Lisboa!

The thing about going to a city when it rains all weekend is that it's much more difficult to get an idea of what the city is really like. You're not quite into exploring because, face it, you're going to be soaked at the end of it, like it or not. But we did get to see a decent amount of Lisboa while we were getting soaked. Downtown Lisboa is a combination of tall business-age buildings as well as older, more traditional and colorful buildings that remind me of the decor in Córdoba.

After dropping our things at the hotel in downtown Lisboa, we were bussed off to a giant plaza where the old royal palace used to stand. Unfortunately, as Portugal is basically the California of the Iberian Peninsula, there was a giant earthquake some years ago, which destroyed about 90% of the structures in the city. Rather than rebuild the city how it once was, the reigning monarch took this as an opportunity to re-do the layout of Lisboa into a more urban one. So the rubble was taken out of the plaza, and it's now a center of commerce which includes a wine-tasting room on one end and the Museo de Cerveza(Museum of Beer) on the other. Oh, Lisboa. But there's a large arch/gate where the palace used to stand, as a smaller tribute to the old palace. In front of this is a trolley stop–they have cable cars just like in San Francisco. The similarities just keep coming.

Unfortunately though, we opted to walk up the giant hill to our next destination, rather than find a way to cram roughly 60 students onto foreign public transportation. Maybe a better plan, but it definitely showed me that I really need to get back into working out…

Anyway, at the top of this giant hill was the Castillo de San Jorge. This was basically a giant compound of large buildings and things we could explore for a while, and get some photos of the amazing views. I believe this was once a defensive structure of some kind, given that it was at the highest point in the city and included very large stone walls.

After we were done climbing all over the castle, they set us loose for dinner. My friends and I managed to find this very typical Portuguese restaurant in a neighborhood called Barrio Alto, known for their restaurants. We lucked out, and had some of the best seafood we'd ever tried. I opted for salmon (always a safer option for me), but my friend got the regional delicacy–bacalao (codfish), which really wasnot bad at all. And my salmon was die-and-go-to-heaven good. We also tried vino verde (green wine), something else Portugal is known for. Finally, the restaurant had a singing show during the dinner, in a very traditional Portuguese style called fado. 

The next day we woke bright & early to go to Monasterio de los Jerónimos, a very famous monastery in the city, as well as the Torre de Belém.

The monastery was kind of cool because it had some fun details. For the most part, it was your standard catholic church–pillars, stone, altar, stained glass, cross-shaped layout… et cetera (The magic of the cathedral may be wearing off on me, which is actually really sad…).

But there were a handful of tombs in there. Some of them were for deceased kings and queens, but had stone elephants supporting the stone caskets, as opposed to the usual lions or just square bases. Apparently the elephant supports are one-of-a-kind in the world, but I didn't get a picture of them (sorry team!).

There was also a tomb of a famous writer as well as a famous explorer upon entry to the church. The explorer's tomb was decorated with the engraving of a ship, for obvious reasons.

Also, there were a few design details that were added to the church that I found interesting. A lot of the detailing on columns or arches consisted of a cable/rope design, borrowed from ships, as exploration was a big deal during the time the church was being constructed. Also, the "veins" on the support columns spread out when they hit the roof, partially because that helps distribute the weight of the stone in the roof, but also to make them look like palm trees. When you lack palm trees in your own country (those hadn't come over the ocean yet), make them out of stone!

Next, we wandered in the pouring rain to the edge of the river, to see the Torre de Belém. Belém essentially translates to "Bethlehem", and is the name of a suburb of Lisboa. This tower is part of an olden-days defensive system, and once had a partner across the river, so ships would have to move through this pinch-point on the river before they could reach the port of Lisboa.

Also, from the tower you can see another San Francisco imitation–the fake Golden Gate bridge. It was built by the same steel company that contributed to San Francisco, and is the same color. And like San Francisco, if the weather decides to literally rain on your parade, you will not get any good photos of it. So here's a photo I stole from my friend's Facebook, since it apparently didn't rain when she went a week ago. (Thanks Lauren!)

