bad

There's not much of value to say today. The worst people won this election, and all the "what country do I live in" sentiments people had in 2016 have been reactivated, somehow both more disheartening and less surprisingly than last time. The below is a ramble, more because I need to write words somewhere than because I think I have anything original or productive to say. Feel free to ignore; do what you need to get through this awful time!

Morocco: looping da loop

One last Morocco post, written in an upper-respiratory-non-COVID haze on the eve of the 2024 elections in America! Hooray/augh!

Back when I planned the Morocco trip the first time, aiming for December/Jan 2020-21, I had schemed it around my hubristic notion of "it'd be nice if every other New Year's Eve I celebrate somewhere I haven't been before!" So hey, we already did a temple on a mountain in Japan, what if this New Year's got rung in... in the Sahara??? Great plan for 2020! Ha ha ha, in my opinion, although in a way I still held to the plan... I had never celebrated a NYE in my Rogers Park apartment prior, and I certainly had never steamed my own crabs and made homemade pasta had champagne and fancy little treats at the kitchen counter while occasionally Zooming with other friends isolating in other locations. So um. ANYWAY.

 Flash forward to Christmas 2022 and the vagaries of academic scheduling plus the availability of the operators who organize trips into the desert, and it quickly became apparent that New Year's would have to be rung in elsewhere (in Fes, as it turns out, which was still mega-lovely!) but that I could head into the Sahara shortly after. And so I did! Deets after the video, and after the jump!