Story about the Sahara - Fall of 03

this is another email-turned-post cause I liked the memory and the story. i was studying in Morocco and sent back this story to good friend Faust:

well, mr faust, you caught me at a particularly awesome time. the weather outside is frightful, but what i saw this last weekend was like food for the eyes and lifetime.

saturday night (only 48 hours ago) i was with friends eating berber chicken tagine, a staple for great cuisine in this part of northern africa. we were sopping up the juices of slow-cooked vegetables and meats with bread and our
hands. and, all of this was done by the soft light of a lantern.

as we were finishing up the dish, my friend, named jimi hendrix, groaned like a cow - he is, after all, a camel; he sounds like a miserable cow when he moans. now jimi was a few feet away, enjoying his own dinner, but he reminded me that i was somewhere i may never be again - the Sahara desert.

after dinner, dessert was oranges and palmagranites, followed by sweet black tea. the hosts of the camping spot picked up their drums, played and sang great songs in berber, spanish, arabic, and english. the whole thing was
dumbfounding. the temperature dropping; the moon rising from the dunes' edges; the shooting stars galore; sand blowing onto my sleeping eyes.

before the sun came up, we all woke and took our last meal before the day of fasting began. then, we climbed the nearby dune (it wasn't the highest - for the highest would have taken hours to climb) and sat patiently watching the same sun that rises every day create new colors and images across the seemingly endless dunes. and yes, the dunes curve and cut off like the photographs. there really are waves in the sand from the constant wind; and, yes, the sahara really is moving, slowly, in every direction, with the constant blowing of the sands. also, i skied in the sahara (later in the day it was especially funny to have skied in the desert).

then, on the way home passing through towns of markets and muslims, friends and strangers, between mountains and rivers (mostly dried up beds), kasbahs and mosques, it began to snow. very seriously - it snowed between our morning in the desert and our arrival back on campus. campus was not snowing, but cold and rainy like williams, mass, or state college, pa.

from the sahara to the snow. from fasting for ramadan to the computer lab. this whole study abroad thing is pretty wonderful.