Somewhere exotic . . . like a house . . .

Obviously, despite my promise to stay on top of my blogging, I have not. I blame this partly on the fact that the few immediate days after our return to the ship from morocco were spent catching up on homework for returning to classes, and also my allotted internet minutes finally wore out, so it goes without saying it took me a few days to make it upstairs to purchase more. Quick interesting fact about the internet minutes, they round up on our sessions, so if we sign on for as little as 1 second, it counts as a minute. Or 7 minutes 3 seconds gets rounded up to 8 minutes. So about 30 minutes gets wasted that way. Totally cheap. Anyway, I lastly blame my lack of blogging on the fact every spare moment truly has been dedicated to sleep. We take napping to a new level here. But for those of you who are just dying to hear about morocco, you shouldn’t be. But I’ll include a few lines anyway.
Morocco was, interesting. As mentioned, our arrival was delayed one day so we headed straight to Marrakech our first day in port. We had a traditional Moroccan lunch, which was pleasantly surprising- big loaves of bread with different vegetable toppings, couscous, and desert of some of the best oranges I’ve ever tasted, mint tea, and really delicious sugar cookies. We stopped at a Moroccan home for more mint tea and crepes, and our first authentic Moroccan bathroom experience: a tiled hole in the ground. We also were wrapped up in turban type headgear, check out danas blog for photos. Then we went camel riding, which I have done before in Australia but have no memory of, which turned out not to be such a loss because frankly, camel riding is neither very comfortable or exciting. The camels were tied together face to butt, which was due to the apparent inability to train camels to do anything, and really they looked rather miserable. We went on about a 20 minute ride through what I would consider to be slums, but our guide was really entertaining and funny and though he didn’t speak English he was more than willing to work out a conversation with me from the 5-10 french phrases I remember. But mostly he just made fun of me. 20 minutes might not seem like a very long ride, but trust me, on a camel, its more than enough time. I think today is the first day the muscles of my butt feel semi normal again, and that is not counting the numerous thigh muscles I pulled trying to get on the thing in the first place. Moving on. The next day we got up early to visit a mosque whose significance I failed to catch, the Palace Bahia which I also failed to understand what it is used for these days, and the Sardian tombs. The Palace was interesting to see the Moorish woodwork and tiles, very intricate designs, but honestly it was cold and really rainy and not many people were feeling very enthusiastic, especially because our guide insisted we didn’t need the bus and had us walk in the rain to each location. We had another lunch of the same as the day before, but it was still good, and by the time we went back outside it was sunny and warmer. We headed to the Medina, which is the market, and our guide led us through a maze of tiny alleys to a little spice shop which was pretty cool. Dana and I stocked up on lots of herbal creams and remedies and teas, don’t really remember what most of them are for. But we did get lots and lots of saffron. The medina is really amazing, it is just packed with stalls of all sorts of souvenirs and foods and all sorts of other things- and if it hadn’t been for the swarms of flies we had seen earlier co-inhabiting the shelves of pastries in most of the shops earlier, we might have ventured to try some of the food. The medina also included such marvels as snake charmers who liked to wrap their snakes around your neck while you weren’t looking then demand payment for that “treat”, and men with monkeys on chains ready to pose for a photo op. Those were the highlights I suppose, all in all I can’t say I was entirely impressed- we just felt sort of unsafe and the city was just kind of dirty. I did hear from people who went into the mountains and visited the berber villages that it was really neat and beautiful there, and a some of our friends who were also in Marrakech had a great time and went out at night and were totally fine, I just suppose it wasn’t my style. So recap: interesting place, lots of different culture, not my favorite.
Since we’ve been back the most exciting news has been Neptune day, which was the celebration of crossing the equator yesterday. It’s an old navy tradition of induction, and was really fun. We were woken around 730 or 8 by pots and pans and whistles in the hallway, not unlike previous conge announcements at villa, and were summoned up to the top deck at 9. Induction included getting some sort of green goop poured on us, kissing a dead fish, kissing the ring of King Neptune (an unidentified man pained entirely bright green), jumping into the freezing pool, then kissing or touching another dead fish. It also is when a lot of people shave their heads, boys and girls. I was surprised by how many girls shaved theirs, I was not one of them, my bio ethics teacher however was among those who did. I noticed in class today once you got over the shock of seeing a bald women, it really accentuated her lovely earrings. So besides that the day was just spent by the pool and out on the decks enjoying the hot equator weather- I managed to contain my sunburn to my shoulders only- won’t let it happen again mother. Back to classes again today. I’m sort of breezing through events here, trying to keep this post from getting even longer and also I want to watch the movie they are showing in the union right now. So for now, I shall say goodbye. Ill get in one more post before Namibia on Saturday. Love to all.