Took off to the mountains with Barakat to several nurseries… in search of the perfect bamboo (to decorate his restaurants). With so much mountain air drive-time, I got to chat and hear so much juicy, insider information about Moroccan life, about entrepreneurial heart and soul, about the King of Morocco and how recent world events have shaken things up, about how real business works in Morocco… I got all the nitty gritty, the lowdown, the skinny…

Before heading back to Marrakech, we stopped at a rooftop cafe overlooking the valley of green, green foothills beneath the mountains…

A Berber boy was playing his piccalo flute, and we had him jam for us as we drank our mint tea…. sitting next to us at the next table, some businessmen were getting entertained by a couple Moroccan prostitutes (Barakat explained)… they all pretended to be unimpressed and unaffected, like they weren’t witnessing, at that exact moment, the most amazing flute they had ever heard in their entire prostituting lives…