It's been awhile

So I guess I haven't really blogged for awhile. Since the last time I wrote on this thing, I've been to the Sahara Desert and a Berber village.
So the Sahara Desert was pretty amazing. It was a 4 day trip, a 10 hour drive from Rabat. We stayed in really nice hotels with not so nice buffets. After sleeping on Moroccan mattresses, which are almost as hard as rocks-no joke, any sort of hotel standard mattress was well welcomed. We got to ride camels into the sunset and climbed up a dune. The next morning most of us woke up before sunset. My friend Kati and I were walking in the dunes when a Berber (native Moroccan) man stopped us and told us that we needed to go out further to get the best view of the sunrise. So he took us out as far as we could possibly walk at 5 in the morning and we sat and just talked with him for an hour. He told us about his culture, that he could speak about 10 languages, and just about life in the Sahara. It felt so surreal, sitting on a dune in the Sahara while the sun slowly peaked over, listening to a Berber man ramble on.

This past weekend we visited Ain Leuh, a mostly Berber village. We stayed with families there. We were warned ahead of time that most families only spoke Amazigh and Darija and would probably only have a squat toilet, but somehow Kati and I lucked out and our family spoke English and French and had a Western toilet. We ended up listening to Justin Bieber and watching MTV with our 16 year old sister and her cousin and dancing to Gangnam Style on Friday night. On Saturday, all of us went on a 5 hour hike in the Middle Atlas Mountains. The first half hour was a challenge, to say the least, but after we warmed up it felt pretty effortless. We passed more sheep than I've seen in my entire life, and had tea with some nomads.

So it's safe to say that I've had some pretty crazy experiences already. Morocco has turned out to be everything I expected it to be and everything I didn't expect it to be. In two weeks I'll be heading to Spain and France, and I can only imagine what it's going to be like there.

Sunrise in the Sahara.

Our footprints in the sand.

I miss it already.

 The backyard of one of the hotels we stayed at.

 Experimenting with shutter speeds while in a cab.

 One of the houses in the village of Ain Leuh.

 The entrance to the same house above.

 The beginning of our 5 hour hike!

 An aquifer?

This reminded me of Lion King, except minus the trash.

 View from the mountains.

 The village of Ain Leuh. The trees in the photo are cherry trees-what this village is "famous" for.

 Now are pictures of my house in Rabat. It's beautiful, 4 stories and all. This is an open-air roof.

 Our first floor. We eat all of our meals at that table.

 A sink when you first walk into our house.

 A sitting room. We occasionally eat meals here, but not usually.

 The main living room.

 Stairs up to the second floor.