The rest of the day after these tours was free time. My friends and I went to a sushi place where I a) actually ate sushi and b) ACTUALLY LIKED IT. Which is new, in case you haven't been around my picky eating habits lately. I have a feeling part of it is that we were on the coast, and therefore I assume seafood will generally always be better than it is in Colorado (landlocked state problems). But we had a great meal where we just stuffed ourselves, because it was an all-you-can-eat deal. Why would any college student not take advantage?? The only thing was that this was the first time I've actually experienced a language barrier problem–we had an issue with our order, and our waiter didn't speak English or Spanish. I'm assuming here, but I think most of the waiters and waitresses were Asian natives who had immigrated to Portugal. Basically, picture an employee whose second language is English (in the USA), trying to speak Spanish or French to a customer. It was almost a big mess, but the table next to us saw our problem and offered their translation services since they spoke a little English–thank goodness!

We also took a taxi to Starbucks. Because we don't have overpriced, over commercialized coffee shops in Salamanca. And it was right by a plaza of town where we could do some souvenir shopping and explore the city a little bit, even in the rain.

Mmmmm Starbucks

Lisboa in the rain

Sunday, we woke up bright and early again to get back on the bus. We made two stops at some little towns on our way home, the first of which was in a town called Óbidos. The main attraction of Óbidos is that it has a giant wall–which of course we climbed. If there is a tower to be climbed and my friends Adrianna & Mila are in the group, we will absolutely be climbing it!

Óbidos

Town cemetery from above

We also got to experience something called gingja, which is an itty bitty amount of cherry liquor inside a chocolate cup. It was like a chocolate-covered cherry, but about six times better and not so overly sugary! 

Batalha has Convento de Santa María da Vitória, a church built as a tribute to Santa María after the Portuguese won an important battle against the Spanish army. Once again–stone, columns, etc. Architecture was pretty standard.

However, there were a few extras. One was a white-marble room for more graves of Portuguese monarchs (these were from around the time of Ferdinand & Isabel in Spain I believe, while the elephant-supported tombs in Lisboa are from a dynasty a few hundred years earlier).

The other was a monastery garden which houses the Portuguese Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This tomb is not as grandiose as the USA Tomb, but it is a little more interesting when it comes to design. The headstone is more detailed with carvings of saints, and is capped by a lamp which is kept lit with olive oil. The changing of the guard, however, is much simpler than the USA's version.

Oh, and we found a fountain with fishes in it. These fishes are troopers, because that water was cold too!

And that, my friends is my trip to Lisboa! We passed the rest of the bus time with some movies that were put on the movie screens, and some riddles from an app I downloaded after we got very bored on the way to Lisboa.

So here's a riddle, in case you're bored.

With thieves I consortWith the vilest, in short.I'm quite at ease in depravityYet all divines use meAnd savants can't lose me,For I am the center of gravity

Maybe I'll just start adding riddles to my blog posts.

Thanksgiving!

So here's the scoop on how I passed my foreign Thansgiving. My program (ISA) knows that all of their 80 American students are probably a little homesick, so they prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for us. We dressed up, they made turkey, we had a lovely time. The food wasn't exactly like home, but they tried really hard. For example, mashed potatoes were not really mashed… it was more like a puree. Zero lumps sir. But hey, they were potatoes! And watching both our fellow students and our ISA directors figuring out how to carve a turkey was pretty funny at times. No one lost a finger, that's why I can say it was funny. But if I couldn't be with my family, being with my Fall 3 family was a pretty decent alternative! Here's a photo of most of the people I've spent my last couple months hanging out with!!

(PS–7 of these people are from Colorado, and 5 of them go to DU. That's why when I tell people I'm from Denver, they usually respond, "Oh, another one!")

This Year I'm Thankful...

(Warning: Cheesiness abound in this post)

This Year I'm Thankful...

My mommy and daddy love me enough to let me run away to Europe for a semester.

I have the type of friends who send me silly cat photos and
travel budget postcards because they miss me too.

My boyfriend is the kind of guy to help me with my fantasy football lineup
even though I haven’t been there to watch a single game with him this season.

My brother is a super smart engineering nerd and seems to be kicking butt at it.

My host mom is an awesome cook & my host brother corrects my Spanish.

I got to visit two different continents in the last month
(but also thankful I don’t live in the Sahara...).

I have new friends I made an ocean away from home
but will hopefully keep when I go back.

