Of All The Gin Joints In All The World…
Last week on a cool, California summer evening at Malibu Winery, beneath a blanket of stars and over a couple of bottles of sauvignon blanc, my friends and I brought one of our favorite travel experiences full-circle: we watched Casablanca. With sound. You see, in January of 2009 we watched Casablanca together, too. At Rick’s Cafe – IN Casablanca. But nestled in the famous establishment’s comfy upstairs bar couches, you must deign to watch the classic film on mute, the better to hear the nightly band playing below. So for my pal Bob, who had never seen the film...
Read MoreMoroccan Musings: a list of cultural observations for the North African novice
From the pie to the sky there was a lot to see and look at over these 10 days, and through my jaded Western eyes it was indeed a Whole New World. If you plan on traveling to Morocco or are just morbidly curious at what I found hilarious/bizarre/compelling, read on. I didn’t want to get all gooey about how it has changed my views on American life or Muslims or travel or the important of being earnest or whatever because no one wants to read about that and if you really want to know you can buy me a coffee one day and I’ll tell you. So here’s the actual interesting...
Read More“i think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”
1/19/09 - seat 22A, over Spain 8:00am GMT We stumbled out of bed with a slim 20 minutes to get ready to ship back to the U.S. A shuttle was coming to pick us up at the hotel, so we rushed around in a daze trying to get to the lobby by 5:30. The shower rod had fallen off the wall in the middle of the night, there were towels and shower curtain everywhere, and none of us were packed. We popped the key card in the slot and began turning on lights – it took about 10 seconds before the fuse blew and the entire room was pitched into eternal darkness. We froze for about a minute...
Read More“you must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss…”
1/18/09 – Rabat/Casablanca, Morocco 12:15am We awoke to a stunningly beautiful morning in Rabat – this time all 3 of us were up and at breakfast simultaneously (OK, that’s it – I have officially HAD IT with the f*ing bread). We finished packing and hauled everything BACK to the train station for our late morning train to the seaside town (okay, urban sinkhole) of Casablanca. Only about an hour ride this time – I plopped down at a window seat so I could look out – from the now-familiar rolling green fields dotted with sheep and bridged gorges teeming...
Read MoreRocking the Casbah in Rabat, Morocco
1/17/09 – Rabat 11:00pm I awoke on time for once, but Bob and Katie did not…so I got ready and tried to be quiet, which is kind of like Oprah dieting – futile, problematic and generally ending in total failure. Needless to say it was just a short while before Katie was up…so she and I left Bob sleeping (he feels about mornings the way I feel about Beyonce Knowles – it is annoying but inevitable) and went downstairs to cash in on our free breakfast. Finding breakfast was like a Where’s Waldo for ravenous partially-comatose tourists – it was...
Read Morecountry bumpkins, meet the big city
1/16/09 – Fes/Rabat, Morocco 11:25pm A troublesome hypothesis: I was either more dog-tired and wonky than I thought, or genuinely getting acclimated, because I was barely disturbed by this morning’s earth-rattling call to prayer. Frankly, I can’t much remember hearing it at all…all I know is that my habitual early-morning bitterness was blessedly absent today. Well, that must have been the Universe’s trade-off. We hadn’t specified a breakfast time, though we’d attempted to text Hicham that we were leaving early to...
Read Morehey mohammed, don’t i know you from somewhere?
1/15/09 – Fes, Morocco 11:30pm 10:00am, Greenwich Mean Time: the Bread Buffet strikes again. Haven’t these people ever heard of fruit salad? But, like a bridge troll, I ate everyone’s madeleines. Again. Our plan today was simple and twofold: to buy and mail postcards home, and find an internet cafe to check train times for tomorrow’s sojourn to the capital city of Rabat. We found a CYBER MEDINA just outside the walls, where I perched drowsily in a folding chair between my 2 friends, watching the languidly buzzing flies and hoping the ocean of coffee...
Read Morecultural immersion 101
1/14/09 – Fes, Morocco 11:00pm We didn’t get a chance to confirm breakfast time with our hosts last night, but suspected that the dishes would start clinking around 10:00am, and…victory! Fresh-baked madeleines, yogurt smoothies and the egg omelette were added to yesterday’s cartel of food choices so we caffienated, dressed and promptly slid back out into the labyrinth for a new day. This time we beelined for the tanneries, hoping to evade any enterprising shopkeepers who might divert us from our mission. Somehow we took a bit of an inadvertent detour down...
Read More“OI! Ten thousand years will give you SUCH a crick in the neck!”
1/13/09 – Fes, Morocco 11:50pm Oh, call to prayer, you predictable yet vile mistress. Awoke at 5am again to the deafening siren blare of Koran verses, whose chants were unusually virulent and ear-shattering today, consisting mostly of fierce, prolonged, melancholy wails that made me long for a congested, tone-deaf Bob Dylan, drunk on Senior’s Karaoke Night at the local VFW. Whoever does these is a terriblesinger. Could they at least find a trained musician to gracefully awaken me with sweet lilting sounds of an ancient foreign tongue serenading we sleepy villagers...
Read Moresouks, spices and stories, oh my!
1/12/09 – Fes, Morocco Midnight or thereabouts Barbarically early call to prayer aside, we willfully ignored the alarm and slept soundly until 10:00am, at which point the sounds of clinking dishes from the riad family preparing our breakfast downtstairs finally provoked us out of bed. We stumbled awkwardly down the perilously steep staircase like shivering, semi-conscious zombies on auto-pilot. Overnight our room had warmed to a roasty 70 degrees, so in this artic igloo it was bizarre and unseemly to sit down to breakfast inside wearing bulky winter coats and watching...
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