Those blue buildings are part of a gorgeous town...village in the Atlas Mountains called Chefchaouen.
Many people will just call it the Blue City, and there are many stories for the origin of the blue, but one thing is for sure, this blue is very stunning.
Yes, you can say the first words that come to mind when I think about Chefchaouen is Doors, Cats, and Obviously, the color Blue (blue like Cinderella)
Blue alleyways with charming details on doors and around doorways, arches and entryways.
And even feline friends that greet you at every corner…literally.
There are oodles of cats but not oodllea of poodles or dogs for that matter.
When you walk past the restaurants in the main square, the first left by a place that has a Starbucks lookalike logo has a wonderful shop that has been there since my first visit in 2017. The wind picks up the scents that fill this shop.
If the scents wafting through the air doesn't draw you in, the colors of the soaps and solid perfumes will. My personal favorite is a dark forest green solid perfume and yellow soap but I already forget what it's called. It's very citrusy and clean.
Go on in and take a huge whiff of everything!
Chefchaouen will call to all your senses and my only suggestion is to take it all in slowly as there is so much to take from such a small town in the Atlas Mountains.
Just look at the vibrant reds against the white sands. Over time, erosion from wind and water carves into the valley and leaves behind breath taking pillars of sand. When the wind hit's certain loose areas in the sand, it looks like waterfalls of white and red.
This structure is nicknamed Fairy Stream but I can see why they chose the name. Just look at the stunning colors of the sand behind that cerulean blue back drop. Walking through this valley was something that one would expect to see in the movies or could picture in books.
Mui Ne is home to these beautiful sand dunes and is normally a tourist trap, but we visited during Tet or the Lunar New Year for Viet Nam. What would have been a very busy place to travel, was quite deserted because many locals go back to their home towns to celebrate Tet with their family.
The best thing about Mui Ne is the Dune COWS! They are just a grazin' and a dunin' (yes, I made up my own verb for cows chillin' like villain on the dunes).
I mean, just look at that face! Who wouldn't love a dune cow?
Just a half hour away, there are pure white dunes with fine white sand that you'd imagine only in the middle east or some place similar.
So, I have a funny story...our driver took out to these dunes and while he was waiting for us, he rode the local tour agent's RTV around. We got back and waited for him to come back but it took almost an hour. When he finally came back, there was a huge commotion because apparently he broke their shit and they weren't too happy. We hightailed it out of there but the guy was nervous and looked over his shoulder during the whole drive. When he dropped us off at the fishing village, he went to trade in his car for another less recognizable model.
The sand was great to see but walking through these fields of flowering trees were breathtaking!
Another 15 minute drive and you can see the red sand dunes, just as fine but only red and slightly courser sand. The wind picks up the sand and creates wave designs upon the dunes itself.
I come from a place that has red sand but not this fine. It's amazing to see the geography of these areas and compared them to one another.
A bit of a warning though, you will get accosted by kids or at the red sand dunes and there are stories out there about how the kids will offer to hold your shit, to which you answer, "Hell, No!" but you can also rent one of their flexible plastic sheets to go sledding in and as long as you take your shit and or have a friend watch it, it's fun it go 'DUNING' on the sand dunes.
So I just watched Cinderella and I liked it. It was much better than Disney's revival of their classic tale of Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent (sorely disappointed!).
I think it's smart of Disney to introduce a new generation of girls to their 'Princess' collection, but revamping it to live action. And LOTS of BLUE (I'll get to that later).
I wasn't sorely disappointed by the cast, that was for sure:
Lily James...I don't know who she is but all I can think of is Harry Potter
Cate Blanchett
I couldn't keep my eyes off of her! She's a great actress, yes, but I feel like the person doing the costumes for this movie was all 'princessed' and 'princed' out that they just had a field day with making her costumes because she was absolutely stunning! If I didn't like Disney, I'd just go to watch this movie just for the costumes.
The costumes are gorgeous!
Is it sad that I find the evil stepmother more charismatic and beautiful than Ella? ...Nah!
Another favorite actress, Helena Bonham Carter
Definitely a nice transformation from her usual dark look she's been associated with as of late.
This girl from Downton Abbey, Sofia McShera and this girl from I don't know what:
Holliday Grainger! That's her name!
The cast of Game of Thrones!
This guy... Nonso Anozie who played Xaro Xhoan Daxos
And Robb Stark! Holy $#*%! (Not because he's good lookin' but last time we saw him, he was a King and...well, you know what happened! If you don't, <--- Click that link and find out if you really want to know - 3:30 GoT SPOILERS for Season 3)
Anyhoo, enough about the cast and back to the movie! I liked it and it was cute and cheesy and corny like most Disney films but it pretty good and they kept a lot of elements from the cartoon that I thought were rather charming. In fact, I feel like there was an amalgamation of Disney's 1950's as well as Drew Barrymore's Flower Production adaptation, Ever After: A Cinderella Story and a tiny bit of Ella Enchanted directed by Tom O'Haver.
Three things - other than it being a very cute movie - stuck out in my mind. I felt that Ella just couldn't get over how pretty she became during the transformation! Ella kept on twirling and marveling at all the finery - granted, if I were here and knew it wasn't a drug trip, I'd probably do the same thing - not once, not twice, but all the time! Maybe she was just doing her best impersonation of being a snooty princess by checking herself out all the time but it was very distracting. When Ella was dancing with Prince Kit, I couldn't help but notice that she would slip into the doting princess that would swoon around the Prince, and if I was mistaken, I think the Prince noticed her more because she wasn't one of those girls.
Enough about her, now let's talk color the BLUE (brought you by Sesame Street)
There was definitely an overall color scheme in this movie and though the stepmother's GREEN colors stood out a lot - she was green with envy - BLUE was in your FACE!
