Casablanca, Morocco

The best word to describe my time in Morocco is 'surprising.' By the time we reached the port of Casablanca, I was tired. I wasn't sure I had the energy to live up to the excitement and anticipation of arriving in Morocco three-years later than I thought I would, when the Fall 2012 voyage had to suddenly cancel our arrival in Morocco. If the sudden cancellation of visiting Morocco in 2012 was the surprise, the surprise in 2015 was the emergence of Morocco as one of the best ports of the voyage. I thought travel fatigue had hit me and I wouldn't see as much as I could have with more energy. Three years ago I was ready to travel around the country and into the desert, but with Morocco being the last port of the 2015 voyage, I was ready to slow down. Descriptions of the walled medina of Fes appealed to me, and I booked an AirBnB, the eighth AirBnB I stayed in during the voyage, for our entire stay in Morocco. With some convincing, Marty joined me, and I think he felt the same level of surprise at what became of our five days in Fes. We were surprised by how adventurous our slow pace in Fes became, from the AirBnB that nobody could believe was our home and not a sacred religious site, from getting lost in the walled medina and wandering wherever our lost path took us, from stumbling upon rooftop views, from stunning sunsets on a hill overlooking the city, from the amount of mint tea we were able to consume in five days, from unexpectedly running into different friends on several occasions, from becoming regulars at a coffee shop and developing a friendship with one of the servers, from feeling as if we went back in time by hundreds of years, from finding a tiny food stall with some of the best soup of our life, from how all the food was so incredible it was arguably the best food of the entire voyage, and from our friendship growing closer from our time together. What an adventurous, beautiful, cultural, exciting, colorful, flavorful, meaningful, and memorable surprise.

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