A happy, bright café in Frankfurt, 8:00am. Jen haggardly sits with her huge backpack on the chair next to her as she somehow manages to stick food in her face. Quite the miracle considering she hasn’t seen a bed for two days. Enter New Zealander stage right, walking to the bathroom. Looks at the tired girl, keeps going. Sees the backpack, does a double take, looks back at worn-down girl and puts two and two together. Light bulb effects as desired.
New Zealander: You’re a traveler!
Jen: (English! What is this foreign language?)Yes?
New Zealander: (still too excited to be allowed before 10am) Where are you from?!
Jen: California. And you?
New Zealander: New Zealand! When I come back out we should chat! I’m just heading back home today and I’ve got the whole day free. Okay wait, I’ll be out in a second.
Jen, still trying to process the exuberant jumble, stares in mild distress at the empty plate where her pastry used to be. A couple of minutes later the man joins her at the table. Insert small chat about Ireland, New Zealand, and weddings.
Jen: Alright, I gotta get going. I have a train to catch and need a few minutes to feel better about life. (change clothes, wash face…)
New Zealander, looking exuberant yet again, pulls a mysterious box out of his bag: This should help! You might appreciate it.
Jen opens the box cautiously to find, of all things, a miniature toothbrush set. After two nights of next to no sleep, she almost cries at the kindness of it.
New Zealander: Take care, sweetheart. And try and get some sleep!
Exeunt cheerful man and Jen from happy café to rainy streets.

Saturday morning I was so nervous to start my travels I could barely eat. It would be my first solo trip and I would be going waaay out of my comfort zone. Yet from the very beginning, God’s been taking care of me. There’s nothing else it could be. Every single step of the way I’ve been taken care of or found a friend when I needed it and it’s been a wonderful start to an adventure. Saturday afternoon I showed up at my hostel in Nerja (beach town) to find a guy in the room eating an entire carton of ice cream with a knife as a spoon (don’t judge, you would too if you were desperate). We got to talking and Sun and I were off to the beach twenty minutes later with two cartons of strawberries and one bottle of whipped cream. We talked for hours just hanging out and exploring the city, I got to hear all about his background in South Korea while introducing him to the wonder that is strawberries and cream. And Poptarts, haha. Ya, that didn’t go over quite as well. “It’s so…processed and…dry,” he tried to say politely.

After Nerja, my friends and I met up and headed to Morocco. You know, nothing big.
It’s not like it’s AFRICA or anything. We got off the plane and were immediately hit with the pure chaos that is Marrakech. Let’s just say that cab rides are better with your eyes closed because there are no street lanes, no stop lights, and no rules. The labyrinth markets are pretty much the same, it’s impossible to walk three feet without someone yelling at you to come to their shop. It was fun to get used to the elasticity of everything, bartering for prices on everything to buses coming whenever they felt like it. We got royally ripped off at almost every opportunity, but there wasn’t much to be done about it considering we were so obviously foreigners.
The time slipped by in a whirl with all we were doing exploring, eating, seeing baby camels (“no Jen, that’s a sheep”), talking, meeting people, getting henna, hiking in the Atlas mountains, swimming in a waterfall, and going to the bath houses. A word about Hammams. Jamie and I thought it would be fun to go to an Arab bath and it’d be nice to relax a bit. The first place we went to turned out to be only for men at the time we were there and instead of waiting around or looking for another obviously set for tourists place, decided to go the “authentic route” with a hammam less than two minutes from our hostel. Ha. Twenty minutes later we found ourselves sitting on rubber mats getting the scrub downs of our lives by topless, Arab-speaking Moroccan women. I’ve done a lot of sketch things in my life, especially while travelling, but this has to rank among the top three. Costing only 20 dirham (2 euro) Jamie and I had to have shower time after the hammam to wash off who knows what we picked up in there. There are some things that at the end of you look at your friend and there’s that instant recognition of “that was epic!” and knowledge that you’ve reached a new level of friendship. After breaking into a castle together, sneaking a baked potato illegally into England, making a horror film in abandoned caves, and sitting next to each other through naked scrub downs, it’s easy to say we’ve gotten close. Boy, am I going to miss that girl.

Tired, full of couscous(I think that translates to chickpeas), a couple of bad hennas, and fourteen bug bites later I caught my plane out a happy camper but glad to be back in Europe. Morocco was an interesting cultural study, to get out of the Western realm. Traveling has made me aware of just how objectified women are, not just in America but all over the world. USA is better than anywhere else actually in terms of equality. I realized that if I were a Moroccan woman, I would lose the three things I hold most dear to me: my religion, freedom, and independence. They have little role outside of the home and the genders do not mix at all outside of the familial unit. Western women, far from being ‘mothers’, are sexualized in ways I wasn’t even aware of. Take a look at the way women walk in different cultures. Moroccans do not draw much attention to themselves while I was told that even I have the American “swagger.” To be confined by my gender and restricted in any way because my role in the home, I don’t know how they do it. Arranged marriages, berkas, the whole bit. It might be the American in me speaking but they’re strong to be able to endure all of that without rebelling against the system.

With a little help from some beautiful, professional-runners-that-were-in-the-Olympics, Italian men in sneaking my stuff across the Ryanair baggage limitations, a four hour delay hanging out with my new, gorgeous friends, a night in the airport later, and here I am, on a train to Switzerland. I’m not nervous anymore about what’s ahead because I learned to have faith a long time ago and have learned to trust God again to take care of me on my adventures. The only problem now is how I plan on feeding this travel addiction for the rest of my life.
Hope your finals all went well and that you’re having luck getting everything all pack up!

Au revoir

p.s. I got an offer of 1,000 camels as a marriage proposal. Should I go for it?