I told myself there was no way I would ever get a blog. I can’t even keep up with my old fashioned journal, for god’s sake. Although honestly, that may have something to do with telling myself that I would only write if I wrote in French. So naturally I just don’t write. Anyway, blogging just seems to be “the thing to do” these days. So we’ll give it a try, and see where it takes us. Yes, in English this time.

I’m afraid this story is a bit late in coming, and so all readers will have to be contented with starting somewhere not quite in the beginning. It was already more than a month ago that I landed in Granada, the Pomegranate, and sailed across the Straits of Gibraltar, where mighty Hurcules once separated Africa from Europe. Although I am not sure what I expected to find when I stepped off of that boat and felt Africa beneath me for the first time in my life, I am sure that whatever it was, the port certainly was not it. We may as well have still been in Spain. Where was the desert? Where were the camels? Instead, I saw before me rolling green hills and steep rocky cliffs falling into the waves bellow. That was only the first of many surprises that awaited me in al Maghreb.  Now, after having lived here for nearly a month, I have come to expect the unexpected and to love and accept Morocco for all that it is, and isn’t. The little things have ceased to surprise me so much, and what I once thought undeniably strange is now simply normal. I no longer take any notice when small, mule drawn carts full of oranges the size of melons turn into four lanes of traffic, and squatting over a little hole in the bathroom floor is nothing out of the ordinary. The cries of “you’re beautiful, I love you!” or “I am Ben Laden!” fail in catching even my slightest attention.

Some call Morocco a melting pot, while others give it the more appealing term ‘bouquet.’ Whatever you wish to call it, Morocco really is a place where everything and everyone mingles and flows together in a truly magical ‘bouquet’ of coexistence. It is not uncommon to see a mother wearing a traditional jallebah and hijab, escorting her tight jeaned and heal toting daughter down the street. On campus, young women in full burkas will be seen giggling in the corner with friends wearing western clothes and nothing covering their hair. Being situated precisely at the junction between Europe and Africa, Morocco is a land where the cultures of the Amazigh people, Arabs, French, Spanish, and southern Africa all fall gracefully into step along side each other, and where echoes of the past can be heard singing in time with the rhythms of the present.

In time, one comes to understand that all is possible in al Maghreb, Moroco.