On the Road to Morocco...

Disclaimer *I have finally written this post because my Mother keeps hinting that it's overdue. And I'm thinking that maybe if I post more regularly, she'll stop hinting about her desire for grandchildren...* just kidding Mom... :-)

So there's this airline called Ryanair. Ryanair is like the Saturn cars of airlines. After takeoff, once you've reached cruising altitude, you realise that you're whizzing through the skies in a plastic box! But it's ok, because you get there in one piece and you can't beat the price!

It was thanks to Ryanair that I got to go to Morocco over Easter Break. From Edinburgh, you can be in Africa in 3 hours and 40 minutes. Brilliant!


My travel partners were flatmate Kate and friend Emma. We arrived in Marrakech on a warm Tuesday evening, and immediately took note of the pink-ness that surrounded us. Traditionally, the buildings in Marrakech were built out of clay made from the Moroccan soil, which is pink in tone. These days, both the traditional and non-traditional methods of building are used, but it is law that all building have to be painted the traditional pink. Interesting, no?

Our first evening we walked into the old town, also known as the Medina. Our first meal was amazing, I had a lamb tagine with dates and almonds. I will never question the art of tagine again. The conical lid allows meat to slow cook into an amazingly tender meal, and the dates and almonds added layers of texture and taste that were out of this world. Happy Kim!


The Medina-home to stalls selling food, tourists, snakecharmers and henna artists.

The Koutubia

We spent the next day wandering the old town. We visited the Kotoubia (the main Mosque in Marrakech), Bahia Palace, the Saadian Tombs, and a restaurant that had a resident tortoise doing laps around the restaurant. I named him Harold.


Homes are art in Morocco. It's so intricate

Yeah, my ceilings look like this too...

The peaceful courtyard in the middle of the Palace

Storks nest all over the old buildings in Marrakech

Caleche rides...we did this!

Dans le caleche

Palace Ruins

The Saadian Tombs


Go Harold Go!

Day 3 was spent in the new town. We visited the beautiful Majorelle Gardens, which are a haven for colours that are not pink, and a bit of a shrine to Yves Saint-Laurent, who lived here for a while. It also ended up stopping us from going into the Medina that day, which proved to be more than a little lucky.


Oh, to be a French Designer...

Colour!

Meow...

Majorelle Gardens? Or a jungle? hmmm...

Loved the colours

Cactus Garden...spot the travel companions!

That afternoon my phone was ringing non-stop, unbeknownst to me, in my bag. By the time I answered it, to the frantic voice of my friend in the UK, I knew something was wrong. There had been a suicide bombing in the Medina that afternoon. A man had gone into a restaurant frequented by tourists and had set off a nail bomb. 14 people were killed and the middle level of the restaurant was blown completely out. We were scared, but extremely lucky that we had not been near that area. Tourists were advised to stay clear of the medina, and we definitely did.

Cafe Argana and...

Cafe Argana, post-bomb

Luckily, we were distracted the following day first by the royal wedding on the only english channel we got in our apartment, BBC News (how appropriate!), and then we popped off to the spa for a traditional Hammam. In a hammam, you get to sit in a steam room, then you get scrubbed down very thoroughly by a woman, washed up, covered in a body mask, rinsed down, and then you get to sit in a robe and contemplate how many layers of skin you just lost. It was so fabulous!


I call this "Cat and an Old Car" prints on sale now!

We spent the next day taking a road trip over the atlas mountains to see Aït Ben-Haddou, a kasbah that is also a Unesco World Heritage Site. The trip through the mountains was beautiful, the kasbah was gorgeous, and had amazing views, and it was nice to get out of the town for a day. Note #1: Marraech really is not a town that needs more than 3-4 full days to get the feel of it. A week was more than we needed. Thus the day trip!


Oh hi! We're in the Mountains! That's a small kasbah behind us!

Gorgeous Mountain

Love the desert!

UNESCO knows their stuff...

View from Aït ben-Haddou

other view from Aït ben-Haddou

On top of the World

Architecture of a Kasbah

How quaint! Gotta love those mountain towns!

The last few days of our trip included wandering through the souks (markets) and bartering for deals, eating amazing French and Moroccan food, finding the only places in Marrakech that sold wine and doing our part for the Moroccan wine industry, and laying out by the pool on our last day, which happened to be one of the only sunny days we had. Note #2: Rain follows me wherever I go. I may need to see someone about this. It's starting to become an issue.


A street off the souks

beautiful

I loved this chair

Emma is Bedouined-up and ready for a desert adventure!

The outside of a school

getting rained on!

I love the sun...

To sum up, Morocco is an amazing country! Yes, there were some scary bits (bombing, and the taxi drivers were a bit of a treat), and some annoying bits (being blonde and white in an Arab country=men shout to you and yell inappropriate things no matter HOW loose and demure your clothing is). But overall, the people were fantastic, the food was a treat, and being so ensconced in such a completely different culture is such an eye opening experience. I love it.


Proof that terrorism is not acceptable no matter what your religion


I wish you all beautiful life and beautiful travels.
<3 Kim


I blend right in...

