Category: Africa

Dear Friends and Family, Salaam from Marrakesh, Morocco! I arrived her two days ago, and it's been incredible. Marrakesh really jars the senses with its bizarre clash of cultures, languages, smells, and sheer activity, and I'm already enamored by it. I'm staying with Faical, my Moroccon friend from the train to Basel (I wrote about ...

Later tonight Faical decided to take his mother to dinner. He asked Anas and Sarah if they wanted to come, but neither did. I agreed to go along. I ate a McDonald's burger after many weeks. Back in America I never eat at McDonald's. I hardly eat fast food in general. In Morocco - as ...

Later in the afternoon, Anas informed me that he was going to a hammam and asked me if I wanted to go. I most certainly did. I imagined hammams were exotic bathhouses with ornate hot tubs and beautiful female attendants. It was about time I paid a visit. I asked Anas if I could first ...

In standard fashion, breakfast this morning consisted of tea, bread, butter, and jam. The tea, I find, tends to be too sweet, but Moroccans seems to prefer it that way. After breakfast I sat around and worked on my journal for a while. I watched Sarah work with a small, stainless steel, hand-operated machine to ...

We rattled down the mountain later in the evening in the back of a vegetable delivery truck. The sides of the truck were very high, and I could only see the sky and the mountains above us. The black silhouette of the receding mountain against the navy blue sky soon started to sparkle with lights ...

Khalid II, Mohsin, and another one of Faical's friends, Redouane, met us at the apartment this afternoon to go to a nearby mountain river called Ourika, which turns out to be Moroccan for Eureka.  Faical, his brother Anas, and I took a bus with them to a taxi depot near Jama al-Fna. The area teemed ...

It seems strange as I write about it that I am here in Morocco at the urging of a guy I barely know. We met on a train in France and spoke for no more than thirty minutes (see Next Stop: Basel). Now I am staying with his family and hanging out with him in ...