Chefchaouen

A hill village, “white-washed” with stunning pastel blue walls and cobble stoned streets with a relaxing and mellow atmosphere. Near the ocean and nestled in a beautiful mountain range, this old Jewish settlement has attracted not only the admireing tourists but also incessant and very persistent amount of hash dealers and goat herders.

Waking up at 6:00am to catch the seven o’clock buss and meet up with a group of students from our language course, we drove for four hours watching a beautiful landscape filled with flat olive groves, mountains and the occasional lone woman or man walking from no-where to no-where (at least in our range of vision).

We arrived and walked up the steep hills up to the medina while being flowed the entirety of the way up by pesky ‘guides’. They managed to stay with us regardless our best efforts to loose them. Once we made it to the medina we were blown away by the colors and how different the atmosphere was compared to the chaotic hustle and bustle of the medina in fez. We stayed in a beautiful hostel named Andaluz for aprox. 6 dollars. Walked to a beautiful riverside café where we could watch women, men and children playing near the water and washing their clothes in the clear mountain stream.

We then proceeded to work our way through the winding narrow streets of the medina to make it up to the medina wall where we could watch the sun set from above the city. Along the way we came across a school with children playing and asking for our photographs, meanwhile the director of the school introduced himself and explain that he wanted to get help to build a school garden to better their ecology class.

The following day we spent the whole day exploring the medina streets, getting our hands painted with henna, going from one store the to next which was especially fun because this town uses Spanish instead of French making bargaining a much more pleasant and comfortable experience. We then proceeded to almost miss our buss back to fez. We were able to make it just in the nook of time thanks to the scariest 5 min taxi drive I have ever had.

- Kendra