marrakech makes me sick.

the end of february brought the first trip of the new year...to morocco!

how exotic! how romantic!

the weather was perfect, the food was out of this world, and christine and i giggled our heads off for 3 days (which sarah and julia did not find amusing). and we did something i'd always wanted to do: ride in a hot air balloon! it was rather expensive, but spending currencies of poorer countries is always a bit like playing with monopoly money. 2000 dirham? no problem, it's probably only about 5 bucks! (turns out it was 200. oh well.)

i'm helping the guys set up. they didn't actually solicit my help, but i was too excited to just stand there and watch.

this is how we take off. really. i was practicing my "we're all gonna die!!!!!" face.
i was on the quest for the perfect tajine. no overpriced fancy city tajine for me. mine came from this middle-of-nowhere tajine stand. it has cracks and chips and no pretty paint, but it's the real deal. and it only cost 30 dirham. what a bargain shopper. (read: cheapskate)

i was kind of afraid he'd bite me, but he was the gentlest camel i've ever hugged.

and we got henna tattoos (all that sunshine was messing with my brain.) which were cool for the first day and then after that looked like we had some sort of contagious skin disease. more than once i looked at my arm and panicked, thinking i was dying.

djemaa el fna market in marrakech. there were snake charmers and monkey trainers, but i wasn't about to pay for a picture of them.
we stayed in a beautiful riad, whose romance was heightened by the rose petals on the bed. just the mood i was going for with my 3 female colleagues. when one of our trips fell through, our riad manager, mohammed, offered to take us to the atlas mountains to meet his family on their sheep farm. we went. and we rode some donkeys. and the "ass" jokes were abundant. the ride was so long we wondered if our donkey drivers were taking us off to be sold in the moroccan sex trade. nope, it was just one long ass ride.

right after i snapped this picture, this guy accidentally dumped all that mint tea all over the place.

inside the berber carpet shop where, much to sarah's embarrassment, i asked, "how much for the flying ones?"

oh yeah, and i got food poisoning (at least that's what i tell people, i probably just ate too much.) that was the best part, because all that eating and i didn't put on an ounce. hurray for morocco!