But mostly, I am thankful I am taking a picture of this outside one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen in one of the most amazing cities I will probably ever live in. And I am so thankful to everyone who helped me even the littlest bit to get here! So, that is to say pretty much everyone who reads this. Thank you to everyone! Even though I don’t get a “real” Thanksgiving here, that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you all and how happy and lucky I am to have every single one of you!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Social Struggle Bus

So here's the way my day went. I woke up, ate breakfast, then got back under the covers to read Bossypants on my iPod. When María knocked on my door to tell me she was leaving, we had a conversation about me being back in bed, in which I decided it was easier to let her think I was napping than to explain I was reading a novel on a 3-inch touchscreen.

Anyway, I finally got productive and went to class, came back fro lunch, and looked up hostels in Rome & Madrid & Salamanca for future voyages & visits (more on that later).

At 6, I had to go to a rescheduled musicology class, which began a series of events that put me into a slightly unnecessary fight-or-flight-or-panic mode.

1. I didn't know which classroom we were meeting in. I made it to the right floor, then stood around like an idiot until I ran into some other kids who were like, "It's room 24, right?" I have no idea. I'm following you guys.
2. I was having a harder-than-normal time picking up the pre-class chatter. Usually, I get an idea of the conversation (even if it's not a good enough idea to participate in the conversation), but not today.
3. Several of my classmates had photocopies of papers I'd never seen before, leading me to believe I'd once again missed the memo on something I had to get printed to prepare for class.

At this point, my homesick, frustrated, stressed brain went int panic mode, and decided my desire to avoid yet another class where I felt lost, unprepared and alone was so strong, it was time to bail. (Mom & Dad, I know that's not what you want to hear, but sometimes at the age of 20, you have to bail on things for stupid reasons. No one died or got arrested. Or skipped class in the end.)

I almost got away with it, except I decided to take the front stairs instead of the back ones. And as I started up the stairs, I saw one of my almost-friend classmates coming down them (We bonded two days ago over the fact that we can both pop our knuckles loudly and the fact that my ability to pop my thumb out totally freaks him out. I'm not sure if our professor didn't hear us laughing or just ignored it because I was finally doing something other than sitting there like a terrified deer in the headlights). This put me into panic mode again.So there I am, taking the stairs 2 at a time with my head down, but halfway up I hear, "Hey man, where you going?" in a Spanish accent. Now tell me, is there any possible way you could ignore that and just keep going? The answer is no, because it was just too awesome to hear out of nowhere from a native Spanish-speaker.

So my knuckle-cracking friend, two other friends from class, and I had a weird bilingual conversation on the stairs where I gave them my silly panic-mode reasons and they basically shut them down.

"I don't have the copies"
"But the printer is downstairs…"
"Well, yeah. I'm already late."
"So are we."
"I don't have the copies!"
"You can look at ours! Come on!"

And that was that. Class was not the torturous disaster I was apparently expecting (Panic-Mode Corinne is beyond overly pessimistic). I wasn't prepared. I was definitely lost part of the time, but no more than usual. But I survived. And I swear my life had one of those movie moments, one that belongs in a new-kid-in-school movie where the tortured protagonist finally has a table to sit at during lunch.

Cheesiness aside, turns out going to class was a good plan. Because I finally actually participated in class too! Mostly because we were talking about the silly way of calculating when Easter or the festival of Corpus Cristi was… or something… and my professor brought up the American presidential elections. Because (in case you didn't know) those are held the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. So it can't be November 1. So I got to explain that to the class, and show them I'm not a complete moron, I just don't know how to answer music questions.

So I'm not sure if anyone but myself finds this interesting (I hope you at least enjoyed that my friend knows enough English to feel comfortable saying, "Hey man, where you going??" because I found it to be hilarious), but this is the highlight of my week so far. Although I am going to Karaoke tonight. And we have a Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. And I go to Lisboa on Friday. So there are more interesting posts coming. I just really felt like writing about my social struggles and why they sucked a little less at the end of today!

Spain, You Are Silly

November 14: Giant country-wide strike.

November 15: Giant party on my street, courtesy of the students of the biology department, which included costumes, whistles, some kind of cheers, blocking traffic, and keeping María from taking her siesta. It does not make María happy when she can't take her siesta.

