Keeping faithful to my blog in Spain

Well I dropped the ball in Spain, but I am going to quickly catch up and enclose a few pics of key events. Having a basic working knowledge of Spanish came in very handy and led to several long conversations with locals who were patient with me, especially since despite the number of Americans, many people knew less English than I knew Spanish.  Going to the GP doctor, and then a rehabilitation doctor, relying on Spanish was a very good test. I even got the treatment for the right problem on the right part of my body. Spain was colder than I expected. Fortunately I brought jackets and sweaters so I was okay.  The whole last month I was there it rained torrentially almost every day, everything was flooded. There was always something washing up on the beach. I didn’t see it but Roman Ruins were uncovered in Cádiz due to the violent storms. I learned the difference between when to pronounce the sound “th.”  The letter Z is a hard “th” like in “think.” Ci and Ce are pronounced more like a soft “th” as in “then.”  Got it?  Good, because that’s the best I can do.

Ronda

So my trip: I posted pix of my day trip to Sevilla in the last post. I visited Cádiz the oldest (?) continuously occupied city in Europe. I took a road trip to Arcos, Grazalema and Ronda.  Ronda’s landscape and landmarks are featured heavily in the new animated movie “Ferdinand” which is also a very good movie. Granada was also quite beautiful, but the real attraction for my trip was the 12th century Alhambra palace and fortress overlooking the city. Gibraltar was another very cool space especially with the added dispute between Spain and England over who should really own it. The Rock of Gibraltar and the Barbary apes were impressive. The many Orthodox Jews surprised me as much, maybe more than the massive mosque on the south end.
My last weekend was reserved for a long weekend in Tanger and Chefchaouen Morocco.  There were not many big surprises except for the fact that they seemed to glory in the widespread acceptance of all people from all races, religions and other identifiers.  The people were very helpful and friendly.  I was not amazed so much as impressed.  Maybe the fact that it rained torrentially most of the weekend kept the aggressive touts at bay, but there was no hassling to buy trinkets and souvenirs.  I did however meet my goal to buy a hand-woven Moroccan Berber Carpet and a Jalaba (traditional garb). I even made a video about it.

I am including links to my Spain and Morocco videos here so instead of looking at a few pics, you can see as much as you like.

Spain video

Morocco video