CelsAway

Moroccan breakfast is just amazing. The whole family (of which I am now a part), except for the father, gathers around the small table. The kitchen smells like bakery-Wonderland, and I spot the fresh bread baking in the oven. Oh, that looks delicious. And it is! The bread is amazing, but it was the msmaan, topped with a tiny bit of honey, that really reeled me in. 

The place is beautiful and a little bit of a maze. The sun shines on the orange stones and it makes me as warm on the inside as I am on the outside. Muhammed and Younes want pictures everywhere and they pose like two little models. Samira, too, likes to have her picture taken, and forces me to pose with her. It is nice to have some pictures of myself, but I feel awkward with the camera pointing at me. 

For lunch we go home where Hakima, the mother, has prepared a delicious big bowl of couscous. It tastes nothing like the couscous I have eaten before – this meal is wonderful. The vegetables are cooked so soft you can eat with just a spoon. Samira and her mom don’t use the spoons. With their right hand they take couscous and vegetables and mash it into a little ball. It feels weird to me to only use a spoon and thus one hand, because as children we got told off so many times when we didn’t use both hands to eat. I feel like a child all over again, learning etiquette, learning how to eat. Samira’s dad asks me why I eat with my left hand, and I answer that I do everything left because I’m lefthanded. “Bad”, he says, but he laughs. Later, Samira tells me I should eat with my right hand, so I take the spoon in my other hand and the whole family nods and smiles in approval. I didn’t think it would be such a difference, but it’s uncomfortable eating with my bad hand, and unconsciously I sometimes take the spoon in my left hand again, to then put it back immediately.

“Chicken for dinner?”, Samira asks me. As a foreigner, I let my hosts decide whatever I eat. The first night they asked me what I wanted, and I laughed embarrassed – I don’t know anything about their cuisine. A few years ago, I was one of the pickiest eaters ever. If the colour of the food was any shade of green, I would make a face and refuse to even try it. Not only greens, but any food that I hadn’t seen or heard about before, was not going in my mouth. 

With my travels in mind, I started forcing myself to try more foods two years ago, but it’s only since last year in Denmark that I succeeded in keeping an open mind. Now, I eat almost everything. Sorry mom and dad for the years and years of me screaming and crying about not wanting to finish my plate… 

While I don’t mind eating chicken, it’s a little different when we get to choose the animal… alive. We get to the chicken market and there’s dozens of live chickens packed together in small cages. This sight makes me want to become a vegetarian, but I am also too shy to tell my hosts I am not comfortable with this. We walk around until Samira chooses a chicken to slaughter. I pay 60dh for my stomach to turn. 

Before we eat breakfast, the neighbour walks in with a pleasant surprise. His dog had puppies last month, and he hands me one named Choukie. Normally a cat-person, I make an exception for puppies, there’s something about baby animals I can’t resist. Choukie is soft and tiny and he warms my heart. 

Samira and I take off to the beach in the afternoon. We walk around while the sun sets and eventually settle down in a chain-café called Espresso lab. Neither of us drinks coffee though, so we order two fresh orange juices. Guess what? I paid 58dh (€5,50) for two large cups! I love Morocco. 

We finish our juices, and she tells me we’re not going home yet. First, she needs to take me to this high viewpoint, Agadir Oufella. To get there we have to take a bus, which is just taking off when we get there. We run and she waves, and the driver stops. I think about De Lijn in Belgium and how they wouldn’t think twice about pushing that gas pedal. 

At the top, we meet with a university friend of Samira, called Sameer (to make it easy for me). It’s dark and getting late and I can’t deny I’m a little tired. Because they are talking in Arabic and I obviously don’t understand, I decide to walk a little in front of them, taking some time for myself. The view is beautiful. The pitch-black horizon filled with thousands of tiny lights is hard to capture on camera, but the photo in my mind is beautiful. 

I will spare you the boring details of my thoughts during the walk around the premises, but when we decide to go back we stumble upon a little problem: the bus has just left and won’t come back for another hour. What first comes up as a joke, quickly turns into an actual solution. Sorry mom and dad… The three of us get on Sameer’s motorbike. The road is steep and a little wavy (it reminds me of the long roads we drove when we went skiing in France) and in the turns I grab Samira’s clothes tighter. It’s my first time ever on a motorcycle and while there’s an adrenaline rush to it, I know it’ll take a lot to ever get me to drive one.