We have added a new continent to our list of visited places: Africa. But we are not on a safari….we are in Morocco!

We flew from Denver to JFK to Amsterdam to Casablanca. The airport in Amsterdam was so cool. It looked like an upscale mall with neat seating and light displays. Check out this clock! The artist recorded it in one 12 hour session.

This was fascinating and it looked so real!

The place we ate breakfast had Delft teacups for seats

and Poffertjes, which are baby buckwheat pancakes that are so fluffy….especially good dipped in Nutella!!!

We then flew to Casablanca and caught our ride to our hotel in Rabat.  We had dinner at the hotel where the decor was very French and so was the waitress: she had no interest in helping us decipher the totally French menu. The food was good enough but we were so tired we could hardly eat.

We only got about 3 hours of sleep Monday night and basically none since then. We arrived in Rabat at about 3pm on Wednesday. We came a day early for the tour so we could get some rest before diving in. Good thing we did! We slept 14 hours last night! We were awakened with the sound of an electric drill coming from the next room at 10:30am. We were so sound asleep; I wonder how much longer we would have slept!

We stopped at a street cafe for some lunch (since we slept through breakfast!) Our first real Moroccan meal was basically a chicken gyro ordered by pointing!

The dress on the streets went from burkas to totally modern and everything in between. This is Moroccan winter so we saw furry boots and down coats. Meanwhile, I was a sweat ball; much more humid than expected here but we are are very close to the ocean. We can see the Atlantic from our room.

We strolled through the medina (the shopping alleys) and I bought a pair of slip on shoes like I wanted in India but they never had my size.

Dinner was with 4 other tour participants at a Moroccan cuisine restaurant where we had grilled fish and chicken tangine that just fell off the bone.

Wake up call is 7am and the craziness of Morocco truly begins.