Back to School

I was recently asked by a couple of concerned friends why I am continuously unavailable on line, why I have been a stranger for quite some time now, why I haven’t returned phone calls and haven’t written emails. I would therefore like to apologise for having been silent for so long and I hope that I have not alienated (all) my friends. What have I been doing lately? Well, not much really, apart from travelling like mad around Europe (the UK, France and Romania, since the beginning of the year). For work. Mais oui, what else. And the travel plan for the rest of the year looks even crazier. Eh, I guess I have to survive.

SO: no, I am not upset, I am not precious or self–sufficient. I have just been busy – I know it is a truism but, unfortunately, it is true. And something else is true too – sometimes I just need some time for myself. Some time when I reduce the conversations with friends, even with family, to a minimum. A time reserved for introspection, staring at the ceiling and hard thinking. I know it’s dangerous, I know I might get lost in the woods but this is something which I really need to do from time to time.

In the meantime, I have felt the need to study. My brain has been underused for way too long. I have been toying with the idea of an executive MBA for some time but have decided to postpone that a bit. Just a tiny bit, until I get my CIA degree. The books arrived while I was away but today (my first day back in the office) I took them home J. This is a qualification which I don’t exactly need – meaning that I can do my job extremely well without having passed these exams (and I have another, more meaningful / powerful qualification already). But CIA is related to my job and it’s a way to keep occupied. So, it’s back to school for me, I guess.

I hope I succeeded to reassure everybody and convince them that I am alive and kicking. Just feel the need to be invisible for a while. Relax, I will resurface soon. But, for now, I say goodbye and retreat to my shell.

Every once in a while I get to thinking about relationships …

I am lying in bed, in a hotel room in Lyon, thinking about relationships. Why are they such hard work? Why are we not always able to reach a compromise, why do we keep measuring our and our partners’ commitment? Are we afraid of getting bruised? Is love enough to make a relationship work?

When we move in together with our partner, are we really prepared to let go of our life as singles? Even when we find what we’ve been looking for, some of us are reluctant to let go of our single selves. Is this necessarily bad? Are we allowed to come into a relationship with single people behaviour? Can we hold on to our old habits without being perceived as either weird or selfish? Or can we continue to keep our space, spend time on our own, ‘do our thing’ AND have a perfectly healthy relationship? At what point do separate interests become separate bedrooms and, ultimately, separate lives?

Lately, I have also been thinking about babies … Why are we so different in this respect – some people have made it their number one objective to have them, whereas others simply couldn’t care less. Does the biological clock function differently from one person to another? Both men and women are challenged in this respect even though I guess it’s the women who are more pressurised. Can’t we be happy in pairs? Do we necessarily need babies to round up a relationship and make it complete? On a personal level, I have often wondered if I would really be good at this … How much would that change in my life and would I still be myself.

Maybe we should stop searching for a perfect relationship and settle for a satisfactory one and, when we are about to throw in the towel, we should be aware of the fact that no relationship is perfect and that good relationships are hard to find.

Fes

We arrived in Fes towards the evening, after having visited Meknes. Very impressed with our hotel, a former palace, now a very nice Sofitel.

We saw places that pretty much resembled what we had seen before in Morocco so I will not go into much detail. It was an uneventful, yet pleasant stay.

On Sunday morning we were off to the local airport to catch a plane to Paris ... So long Morocco! Do I recommend the destionation, I was asked .... Yes, I do, but make sure you book good hotels otherwise you may be in for a nasty surprise :-)

Heh ... the holiday is over for a while ... It's back to work for me and back to intense travelling. And that is not that bad ...

Meknes

We visited Meknes en passant, on our way to Fes. Although I quite liked the place, I was negatively impressed by the lack of toilets at the tourist places. Additionally, as we were travelling by car with our entire luggage and we left the car in a parking lot, I had to take the laptop with me while visiting the town since I wasn’t brave enough to leave it in the car. This is how Meknes became the town which was visited with a rather heavy backpack. Not too comfy
:-(

After having avoided lots of cheeky persistent false guides trying hard to sell their services (one of them told us plainly that ‘he was famous’ – I couldn’t help but laugh in his face), we ended up accepting a more reasonable one and went exploring – first the Medina (of course) and the souks (markets) and, in the afternoon, on our own, the medersa Bou-Inania (religious school) and a museum of Morocco’s traditions.

We were told that, in each Muslim medina, there are five important elements which are always present: the mosque, the well, the Koranic school, bakery and public bath.

We were tricked into visiting a place where various types of carpets were woven (some of them by women, other by men). Impressive but … no, not really. We were not interested in buying carpets and our guide was, of course, disappointed as no commission was coming his way. Of course we had made clear to him from the very beginning that we didn’t intend to buy anything but … well, he tried.

Fes is less than 100 km away so I was very relieved when, sometime in the (late) afternoon, we were back in the car and on our way to Fes, the last town on our list.

Rabat

And no, I'm afraid it’s not Rabbit :-) …. Was the next city that we visited. And probably the city I liked the most. The kingdom’s political and administrative capital, apparently Rabat, as compared to Casablanca, is a bit as Washington as compared to New York.

Calmer and wiser, a town in which the modern pleasantly combines with the old. And much, much cleaner than Casablanca, thank god! The town was built in 1150 by the Almohade sultan Abd al-Moumin, situated north of the antique Roman city of Sala Colonia (this site is, however, nowadays occupied by the Chellah necropolis).

On the first day we took long walks in the medina which resembles the other ones that we had visited before, and the Kashbah of Qudaia. Lots of false guides were lurking at the gate, as all over Morocco’s tourist places. One of the town’s first Arab constructions, the Kashbah was built in the 12th century on a site that had been occupied since Roman age. We paused to admire the luxurious plants and palm trees in the Jardin Andalou. Here, two cats in heat were living their little love story in public, totally ignoring the human presence all around them. After they closed the garden, we went to Café Maure for a coffee (and a mint tea) and some patisserie. This café was full of both locals (mostly couples that were dating) and some tourists. Very beautiful view of the beach and the ocean. This is where we met Cochi, a cat which fell in love with A the moment she set her eyes on him (Cochi from 'cochilie' which, in Romanian means 'shell' and was inspired by the form of the cat on A's lap). She just approached him while he was seated, occupied his lap and went to sleep carefree, showing total trust in him. She would have never left his lap, had we not been forced to leave the café by the cold. I tried to feed her patisserie, but she was not too impressed. I teased A forever, saying that he should have adopted her as his pet and that we should go back to the café and take her, etc.

On the second day we visited the Chellah Necropolis. The place is beautifully green, with lots of stork nests (where you can actually see the birds, in pairs), lots of cats, antique Roman ruins and tombs. The air is totally fresh and unpolluted, a little paradise.

The last place that is worth mentioning is Mohammed V’s Mausoleum. Tens of colonnades, beautiful construction, incredible view of the city and the port.

Lacking inspiration and other interesting spots, we popped in the archaeology museum but all that really impressed me there were two large, black tomcats. Beautiful specimens, brothers, incredibly huge, like two small panthers. Ah …. Why do I travel all the time! Why can’t I have a pet!