OGP’s Peer Advisor Explores: Maria’s Travel Videos

Studying abroad is about immersing yourself in your host environment and creating a life in a new city, as well as exploring nearby countries and discovering even more cultures. During her time in Paris, Peer Advisor Maria Giménez Cavallo filmed the best sights when visiting other cities in order to create these short travel videos.

The “OGP’s Peer Advisor Explores: Maria’s Travel Videos” are a monthly series to bring snippets of the foreign experience to Columbia students who may be thinking about studying abroad and are looking for places to visit. Watch Maria’s first videos on:

 

Getting lost and found in the medinas of Morocco

Most of Morocco’s cities are comprised of two parts: the ‘ville nouvelle’ or new town, which was built during colonial times, and the ‘medina khedima’, the old city surrounded by impressive ancient walls that remind you of how the past is still a part of every daily life here. Standing under one of the Bab (door or entrance), you can see the stark contrasts between the new town with its modern restaurants, new buildings and flashy cars and the old part with stalls filled to the ceiling with figs, dates and other dried fruits, shops selling babouches and djellaba’s and butchers chopping up a fresh piece of meat all eager to welcome you inside. The scenery says it all, a walk in the medina is not just an average stroll; it’s a journey filled with colors, smells (both appetizing and unbearable), and familiar and unusual sounds. I can still remember the rush I felt the first time I entered the medina: vendors were yelling out special promotions in Arabic and calling you to come eat at their stall, men on scooters pass by other men on donkeys loaded with fresh mint and vegetables, woodcarvers and basket weavers bent over their wares. Store after store was filled with Traditional Berber jewelry, leather bags, and beautiful carpets. Occasionally, men and women would stop me to ask me where I was from. I can still remember a conversation I had with an older man, who after a short conversation on The Caribbean and Bob Marley thanked me for allowing him to travel. “You don’t understand”, he said.  “Most people here cannot travel for it is very hard to get a visa. Our chance to travel is by speaking to people who come to us, so thank you for finally taking me to the Caribbean!”  Moments before I had conceded that the travel guide was right, I had gotten lost, and I had no idea where I was in this myriad of little streets, alleys and dead ends.  Then another thought crossed my mind.  Perhaps I am not lost, perhaps I had been found.