l, and the 25euros each that he quoted us was definitely the tourist scam price. After failed attempts to bargain, we tried to lose the guy and ask around to other drivers, but he kept intervening and apparently telling the drivers in Berber that we were going with him. We called Blake to see if his unmarked "cab" was legit even though he had a little paper that said tourist license on it "proving" himself. (Still not sure if he was legit, but I wouldnt put it past Morocco). We got in, and were off for Azilal. About 1 hour into the ride and started seeing signs for Azilal I felt a little better- all I could think was that he was gonna drop us off in the middle of nowhere and refuse to return us until we paid 500 euros or something. The driver was actually sweet and only spoke French, so Alex whipped out some incredible French detection and decoded his words. (She doesnt speak French btw). We got to Azilal in 2 hours, instead of 3, and met up with Blake and his friend Isabel at the bus station. We headed for lunch first thing and got my favorite, tagine. (So much better than the "Moroccan food" they had in Granada). Right after we headed to the market to pick up ingredients for dinner because Blake would be cooking at his house tonight. Im a sucker for any type of market- theyre always so cool. It was insane too, all the ingredients (minus what he had in his house cost less than 1$). We took a cab to Blake's site, about 30 min outside of the town. It was beautiful!!! There's a huge lake with bright blue/green water surrounded by mountains. His house is really cute too with its pink walls, a apricot tree out front and quite rustic decor. We all hung out, ate some delicious watermelon, played bananagrams, and then set out for the lake to watch the sun set. The hike = scaling down a nearly vertical dry, pebbly mountain. I slipped, and have a nice battle wound souvineer on my elbow! After drooling over the gorgeous lake, we hiked back up to Blake's house for some mac and cheese and fench-fries, moroccan/mounatin-style, and then slept with the family of lizards that live in the roof.Then, we stopped at a cafe at overlooked the falls for our picnic lunch with the best moroccan bread Ive ever had, fresh dates, and laughing cow cheese (haha its EVERYWHERE). We reached the water below, and crawled out to a rock in the center and chilled with with our feet in the water for over an hour. We hiked back up the mountain, and stopped fo
r another posse of monkeys. These guys were a little tamer, so we hand-fed them peanuts. One stuffed his cheeks so fat, he couldnt fit anymore and started piling up his fits. Those monkeys loved us. We left Ozoud and headed back to Azilal, where Alex and I had to say goodbye to Blake and Isabel and take a 3 hour bus to Marrakech. That turned out to be a 5 hour, terribly miserable bus ride. We arrived in Marrakech at 11:30 pm and make the sketchy walk to the town center instead of getting into sketchy cabs. Dont worry, I had my pepper spray in hand the whole time. We were starving, so it was 1000 times better when we say the smoke and lights from Jemma-Fna! We went to the same stand to eat that we went on our first night in Morocco the last time with Blake, Joe and Brian (fyi there are over hundreds to choose from!). I found my way back to the hostel we stayed at last time, good old Sindi Sud, and luckily the doors were still open at 12:30. We paid 2.5euro and got to sleep on the rooftop terrace with little mats and blankets. The guy asked us if we were in the Peace Corps, cause I guess theyre the only ones what do it/know about it- so we calimed we're "friends of the peace corps" haha. It was a surreal ending to a wonderful day. It was a good night's sleep until the call of prayer from the mosque woke us up at dawn.
Thursday 
If it wasn't cool enough to fall asleep on the terrace, waking up realizing I was on the rooftops in Marrakech was pretty cool. We started our day shopping in the market for a few souvineers I had left to get and lost ourselves for 2 hours in there. Its a freaking black hole- the precursor to the casino, for sure. I restrained myself and only bought myself some sweet cereal bowls. We had a run-in in the tea shop where the man stuffed a bag of black seeds up my nose because he said it cures athsma and hangovers. Luckily, Im still alive. When you walk down the markets, they shout at you in 15 different languages to attract you to their shop. Too many of them know English, so we decided to try talking to each other in Spanish to see what would happen. Sure enough, they all switched to shouting "hola" and instead of the stereotypical things they shout in 
English that they hear from movies, we heard, "Juan?", "Maria?" haha. After we finally escaped the clutches of the market, it was time to be responsable and start studying for my exam the next morning. We went to a rooftop cafe and had avocado smoothie number 2 (yum, even better than the last one)! ...I think we spent over half of our time in Marrakech on the tops of buildings because then we ate lunch up there too. We made some last minute purchases before heading to the airport which included the always difficult task of choosing one OJ stand out of the 25 that line the square and sell the exact same thing for the exact same price. We decided on one guy hard at work, meticulously slicing his oranges. Turned out to be key and he let us take a picture up in his stand and refilled our glasses! Then we got to the airport and were so upset to leave until we realized it would be our last few days in Madrid, and made the blow a little less hard.
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