fourth of what?

i can't believe it's july already. well, happy belated independence day. (i can say independence day in arabic... impressed?)

this weekend, we took a group trip to the neighboring cities of tetuan and chechaun. for some reason unbeknownst to me, we only stopped in tetuan for 20 minutes. guess it's not a very interesting city? i guess i might have known the reason, except that i have this horrible/wonderful habit of completely ptfo-ing (mom: ptfo = pass the f*** out) as soon as i sit down in any moving vehicle. so, since were were on a bus, i was slept while our program director explained the history of the places we were visiting. too bad. guess i'll have to read my guide book to understand where we went.

so tetuan was pretty uneventful. i ate a croissant.

but chefchaun. man that place was cool. first of all, tetuan is about an hour southeast of tangier (by tour bus), and chefchaun is approximately another hour away from tetuan. and it's further inland, so we were in more mountainous terrain. chefchaun is this really cool little city that is located between two mountains, which is where it gets its name - from the berber word for 'horns' because the mountains look like two horns. or, so i've been told... or maybe, so i've misunderstood. we were given a small presentation (pre-sleeping through the bus presentation) that was a little more detailed about chefchaun, and from that presentation i came to understand that that is the origin of the name 'chefchaun'. but, the presentation was in arabic, so i may be completely off the mark on that one.

anyway, the town is really cool. because it's in a valley though, the medina was kind of annoying to walk around because every other turn you ended up walking up a hill. laysa mushkela. i especially liked (and i think chefchaun is famous for this) that the bottom half of all the buildings was painted blue (subject-verb agreement in that sentence... someone help?). so, it made you feel like you were walking around in anarctica or something, and that all the buildings were really igloos and that it wasn't a hundred and frick seven degrees. it wasn't really that hot, but it was hot. probably needless to say, but i took a lot of pictures. it was amusing that i ended up walking around with two other people from the program who also happen to take a lot of pictures. chefchaun is a pretty tourist-y town though, so we weren't really worried about sticking out as tourists.

our program only scheduled a day-trip to chefchaun, but we of course had the option of staying over if we wanted to. of course i wanted to, and of course i did. so we got to the city on a saturday, hung around the town and did a little site-seeing. then on sunday, i climbed one of the mountains!

yeah, i thought i wasn't gonna get to do any of that mountain-climbing stuff this summer, even though mountain-man karl is out in colorado again. so i was happy to be on a trail again. although, i have to admit it was nothing like mt. yale... what a bitch. anyway. it was fun. and i took a lot of pictures of that too. so i'll put those up somewhere, sometime... perhaps.

the hike took us about 8 hours, but that was because we had to walk up part of the valley, and then walk through the valley for a while more until we actually started walking up the mountain. then we followed a road for a long time, and then we had to blaze our own trail up the the summit. but we made it to the summit.

so yeah. that was my fourth of july weekend. hope you all enjoyed the independence!