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welp, my parents (and auntie sarah and uncle craig) just left granada, and it was really the best time i have had with my parents in years. it was really amazing to be able to show them around my new home, impressing them with my spanish, and really talk to them as an adult, and have them drinking with me and talking to me as an adult, a real person, rather than their daughter.

dad and i met mom (much later than we had said, making her think that we had both died in africa) in málaga on sunday night and took the bus to granada. i dropped them off at the hotel and agreed to meet them after class the next morning. we spent the next afternoon at the cathedral (where i gave them a tour, repeating the things that i could remember from when marie and i got the audio guide a week or so before… and i think i did a pretty good job) and shopping in the albazín. that night, we went out for a couple tapas and met up with jess and maddie to have a few drinks. it was really fun! mom admitted to me that she smoked pot (LESS THAN A WEEK BEFORE SHE GOT TO GRANADA) with a family friend… and showed some interest in smoking with me, although that never materialized, which is fine. she also told me that her friend has been reading this blog (instead of the censored one) and saw the videos of me and jess “high on dope” in amsterdam. HAHA… (kirsten, if you are reading this.. that would be YOU. and i cant believe your girls saw those videos. that was not my intention…) we all got pretty sloshed and went home late. the next night was about the same. we met up with elliott peet and had a couple tapas at a little bar, where a guy was playing classical guitar, which my dad really loved. then the girls [jess, maddie, and gari (my greek roommate, who is studying to get her masters in nutrition)] met up with us and we had a couple more drinks and went to patty’s, the local irish bar. i met patty a few weeks ago and i wanted him to meet my parents because he’s hilarious and i thought he’d think it was cool to meet them… plus i though my dad would like to have a guiness and watch some fútbol. we had a couple cocktails and my mom told me she was about to be on her ass, so they went home. the rest of the night was cool… i got the phone number of a boy i have a crush on and then ran right into a glass door and bruised my forehead. how embarassing for me.

the next day, my aunt and uncle arrived in granada. it was like a little family reunion (but i was the only kid). it was great to have them here as well!! they are like my surrogate parents in seattle and i had been missing them alot. we went out for paella and churros con chocolate, and then went to bed. we pretty much bar hopped everynight after that, and went to a wine/olive oil tasting place one night too. we also went to the alhambra, which was pretty fucking amazing (although i must admit that, even though i dont know what beat the alhambra as one of the new seven wonders of the world, im not THAT surprised that it didnt win. it was really cool and beautiful, but its kind of just another castle, and i happen to think that it is MORE impressive from the outside than the inside… just my opinion, so dont flip out, alhambra lovers). we also went to mass at the cathedral (which was a bust) and hiked up past the city to a peak that overlooked the entire city, the alhambra, with the sierras in the background… now THATs what i call amazing… can a view win for one of the seven wonders?

then yesterday i had to say goodbye to all of them. it was really hard, although i know i will see all of them in less than two months. but it makes it really hard when i am so far away from my parents all the time and dont get to spend much time with them anyways. plus, when my mom and dad cry when they say goodbye to me, it really breaks my heart. and of course i was crying. and the walk home was really hard after saying goodbye. i had just had such an amazing week with them, and was really able to open up to them in a way that i never have before, so saying goodbye was terrible. and walking home afterward, all alone and sad, was horrible. and people kept staring at me because i was walking and crying. geez.

but oh man… memories for a lifetime. so thanx mom and dad, and sarah and craig.

after THE BEST TEST I’VE EVER TAKEN, i went to africa (morocco) with my dad, jess, and this girl from england, jennifer anne. it was quite the experience.

