Viajes

WE got back from morocco and had the best time of our lives!!!! We learned once we got there that it was a muslim nation- who knew. So most of the women wear the head scarfs and dresses- but the significance of it was what blew me away. They wear them because they want to- it signifies their faith and how strong they are to their god/ala. I'll go into more detail on the villages we went to in a later blog, i only have a little bit of time right now. but a quick note, another thing is that you eat with your hands in morocco. And you eat with your right hand, it is against their culture to eat with your left. This is the case because you wipe with your left hand so you are supposed to use your right to eat. I turned to our guide lady and was like, well what if i wipe with my right, isn't that defeating the purpose?? and she just laughed and said, well with the culture you were supposed to grow up learning to wipe with your left. I also soon learned that they wipe....with out toilet paper. they use their bare hands to wipe, and then cook and eat with the same hands!!! One night we all ate supper with my host family there and there was another girl from the us staying there too, we ate out of one big bowl of veggies and chicken and she would reach her hands in, lick her fingers and then stick them back into the main dish... i didn't last long eating out of the same bowl. Then i found a hair in my soup one of the nights, so once i again i had to eat thinking that there were children starving in Africa.. but this time i was IN Africa thinking these thoughts...crazy. So i'll go into more detail later about the islamic culture and how much i've learned, which is a ton!!! - we got back tuesday evening from morocco came home, got lots of kisses from mama carmen, ate supper and then were off again! Also- when we returned to carmens there were two french girls staying there from high school- they knew like 3 words of spanish. Caitlin and i came in yelling in spanish because we were so excited to speak a language we could speak !!!!! and they just sat there and didn;t talk, and we saw them and were like.. oh haha hola! We left that night at midnight for the bus station- and we had a 5 hour bus ride from granada to madrid- then we took the metro to the airport- took a plane to Milan, Italy and then took a train to Speitz and then another to Interlaken, switzerland. We thought we were saving ALL this money by taking busses and trains instead of a plane...turned out we weren't. We got to the train station to learn that a one way to speitz was 56 euro- we had no choice but to take it at that point! so we are going to look into flights for the way back- but last night after almost 24 hours straight of travel to get to switz- thats not including the traveling from africa the day before. We got here!!!! It's gorgeous and is a small town by lakes and in the mountains!!!! Today the girls are going shopping and to the grocery store so we can make some pizzas tonight and get some food for the rest of the weekend, and the boys are heading to the mountain to ski and figure out how all that runs. We went to mc donalds last night and one meal was 15 dollars. RIDICULOUSLY expensive, and the response from the people there was, welcome to switzerland! so we are going to try and save some money by making out meals! pizza and sandwiches. Tomorrow all of us are hitting the slopes and getting a taste of God's creation!!!!