Foreword

I’ll be in Morocco from March 6^th to the 13^th.  I am going with a group of 80 people, none of whom I know.  I am going with these 80 people I don’t know because we all saw and signed up for the same trip advertised by the George Mason University Center for Global Education (the same office that set me up with the internship that inspired the London blog of 2006).  These week-long trips are open to the public as well as to students, which may be why an alarming majority of the people who showed up to the orientation for the trip were not exactly strictly in my age demographic.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it just adds another dimension to this new experience.

Traveling is not a new experience to me; what will be new to me is traveling with a large group on a trip where there is a detailed itinerary, hotel reservations are made more than a day or two in advance, many meals are already planned, transportation between cities is arranged, guides are waiting – these are foreign concepts to me.  Elementary school field trips aside, this will be the most structured trip I have ever been on.

I will have a roommate I don’t know and didn’t choose.  I won’t have very much of a say in my schedule, and I will have limited free time.  I will consume alcohol only in secret.  I won’t do laundry.  Most of the people I’ll be with will be older than me.  I’ll hope and expect to learn a lot, but those lessons will likely come from places and things I don’t expect at all.  It’s going to be like starting college all over again, except with more camels and minarets.

I’m going to take lots of pictures, some of which I will try to incorporate into these blog posts.  Pictures that don’t make it into a post will go up on flickr.  My flickr can be found here, but I will post a link to the gallery specifically for Morocco pictures as soon I upload the first set.

I’m sure that sometimes it’s going to be a challenge to find reliable internet.  What I’m going to do to try to keep things clear is headline each post with where I am when I’m writing it and the local time (Morocco is five hours ahead of the east coast).  The timestamps on the posts themselves are set to east coast time.

Please feel free to leave comments or to email me, but I won’t promise any sort of substantial responses until I get back.  I expect most writing to occur late at night after we’re done for the day or while in transit.  Then I can just quickly upload what I’ve written either at the hotel or the internet café or wherever it is I’m getting online so that I can spend as little time there as possible, and instead spend more time learning to charm snakes or tan leather or pour the perfect cup of mint tea.

In the mean time, I will finish getting ready.  My flight is at 10 o’clock tonight so I need to begin the journey out to Dulles shortly as I still have some errands to run.

Air France’s online check-in system is broken.  The fun begins.