Not even a week yet and being home has meant...

investment planning with dad. fresh salsa & guacamole. bucket loads of fresh tomatoes that I cook with daily. my french press & coffee grinder. at times, feeling lonely. bike rides. rock climbing. running on familiar routes in Southside. loving and hating the way that 'nothing ever changes'. iced tea. sushi. sailing. warm puppy dog lovin' in the mornings. clean clothes. haircuts. respecting the cute old farmers at the farmers market. bottles of good wine. red beans & rice. afternoons with mom around the house. finishing books. loads of opportunities. future planning. reminiscing over wonderful summer memories. taking care of business. unpacking. big fluffy beds. hanging clothes on the clothesline. missing my best friend. embracing my small town friends and family. unexpected changes. quality sister time. juicy watermelon. writing letters. questioning my direction. fresh tomato soup. giving into a gluttonous magazine addiction. desiring a mentor. having a kitchen to cook in. candlelit bath times. having my car. fresh flowers from the garden. deodorant that works. 80 degree MS weather. hummingbirds. spontaneous mid-afternoon rain. homeade cottage cheese & tomatoes.

For so many reasons, I'm glad to be in MS for awhile. It's great to be around great friends and an amazing family who love me unconditionally. I feel changed, although I can't really tell you how; I've learned a lot, although I can't really tell you what. A lot of the dust that was stirred up this summer will inevitably settle leaving the lessons I learned behind. I yearn for that moment to be able to conscientiously articulate who I am now after such an epic adventure. Until then...I am taking it day by day, trying to dodge as many probing questions as I can as I figure out 'what's next'. Slowly, I will make my rounds, seeing all the old and familiar faces that I know care about my summer adventures. Until then, it's kind of interesting to see who even knows I'm back in the country! A wise man once told me : " You can count your best friends on one hand. "

Making It Count in Morocco.

All I can say is Wow! ... What a trip it was for me to this amazing place called Fez, Morocco. Literally felt like coming home...and, I'm not totally sure what that really means right now, that's just how it felt.

I had the first two days to travel away from our port, Casablanca, and more into the country of Morocco. Originally my goal was to get to a rural place called Chefchaouen, but alas time constraints kept me from doing the 8 hour trip and instead I chose to go to Fez based on recommendations from Dr. Waldron. "Stephanie, You'll totally love it!" he exclaimed for the 5 days sailing from Egypt to Morocco (little did I know how right he would be!).

The morning we docked, I quickly jumped off and took the first train to Fez train with a great couple from the ship: Rocky & Shaun Rohwedder (check out his super informative & insightful blog) and their adorable 3 yr. old Ryder. It was a 3 hr. train journey to the city, which put us there late afternoon on the 1st day.

From the moment we stepped off the train, things just seemed to fall into place for us. Josephine Kwan, the owner and operator of the dar where we stayed, agreed to meet us at the designated gate (entire city has a wall around it with many entrances into it) to lead us to our dar.

While there I learned that a dar is a typical small Moroccan house, and a riad is a larger one with a garden in the middle. Dar El Hana was absolutely the quaintest, cutest, most welcoming of all the places I'd been to this summer and immediately I felt the good energy of the place. Josephine invited us all up to the top terrace of the house where we sat around with Moroccan beer, wine, olives and nuts chatting away until we were all confident that new friends had just been made.

Josephine is originally from Melbourne, Australia (ironic). She came to Fez 4 years ago on an extended holiday w/ her partner, and by the 2nd week had bought this house and a year later, after extensive remodeling, opened it as a guesthouse. She initially spoke no French, no Arabic, but seems to have-against all odds-managed as a non-native woman in a partly Muslim country. Impressive. Her stories were fantastic! and her love for Fez poured out very naturally. After only a couple of hours there, I could easily see why she hadn't left.

The next day, Josephine arranged for us to have a guided tour through the ancient medina with "the best of the best" tour guides, Hakim. She was right; He was definitely an amazing guy. Studying now for his Phd in the history and significance of the Sacred Heart Musical Festival (local in Fez), he was smart, articulate, knowledgeable on all aspects of the medina and the city, as well as pretty damn witty. Combination = great afternoon learning lots from a great guide.

He hussled and bussled us through an endless maze of winding alleyways in the medina. This medina is believed to be the largest car-free urban area in the world. It was huge!! It has not changed for centuries. Its narrow alleys house hundreds of merchants and craftsmen selling a range of products such as dates, fish, spices, copper urns, carpets and musical instruments. The narrow alleys are busy with local people and tourists brave enough to find their way through the maze.

