ‘mountains covered with snow”.  September is not a good month to see snow in the mountains, but we did see signs to ski resorts.

The big draw to Granada is the Alhambra.

There is wall a mile long around the fort and palaces you see in the picture, and people visit it by day and enjoy it from viewpoints in the evening.  To tour it, you are advised to get your ticket months in advance due to its popularity.  From it’s location, this site was built and successfully defended by the Moors (Muslims) for 800 years!  

The Alhambra was part fortress and at one end, the army was garrisoned. Our tour took us through the many parts of the fort.

Back in the day when this was a working fort, jail cells were holes in the ground with a trap door, and the prisoners accessed the cell by rope.

The highlight was the Moorish Royal Palace.  Several of the rooms had courtyards, and two of our favorites are these two:

There are some large gardens within the walls that were aromatic as well as beautiful.

Jan Studer encouraged us to try what we might call the Turkish Bathes (and what they call the Arab bathes).  Three of us have colds and coughs, so it was a chance to test whether they were therapeutic.  There were hot bathes of various hotness and steam, a cold bath, and the part I liked the most, a massage.  After two hours, you feel 20 years younger.  No pictures were allowed of the bath - sorry!

On one of our days, we took a tour of olive groves and learned about the processing of it!  Spain is the top producer in the world with 45% of the total.  Neighboring Italy is a distant second producer with 25% of the worlds olive oil.  The town we visited has the oldest known press and we got a special tour.  The stone below was pulled by a donkey, and the stone smashed the raw olives into a pulp.

Then, we did the taste test of 5 different oils, something I can’t recommend.  I love olive oil and know it is a healthy oil, but drinking it and swishing it around in your mouth before swallowing is not as fun as when I do it with wine!  Here are some of the other tasters sitting in front of their five cups of oil.

One of our days in Granada was a Saturday.  Every night a few evening hours are used for walking the common areas and enjoying the evening air with friends and family.  Saturday evenings are more lively with music in many of the plazas.  It was interesting to run across the following in late afternoon in one large plaza.  There are lots of young people in Granada and the attention is usually on them.  In this plaza, it’s the older people dancing and the young people watching.

On more than one evening, we went to neighboring Arab Quarters for the view of the Alhambra at sunset.  Finding a good viewpoint is part of the challenge as well as navigating throughout the small and erratically laid out streets.  For over 1000 years, the Jews and Muslims have gotten along very well here in Granada.  This picture reminds me of the Jewish word ‘Shalom’ meaning peace.  

Days 8-10 Seville

We found this striking couple in Seville and took a liking to them.  It’s not easy finding people wearing the traditional garb of Spain years ago.  The clothes probably make these people look four times as good as they would if they were wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts!

Looks like there maybe a pick-pocket trying to find the wallet of the caballero.

There are Churches and Palaces (Cathedrals and Alcazars) in most every Spanish city we visit so it might seem a little repetitive.  So far, every one has been been more grand than that of the previous city. 

In Seville, there is the largest gothic cathedral in the whole world.  

More impressive is the interior.  There are dozens and dozens of side altars.  The main alters are enormous and often decorated with gold, silver, huge paintings, and sculptures, and even tombs!  There are even rooms where some of the gold and silver treasure is stored.  There is so much, one could think it decadent.  One very interesting thing found in the cathedral is the tomb of Christopher Columbus.

His tomb is carried by large sculpted kings who represent the four regions of Spain.  It is interesting to note that Columbus traveled a lot both before and after he died.  You probably know he sailed several times to the Americas.  His remains also traveled and were first placed in a northern Spain, then moved to Seville, then moved to the Dominican Republic in the West Indies, then Cuba, and then around 1900, back to Sevilla.

Another interesting note about Columbus is that we sailed for the new world from Seville.  This city is on a river, not an ocean.  It used to be a major port city and place for the Spanish Armadas to dock even though some distance from the sea.

Even more impressive for me is the alcazar (palace).  Seville is much closer to Moorish (Muslim) countries of North Africa, and the influence in this old city is more noticeable than Madrid and other cities in the center of Spain.

The outer walls occupy four city blocks. It is what’s inside that is most impressive.  One of the first things you see is this courtyard.

We used the audio guide to help understand the many many rooms and decorations.  Each of the rooms had a purpose many of which we would not consider needed today such as the Admirals’ apartments where debriefing of the explorers such as Columbus would occur or plans made for Magellan.

All room walls have artistic elements, and many of the doorways include marble pillars.

This sizable piece of land also had outdoor pools such as this one

and a huge garden that even had an observation walkway built into the boundary wall of the garden.

One of our nights in Seville, we took in our first live flamenco dance in a small theatre.  Flamenco has an interesting history, but we leave that for you to discover.  It was an amazing show by all three artists:  the guitar player, the dancer, and the singer.  This is a picture I took from our front row seat.

One last thing is the old world streets.  This is Shari just outside the front door of our hotel.  Cabs can’t take you to many of the hotels in the old quarter of the city, and that suited us just fine.