Moroccan Plague & Huelga General

So the majority of this week was taken up by what my American friends and I have been referring to as the "Moroccan Plague" due to the fact that every single person who went to Morocco felt pretty bad this week. Maybe it was the desert food, or the salad that I accidentally ate (yeah, probably the salad), but my digestive system is all kinds of messed up. I came home from class on Monday and basically ate half my lunch before collapsing into bed for a long nap. At this point, María started feeding me water with lemon juice and salt. Every time she gave it to me, she would make sure to say that I should just sip it, not drink it all at once. Pretty sure I couldn't drink almost a liter of lemon/salt water all at once even if I tried… 

And so many other people were sick that our program director finally sent out an email with advice she'd gotten from the doctor, because she took 5 people this week, apparently. So I went to the pharmacy and bought something called Sueroral, which is basically a powdered drink. You mix a packet with a liter of water and drink it over 24 hours. It smells like orange gatorade or something–pretty good. It's very deceiving. It does not taste good. At all. It's much worse than lemon/salt water. I'm about 20 hours in and just a little over halfway through my bottle.

I mean, look how pretty and orange it looks! But I woke up this morning feeling a lot better, and the thought of food doesn't make me feel sick anymore, so I'm going to call that a plus. Especially since María fed us salmon for lunch, and I absolutely love salmon.

In other news, I got better just in time for the Huelga General, aka the big strike. Very little has changed in my day, besides some classes being cancelled. There are giant stickers on every flat surface advertising the strike, but I only saw a small group of protesters in the morning, who were almost outnumbered by the number of shop owners scraping the stickers off their windows.

 Also, some shops are closed, such as Mandala. But I'd say it's only half the shops at most.

Good news–you can still buy an iPhone on strike day.

According to the news, it's a lot bigger in big cities like Madrid and Barcelona. In Salamanca, however, daily life was about the same. There was what I would call a protest march later at night, after I got out of my only class of the day, and I had to go through the Plaza Mayor where they'd initially met, and then cross another street on my way home where they were marching. It was mostly a lot of flags and whistles in the plaza and people going on a giant walk together on the street, nothing too crazy.

Morocco: The Missing Entry

So I'm apparently in trouble with the blogging gods, since I definitely wrote and thought I posted an entire entry about being in the Sahara desert… but that's nowhere to be found. Apologies to those of you who were on the edge of your seats waiting for that one (you know you were).

In any case, we left off at the end of our long day in the Medina of Fes. This long day was followed by another several hours of bus travel south, to the Sahara desert. We stopped for lunch at a place they kept calling the Oasis Café for lunch of the standard fare–veggies, chicken & couscous. With clementines for dessert.

Oh yeah, and my sorority sister Charlotte and I found donkeys.

After lunch, kids from nearby (I assume) basically stalked us back to the buses, trying to sell us camels they wove out of palm leaves. The kids were cute–but there's no way I would get a camel made out of plants home in one piece. No way.

This woman was also doing laundry outside the complex where we ate lunch.

So we got back on the bus, and finally arrived in Erfoud, where we were leaving the buses for the next two days, and piled into jeeps to take us out to the camp in the desert. Also, these guys drive like maniacs. It was awesome.

We stopped for a few minutes (when you're in Morocco, "ten minutes" usually means at least a half hour) to look at the stars. You could see the Milky Way, shooting stars, satellites… the works. It was beautiful. I wish my camera was cool enough to pick up the stars, but y'all will just have to deal with my mediocre writing skills.

Then we finally made it to the camp, which consisted of one large white tent big enough to house dinner tables to seat 150+ students, and the jaimas where we kept our things and slept. Basically, it was just rows of beds for dayyyys.

The evening consisted of snacks of mint tea (yum!) and peanuts (double yum!), going to explore the dunes and ending up having conversations with the guys from the local village who hang out at the camp, and a dinner of, you guessed it, the standard fare.

After several long days on the bus with the ISA Madrid students, it was nice to have the chance to split up and get some breathing room. Especially given that the Salamanca group has noticed we care a lot more about learning about other cultures and languages, while the Madrid group has a higher percentage of the kids who are abroad just for fun. When choosing what language to watch a movie in, the phrase "Can we get some 'MERICAN up in here?" was used… and someone asked if there was going to be wifi in the desert. Not anyone's finest hour. But it means I'm a lot closer with the kids from Salamanca, because nothing bonds people like gossip, right?

In any case, after all of that, we were pretty beat, and turned in so we could get up the next morning at 5:30 for the sunrise.