Throughout there were donkeys and horses transporting all sorts of goods. They came barreling through and it was easy to be run over unless you were paying attention to "Balack! Balack!" (translation: Arabic for 'get out of my way!')

One of the most interesting sites in Fez was the Leather Souq and the oldest leather tannery in the world. The tannery dates back at least nine centuries. When approaching the tannery the smell is the first suggestion that something different is about to appear. The smell drifts around the balcony from where all the activity can be viewed and is enough to put off the most enthusiastic of tourists. The stench is worth braving as the view over the balcony allows those watching to see a site that has not changed since the 11th century. They gave us sprigs of mint to smell as we watched all the action below.

The tannery is composed of numerous stone vessels filled with a vast range of dyes and various odorous liquids. The tannery processes the hides (skins) of sheep and goats, turning them into high quality leather products such as bags, coats, shoes, slippers and other similar products. This is all achieved manually, without the need for modern machinery.

The workers stand in the stone vessels arranged like honeycombs, filled with different dyes, dying the arms and legs of the men. The hides are first soaked in diluted acidic pigeon excrement and then transferred to other vessels containing vegetable dyes such as henna, saffron and mint. When the dying process has been completed the hides are dried on the roofs of the Medina.

Have a look at what I saw while listening to the call-to-prayer (make sure your volume is up!). It was an awesome moment.





I found this diagram which gives a visual of the process:

(Thanks to www.technologystudent.com)

It was an absolutely amazing process to witness, along with an impressionable view from above. Interestingly, the Amazing Race had stop in this tannery where a clue was hidden in one of the vats. The guys there were very proud to talk about this!

I came back to the ship to accept the medical call beeper and did what I could in Casablanca the last two days. The largest mosque in North Africa is here, which was so beautiful to see and experience from the inside. One thing that I've grown to respect is that no faces of people or animals are represented in mosques....as opposed to all of the Christian icons that adorn church sanctuaries. Without the multitude of 'important individuals' surrounding worship, it somehow made it feel more direct to the God above. I liked that.

So much to capture of a summer of adventure & fun. I'm still letting it all settle in and will finish off this summer when I can. Until then, I'm out of words. Thanks for keeping up!

***
The trip ended with this port, so an Atlantic crossing is currently my reality! I arrive back to the mainland August 22nd. See some of you then.

Morocco Video

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth??

http://vimeo.com/6080394

Casey's Egypt Video

Another pirated copy of a video that sums up Egypt .... kind of. enjoy.

A Cheer-Up Gift from a Creative Dude.

Kite Runners

It would have been lost within my Egypt blog, which many of you may/may not thoroughly read, and it is probably my favorite moment in Egypt.

Anyone out there either read "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini...or seen the movie?
Yeah...riding in one of these big tour buses with the super big windows, I fortunately looked outside on a stretch of highway that wasn't that appealing to me and just happened to just look up. There, kids with kites were flying their Egyptian kites on roof tops. I think it took my breath long enough for me to forget my camera; I'll never forget the picture in my mind.

Spawned thoughts...

Recently on board in our ship wide mandatory class, Global Studies, a few of the lecturers have given me great snippets to think about. A blog is a terrible medium to try and capture the essence of a meaningful moment, so all you get are my favorite quotes/thoughts from one of these days to let effect you as you wish... ( I always hate affect and effect. No matter which I decided on, I'm never quite sure) ...

"In order to write, you have to read the world first".
It is possible to "hold 2 ideas of the mind at the same time".
"You might speak the language, but you don't speak the culture".
....a "beautiful complication".

---all from the Poetry professor onboard the MV Explorer, David Swerdlow Check a bit about him at: http://www.versedaily.org/aboutdavidswerdlow.shtml

Egyptians are a Peace loving bunch

Egypt. Dirty. Crowded. Awesome

Egypt. What a place! Bathed in history from every corner to every height, infested with people that ooze from every city pore possible, filthy, dirty, crowded, HOT, disorganized (to the outsider), intimidating, but amazingly challenging, thoughtful, delightful and rich in culture. Egypt has been one of my top ports by far. I felt easily at home.

