Follow the Fellow Who Follows a Dream

Wow - where to begin? For Spring Break last week I went to Morocco, Portugal, and Ireland. I know, this trip didn't make much geographical sense, but when you're planning according to cheap flights and hostels, you can't be too picky. If you don't know what a hostel is, you've probably never been a college student traveling around Europe. Anyway, here you go:

MOROCCO

Located on the northern tip of Africa, and right across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, this country is an entirely different world. I went with a program run by a native Moroccan who lives in Spain, and we took a tour through three cities over the weekend. Spain has a territory on the tip of Africa called Ceuta, which borders Morocco. While we were waiting on the bus at the border, we were watching these guys jumping down from a  part of the wall where there was a break in the fence. When we asked the Spanish photographer with the program what they were doing, he casually explained that they were sneaking into Spain to work because they didn't have legal papers. No big deal.
The first city we explored was Tethuan. We got to see market day in action, which was really cool but also really not glamorous. The people were selling everything from beans to clothes to henna, but there were also lots of dead fish and chickens waiting to be butchered. Morocco is slightly more than 99% Muslim, so we got to see some mosques as well (entrance is prohibited to non-Muslims). The language spoken is Arabic, but the street vendors knew enough words in other languages to get your attention. In our group, we had students from Spain, France, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. One street vendor even knew how to say "bargain" in Swedish!

After Tethuan, we went to Tanger, which is a much more touristy city. Our tour guide was fond of telling us about the American celebrities who had houses in different parts of Morocco; Malcolm Forbes apparently had two houses in Tanger, of which one is now a museum. There are also two American neighborhoods in the city, appropriately named San Francisco and California. On our way out of the city, we rode camels (which were technically dromedaries) and stopped at an outlook by a lighthouse, where you can see both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

The next day, we traveled to Chefchaouen. It was a closed city (no tourists allowed) until 1959, and is apparently adapting very well to the new touristy culture. From a distance the city appears to be all blue and white, and when you get closer you realize that it actually is all blue and white. Five times per year, on Muslim holidays, the inhabitants of the town blue-rinse the buildings, a tradition that is supposedly left over from the former Jewish population. There's a strange mix of somewhat primitive living and a rapidly booming tourist sector. Along the river there are two pavilions where the women go to hand wash all their clothes, but right down the street there are new hotels and restaurants. There is a local currency called the dirham, but euros are also accepted everywhere. The best part about the shops is the bargaining - at first the seller sets a super ridiculously high price, then you set a super ridiculously low price, then you haggle back and forth until you agree on a price that makes you feel so proud of your bargaining skills when in reality it's still way too high. But at least we're boosting their economy, right?

PORTUGAL

Well, I don't really have that much to say about Portugal. We stayed really close to the beach, but the weather didn't exactly cooperate. So we ate lots of food, including the local favorite Chicken Piri-piri, and tried to soak up a few rays of sunshine in between bouts of rain. One day it was chilly but somewhat sunny, and I really wanted to swim, so I jumped in the frigid pool while everyone looked at me like I was crazy. But I didn't have as much Park Shark left in me as I thought, so that swim lasted all of ten seconds. Oh, well. At least I got to put my feet in the ocean a little bit. Now I know to avoid the beach during Semana Santa, or Holy Week. In Spain it has probably rained for a total of two days since January, and this past week was all rain. Apparently it does that almost every year for Semana Santa, severely inhibiting the processions throughout Spain (more on those later).

IRELAND

I still can't believe that I actually went to Dublin! We were only there for two days, but I loved it. The people there were incredibly friendly and helpful, and the Irish accent just made them seem more happy. One of my travel buddies burned her fingers pretty badly on a straightening iron one morning, so we set out to find some burn salve and band-aids at a pharmacy. When we got to the store, the pharmacist working there opened the ointment, applied it to my friend's fingers, got a band-aid strip and cut it into the appropriate sizes, finished dressing the wound, and equipped us with knowledge and supplies to treat the burns for the next day and a half. It made me proud to be Irish!

