The Moroccan State of Mind/ Part Un

For the past three years I have been using a small Converse notebook to record down things when I travel. Some of it is still very funny. That book ran out of pages and I decided to scale things up this time around. After all, seeing all the handwritten stuff beats reading after-the-fact retroblogging material, with all its editing and censorship and memory loss issues. The very cool “journal” I used was designed by Troy M. Litten. As usual, it was not solely authored by myself–the minuscule penmanship belongs to Huangyu.

Ticket stubs. It’s cheating a bit because one of them belongs to the Maritime Museum in London. Clockwise from top left: admission ticket to Nejarrine Museum in Fes, typical bus ticket, typical ONCF train ticket, Aer Lingus flight stub, Singapore Airlines flight stub, Aer Lingus flight stub, aforementioned musuem ticket, admission ticket to the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca, Easyjet flight stub.

The original itinerary. We switched Chefchaoen and Meknes around later. We could have left via Tangier into Spain, but that would mean missing the Gnaoua World Music festival in Essaouira. We could have cut out Chefchaoen, but that would mean not smoking sheesha on the terrace. We could have gone straight from the desert excursion to Fes, but we didn’t know that. You always think there are better ways to do things, but it means changing everything.

The adventure started in Manhattan. The day we were supposed to fly off, I called HY in the morning and asked him where he was. See conversation above. What followed was me forgoing lunch with Kim, a rush down to Stuyvesant Town to collect his luggage, and the ironic thing was that I arrived at JFK later because of a pile up on the Long Island Expressway.

JFK is the worst airport in the world. It screwed us up big time because our plane hung around on the taxiways for two hours before taking off. Now, we originally had an hour in Dublin before flying into Madrid, and then from Madrid to Marrakech. We missed both of those flights. It was a scene straight out of the Amazing Race: we were racing through the terminal only to find that our plane had left, and then talking to the customer service people to get a later flight, and then booking a hotel in Madrid. We spent a record 10 hours at the Dublin airport. At least we got a breakfast voucher and had a traditional Irish breakfast, which mainly consists of eggs sunny side up, sausages, baked beans and falafels.

Zee called the police because the neighbors were having a party and he couldn’t sleep and HY told him “call police lar!” and he really did so but thankfully not the 911 number.

We met up with the girls who were already there. Got ripped off on the way to the hostel by AMIN, who showed us the way and then demanded a ridiculous amount of money for it. The day after, we left for Erg Chebbi, a sea of sand dunes near the Algerian border. The bus got really stuffy. I have personally drank that much water in a single day without having to pee.

With regards to the Tatooine quote, we passed by a major studio where they filmed Laurence of Arabia and Star Wars etc.

We also had some intellectual conversations, about, I don’t know, the welfare system in certain countries.

The reason why HY thought YSL was a gardener was because we visited the place he owned in Marrakech, which had a huge cactus garden.

I was Mohammed Couscous. I got sick of eating couscous after the first few days and never had it again.

Typical planning done by HY.