first of all, we had to meet my dad in algeciras, españa so that we could take the ferry across the straight of gibraltar. my dad had been backpacking in portugal for about a week and was making his way to spain to meet up with us. well, as it turns out, november 1st was a holiday and the buses, ferries, trains, etc were all messed up and had different schedules than normal so we ended up waiting for like 6 horus for him to meet us. this was all okay because i didnt really care… all i wanted was to see my dad! and when he finally got there it was amazing!! it was so awesome to see him, and of course i cried (i always cry). after some confusion and canceled ferries we got on the biggest boat that i’ve ever been on and made our way to ceuta (a spanish colony on the african coast, next to morocco). the weather was bad and the ferry ride was ridiculously rough. i ended up puking up the beer and sandwiches that my dad bought for me. oh well…

once we made it to the moroccan boarder, we were bombarded with the beginning of the craziness that is morocco. first we were approached by a man who was trying to scam us (like basically everyone else that we met) into paying him to “speed up the process of boarder crossing.” i was pretty sketched out and made it clear to everyone else that we probably shouldnt copy down our passport info onto these scraps of paper and hand them to a random, street-clothed moroccan man. i think they agreed, and we walked over to the boarded patrol to have our passports stamped. and it only took a few minutes, so speeding it up would have been a waste of money. once we got past the patrol we were in morocco, with nothing around; a dirt road, no street lights, no buildings, no stores, just a gang of taxis and 30 dudes trying to get us into one taxi or another. we ended up in an old, busted taxi with this guy named mohammed (im pretty sure thats what every moroccan man is named). we were stopped several times to check passports again and whatnot, and eventually were on our way to tangier (about an hour away by car). mohammed was an amazing driver, like a formual 1 racer, with no fear. he went around blind curves on winding mountain roads, while the headlights of his car flickered and the engine sputtered. the middle divider lines apparently meant nothing to him and he went from one side of the road to another with no concern for cars that might be coming… but i was never scared and i knew that he would get us there just fine… and he did.

after a night in tangier, we took a bus to rabat, the capital city. the bus station was a complete zoo, with 20 men trying to get you to buy a ticket with THEIR bus company (there were several to choose from, with no apparent differences or benefits in choosing one or another). the bus took a few hours, but once we got there we went straight to our hostel to get settled. the hostel, Rabat Youth Hostel, was really nice with seperate rooms for boys and girls and a really lovely atmosphere. almost immediately, we met two men from lybia who befriended us. Nuri, the son of an important diplomat of one kind or another, had been traveling and working as a lybian corrospondent for international relations (or something) for ten years. and abobaker, the son of a lybian farmer, who was studying to get his masters in international law. abobaker really took a liking to my dad and started to refer to him as “my father” and, after ignored attempts at flirtation with me, referred to me as “my sister”… hilarious. they invited us to eat couscous with them for the sabbath and then they offered to show us around rabat. we walked through an amazing street market with meat and animals brains sitting in the sun, and hundreds of people shopping; buying knock-off shoes and multi-colored scarves. after a lovely evening of traditional moroccan food, beer (which we had to wrap in newspaper so no one would know we were drinking it in a local restaurant), and coffee, we headed back to the hostel. there we met mohammed (yeah, thats right) a friend of nuri’s that worked at the hostel, and his dog (an amazingly sweet, well-trained german shepard) likka. we sat around drinking the best tea i think i’ve ever had (next to the cocoa tea that we drank while hiking the inca trail to machu picchu) and smoking joint after joint of moroccan hash. the boys were worried that my dad would not approve so they made me ask him if it was okay to smoke:

me: dad, you dont care if people are smoking hash, do you?
dad: no.
me: do you want to smoke?
dad: oh no… i havent smoked anything in 30 years

so we all sat around smoking while dad regaled us with storied of things hes smoked and drugs hes done throughout his life. my favorite story was when he was young and poor, he and his friends had heard that if you scrape the inside of banana peels, bake it, and smoke it you will get high. so they tried it and of course nothing happened. what a waste of time. haha.

while we were sitting around, abobaker (who is a member of an accomplished mens choir) agreed to sing a song (acapella) for us. it was incredible. it was a religious song of sorts (in arabic) about trying to get close to god, i think. it was really amazing and lasted for at least 5 minutes. it was really one of the highlights of the evening.

