read the title, suckers. [View Full Entry]

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Our cab dropped us near the Djama el Fna: Marrakech’s notorious central square, described as the center of night life for locals and as a twenty-four hour tourist trap. From the road we entered a pedestrian only pathway and walked past a park, where rows of boys sat on benches and stared intently at us—challenging us to break our determined, straight-ahead gazes. “Hello gazelle.” “Hey sweetie. Welcome to Marrakech.” We kept our eyes forward, pointed in the direction of the strip of white lights that our cabbie had pointed us toward. At the center of the square was a maze of [View Full Entry]

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In Morocco, music is all around us. Here are some short (sorry about the quality) videos from our daily life with the family and not so daily life as we summited Toubkal. [View Full Entry]

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From the rocky desert outside the city our taxi pointed toward the vague outline of the High Atlas mountains, eventually climbing through low red hills until the turns grew tighter and we were deposited in our small-town mountain destination. Imlil is the sleepy Berber town that exists primarily as a starting-point for trekkers who set out to hike the Toubkal region and summit Toubkal, Africa’s second tallest mountain. Imlil is like many of the other small mountain towns that I’ve encountered. Endless budget hotels, restaurants that offer more or less the same few dishes (no menu to speak of), and provisions [View Full Entry]

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Sunday October 14, 2007 Eid Said. We have just emerged from a day of eating our way through the Eid Said celebrations. Yesterday was the last day of Ramadan, so last night’s sleep was uninterrupted by a call for the midnight meal. Instead we were left to sleep until a knock came at our door to announce breakfast. It was the first of four meals that we sat down to today, and set the tone appropriately for a day of doing nothing much other than eating Moroccan doughnuts, disks of round bread with olive oil, peanut butter sweets and cous cous [View Full Entry]

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October 2nd, 2007 If cleanliness is next to godliness, then I am Raphael’s “Alba Madonna,” glowing with saintliness. I have just returned from our neighborhood hamam, now a weekly ritual, and can state out of experience that you’ve never been truly clean if you’ve been to a hamam to sweat out all the toxins and be scrubbed within an inch of your life. My first time, accompanied by Mohammed’s wife Anna, I was nervous at the prospect of communal nudity. In the States, modesty in dress is nearly non-existent, with women free to wear just as little as they please. But [View Full Entry]

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Because we can't ever seem to put the camera down... [View Full Entry]

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Our train carried us through olive orchards and low green hills (a comforting change from the desert landscape outside of Casablanca) and deposited us in Fez. We bargained our way into the back of a taxi-van and sat on the floor of the luggage area in the back, peering through the red window curtains as we drove from the Ville Nouvelle, through the Fez J-did and finally to the Medina (Fez is divided into three distinct sections, which are vaguely the new and more Western quarter, the old Jewish quarter, and finally the old walled city, where we live). The medina [View Full Entry]

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It is strange to be in this country just to be. I know that I have left the US. And I know that I am here with my sister. But where is here and how long will I be there? I arrived in Casablanca under cover of night last night. It is strange to fly into a new place at night, because the lights give you very little sense of the dimensions and textures and setting of a place. (In this case, however, even a daytime approach wouldn’t have helped me much, as I woke up only when the front wheels [View Full Entry]

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