Alyssa Week 4 Rabat

Not much has changed at work. I got sick this week so I had to miss one day to go to the doctor.  Going to the doctor was actually a really cool experience. The Doctor  was afraid that there were issues with my appendix (because I had a lot of stomach pain and a fever) so he gave me an ultrasound. The cool part was that it was only $30 for the whole thing.

  Luckily I was feeling much better by the weekend because I had plans to travel to Chefchouen with another volunteer. Chefchouen is this beautiful little mountain town where all the houses are blue. Unfortunately the only way to get there is by taking a crammed and packed bus. The bus ride there was fine, we even made friends. One thing I really like about Morocco is how nice and helpful most people are. We made three friends on the bus -two Moroccans and one American who were all traveling together. When we got to Chefchouen the five of us asked a woman how to get to our hotel and she walked us to our hotels. There she ran into her friend visiting from Spain and a guy her friend had met on the bus (super confusing J). The eight of us hung out together all weekend. On Saturday we went on a five hour hike to a beautiful waterfall in the mountains together, we ate almost all our meals together, and went shopping together. It was really fun to meet new people.  Another thing I really liked about Chefchouen was that everyone spoke Spanish.  Usually when I don’t know a word in Arabic I just say it in Spanish and hope it is similar enough to French for my host family to understand, but in Chefchouen I could do that and know the people would understand me perfectly.

The bus ride back from Chefchouen was miserable. There were so many hairpin turns that everyone felt sick, and instead of taking 4 and a half hours the bus ride took eight. This was super confusing because there was very little traffic.  Hopefully the next time I travel I will be able to take the train.