after dad went to bed, nuri told me the most intense, amazing story (after which he said that because of this, we must appreciate the beauty that we had right there… and of course the hash), which really made me think about my traveling and what i want to see in the world, what i want to get out of traveling, and what “seeing the world” really means. he told us that while traveling through africa, he stumbled upon a tiny village somewhere (whose name sounded ironically similar to cannibal). he said that it was already strange that he was there because the whole village knew each other and he was easily spotted as an outsider. all of a sudden he spotted something roasting over a fire, like a pig… but as he got closer he saw hands, feet, hair (it was a human). he was so scared and appauled that he said he ran from that place. he “ran for two days without stopping, without a want to stop.”

traveling is so beautiful and amazing but i forget that the traveling that i have done (expect for the limited poverty that i experienced in peru) i have been experiencing a very subjective sdie of travel. i hadnt stopped to think that in traveling (especially over the course of 10 years) one is bound to come across things that they would never want to see or which for anyone else to see. things that make the workld a strange and terrifying place. i saw that iwant to see the world: beauty and otherwise. but do i even know what that means? i dont think i have any fucknig idea. when nuri hugged and kissed me goodnight that evening, it sounded like he was about to cry, holding back tears. it really gave me a profound appreciation for the suffering and hurt that he must have seen over the years. what an amazing accomplished man.

the rest of the trip was pretty cool as well, although nothing compared to the time that we spent with these amazing people in rabat. we went to fés and spent less than a day there, seeing similar things as we did in rabat (an amazing market and interesting people) and finally headed back to tangier to take the ferry back to spain. the way back was a LONG and stressful trip, as we hurried back to málaga to meet my mom, who arrived on sunday morning.

i feel like i just barely scraped the surface of what we saw and experienced in morocco, but i wont keep you…

so yesterday, after Marie Sullivan (Eggertsen) left granada, i had a final for the courses that im taking. i studied at café flores near my school for a couple hours and then walked to school to take the test. as usual, most people in my class were late and when the sub showed up to administer the test, she was quite surprised by the shortage of persons in the room. eventually the rest of the class showed up and we all sat down, test infront of us, ready to prove all that we had learned this month. and how.

and (as the title may hint toward) it was the best test i’ve ever taken. and the most interesting test atmosphere that i could have ever imagined. at first everything was normal, or at least what we would consider normal in the states. and i never even thought that things would be different in a testing atmosphere. i guess i just assumed that quietly, privatly working on a test was a universal way of showing what you have learned… but i was wrong. in the states people cheat and look at other people’s answers, but not only is it completely hushed, but you can get in serious trouble at a university (or high school i guess) for cheating. you can get kicked out of school… and, well, then your life would be ruined. also in america, people who study and try hard dont want to share their answers with people that dont try so hard by covering their answers. but in europe they just dont do it like that.

shortly after the test was started, the teacher left the room and shut the door and it was like someone flipped a switch. everyone started talking and laughing and asking everyone else for answers to the test.  but it wasnt as if we were cheating… it was like we were all working together to get the best grade possible.  i guess it was because the entire month we had been working together, helping each other in one way or another and bouncing answers off each other to get it right, that once the test came around we needed to help each other and collaborate to do well.  its like when you are told to study in the same environment or under the same conditions in which you learned the material, we had to use each other’s knowledge and expertise to get the answers.  it was magnificent… plus it kind of blew my mind how naturally and quickly we all reverted to helping each other the second that we were not being watched. 

after the test i was talking to this kid, anders from germany, about what had happened.  he was surprised that in the states we dont do things like that.  he said that in croacia (where he attended high school) and everywhere in europe that he has studied, this is how it is done.  he had an interesting take on the situation:  if you could take a test on your own and do decently well… and in the end get a decent job and make decent money OR take a test with the help of your peers, get a better grade, get a better job, and make better money; which would you choose?  i guess i’d choose the latter. 

oh europe… you never cease to amaze me.

and as it turns out, i did really well on the test (even the parts that i did all on my own).