Marcel Proust said that after he had seen Venice, his dreams had an address. That is really how I have always felt about Morocco. It was ten years ago that I first came here, and since then I have basically spent all my available money on travelling lots and seeing many other places in the world. But for the last ten years, I have closed my eyes ( Read more... )

Weird day. This morning I was moving the bed in my hotel room and I discovered an emergency fire notice underneath it. It is printed on a huge block of wood for some reason, and it just says ‘In case of fire, assemble outside the main entrance.’ The hotel only has one entrance, so this notice is merely saying that if the hotel catches fire you ( Read more... )

I had always wondered what the souks were like after dark. Yesterday, I got to find out. Kamal had found someone he thought I would like to talk to - a seller of traditional musical instruments who has a little shop deep in the heart of the labyrinth. I arranged to meet up with K that evening, and head in to speak to our guy after he closed up.

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I was due to meet Kamal at quarter past seven this morning. More out of habit than expectation, I arrived fifteen minutes early. He arrived an hour late, so I had plenty of time to stand around on a street corner in the cold inventing new swearwords for him.

Eventually he rocked up in a van with a couple of friends and we headed 15 minutes out of ( Read more... )

Hi everyone, sorry I'm posting so late, I've had a bit of a disasterous afternoon. I was trapped in a suburb of Marrakech and couldn't get out. Kamal invited me round for lunch at one o'clock. I didn't get back here till quarter past nine ( Read more... )

It is very hard to be bored in Marakech. Although I am currently enjoying some time off, if I ever feel I have nothing to do I can just take a walk into the souks and try to get myself lost. Every day it takes me a bit longer, so I guess I'm slowly learning my way around. Yesterday was a weird one - I headed in and followed a straight line, turning ( Read more... )

Well yesterday I finally got some interviews in the can, although it didn't all go exactly as I had planned. I had tried to talk to Kamal on camera the day before, but he was nervous and asked for some time to gather himself and look a couple of words up. Well that sounded reasonable so we had rescheduled for yesterday ( Read more... )

Woken up just after five this morning by the call to prayer. The muezzin sounded all lost and melancholy, hitting all the blue notes in the pre-dawn dark. I wanted to lean out of my hotel window and shout out as well, towards a certain girl in England in the hope that part of her would hear me and know that I wish I was with her on Valentine's ( Read more... )

I have spent the weekend largely stressing about what the hell I am doing here. I could still be working for the BBC in Britain, earning steady money and not using up all my savings on some ludicrous pipe-dream, staying in a dodgy flea-pit and passing my evenings in a haze of leaded petrol smoke, sweet mint tea and bad Arabic, being hassled by ( Read more... )

This morning, I thought: it's Sunday, I'm leaving the city, and I'm spending time with friends. For all of these reasons, I'll leave the camera in the hotel today and be sociable ( Read more... )