Morocco - Part 1

Sorry for the delay (Mom and Dad!) this ship has a way of keeping you really really busy. I will be walking off the ship into Ghana in literally 8 hours, I dunno how it came up so fast

Morocco So far......

We debarked the ship in Morocco after a quick diplomatic briefing from U.S. officials about the cultural Do’s and Don’ts along with a little history about the country. The itinerary for the day was a 12 hour journey deep into Morocco, past the city of Zagora to a camel trek and desert camp in the Sahara desert.
It was thankfully a small group (6 people) in a large van (12 seats) with a pretty interesting guide (Hassan) so the drive was not as intimidating as that figure alone would indicate. We drove along desert highways recently expanded by King Mohammad the VI as one part in a larger plan to nourish the tourism industry Morocco is so heavily dependent on.

The first stop on our trip was the large tourist city of Marrakech where we had our first meal of the trip.
*Just a prior warning, I will probably dedicate a pretty large portion of my entries to the food I encounter, its what I am most excited about in each port*
I’ll start off by saying that Moroccan food is great and this lunch was the perfect introduction, it consisted of the following, shared family style:
 A Moroccan Salad: in Morocco, the term salad refers to any type of fruit or vegetable, cooked or uncooked in any other term you can think of. What we were served was a collection of dishes; 5 types of olives, potatoes, fresh & cooked dates, pastries, peppers, tomatoes and other unidentifiable but entirely delicious dishes. The crowning achievements were these little entrail-looking & cinnamon-tasting pastries which I hunted down in the Marrakech markets later in the trip (you will be able to see all of these if I am able to upload pictures any time soon.)

3 Tagines (Entrees) Chicken, Lamb and Cous Cous – The chicken was marinated lemon juice and other great stuff, served with olives and potatoes, it is something safe but entirely delicious that I could go back to in a heartbeat

The main course was followed by Almond pastries and a platter (literally a platter as big as my arms around) of apples and grapes and a steaming, frothy, aromatic pot of Mint Tea (consists of fresh mint, a lot of green tea and a fist full of sugar)
  
If you are looking for Moroccan Cuisine: 101, this is it, as basic as it gets with a lot of the staples present and executed extremely well. Mint tea is definitely something I will try to recreate when I make it home.
Another part of the meal that was unique to Morocco was the building that we ate it in. It is called a ‘Riad’ and they are extremely popular in Moroccan cities. Most I encountered were built with an open courtyard in the center and invited an extremely social atmosphere among its inhabitants.  They are truly the Moroccan bed and breakfast, with the top floor being the restaurant we ate at and the others below containing hotel rooms. Another popular feature throughout the Moroccan architecture was the salon ever present at the top of every building which contains long benched couches lining the room in a semicircle and facing each other. It seems as if the entire country was designed to promote conversation and interaction among people.
The next leg of our lengthy drive was up and over the Atlas Mountains; lined by cacti, small villages, and people everywhere. Something that I noticed about the highway in Morocco is that people are very much a part of the landscape. As opposed to driving along the highway for hundreds of miles without seeing a person on the side of the road, drive on a Moroccan highway and you will see children playing soccer, workers collecting cactus fruit, Mothers leading their children or men riding donkeys side saddle.

In the end after the 12 hours of driving we made it to our destination, which turned out to be the side of the road, hours away from civilization with only our headlights to show us that nothing else was around.
“Asalam Alykum! (Greetings!)” our guide yelled into the darkness to no answer
“Asalam Alykum!”  he repeated, again with no answer. At this point, the 5 other students and I looked around the van at each other wondering what was happening. We had stopped unceremoniously in the middle of the desert with no explanation and no camp or camels in sight so we were slightly uneasy.
After no response for the second time in the evening he made a call on his cell phone and after a quick conversation in his Berber language we got back on the road and continued for another few minutes down the road and pulled over to the side of the road where this time the headlights actually revealed camels.