Bedroom at Dar Amine in Rabat
It was that time of the year where I need to clear my vacation leaves. I was in the United States a couple of months before and I actually considered staying longer there. However, it is quite expensive to stay in the United States for longer periods of time if you don’t have friends’ homes to stay in. Even if it was around fifty dollars a day, it would have been prohibitively expensive for me to stay long. It is a pity since there are a lot of nice places in the United States that I would love to visit. I hate to keep waiting to be sent there for a business meeting and extend afterwards only because I wanted to save money on plane fare. This time, I decided to visit somewhere somewhat nearby. Because of visa requirements, the nearest country which I can visit on short notice would be the Kingdom of Morocco.
Common Area at Dar Amine in Rabat
To be honest, I was having second thoughts on going to Morocco. Much of it is unknown to me and in such short notice, I didn’t really plan where I would be going. It wasn’t until I actually needed to book places to stay in that I managed to nail down an itinerary. My port of entry would be Marrakesh. However, before that, I needed a five hour stopover at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for the flight to Marrakesh. The flight to Marrakesh was much longer than the Paris flight. As I was looking out the window I was imagining that Morocco would be all desert but that didn’t seem to be true. It only turned desert when were close to Marrakesh. It seems that the northern half of the country can be rather green while the southern half is drier and more desert.
As the plane was approaching the city. I noticed that the buildings of Marrakesh were all earth colored. Matching the desert sands. I don’t know if this was intentional but I thought it was quite amusing to see this. I still have a long way to go before I get to where I would stay for the night. It was only then that I realized that I made a huge mistake in planning my stays. Dar Amine is where I would be staying for the night is in the capital city of Rabat which is still at least three hours away from Marrakesh. This means I still need to catch a train going there. It was probably at that moment that I felt tired. I didn’t have a place to stay in Marrakesh so I just needed to keep on moving.
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