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks 'Go'

 ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe


For all the horrible, terrible, soul-sucking months of winter that Scotland throws at those of us who live here, once spring comes,  you start to forget just how bad the winter was in a haze of vitamin-D induced euphoria. Then there are the flowers. The lovely, lovely flowers...







And the sun! And trips to the Royal Botanic Gardens! And...and...what was I complaining about all those months? 








Today I'm off to Morocco for a week. I'm feeling very calm. No rush, no last minute worries. This is what happens when you take afternoon flights instead of 6 am flights. I need to remember this, and plan my future travel accordingly. 


So prepare for a taste of Northern Africa next time I write! And everyone enjoy the Royal Wedding! I myself will be sitting in the Marrakesh medina watching snake charmers at that time...


<3 Kim

Londres otra vez y en primavera

Time marches on and it’s another blog written from another train headed south…March almost over, the clocks have sprung forward, and the mythical sun has deemed the British Isles worthy of her presence.

It’s about time, eh? This winter was definitely loooooonger than the last two I spent in Edinburgh. Multiple reasons for that, I know, and many of them explicitly NOT related to the weather or the position of the earth in relation to the sun. Luckily for me, the first day of spring also corresponds with my birthday, meaning that I am able to ring in new life for the earth with a new year of my own life. Poetic, I’m sure. There are cherry blossoms on the trees outside my window as the train crawls into York station, a lovely pink burst of new life. I love flowers, and have started buying them for my flat on a regular basis. I usually buy the ones that are close to their Tesco “expiration date”, both because they are strongly discounted and because I feel like these beautiful buds deserve the chance to brighten a home just as much as the newer ones. There is nothing WRONG with these flowers, but they have been deemed as having a shorter life span then their packaging claims, or else one bud has snapped off and the bouquet is deemed too damaged to be sold full price.

Fittingly reminiscent of our cultural obsession with youth, I think. We want the youngest, most flawless people in our movies and TV, and we want the least damaged fruits-flowers-pets-cars-partners. Personally, I cannot comprehend a life of perfectly undamaged goods. How boring and lacking in character! Character is the one thing that we continue to develop throughout or lifetime, slowly formed by every experience, run-in, and life-affirming event we dance through. The minute we are born we slowly begin to die, one day, one year at a time. It is what we do with the life between birth and death that defines us, and the people and things that we cherish that will remind others of us once we are gone. And if you think about it, all of our worldly goods, no matter how new and shiny and perfect they are now, will someday end up in what anthropology calls a ‘midden’, which is really just another name for a DUMP, mingled with other material goods into a stratified history of society that future archaeologists will dig through with careful excitement, hoping to find the secrets of a society long gone, lost in the sands of time.

Now, I’m not trying to preach about the evils of consumerism. (Anyone who has ever helped me move or stored boxes of my belongings when I move overseas knows that I am a leeeetle bit of a packrat.) I’m just saying, we should value the things we own, see the beauty in items that have already lived one life and still have life left in them instead of immediately throwing them out when the newer model comes out. Think about how ugly the world would be if we were constantly tearing down old buildings to build new, more structurally relevant ones? Or fervently fixing any flaws or cracks that creep into our useful possessions? There would be no amazing Roman architecture left from the time before Christ to draw millions of people into Rome each year, no cracked Liberty Bell to remind us of the struggles that our ancestors went through in order to build a new nation.

This week my family is emptying out my Grandparent’s house in South Carolina to get it ready for rental. A sad, nostalgic time spent revisiting Al and Helen’s past through their material possessions. Unbearably emotional for my parents, Aunts, and Uncles; and unbearably emotional for me, because I cannot be there to help them and to touch the physical remains of my grandparent’s lives together as they were left by my Grandma when she left for the west coast in 2009, not knowing that she would never return to her home. Now the life that was so neatly stored and displayed and lived in the house by the lake will be boxed up and moved to Seattle, for my Grandmother to have near her and for the family to take to their respective homes, bringing new life and purpose to old items that hold memories and sentiment of the last 83 years of my Grandmother’s life and the too-short life that my Grandfather lost 15 years ago.

How much will these items lose by being moved from their home? Will the shadow of sentiment diminish with the passage of hands and time? Yes. But I know that my family will try its hardest to retain the most meaningful pieces, the most fabulous memories, for years to come.

This has turned into a much more depressing and wandering piece than I initially intended. I was going to share news of my birthday, news of the arrival of spring. But I suppose in a circuitous way I have done both of those things. I am 27 years old. I have ushered in spring with the addition of another notch in the belt of my life. And I will, I know, continue to live, continue to collect items of consequence and (hopefully) of character. This is what we as humans do. We give meaning to the most meaningless events and we attach emotion to the most lifeless items. But it is our choosing of these items, our reactions to these events that make an impact.

Remember this the next time you casually toss out an old scarf, or carelessly knock a chip out of your dining room table. Or when you walk past the discounted flowers at the grocery store. What material goods do you want to define you, to define our culture 300 years from now? Would we treat items with such careless abandon if we knew that someone, somehow, would be able to equate their state of being with us personally when they are dug out of the midden? I don’t know…

But I do know that this plastic inflatable man will not be the defining object in my life. He was a good party favour, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be leaving him in my closet for my future family to find when I have gone.


A birthday "gift" haha

<3 Kim