Ceuta and first glimpses of Morocco

After we left Gibraltar we boarded a ferry to make the trip across the Mediteranean to Africa. The ferry was bigger than I had expected, but it rocked back and forth in the way that makes you feel like you're floating in the ocean when you lie down in bed at night. We spent a lot of time out on the small deck with wind-swept hair, getting splashed by the waves.



We arrived in Ceuta, which is on the African continent but is actually a colony of Spain. It was basically like being back in Spain-- everything was written in Spanish and the architecture was similar. Ceuta has a population of about 75,000. It consists of Christians, Muslims and Jews, a mezcla of cultures, and according to our tour guide they all live in peace. This was hard to believe until I saw it for myself-- Muslim women in their hijabs pushed their hijos on the swings in a little park next to women in jeans and t-shirts with long, flowing black hair.

We rode the bus through the town and had a short tour with a native of Ceuta. We wound up a cliff for a 360-degree view of the city, the Mediterranean Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. We could look across the sea and see the Rock of Gibraltar, where we had been only hours before!

It was a little windy here too

Better

We finished our bus- tour of Ceuta and headed toward the boarder to Morocco! We spent a lot of time sitting on the bus at the boarder, trying to get everything cleared with customs (I didn't really know what was going on.) I watched Muslim women walking through the gate from Ceuta to Morocco carrying bags of groceries. Above the fence, which was black iron bars with spikes on top, there was a cliff, where people were sitting as though they were picnicking. As it became dusk we watched a man jump over the fence on the Morocco side and start heading toward the security gate. Nobody seemed to stop him.

By the time we made it through customs, it was nightfall. We arrived in Tetuan and checked into our hotel. With a hundred students standing in a hotel lobby and Lizzie, the organizer, calling out names one at a time to get our keys, it was a disorganized mess.

The hotel was beautiful and our room was nice. We turned on the TV to find one channel in Arabic, one in English, one in Spanish and one in French. Every channel had some kind of violent program on (I thought it was interesting... coincidence?) We watched Terminator in English (with Arabic subtitles) until it was time for dinner.

Hotel lobby-- very nice

Our room

We had dinner in the hotel-- some kind of potato-like soup, chicken with olives and flan for dessert. We ate most of our meals in hotels. Before we went we were warned that nearly everyone gets sick after visiting Morocco. We were told specifically not to drink the water, eat the fruit or buy food in the street. As our tour guide told us as we got to Africa, "Morocco is a place you go to experience the culture and the people-- it's not a place you go to eat or to sleep."

Views from our hotel room the next morning

More to come!