Salam waylaykoom ! Marrakech is amazing! The sounds, smells and chaos abound and can be overwhelming, but addictive all the same! Our Riad L' Orangeraie is a calm oasis where we retreat after bargaining in the souks and visiting the Islamic sights of the city. We have enjoyed wonderful cuisine, both Moroccan and French influenced at our riad and at Villa Flore, a riad owned by a couple from Paris. We are not so brave as to sample sheeps head, pigeon and other such delicacies cooked in the food stalls! Snake charmers, storytellers, acrobats, musicians and dancers fill the Djemaa el Fna Square, which also has orange juice stalls, Berber water sellers, and food stalls that move into the square in the late afternoon. The Square is an incredible experience throughout the night and early morning ... read more

Started writing this blog entry while waiting for our delayed flight to Barcelona from Lisbon Airport on TAP Airlines, while a certain bear got into the port! We finally arrived at our Barcelona hotel, Hotel Constanza, late Monday, March 19th. Since our arrival, we have been so busy touring Barcelona that we haven´t had a chance to post and we are leaving Barcelona tomorrow morning on Iberia Airlines for Granada. Here´s a quick recap - believe it or not, this is what we have been up to over the past two days: Monday night, we walked down the Ramblas to the Barri Gothic looking for a restaurant. We ate at a restaurant called Les Quinze Nits after waiting in line for over one hour in the cold wind. The food was good but not worth the ... read more

Lucky for us, an extraordinary exhibition of Cartier (1899 - 1949) - The Journey of a Style was being temporarily exhibited at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The gorgeous jewelry, clocks and other pieces of craftsmanship were tremendous. We finally know the secret of how the Cartier Mystery Clocks work...all very hush-hush you know! The wide selection of paintings, antiquities and artifacts collected by Calouste Gulbenkian over his lifetime was impressive. We spent a sunny, but very windy afternoon at Parque das Nacoes (Expo site) , along with every other citizen of Lisbon. We visited the Oceanario of Lisbon after navigating the Lisbon metro system and the Vasco da Gama Mall. The diverse sea life at the Oceanario was amazing. There are over 400 species of animals and plants! The exhibits were extraodinarily life-like with ... read more

After an enjoyable flight with Lufthansa in Business Class, we arrived in Lisbon and headed out for a stroll in the Baixa District of Lisbon. Navigating the twisted streets in the dark and climbing the steep hilltop in the Barrio Alto, we discovered a quaint restaurant by the name of Bizzaro. We enjoyed our first Portugese dinner and headed back down to our hotel where we fell asleep as soon as our heads hit our pillows. Our first day in Lisbon included a tour of the historic Alfama District where we visited the Castelo de Sao Jorge and the Se de Lisbon (Cathedral ) and then we hopped on a tram to Belem and visited the spectacular Mosteiro dos Jeronimos and Torre de Belem and the monument in honour of the Portugese´s Age of Discovery, Padrao ... read more

After planning this trip for almost a year, we are so excited about our trip to Portugal, Spain and Morocco over Spring Break. Our bags are packed and we are ready to go! But wait, our plane doesn't take off for another 4 days. What are we going to do? Our bags have been packed for the past three weeks, we have been fully innoculated, we've read every travel book, and days have been spent surfing the net researching trains, planes and automobiles, hotels and sights not to be missed. The only sensible thing to do is to sleep! Once we hit European soil, it is going to be quite the journey! Here are our plans: We're flying from Vancouver to Frankfurt and then on to our first stop, Lisbon, Portugal for four nights. From Lisbon, ... read more