Barrel O' Grease

So instead of heading to Greece like was planned, my oh so smart self decided to book a flight to Africa in the middle of the summer and see just how much more heat my body could endure before I died.

My flight through Rome connected in Casablanca and I was quite excited to be on my way until I learned that my second flight had been cancelled and I was to wait around in a Moroccan airport for the next 5 hours. Luckily the people I was with threw a fit until the airport personnel gave us all meal vouchers; Baloney is what we were given...literally baloney. Never in my life did I imagine I'd be sitting in an airport in Casablanca eating a processed meat sandwich. At some very early hour we made it to Marrakesh and found the hostel.

When I awoke the next day I sat down to breakfast with some girls discussing something called a Hamam that they described as a massage which sounded really good so I decided to give it a go because I was feeling refreshed and energized after my first legit shower in weeks.

Turns out, a Hamam is a bath house where an old woman in a thong with boobs hanging over her panty line literally ripped my clothing from my body and plopped me down on a rubber mat in a steam room with crumbling tile walls...surprise! Not sure if this endeavor was going to make me cleaner or dirtier I sat there and waited for her to return with a vat of black grease that I was promptly rubbed down with. Then she "exfoliated" my skin to the point of chaffing with what can only be described as steel wool all the while pointing out how dirty I was and how much crap she was scrubbing off of me. I tried to explain that I only wanted to be washed from the neck down and I thought she understood until she threw a bucket of water on my head that was poured from a rusty spigot on the wall.

After that I decided I had been through the most Moroccan of Moroccan things and it was now safe to eat street food, walk around without being covered from head to toe and drink the water...ok well not the water but everything else. So far its all been lovely minus the bug infested dates I bought from a man with a rickety cart covered in flies.