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.