Florence to Chefchaouen - With Pictures!!

As promised in my last entry, here's a nice long entry with pictures from the past few days - I can't believe Christmas was only 3 days ago!!

Christmas morning would not have been complete without getting in a fight about being late to church. Trevor: "Well, how did you THINK you were going to wake me?? By LOOKING AT ME??" It was fun to walk to church through the empty streets of Florence - this was our view approaching the Duomo:

Mass was beautiful and involved a lot of chanting. Our Mass was said by the archbishop of Florence - with the assistance of about 20 other priests. I told Mom afterwards that I finally understand why there's so much great artwork on the domes/ceilings of churches - so that you can zone out and look at the pictures while pretending to be looking piously heavenward.

After church, we went out for Christmas dinner - we were excited to FIND the restaurant, and it was OPEN! A big win! They didn't have an English menu, so we pointed arbitrarily at things on the menu which contained one or two words we recognized. We also got some very sweet (and delicious) champagne:

Not knowing exactly what we were ordering meant that when the food arrived, we weren't 100% sure who was supposed to get what. My meal was DELICIOUS but I spent a good portion of it worrying that I had stolen Trevor's Christmas dinner. We consulted the menu again on the way out and determined that we THINK we all had the correct dishes. Regardless, Trevor seemed to enjoy his food:

Here is our reservation card:

After a great dinner, it was time to go down to Rome to catch my flight. I had a bit of an adventure on my way down to Rome. I had put my big backpack in the luggage rack at one end of the car, and I was sitting and reading intermittently. I noticed a woman go by muttering to herself. A few minutes later, she walked back the other direction, still muttering to herself but this time wearing a backpack that had a coat draped completely over it. I caught a glimpse of a buckle hanging down and suddenly thought, "THAT LOOKS LIKE MINE!"

I hurried to the end of the car and sure enough, my backpack was missing from the luggage rack. I went back down to the other end and through another car and found the woman, surrounded by a few backpacks and shopping bags. I pointed to my backpack and said in a loud voice, "That's my backpack!!" She said something to me in Italian and pulled the backpack towards herself. We shouted at each other for a few minutes before a conductor appeared. He talked with her and turned to me and said, "She says it's her backpack." Luckily I was able to prove it was mine by pulling out my (English) travel guide. I grabbed the bag and went back to my seat, where the women around me wanted to know what had happened, especially after the crazy lady came through the car and shouted at me as she went past. A woman sitting near me offered me a cookie as consolation for my troubles. When I went through my bag, the only thing I could find missing was the scarf I had tied on the outside. I am VERY SAD about that scarf - I loved it - but glad that she hadn't had a chance to take anything else.

Somehow, I totally misjudged my airport timing, and was still waiting in the ticket line when they were supposed to close the check-in for my flight to Madrid. LUCKILY, the woman shouted out to see if there was anyone else for Madrid, so I got to cut most of the line to get checked in. Then I went to the wrong gate, so it was amazing that I actually managed to make the flight.

A flight from Rome to Madrid contains A LOT of Italians and Spaniards, so it was actually more like a social event than a flight. Once the seatbelt sign was turned off, the aisle was totally filled with people talking and shouting - gesturing wildly the whole time, of course! It was incredibly loud and there was applause at both takeoff and landing - a general enthusiasm for the whole idea of traveling.

I met up with Scotty in Madrid. No, we don't have Paradise Lost memorized but Scotty has an international data plan on his phone so he was able to Google my clue. My bad luck with restaurants streak carried over from Italy - we attempted to go to TWO restaurants that were closed before randomly stumbling into this one:

It was good but we really had NO idea what we were ordering. I wound up getting some sort of steak and eggs dish, which was pretty delicious.

Yesterday, we spent pretty much the whole day in the Madrid airport. Nothing really significant happened, except that for a while Scotty insisted that I push him around in a luggage cart because he was tired of standing, and it made me think of the time that Trevor forced me into the 4th of July parade with his wheelchair. Needless to say, I am bitter about both of these incidents.

We arrived too late to journey to Chefchaouen, so instead we found a place to stay in Tangiers and then searched out for dinner.

Our meal was quite good! We had all sorts of fish and other deliciousness but this meal has become a bit of a sore point because we got totally ripped off by the restaurateur - he charged us for two of each dish because there were two of us, when we thought we were only ordering one of each. Still, it wasn't THAT expensive but Scotty was cranky about it "on principle" and still hasn't let it go.

We got up this morning and caught the bus to Chefchaouen. It was about a three hour bus ride up into the Rif mountains, and as the turns became increasingly hairpin, I began to wonder if we were close enough to abandon the bus and just walk. But we arrived there safely, if slightly queasy. We wandering through the medina until we found our hotel (slightly assisted). Scott made new friends with his guitar playing skills:

We went out to explore Chefchaouen. A distinctive feature of this town is its pale shade of blue that nearly everything in the medina is painted. They haven't reached consensus on an EXACT shade but anything that could be described as "light blue" is acceptable.

Here is a view from our lunch spot looking up into the mountains:

I got a kefta tangine for lunch, which is a dish I have attempted to make at home and am pleased to report I have gotten mostly right. I shared a tiny little bit of it with a stray cat, who then decided we were her people and curled up and went to sleep on one of the other chairs at our table. I took a picture of her but am restraining myself from posting it because of some recent complaints that the blog has become slightly cat-heavy. She was REALLY CUTE though so I hope everyone knows that they're really missing out.

Here's my food, the white in the middle is egg:

It got dark before we had much time to take pictures of this beautiful town, but there is wi-fi at this hotel so I will be posting again soon!