Exploring with Friends

10/6/14

As it is the day after Eid, we get the day off, and I spend the day with my friend Alexis, who is a 29 year old girl traveling on her sabbatical from teaching 5^th Grade world religion class (how she already got one I want to know!).  It’s her last day, so we explore to the max, going up and down the shopping streets, looking at beautiful leather shoes and bags, chatting with vendors.  The street vendors are tickled at our curiosity, and we get to try many new foods for free: snail soup (a common afternoon pick-me-up served out of carts on the street), avocado juice (which is as thick as dough) , hand made potato chips sizzling on their streetside carts, flaked pink shards of some kind of sweet root (that has no translation in French, apparently).

What fun it is to have friends to explore with!

I have also just moved into my new home! I adore the women I am living with—one woman is English, about 40 years old, here learning to teach.  The other, the owner of the house, is Moroccan but grew up in Paris, and could be anywhere from 28 to 48.  I want to use the facial treatment she’s using!  And she is a lovely person as well.  I could not be happier to be here, and, sitting on the roof with candles burning and a cool breeze blowing in, the sky slowly deepening from its pale sunset pinks to a gentle blue, I don’t want to leave.  How has it already passed so fast?  But the other feeling in my heart is just as settled, the knowledge that I will come back.  This is just an introduction for Rabat and me: I have no doubt that we have a beautiful future together.