The next morning, dark and early (if it was bright, we would've overslept), my friend Britt and I hiked out to a dune about 15 minutes from camp with one of the two-dozen Berber guides who were outside the camp. We watched the beautiful sunrise, saw the ocean of sand around us change colors, talked to our guide a little bit, and then had to extricate ourselves at the end of it when he tried to sell us some polished fossils. No such thing as a free lunch, especially not in Morocco.

Breakfast was pretty good–hard-boiled eggs, naan with jam (my new favorite thing ever), bread, and peach yogurt. And orange juice.

And then it was camel-riding time!! Which is a bit of a process. What happens is, you get on the camel when it's sitting down. And then the camel gets up, with its back legs first, then its front legs. If you're lucky, you get a quick one who doesn't take long in the transition. If you're not, you get to sit there for several awesome seconds while seated on something that's at what feels like a 60º angle. Iago (that's what I named my camel) was not what I would call the fastest of the bunch. And my hand slipped off one time when he went to sit down, so I almost face-planted in the sand. That's a scar with a good story though, I guess. Luckily though, no scars! Not even a sunburn, despite my pasty-white skin. Thanks for the SPF 45, Mommy!

We rode on the camels out to the "giant dune" as it was being called. Some of the kids from the village followed us there (camels are slow), playing soccer the whole way. When we got there, we gave the camels a rest and climbed the dune ourselves to see the view. On one side, you could see out to the border of Algeria & Morocco. On another, you could see the local villages. On all sides, you could see sand, lots and lots of sand. The kids from the village who came up kept running and doing flips off the ridge side of the dune–crazy little children. They were pretty good too!

After all this, we rode the camels back to the village, I bought another giant bottle of water and drank 2/3 of it within a half hour… I may have been slightly dehydrated. Even Colorado girl conditioning can't quite stand up to the Sahara. We visited another shop (even though most of us were out of money or forgot to bring it…) and then walked home across the hot, hot desert. It was at this point that the phrase, "F– off flies, I have enough problems!" was coined by one of my fellow students who was having a particularly rough go of it (ripped off by vendors, sick from food or something, lost his iPod in the desert after watching the sunrise…). So that became our motto when we were being whiny. We're classy like that.

But once we got back to camp and got some lunch in us, we were much less whiny. And some of the ladies from the village came to do henna! The girl who did mine was named Fatima and she's 14 years old. She speaks English well enough to get customers and have a conversation, and her 6-year-old brother was sitting next to her and started counting to 10 in English while I was sitting there. They were adorable, the pair of them.

The rest of the afternoon was a lot of the girls sitting around chatting while our henna dried, and the boys playing cards. If you ever visit the desert, cards are a necessity. That's my advice.

We ventured out to the dunes and had more conversations with local Berbers while watching the sunset–including one where they were surprised that my 20-year-old friends and I weren't married off yet. Reasons I do not want to live in Morocco. If a woman hits 28 or 30 and is still single, she's pretty much doomed to be the African version of a cat lady.

After dinner, I went out with two of my friends to look at the stars again. We saw about 3 shooting stars within two minutes, and then got to watch the moon rise over the desert. Nothing like it.

The next morning, we got back on the bus, and drove to Meknes, where I took one of the best showers of my life. Even though the tub was a weird color and there was no water pressure. Not having sand in your hair or pants makes everything better. Dinner included french fries and chicken–a welcome change of meal!

The next morning, we left the hotel at 10 AM… and arrived in Madrid at about 6 AM, just in time to hear the official election results from the USA. And then we got on another bus to Salamanca, and I got home at 11 AM. Longest day of my life. After another hot shower and a coffee, I managed to make it through my classes. I learned how to say "Milky Way" in Spanish from talking to one of my classmates about the stars in the desert (Vía Láctea). And then I went home and slept for about 12 hours. Exhausted, but it was such a crazy experience, I'm glad I went.

Saturday Afternoon

Things to do in Salamanca on a rainy(ish) Saturday:

• Get café con leche and a a pastry. Sit on steps, watch the tourists.
• Get cold. Go tourist shopping. Finally get thimbles. And a photo of the famous facade of the Universidad de Salamanca. Watch tourists try to find the "lucky frog" on the facade. 
• Go to the Catedral Nueva because it is a) free and b) warmer. Watch more tourists.
• Realize the brilliant marigolds planted outside the Catedral have been replaced by pansies. Have a mini sorority-girl freakout moment because that's one of Tri-Delta's symbols. Take artsy photos of said pansies.
   
