Home, and back again.

Okay, yes, I have been gone for a month and a half out of T-town, but I have not been just sitting down contemplating life! Let's cover where I've been first. Starting July 3rd, I packed a big suitcase, and went straight up to the capital Rabat, where I worked in an orphanage. Eleven days after that I went to another city named El Jadida, where I became a camp counselor for Summer Camp. And then lastly, I did another 5 days at an orphanage in the same city. So that takes care of all of July, which I had patiently worked through in order to get to August, where I took vacation to go to AMERICA. Oh man, I teared up just walking through JFK. I'm confident people thought I was nuts. I bought my first Starbucks in eleven months and told the barista, "This is the best coffee you have ever made." 

Sweet-sweet America, I can't say enough good things about you and how much I missed you. Your entitled-mid life crises, your barely legal mothers, your mountains of unattainable paperwork, your processes, your legal system and encumbered way of life, etc. The amount of infrastructure that America has is staggering. I mean, it seems as though EVERY road is paved! There are trees and flowers and greenery everywhere. The weather in the Seattle area was a nice cool 68 degrees Fahrenheit the entire time I was home. I was totally unused to it anymore. I got to wear jeans for the first time in two months! Holy cow! This was unbelievable. What a change from the upper 80s of the coast I had been enjoying, and the intense 108 degrees I was getting in T-town. 

Visiting America was an enormous blur. Basically, I went home, ate as much ridiculously good food as I could, shopped, and hung out with friends and family. I even saw a movie in a theater! Egads! Not to say that Morocco doesn't have movie theaters, it's just that they usually have Bollywood, Arabic, or French films. Occasionally there will be English speaking films, but they're usually from a few months back. So, it's a toss-up. But anyways, two weeks in America felt like an ice-cold shock to the system. I think I acted normally but inside I kept thinking that there is American life and there's Moroccan life, and they are two separate worlds. Or rather, one place has my American family and friends and the other has my Moroccan family and friends. I don't even know what to think. On the way back from America, I had a layover in Paris. So I had about 5 hours to kill and I was relaxing in the airport lounge, drinking coffee. While I was trying to put back together my broken heart after leaving America, I heard a mysterious airport voice calling passengers, and there indeed, was a certain 'Williams' called. But I thought that couldn't have been me, my plane wasn't leaving for two hours still. However, I went upstairs after a fair amount of time just looking around and minding my own business. So I looked at my gate and saw that boarding had just closed. So after I about started crying, jumping, and falling on the floor all at the same time, I had to go talk to the airline and switch my tickets, and blah blah blah. Happily though, there was a flight only two hours after my original flight was supposed to take off. I did indeed make it to Morocco only to fall into the arms of my beautiful friend Jolie who let me sleep at her house for the next four days. That's all I'll write for now. More soon. :) 

So, I thought that Charles de Gaul airport had fantastic architecture. 

Here's a picture of Jolie's dog, "Mushkil" (a.k.a. Problem) being adorable as per usual.

And let's end, of course, with some food porn. We made excellent pretzels!