September 8 2010 / Seville, Spain/MV Explorer

So we went to bed at six in the morning and woke up at ten minutes to nine, so that was pretty exhausting.  We walked back to the train station with relative ease and saw the Torre del Oro, which is a watchtower that was built next to the river as a deterrent from boats trying to get in through the river to the port.  It’s said that it used to have been gilded in gold, so that was kind of neat to walk by.  At the train station we all just kind of put our heads on our backpacks and rested a little bit while waiting for the bus.  On the bus we all pretty promptly conked out—we were pretty exhausted!  It was exciting seeing the ship again, once I woke up yet again just pulling into the bus station.  The ship has definitely come to be a secure presence to see.

Once on board, I took an intensely long shower.  I hadn’t showered at Seville and at one point I had kicked up dog crap onto the back of my leg (remember when I said that people don’t pick up after their dog in Spain?  I experienced this firsthand.  It was disgusting), so I felt pretty nasty.  I also hadn’t really packed very well so my clothes were totally dirty.  It made the shower all the greater though.  It felt nice coming back to my nice little room.  :D 

After working on my blog a little bit and writing up my royal family homework, I took a great big nap.  I couldn’t help it!  I woke up later for dinner, which was a bunch of Moroccan foods to get us prepared for TOMORROW, when we will be in Casablanca, Morocco!  It’s crazy that we will have no downtime between ports, but I’m excited all the same—at least we GAIN two hours tonight!  A little after dinner we went to post-port discussions, where we talked about some of the things that we enjoyed or didn’t enjoy about Spain and what we were looking forward to/were anxious about in Morocco.  It was a pretty good time and it was nice hearing what other people had done—I talked to a girl about her trip to Barcelona a little while afterwards.  I wrote in the Piano Lounge for a little while (I’ve missed hearing people clunk around on that piano!) and then wandered up to Deck 7 to get something to munch on.  I got something called La Paz Patchoy, which is kind of like a cup noodle except a lot bigger and Filipino.  It was delicious. 

A song called “We Speak No Americano” that played at the Flamenco night during our dance party was playing on someone’s laptop out on deck 7.  It is an international hit across Europe, so you guys should download it and be the first ones to know about it for when it hits the USA.  :)  I’ll have to download it when I get home! 

I definitely enjoyed Spain, though I feel as though I loved Barcelona more than Seville and Cadiz.  I’m very proud of myself for spending almost exactly the amount of Euros I took out of the ATM at the very beginning of getting to Spain (100 euro, so 130 in all).  I felt that I was pretty thrifty.   I am disappointed I could not find bull testicles to eat, though I did try fried barnacles and octopus, as well as jamón ibérico.  I hope I will be just as adventurous in trying new foods in the future (I’m sure I will be).  Overall it was a good starting place for getting acclimated to traveling to foreign places, because I thought it would be easier than it was to communicate and get by in Spain (Barcelona spoke far more English). 

Morocco is going to be pretty interesting during September 11, as the country is 99% Islamic.  I wonder if they even acknowledge it, as of course it wasn’t an attack by Islam but by a tiny political faction, but it’s still something interesting to think about in how they react, especially since apparently some asshole in the USA is organizing a Qur’an burning.  It’s like… I want to disaffiliate myself from assholes like that, but not away from the tragedy of something that happened in my country.  Most likely I won’t even hear much about it, as I will be up in the mountains with rural villages for the majority of the time.  

Tomorrow I am going to an SOS Children’s Village in Morocco, which I am extremely excited for, and the day after that I will be travelling into the mountains to see the Berber villages and stay with the people there.  I will most certainly blog tomorrow, but in the mountains I probably won’t be able to blog until I come back on the 13th.