• Try to find headphones. Everything is closed. Happy Saturday.
• Try to use the ISA office bathroom, realize that they're closed too. And the University buildings are closed. Time to go home.
• Finally get a photo of the Plaza Mayor. Take a photo for an adorable passing tourist couple. 
• Find a cool painting/poster for the upcoming general strike on November 14.
   

Morocco: Fes

Our excursion to Morocco began with a 24 hour bus ride to the city of Fes. Granted, this bus ride was broken up by late-night gas station stops, a ferry ride, and more stops the next day for the bathroom and lunch, but it was a long, long, long time to be on a bus. Unfortunately, I have trouble sleeping on moving vehicles, so I slept a whopping three hours between when we left Salamanca at 4 PM and arrived at the ferry station at 7 AM. When we got on the ferry, I'm lucky I didn't just fall asleep before I got my passport stamped. It was a close call.

When we finally got off the ferry and on the road again, I have to admit I was surprised by how green everything was. I mean, it makes sense if you think about it, given that we were on a coast and really not that far from southern Spain, but when you think "Africa" you definitely don't think of green coasts. Or at least I don't.

Anyway, the hotel in Fes was beautiful. We were originally supposed to stay at a 4-star, but that one didn't have enough availability for us (between all the ISA groups, we were about 150 students…) so we got booked at a 5-star instead. Now, they told us roughly a thousand times to keep in mind that the standards for these stars are a little lower in Morocco, but this hotel was super nice.

And the beds were super comfy. So comfy that Megan and I almost slept through dinner, which was supposed to be at 8. We woke up at 9. And Megan doesn't remember the conversation I had with the waiter when we came down for food, that's how zombie-like we still were when we got to the lobby.

On the bright side, being this exhausted meant we got a good night's sleep before we were off bright and early for our short tour around the city of Fes, and then to the Medina, the giant marketplace in the city.

Our first stop was a location where they make pottery, and they showed us what they use for the whole process, from the pile of clay in a corner, 

to the colored tiles they use, 

to the men who chip these colored tiles into tiny pieces that are used in the mosaics around the city,

to the molds that are used when making fountains, and how they set the mosaic, piece-by-piece.

Then we finally entered the Medina for real, just streets of little shopfronts stuffed with bottles and fruits and saran-wrapped bricks of candies. One shop was full of cassette tapes.

We went to a carpet store where they fed us mint tea, showed us a lot of carpets, told us we were the "future of America" and that buying one would be an investment, and then proceeded to haggle the bejeezus out of anyone who decided to buy a carpet. I was one of the students that just took advantage of the free tea and then watched everybody else attempt to haggle with the super-skilled Moroccan salesmen.

Next, we went to a Moroccan pharmacy, where they sold things like spices, oils you could use for perfume, Argan oil which you can pretty much use for anything (bought some), magic headache/allergy medicine (bought some), and magic green lipstick that shows up pink when you put it on (bought some o' that too, I'm SO excited to whip it out when getting ready for something with other girls, just to see their reactions), kohl eyeliner, tea, and so on. Definitely my favorite place we went.

After all this, we went to lunch, where the food was the usual fare of the realm–cooked veggies (carrots, zuchinni, potatoes) and chicken, with couscous. And bread.

And Arabic Coca-Cola that my friend ordered. That too.

Next, we visited a tannery. As in, we literally saw the whole process. Not in great detail, given the horrible smell from things like dead animals and pigeon excrement (the white bins, the chemicals are used to condition and soften the skin), but I have now seen where your leather jacket came from. It's not pretty.

And last, but not least, in the Medina, we went to a scarves/clothing shop. They have people hand-weaving the scarves, which are super long so you can tie them into a turban. Which I totally learned how to do.

And my friend Samantha tried on one of the traditional dresses.

Then we were finally done with the Medina. After a break at the hotel and dinner, we went to the final activity of the day, which was referred to as an "authentic show" on our itinerary. This involved bellydancing, drums, audience participation, and a short magic show even (the bird appeared out of nowhere, it was nuts).