ALL BLUE!
I'll talk more about this in my next post but I feel like my eyes are not accustomed either to whatever blue they used or if they digitally enhanced that color, man does it not look natural!
Just sayin'.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the third recurring thought in my mind, especially at the end when they got married (Whoops! Spoiler! As if you didn't know how Cinderella ended and if you did, Thank GOD you came out from whatever rock you lived under!) I couldn't help but think that someone was going to ambush the castle and kill them all.
I recently read an article about the existence or evolution of the color blue and I think after watching Disney's 2015 version of Cinderella... I GET it! The article is called No One Could See the Color Blue Until Modern Times and it basically states that blue is not found in nature - rarely in humans and engineered by us in flowers - and everything was either a shade of green and the oceans were described as being wine colored in ancient Greek literature. Blue wasn't even a color until someone made it up and started to refer to things as 'blue' in modern times. Historically, the most identified colors were Red, then Yellow, and then Green yet no Blue. In fact, the only ancient culture that had an identified name for the color blue was in Ancient Egypt as it was a dye they made. Hmm...so I didn't know what a color is and I wanted to make up one, I should just start calling it some random thing until it catches. Sound good to me. But really, one way I can describe this phenomenon is by having a pack of crayons. When I was a kid, I remember I had a 12 pack of crayons and they came with all your standard colors. When I was in 2nd grade, it seemed that they had developed a new pack of 24 and then 36. Before the 24 and 36 pack came out, you only described colors with your basic, red, yellow, green, and yes, blue. But when those other colors came out, there were colors like red-orange or blue-green (I was so fascinated with the two color combos as a kid - especially b/g) or even hot pink in the new 36 pack. Yeah, wow, neon colors were the shit back in the day! All the boys and girls fought for the Hot Pink colored crayon because it was just so different!
Actually, these aren't the original 8. Most are in here but you get the point.
Think about. When you were used to drab, matte colors, you only knew and used it and didn't think much of it.
In fact, you knew these colors very well. Then Crayola threw a wrench in your system by introducing the 24 pack, the 36 pack and then the 64 pack of colors!
Ooooooh ~!
Man, what were you going to do with all these color?! Why, your world has now been broadened but so much more, now! Oh! And there's a Crayon Sharpener!!! (Oh, the things the 3rd grade me found fascinating)
No more just peeling back the crayon or sharpening it by scratching it on a piece of paper to a nice point or under the roof of your desk (BTW, I never did that when I had no paper...maybe).
Broken crayon tip? Pssh! You have evolved and now have the tools to efficiently sharpen and color like a fiend!
After getting that 64 pack of crayons in 3rd grade, you just had so many options to work with! When you asked your friend for that Forrest Green Crayon because it was just slightly darker than drab old green and you've upgraded, you knew your prospective had changed. Now, you can recognize or at least put a crayola name on shades and tints besides your basic 8 colors to everyday items and your color pallet has grown!
Then the mother load came out in 3rd grade...the coveted 96 Box of Crayola Crayons and whoever had that box was your bestest friend EVER!
I never got one because my dad was way too practical to have been a kid once and was one of those old dudes that would say, "When I was a kid, we didn't have [Insert shiny noun]! We made our own by hand!"
Needless to say, I was definitely buddying up with attention hungry kids that were fortunate enough not to have parents that spoke about their depraved childhood and wanted to share that experience with you - me. jk.
The coveted Holy Grail of all Crayon Boxes!
Holy Shit! 96 Colors?! I could barely count that high, let alone name that many colors. And, oh! The things we can color with it! My mind was officially blown. Boom.
Apparently so were Crayola's because - and I didn't realize it at the time - the new colors were such a hit! They came out with bigger packs with more exotic colors! Crayola banked on us greedy little color hungry kids that based our popularity on the number of crayons, the variety and if you sat next to the cool kids with those crayons! Crayola had such a demand for more crayons and colors that they probably got smart and used the consumer to help with the naming of all these exotic color.
I forget how many colors but when this box first came out, there were the mystery unnamed crayons. Crayola then ran a contest, "Name the New Colors", to enlist kids to name their new crayon colors introduced in the box - but really...we knew the parents were the ones naming them because who doesn't like free shit for their kids!
Well, now, thanks to that 96 color box, we have things like Macroni n' Cheese orange (which is kinda gross if you think about how bright that orange is for cheese), Watermelon and other stuff like that to broaden our young minds. Below is an example of a child's favorite dish.
But this? Wow...Definitely not for kids as they probably don't know how to read half of that.
Actually, if I were honest to myself, I would say my fascination with colors did start with a box of crayons but those names are so obscure (they actually are because this was part of a special limited pack, not your normal crayon pack).
If I was a kid, with only an 8 or 12 pack of crayons, my world would have been confined to those meager colors and I wouldn't have known any difference because I wasn't exposed to it but now we all can probably list 10 different names for the color blue, or green or red. I get fixated on certain things but in high school, for some reason, finding different names for colors was one of my fascinations. Heck, if you watched Pokemon in the 90's and 2000's you'd at least have expanded your color knowledge if you knew the towns the characters visited.
Getting back to the ranch and to my original thought, this movie of Cinderella was over inundated with not just blue but brilliant cerulean blue! It was very unnatural to my eyes, but with how easy it is to enhance and digitize things, I wouldn't be surprised if they did spruce it up a bit...and by a bit, I mean a LOT!
So moral to this story, apparently color is very much different from person to person, culture to culture but until someone deems a different shade/tint worthy of naming, no one else will really notice.
Therefore, I name that particular blue 'Freaky Ass Retina Burning Nuclear Cinder Blue'.
