I decided to visit my friend Rebecca, who was in Peace Corps with me and is still here since she extended her service a year. Becky lives in another town close to Marrakech and I used to travel from Kelaa to her site in Ait Ourir almost every month. Maryam woke me up in the morning around 11:30. It had been another hot, sleepless night. When I looked out the door of my room into the central living room I saw all the furniture had been moved. It was washing day. From the cleanliness of Boise it’s hard to understand just how much dirt the Sahara produces, but imagine that southern France is often blanketed by dust blown north from the North African desert. Satellite images have documented swirling clouds of sand and dust far out ... read more

This is the most suspenseful part of any journey - getting to the beginning. Somehow airplanes don't feel like travel, it's more like a time machine that whisks me through time and space. I can never get my head around time zone changes and distances when I'm in an airplane. I'll feel much more comfortable when I'm on the ground in Marrakech and I can start my journey by land. This blog is mostly a warning that if you're on my subscriber list you're going to be getting quite a few blogs over the next couple months as I travel from Marrakech north to Paris. ... read more

Hello Everybody, Salamu alakyum, Travelblog crashed last week and lost my last ten blogs. While I am very disappointed I hope that you all had a chance to see my last ones before they disappeared into cyberspace. I am now back home, having finished with Peace Corps and accepted a job teaching in Boise. This is my last blog and I am now retired from blogging. Yay! Knowing my days were limited in Morocco I tried to fit in as many adventures as I could in the first half of summer. Gnawa, June 21-24: The Gnawa music festival in Essouira is infamous and every year a group of volunteers manages to go. Gnawa is a Sufi brotherhood and the music is designed to inspire and put people in a trance. The rhythms are repetitive, energetic and ... read more

I have been hearing about the wonders of Ozoud for almost two years now, and finally got to see the splendor for myself. Photos really don’t do it justice. People have been showing me their photos for a while now and I was only vaguely impressed. The majesty of Ozoud must be appreciated in person because only then do you feel so completely dwarfed by the huge falls. I’ll admit, I haven’t seen Niagara, but after driving for a couple hours across the foothills of the Atlas, the Ozoud canyon opens up without warning in a wide, desolate plateau. We escaped the oppressive flat-land heat of Kelaa in the morning and drove along back roads through the towns of Freita, Ouarji, El Sahrij, Majden and Tanante (none of which appear on my map of Morocco) before ... read more

Looking at my blog it seems like I am always on vacation. Peace Corps can be a lot of fun and I am so lucky to live in such an amazing country that has so many tourist attractions. But I am most often in Kelaa and usually doing something productive. This was a big weekend for me. On the 19th the women’s association I’ve been working with, El Ghad Al Bassim, organized a “cultural competition”. I’ve never seen anything like it in the US but it seems to be a fairly normal event here. There was a performance by Kelaa’s star lute player, Abderrhmane. I’ve seen him at events around town before and always noticed him for playing and singing beautifully. What I didn’t know until Saturday was that he speaks English perfectly. He’s never noticed ... read more