Category: Africa

A Musical Culture
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 ...

Ana Mahdood
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 ...

Ourika!
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 ...

An Unusual Homecoming
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 ...

From Madrid to Marrakesh
On the EZ Jet flight to Morocco, I understood how the low-cost carrier makes ends meet. The crew members work as a sales team, advertising and selling a mass of products to their captive audience. Every few minutes a crew member announces over the loudspeaker yet another item for sale, rousing anyone who's managed to ...