Part I: Marrakech and the Sahara

Have you ever ridden a horse and felt sorry for it? Like, Aw, the poor animal has to walk around with a fat human on its back.

Well, I am no longer one of those people. Ever since my weekend in Morocco, all of my sympathy goes towards the riders of these beasts of burden.
 

This being said, I should clarify that I’m talking about camels and how uncomfortable they can be.
 

Context? Ah yes, well, over this past summer, I spent two months in Europe. This post, cleverly entitled “Part I,” is, indeed, the first of a few stories from my summer of 2015.  
 

During the first month, I stayed in Switzerland to take a course in microeconomics. Fortunately, I was sharing a dorm with the coolest girl ever (Shout out to Amelia) and we had some time on our hands over the weekends.
 

So we flew to Morocco for three days.
 

Now, our trip there was a little rough. Unable to catch a bus from our university early enough for our flight, we had to spend the night in the Milan airport, which is a really sketchy place from about 10:00pm to 5:00am.
 

We did, however, arrive safely in Marrakech with only moderate back pain from sleeping on benches, and found our hostel in the Medina after a few hours of wandering.
 

 

Our room, essentially a closet with 3 sets of bunk beds in it, kind of forced us to make friends with the four other people sleeping there and we all went out to this huge food festival.

The festival was basically the entire city coming together in one plaza to sell every sort of Moroccan food imaginable. Everywhere we went it smelled like these stands of awesome and multicolored spices.

 

The second night is when things got really interesting.

Through our hostel, we signed up for this camping trip in the desert, wherein we would drive out to the Sahara, ride camels for 2 hours, and then stay in tents in the middle of... well, nowhere.
 

On the way up, we stopped at all of these places that I regret not photographing. We saw the village where scenes from Gladiator were filmed (Russell Crowe has been my old-man crush for a while) and all of these tiny oases that people lived in. They were like mini towns, but cuter and green.
 

Anyway, it comes time to mount our camels, and as they come near us with a group of them, I make a joke to Amelia about what seems to be a particularly stubborn one. He was making a curious camel noise, stomping the ground, and just being pissy.
 

I think I said something like "I wonder which lucky person gets to ride that one.” 

You guessed it, the joke was on me.
 

Long story short, the camel's name was Barok. As in Baroque, the classic cultural period, or “Damn, that camel look broke.” 
 

Being the graceful steed that he was, he basically set out to annoy every other camel in our group by getting fresh with them.
 

 

He was also incredibly unpredictable, so I was shy at first. Camels spit, by the way, so keep that in mind next time they bring one on campus for homecoming.

But, as usual, I reconciled with a hostile entity via selfie.
 

And, despite our lack of access to running water, we maintained impeccable dental hygiene the morning after.