Lady Justice

Liffey Bridge (a.k.a. Ha'Penny Bridge)

Our first day happened to be Good Friday, a rare holiday in Ireland when the sale of alcohol is prohibited. Everyone, especially the tourists, seemed to be kind of confused, and nobody really knew what to do with themselves since many restaurants and pubs were closed. We went on a walking tour throughout the city that lasted most of the day. A few highlights from the tour were the Dublin Castle, Trinity College, Christ Church Cathedral, a Viking Settlement (well, sort of), the Dublin Doors, and St. Stephen's Green. I can't help it - there's so much information about these places that I just have to share a little. At the castle, there's a statue of Lady Justice; she has her back to the city, has her sword unsheathed and raised, and is holding a scale that is unbalanced. Nothing about her says "justice" (although the tipped scale is supposedly due to rainfall). Trinity College has plenty of interesting and crazy rules on the books, some of which students dare to challenge. One student showed up at his exams in a full suit of armor, riding a white horse, and demanded a free meal as per an old rule on the books. The administrators had no option but to hand over the meal, but the next day they intercepted him on his way to class and fined him for not bringing a man to watch his horse during the exam, which is also a rule. A computer generated image of the library there was also used in Star Wars and Harry Potter. Sounds like a fun place to go to school!

Christ Church Cathedral

Famine Memorial

The Protestant Christ Church Cathedral is where the mummified heart of St. Lawrence was kept until its theft a few weeks ago. Apparently one of the most photographed pieces of art in the building is a stuffed mouse being chased by a stuffed cat; two animals that had been found clogging an organ pipe, now dubbed the "Tom and Jerry" of the cathedral. On to the Viking settlement...it actually existed, and had been buried in mud during a flooding of the Liffey River. But instead of preserving history, the city decided to build office buildings on top of it. So now there are stones set into a plaza that outline parts of the settlement. You're probably wondering why the doors of Dublin are noteworthy. It's actually very simple: when many Georgian homes were built a few hundred years ago they all had the same exterior, so in order to set themselves apart the homeowners painted and decorated the doors. The concept of the Dublin Doors has just become famous in the past fifty years or so, but it's already on postcards everywhere! St. Stephen's Green is an absolutely beautiful park that borders the shopping district; at the entrance to the park there is also a memorial to the potato famine.

P.S. I Love You bridge

On our second day in Dublin, we opted to go on a tour of the Irish countryside. We saw the fields where Braveheart was filmed and the bridge from P.S. I Love You, as well as Bono's house (well, the gates, anyway), Guinness Lake, and dolphins jumping in the Bay of Dublin. There is also a beautiful area that contains a graveyard and the remnants of St. Kevin's Monastery. Here we were shown a yew tree, which was the source of the original English longbow, and an elder tree (as in Harry Potter's hollow elder wand).

I also went to Easter Vigil mass at St. Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin, celebrated by the archbishop of Dublin, which was fantastic. The music was phenomenal; I especially enjoyed the Hallelujah Chorus as the closing hymn. Attending my first English-speaking mass in over three months was somewhat refreshing, but I was slightly confused when they started praying the Our Father in Gaelic. Gaelic is actually on all the street signs in the city and taught in the schools. The Irish language is alive and well in Dublin!

Guinness Lake

About the Semana Santa processions...like I said before, many of them were rained out. Granada is definitely the place to be to see them, though. Starting on Palm Sunday and ending on Easter Sunday, the people of Granada take to the streets to be part of this religious tradition that dates back to the sixteenth century. Different parishes have their own "tronos" (or floats, for lack of a better word); it takes about forty people (called "costaleros") to carry each one, and they are all adorned with candles, gold, and statues. The processions can last up to eight hours and include "penitentes" or "Nazarenos" - people who walk as a form of penance. They wear special clothing, as you can see in the picture, as a way of hiding their identity. With the robes and "capirotes" (the tall hats) you can't tell how tall, short, thin or fat they are. The processions have created a massive tourist attraction out of a religious aspect of Spanish folklore. Right before Semana Santa, I went to a flamenco show of the Passion of Jesus. It was sort of like Mel Gibson meets flamenco - very dramatic.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my adventures galavanting around Africa and Europe! For some reason, throughout the whole trip I couldn't stop singing "Look to the Rainbow" in my head (it's a great song from one of my piano books at home). So I've decided to make it the theme song for the trip. It's quite inspirational, and very Irish!

"Look, look, look to the rainbow.
Follow it over the hills and stream.
Look, look, look to the rainbow;
Follow the fellow who follows a dream."