I knew that I had a SAS to lead trip for 2 days in Cairo to hit all the big sites: Pyramids at sunrise, Sphinx, Egyptian Museum, and the Bazaar, so I was prepared to spend the first day just "being" in Cairo. Granted, Cairo is not close--and after a 3 hour hot, sweaty cab ride from Alexandria (our port), I had begun to rethink my plan. Our cab driver was the most persistent cabbie we met outside the port gate...kudos to persistence....initially, he was only taking us to the train station in Alexandria but in the 15 min. cab ride, we were offered a ride to Cairo and back, along with all day in Cairo with him for only $100. $50/piece seemed like an awesome deal, so we went with it and let the adventure unfold.

Egypt quickly struck me as being dusty, barren, dirty, hot, and brown. Traffic is very disorganized, meaning the painted lane lines are irrelevant and were a waste of someone's time.
He was a super hospitable guy, even stopping along the way and buying us Pepsi's to ease the heat. Mido was his name--a young 28 yr. old Egyptian man, born into a family of cabbies from which the art of shuttling tourists (mainly) around Egypt in a semi-purposed fashion had been handed down generation by generation. Throughout the day, I learned that he had recently ended a serious relationship with a woman because "she was too much after money" and that his hometown of Alexandria, Egypt, affectionately known as "Alex" was far more superior (in his eyes) to the chaotic Cairo where we were headed. I also learned that the phrase "no problem" rolled off his tongue as easily as the sweat collected in my lower back. He was there to take us where we wanted to go, and was a bit struck by this odd pair that didn't have any interest in going to the Pyramids, but would rather just wander...but "no problem" he easily said. It took a bit of coaxing, but eventually he succumbed and took us to a random street where we had a quick, but oh so good! lunch of foul and falafel. (easily the best falafel I'd ever had the joy of eating. Thank you, Adam, for the foul recommendation. Egyptian refried beans??) This led to tea, then coffee mixed in with an impromtu Arabic lesson. Watch here.


My travel partner was on a mad-dash for an overnight train to Luxor, which left me and Mido getting back to Cairo on our own late that night. The idea of this was something that I paused to consider the safety of several times that day, but in the end Mido had won over my confidence that he was a nice guy that would safely get me back to the port in Alexandria. It could have been a long 3 hr. cab ride back, but with sunflower seeds shared between us and multiple stops for bottles of water, the time seemed to fly by. Before I knew it, after a late night stop for falafel, I was happily walking up the gangway back home again.

The next 2 days were spent in a large tour group on an even larger tour bus (i.e. Definitely not Stephanie-style!) that was traveling in a caravan with 3 other equally as large tour buses around Cairo from tourist spot to tourist spot. On the one hand, it was nice to be shuttled from place to place without having to navigate trams or taxis on my own, but eating lunch at the 4 Seasons and dinner at the Le Meridian hotels in town was a bit obnoxious for my tastes. I, however, made the best of it and really got to know a lot of the kids on my bus much better. The one thing that I shocked me more than anything was how extremely close the Pyramids were to the city. ... part of the skyline! And how camels and horses were in the streets as part of the traffic--Less that they were there, but more that they didn't seem bothered by the chaotic traffic.

It was my turn to carry the medical beeper for the next two days, so essentially I was forced to relax and hang around the ship more often....which is a nice thing to be 'forced' to do because it is easy not to take care of yourself and become a slave to the block of time in country. I got to see the famous library of Alexandria. Very interesting place: held the 2nd machine ever to be able to print an entire book in 20 minutes, architecture was designed in a way to use only natural light and no light bulbs, but never let direct rays in, and from the outside was supposed to symbolize the sun with a revolving moon. Interesting.

A highlight of the day was spontaneously meeting a group of University students at the falafel shop. They saw us in line and graciously offered to help order our food. We all began chatting and discovered how amazingly perfect their English was. One of the girls told me that she had never left Egypt to practice her English (amazing!) and was currently enrolled in a class to 'perfect' her accent to enable her to work in a call center. The goal, she said, was to emulate the Britsh accent like on the "BBC network". They listened to recordings of this in class as a way of changing her accent to be 'neutral' for the call center. Wow, and doubly wow!

All in all, Egypt is a place that I need a historian to come back with me next. (Adam, help!) Too many nuances and too many details that I felt that I glazed over because no one was there to tell me about them! Chalk that up as the need for another trip. Dad, when you're ready, I am too.

Thanks for keeping up this far!
On our way to Morocco now. More of this adventure later.