Here are some of my favourite Moroccan food dishes

Big Meals:

Couscous: A Moroccan Friday traditional meal made of steamed semolina grains topped with veggies and meat. It’s served typically on Friday after the midday prayer, and part of it should be given away to the less-fortunate.

Moroccan meals are typically communal, as such couscous is often served on a large dish. Everyone is supposed to eat from their place inwards.

This couscous is also topped with sweet onions and cinnamon- my favourite!

Tagines: A Moroccan stew which, like North American or European stews, is slow cooked for a long time so the flavours soak in. Tagine also refers to the dish in which is it cooked and served.

There are two which I really like. The first is a beef tagine with prunes and almonds

and the other is a chicken, lemon and olive tagine which is sometimes served with fries on top.

Rfissa...

It’s been just over four and a half months since I arrived here in Rabat. And in exactly four and a half months, I’ll be back in Canada. It feels like forever ago since I arrived here. Life here in Morocco has become normal and dare I say it Morocco almost feels like home. Almost.

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a couple weeks now. It’s not that I’ve been busy or lazy, it’s that I honestly don’t know how to reflect on my experience.

Google says that the first thing to do when trying to reflect on something is to find a place of comfort and somewhere relaxing. I plugged in some Louis Armstrong in a cafe. Check.

Next, it says to think back to the beginning of the experience and relive it mentally. Thinking back to when I first arrived is difficult because it felt like forever ago. As I play back saying goodbye to my mum and sister at 5am, nearly missing our first flight...

Last weekend, my roommate Sam and I took a short overnight trip south to the big city of Marrakech. We hopped on an early morning train Saturday and attempted to sleep the whole way. We probably would’ve succeeded were it not for three of the most adorable kids!

We arrived in Marrakech at around noon and walked from the train station to the Jemma el Fnaa, the main square in Marrakech. It’s effectively a huge market with vendors selling not just food and things, but also snake charmers, acrobats, henna artists, monkey trainers, musicians, dancers, and so much more.

After checking into our beautiful hostel and having tea (lots of tea) we decided to go explore the medina.

The medina is a massive organism, comprising stalls full of everything you would ever need, houses, hotels, street vendors selling things from their hands, restaurants, cafes, mosques, workshops, and so much more...

Here’s the thing most people don’t tell you about exchange: It becomes routine. After you’ve been in a country for a while, it becomes normal. You settle into the pattern of school life and all the things which come with it- studying, friends, etc. Sometimes travel gets forgotten.

This trip to Spain was my way of changing things up. I love Morocco but it had become normal for me in a lot of ways. When I decided to take this trip (in the shower no less), it was a very spur of the moment decision. I decided to book a return ticket only and then find my way through Spain almost entirely on my own (Caleb joined me for the first bit which was awesome).

About 3 days after Caleb and I split ways, I was sitting in a Starbucks (bc none in Rabat) in Sevilla, and had a bit of a breakdown. Put it simply, I didn’t know how to be on my own. For the first three days, I had fun, met new people and...

When most people travel Spain, they go see the highlights: Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, and Granada. The big four. While I obviously went to all four, I wanted to see something a bit different as well, so I decided to go tour Northern Spain as well.

I decided (for some crazy reason) to take a nine hour overnight bus from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

I arrived at nine in the morning, after getting almost no sleep, and realized that it was pouring rain. And being totally unprepared, I had my peacoat and a toque, and no umbrella. Great thinking, Khalid.

Compostela is the capital of Galicia, one of the autonomous provinces of Spain. It is the end of the Way of Saint James, a pilgrimage route which people still take today, which ends at the Cathedral of Santiago. This is also allegedly the resting place of Saint James the Great, one of the apostles in Christianity.

The...

As many of you know, I just got back from a whirlwind adventure touring Spain! Over the course of 17 days, I found may way to 8 cities on 3 different coasts, took 3 different modes of transport including 3 overnight busses, and had learned countless things. Here are the five biggest highlights from my adventure in no particular order.

The Sagrada Familia, Barcelona: Because of Spain’s strong ties to Catholicism and because they are usually free, I managed to see a church or cathedral in every city I went. All of them were phenomenally impressive, however none came close to the beauty and magnitude of the Sagrada Familia.

Designed by Gaudi, this church has been in the process of being completed for about 200 years, with estimates of it being competed by the middle of the decade (What?!). However, even in it’s incomplete state, it is unbelievably beautiful. Here are some pictures:




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Written by Heather Sherlock and Mackenzie Bartlett

On our second day in Morocco, Mackenzie and I took it open ourselves to explore the neighbourhood where we live, l’Océan. We were cautious and tentative out on the streets, having heard horror stories about the kind of harassment women face in Morocco. In the few minutes it took to walk to the local grocery store, we were harassed upwards of ten times, consisting of “welcome to Morocco,” and constant attempts to guess where we’re from, including “hola,” buongiorno,” and “hello.” Naturally, experiencing street harassments leads to thoughts of more violent forms of sexism such as sexual assault. When we reached the grocery store, Mackenzie turned to me and asked, “What do you think the police would do if we called them about sexual assault or harassment? Would they help us?” Almost as soon as she finished her thought, we were...

I haven’t been as active on this blog as I should/could be but here’s to reviving it!

My life has fallen into a routine of the Cafe, home, and school, which has been nice but makes blogging about new things hard. However, in this routine, I’ve become settled in Morocco and for that I am thankful. In the last couple of months, people have asked me what my favourite part of Morocco. Initially, that was a really hard question to answer because everything was still so new and it was hard to contextualize things. Now I think I have an answer.

My favorite thing about Morocco is the people

Here’s why: Moroccans, by and large in my experience, are super hospitable, and will go out of their way to make sure that you are alright. Nowhere is this more clear than in just greeting someone. In our first darija lesson, we learned four or five different ways to say how are you. Initially, I imagined...

For the last couple weeks, my body has been in a deep chill. It has been a very cold 10 degrees every day. Now for those of you in Canada, I know you’re looking at that like… “ooh 10 degrees, it’s frickin minus 30 with the windchill and you’re complaining about it being above zero… give me a break” believe me I would’ve thought the same thing last year.

The difference between Morocco cold and Canada cold is huge. For one thing, winter here is only 2 months rather than 6, and that it doesn’t get below freezing. However, here in Morocco, you are always bundled up because there is no indoor heating. And when I say no indoor heating, I mean huddle under three sweaters and 2 pairs of socks under your covers to try and keep warm. In Canada, we complain about how cold it is outside because relative to inside, where it’s 18 or 20 degrees, it’s freezing cold. In Morocco it’s the opposite. I...

It has now been just over three months since I first arrived, tired, stinky and luggage free, in Rabat. Here’s a quick look at how things have been.

1: School: Wow that was fast. First semester (with the exception of two papers) is officially over. The six courses I took were, for the most part, interesting and I feel like I learned a lot. This is especially true in terms of…

2: Language: This has been a struggle. This semester I took classes in both Modern Standard Arabic and Darija, Moroccan Arabic. What’s the difference? A LOT! Modern Standard Arabic (written arabic) provided a lot of the basis for Darija, as in we learned how to write all the letters and some basic grammar structures which exist in both. Darija, was basically a crash course on all the vocab needed to survive in Morocco. We learned a million different words for daily life, but having zero Arabic before coming, it...