I finished my stroll through Rabat’s ginormous cemetery overlooking the behemoth, crashing waves and the ocean (I think this is where I’d like to be buried… AFTER I’m dead, I mean) and wandered around the kasbah and French colonial gardens inside…

Ah, and it wouldn’t be a day in Morocco without someone asking me to buy hash… “No, sir. Thank you.” Not sure why I have to be so polite in my declining their stalwart, entrepreneurial efforts, but it’s become my trusty, failsafe mantra here, like a six-gun shooter at my side… and I keep my itchy, FRENCH trigger finger ready at all times… “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Boom – done! “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Bam – back away!

I sat to rest my weary self outside the impressive and massive front kasbah gate… when two girls came up to me, asked if they could sit, and proceeded to try out their scant English against my non-existent Spanish/French/Arabic. Sisters, I deduced, on a shopping excursion to the big city to escape their family and small town for a quick daytrip jaunt. I thought for sure they were prostitutes, not by how they were dressed, but by how intensely friendly and immediately, gregariously comfortable and curious they were with me as they sat down and started chatting.

Once again, my cynical guard and cautious defenses were shamed by true kindness and innocent sweetness. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out at a restaurant where Najat took exceptional pride in ordering the entire meal, sending my plate back when the wrong dish was served, insisted on paying… Afterwards, we taxi’d to the train station so I could treat them to ice cream while they waited for their return home, back to their tiny, Moroccan village, back to their huge family…. and off they went…

I kept exploring for the next four or five hours… getting super lost again in the sardine-packed, ant hill, cattle herd crawl of the medina…. outside the medina walls, I finally stumbled on a beachfront seafood restaurant for dinner and found myself surrounded by all the Rabat lovers, gazing out across the ocean and over their lovers’ dinners… I think it was quite noisy (as when any crowd chatter swells), but I couldn’t tell… I was too enchanted by my seafood spaghetti, and a day’s worth of thoughts to sort through… perfect peace and quiet in my secret head…