Here's a quick update on my life post-Morocco:

After Marrakech we took the express back to Tangier, without anything breaking this time, and then flew to Madrid where we spent just a couple days before flying back to Rome, with Abbie in tow.
Matt and Joseph joined us in Rome for the next few days in which we had some Absinthian adventures.
The next weekend was my 21st birthday, I believe, which was made even more wonderful because Meghann AND Nicole came to Rome where my Roman friends and we ate pizza, celebrated under the stars at the Colosseum, and drank our way to Trastevere. It was quite a night.
The next weekend I was lucky enough to have a visit from Kirsten, who was a doll of a guest. The Monday after, my parents came to town and proceeded to terrorize the city of Rome for the next week. Mike and I discovered a fabulous little jazz club where we spent a couple evenings, and then finals kicked my ass to the ground.
After all was said and done, we had a farewell party which I left sort of early to go back and pack up my life and clean up my apartment so I could leave at dawn to catch my flight to Paris.
The next morning Meghann and I were supposed to fly to London but we encountered some technical difficulties so we took the bus the following morning through the Chunnel and all.
We won London, went to Oxford, had a nice punt, and ate some Bangladeshi food, was it? Something like that.
After London I met up with the parents and went to Venice and Prague, and now I'm back at Meghann's. That's the unreasonably abridged version; juicy details later.

I have two choices here: one is to take the next 93 minutes of your life by having you read my ridiculously long descriptions of what I did and saw in Marrakech, but neither you nor I have the patience for such things, so you'll have to go to my Flickr page to look at pictures and imagine things for yourself. Go there if you can, it's quite a treat.

Suffice to say that Marrakech was, well, I don't want to say "a feast for the senses," because I hate that expression and it's cheesy, but I can't think of anything better to describe how much of a sensory experience it was. The smells changed around every corner: curry, oranges, cinnamon, spice, donkeys, freshly tanned leather, musk, cooked lamb and chicken, bread... I can't even name a quarter of the things my nose took in. We saw cobras in and out of baskets in the central square, we saw monkeys on shoulders, countless women selling henna and macaroons, vendor after vendor selling dried fruits and candied nuts; we saw donkeys pulling carts, men of all kinds of bicycles, dark narrow alleyways so low we had to stoop to walk through them. We heard the music of the snake charmers, dozens of languages, the orange-juice vendors yelling to get a potential customer's attention, owners of restaurants and cafes shouting everything from "Ciao, Tourist!" to quotes from the Borat movie. I could go on and on, but I won't. You get the picture.

Alrighty, well, here ends the chronicles of Spring Break.

Finito.

So Gilli and I hopped back on our favorite 6-hour bus, this time overnight, from Granada to Madrid. Abbie met us in the airport [the reunion included the running through the airport/hugging thing, don't worry], and we flew over the Straight of Gibraltar to Tangier. Welcome to Morocco, and please don't mind the nice men with the guns posted every 50 feet or so along the airport's perimeter. Enjoy your stay! I personally don't really like nice men with guns, so seeing them in the bushes as we landed was a bit of a unpleasant surprise. In Tangier, we knew we needed to get to the train station to take our overnight train to Marrakech, but we had no idea how to do so and the strain station was clearly not in the teeny-tiny airport, so we went to the information desk [which was literally a small Ikea-like desk in a corner] to get some information. Well, no one was there. Actually, no one was there either time we were in that airport. After waiting 40 minutes or so we were getting a little impatient, so Gilli and I went to try to ask one of the nice men with guns what we should do. Except that in Tangier, everyone speaks French. French and Arabic. Seeing as none of the three of us could speak more than 5 words in French, Gilli and I found the most English-speaking officer and with hand gestures and sound effects ["Choo choo!"] he was able to tell us we needed to take a taxi to the train station. Well, we didn't see any taxis, so we asked, and were told to go to a corner of the parking lot. Still no taxis. Another nice gun-carrying guy showed us the taxis, which were just ordinary cars with no meters. We had to arrange a price before we got in. Finally, after we do all this and as we're driving out of the parking lot, we're stopped by, who else? - another nice man with a gun. Who said we couldn't exit. We had no idea what was going on, but we sat in the taxi in the parking lot for another 30 minutes or so, eating Abbie's corn nuts and occasionally dozing off. When we were finally on our way, our taxi driver asked us something about California, so we said yes, we are from California. This happened twice. Eventually he pulls over in a residential neighborhood and announces, "California!" We were confused. Well, what are the odds that somehow he totally missed the train station comments and "Choo choos" and took us to the part of or street in Tangier called "California?" Yeah. Well. We were all disgruntled while working out the confusion, but he took us to the train station and didn't ask for more money than we agreed on.
We bought our tickets [unfortunately they had no sleeper beds left, we had to buy seats], walked around a tiny part of Tangier, ate, and found our way to the beach around dusk, where we received stares as we ran out to touch the sea. We walked back and waited in the center of the train station, showing each other magic tricks and playing card games and attracting everyone's attention until it was time to go.
We separated: Abbie and I bought First Class tickets but Gilli wanted to save some money so she bought a Second Class ticket. Abbie and I were in a little room with 6 seats and 3 other people. Two were Welsh guys our age who were hitchhiking their way from Wales to Marrakech, and the other was a girl our age from Casablanca.
To make a long story very short, our train broke down. In the middle of east-Jesus nowhere. In Africa.
Basically we woke up, fell back asleep, and woke up a few hours later only to realize that we hadn't moved. Then we were told to grab all our bags and exit the train. It was early morning and very cold as several hundred of us waited outside this tiny janky train station thingy quite literally near nothing except fields and open flatlands. We had no idea what was going on because we didn't understand Arabic, but we weren't the only ones: when a whistle was blown some people started getting back on the train but were screamed at until they figured out that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing. The next train ended up picking us up god knows how long later, and we were all squeezed in with the passengers already aboard the train. Luckily, we weren't too far, and we were all glad as hell to roll into the Marrakech station not too long after.
After our first toiletpaperless-hole-in-the-ground potty experience, we drove us into Medina, the old city, where we were staying. After some more complications we found our hostel, paid, and were led through a maze of alleyways to our our rooms, where we waited for an exhausted and scarred Mike who had arrived the night before. Then it was lunchtime.

Let me tell you, I had to take down that other post about the open-air market near by house, because after being in that central square in Marrakech, it just didn't even seem worth reading about...