Sitting in Casablanca with an Arkansas t-shirt on

Dear blog,

I have been cheating on you.  You can't blame me though - you are much less easy to transport than my freebie Grant Thornton purple notebook that my dad got for free and gifted to me for Christmas, and definitely less pocketable than my Moleskine notebook, the one I feel fancy writing in because it is the notebook that Ernest Hemingway wrote in, even though it makes my hand hurt and my sentences shorter.  So, I have to be completely honest....I have written about 6 entries since our last visit, and quite frankly, I'm not sure that I can share with you all of the drawn out details that I shared with my other notebooks.  Maybe some day we can get to that point.  I hope you can understand that it was very personal.  I hope you also understand that writing in a journal as I eat dinner alone makes time fly by much quicker.

I sit here with a smaller amount of baggage than I carried yesterday, but it is still more than I want to be carrying.  It is NOT sustainable.  I think my next blog will be dedicated to this theme - baggage.  It is such a fitting metaphor for this travel escapade that I cannot ignore it.

I spent most of the day traveling today, with my start point in Nyon, which is a small town between Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland that I was visiting because it happens that my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Ammon worked in this adorable Swiss town.  I have come to really adore this woman and she has become a sort of inspiration for me over the last few days of travel.  Long story short, I traveled all weekend, seeking out my roots - retracing the footsteps of Elizabeth Ammon in Switzerland, prior to her departure to the US to start the American lineage the descends from my Grandma Schoonenberg.  Incredible experience.

It is truly amazing when you have sensations that drive where you walk and where you explore, and you don't know why.  You just have to believe that your body is taking you to a place that is important.  I read recently about migrating birds and how humans have tried to understand via different experiments and theories how migratory birds find their way home.  They haven't quite figured it out yet, but they seem to think it has something to do with the sun.  I have been wondering how the hell I found out four days ago that I was working, overlooking Lake Geneva, only ten minutes by train away from a place that my great-grandmother worked, overlooking Lake Geneva and the very same mountains.  Not only did I find this out, but I was compelled to visit this place and when I was there, I felt an extreme sense of understanding, comfort and peace, almost like it was some sort of home.  I found myself looking at old buildings and fields and trees that had no direct meaning, but I knew I should be taking the sensations in, like I had some sort of deeper understanding with certain things around me without any needed rationale.

Unbelievably, the place where Elizabeth Ammon worked has since been converted into a National Swiss Museum, full of ancient Swiss relics, in addition to artifacts from the school at the Chateau that she worked in as a maid.  Coincidentally, I met the curator for the museum, who was fascinated by my story and I was so overcome with emotion that I cried when she told me that just a few steps away were the maid's quarters.

That was Nyon.  I carried a lot of baggage with me there, up and down the winding streets, through chilling winds off of Lake Geneva.  It was stupendous.

I traveled all day today with a colleague who happens to also be very interested in what I am - ecodesign and Life Cycle Assessment, so we chatted the whole plane ride from Geneva to Casablanca.  Casablanca is fabulous. I have been to Morocco before on a weekend tour from Spain, but I do not remember spending any time here in the city.  It is a very metropolitan place, with a population of around 4 million.  Other than the fact that things are written in Arabic, traffic is mildly horrible and most people walking around in muslim garb, you would feel like you are in a European city.

We walked around through the rain, accompanied by my boss, to find a place to eat dinner and happened upon what we thought was a restaurant, but was actually a hookah bar, where people apparently did not come to eat food.  So, we happily ate dinner like outsiders, followed by apple flavored hookah and watched the landscape of the "restaurant" evolve throughout the evening.  It started with around 10 people besides us, very conservatively dressed.  I felt  so uncomfortable in taking off my trenchcoat, because I was showing my bare arms (considered sexual, I think), that I wore my coat the rest of the evening. But, interestingly, around 10 p.m. a lot more people showed up, including women.  Not just women, but women scantily clad.  It was very interesting.  To put it frankly, I believe we were actually amidst some sort of "pleasure place", for lack of more appropriate words.  We pretended not to notice and happily chatted (or I was more lectured) on how America is messed up and the politics are all wrong until it was time to go back to the hotel for a nice night's rest before our plant visit tomorrow.

Bon nuit!