The Waiting Game

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March 15, 2008

After waking up this morning, we ate breakfast at the hotel. They had a lot of pastries and fresh orange juice. They were very good! We had a change of plans, and stayed in Fès for awhile. We went to the Royal Palace to see the walls outside, the gardens, and the guards. We drove a little more to a market area called la medina de Fès. There were a lot of little streets with people walking around selling things or at their stores. It is so different than anything I have seen before. It shows how lucky we are in the US.

Our local tour guide took us to three unique and very cool stores. The first place was a rug store. It used to be a mansion, and now women make these rugs (some take 2 years) and bring them here to sell. They were very pretty, but extremely expensive! The second place was a tanning store for leather. The first level had coats/jackets, and the top level had wallets, purses, shoes, belts, and cushions. You could see outside where the men were working to tan the leather to the different colors. We were able to barter, and I got a pair of teal, embroidered shoes for 10 euro. The last place we went to was a weaving store. They had the scarf/head dressings, and clothes worn by Moroccan people. We got the student discount, and we were able to buy a head dress for only 5 euro. Mine is teal, again, since I love that color. It was a lot of fun at la medina.

We got on the bus to go to our next stop. After an hour, the bus stopped. There was a lot of white smoke coming from the back end of our bus. We ended up having to get off and wait for another bus. The company kept saying they would be there in 30 minutes. Well it was today that we learned the definition of “Moroccan time”, because after numerous 30 minutes, and 4 hours later, a minivan like bus finally arrived. The first of 2 buses that were promised to us since the big bus didn’t have enough seats. We decided after a half hour of the big bus still not coming, to take multiple trips in the minibus to the restaurant 7 km ahead for some food since we were starving. It was about 4:30 before the minibus showed up, and 5:00 before we ever left, and we hadn’t eaten since 7:00 in the morning.

I was in the first group. We started eating right away, and about 15 minutes later, everyone else showed up in the big bus that finally arrived. Dinner was good, and we were ready to continue forward. After we were all ready to go, we found out that the bus didn’t have insurance to go all the way to our destination, Erfoud. So we ended up waiting around, receiving free drinks, to figure out what we were going to do. When we finally learned we were going to take 3 microbuses to Erfoud, we had to wait 3 more hours for one of the drivers to get his license to drive all the way. It was about a 6 hour bus ride, during which we all slept.

When we finally got to the hotel in Erfoud, we figured out what the plan was for tomorrow, and went to our rooms. They were gorgeous and Hotel Cherguí is probably my all-time favorite hotel I have ever been to. We passed out around 4:30 am, since we had to be up in 3 hours!

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Comments

[lanegra]

the bus...
sorry to hear about that but sounds liek overall great fun and adventure to be had.