My Month in Morocco

After 2 weeks in Italy, we returned to the African continent, this time to explore the North African country of Morocco. 

Upon arriving in Morocco, I was excited to try a new and different cuisine. Italian food was good but not much was new to me. The most exciting part was that I knew absolutely nothing about the Moroccan cuisine. We arrived at the Casablanca International Airport, where we got an Uber to our hotel. On our first week there, we did not do much. Instead, we took the time to catch up on school work and relax. We walked around the medina (old town) and took a day trip to Rabat.  Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, was much smaller, cleaner, and more beautiful than Casablanca. It was too bad that we were only there for a day!

After our first week, we took a train to Fes, where we were taken to the old town to spend the next 5 nights there. After trekking through the cobblestone streets, past local vendors and transport donkeys,  we arrived at our riad( a riad is a traditional Moroccan house), where we were ecstatic to find out that we could pay around 48 dollars for a freshly cooked dinner to be brought to the riad to be prepared and served. The food was delicious, but my favorite dish was definitely the kefta tagine. Kefta is a traditional Moroccan dish of spices, onions, and herbs similar to meatballs. The next day my family and I went out and explored the old town, which has over 9300 streets in total, which is the largest medina(old town) in northern Africa. On our second to last day inside the Fes medina we got to see the tannery, the tannery smelled pretty bad but getting to see how animal skin gets turned into leather. We discovered that the smell was so strong because they still use ingredients such as pigeon poop to process the leather. We were given fresh mint leaves to hold over our noses and that was very helpful.

After we left Fes, we went on a 5-day tour of the Sahara desert on our way to Marrakech. On this tour, we got to ride camels, sandboard - like snow boarding but in the sand, drive ATVs, visited Berber nomads, hiked in the Dades gorge, etc. The coolest part of the desert tour was when we stopped to scavenge for fossils. Our tour guide drove us to a field of rocks, where we found over 20+ fossils, too bad we couldn't keep them! After a long 5 day trip, we stayed in Marrakech for a week, where we relaxed and finally got to eat different foods besides the Moroccan cuisine. 

Our last week in our month-long trip to Morocco, we traveled to Taghazout to enjoy the beach and pool, which turned out to be very cold. I think this destination would be great in the spring or summer when the weather is a little hotter. At least if you want to swim! In conclusion, our trip to Morocco was definitely worth our time, and seeing the Sahara desert was definitely a plus!