Month: January 2025

While in New York City for the Acquiror Summit, I finally had the opportunity to see Hamilton. The show has been going for almost a decade now and has even been here in the Triangle while I’ve lived here, but I hadn’t seen it before Saturday. Mom and Dad joined me at the show as part of a long weekend in New York City.

I’ve seen six shows on Broadway now and several others off-Broadway, and Hamilton is right there with The Lion King with the two hard to compare as I saw them at different points in my life. None of us listened to the music beforehand, which I would advise anyone who doesn’t regularly listen to hip-hop to do so that you can understand more of the lyrics. I read the Chernow biography in college, though, and I was able to understand the words in all of the songs. The place was packed and the energy was high even for a Saturday matinee.

King George was hilarious with his short vignettes during the performance even if fans of John Adams might be upset by the treatment he received from the British monarch. Thomas Jefferson was also cast in a soft villain role, which worked from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton but is not a universal view. The real villain of the story was Aaron Burr, the man who shot and killed Hamilton on the dueling ground. His character received little development, a deliberate and well-executed choice given Hamilton’s perspective that Burr lacked any real beliefs. The play accentuated Hamilton’s immigrant status and the actions and life of his wife, but it wasn’t done in the beat-you-over-the-head-with-my-ideology sort of manner preferred by lesser writers. In summation, I left the theater without wondering why the show has seen such a long run.

I’m now back from my vacation and have jumped right back into the swing of work. This week, I’ll record a few of my favorite parts of the trip. You’ll note that the motorbikes in Marrakech will not be on this list.

My favorite places of the trip were the areas away from the cities and where I was either alone or with only my guide. There is something enchanting about large sand dunes in a moonlight glow. And a little off roading during hikes to waterfalls or up narrow slot canyons gives a walk a little more sense of adventure. I opted for a more physically demanding tour than most would choose, but even if you aren’t interested in hiking you will need to be ready for stairs when visiting most places in the country.

On the trip, I purchased a couple of Berber rugs. I saw a few that I liked and so I decided to buy them. Then it was a matter of agreeing to a price. It wasn’t the usual sort of dynamic with wild differences in valuation and I wasn’t eager to make it such due to the nature of the business as a cooperative. There was still some back and forth, though, done by writing numbers as a means of limiting the possibility of confusion. Then the call to prayer rang out from the mosque in the village. And that was that, with the price already more or less in the middle of where we’d started the discussions and the owner of the co-op making reference to the transaction being divinely ordained. We shook hands and that was that. I chuckle a little thinking about how the whole thing played out.

The two most memorable and enjoyable meals on the trip were the two meals where I did the least. In both instances, I just went exactly where the guide told me, sat down, and let the guide order for me. One was near the main square of Marrakech. The place was unassuming and I probably would have just walked past it, but Salam stopped and told me this was where I needed to eat lunch. The oven was actually built into the ground, and there were several lambs being cooked. I had both some lamb meat from this kiln style oven and tangia, a beef dish slow-cooked in a covered clay pot with all kinds of spices. I ate at a single communal table in the back of the restaurant stall alongside people of multiple nationalities and sprinkled the lamb with the mix of salt and cumin that was on the table in front of me. It was great, and the tangia was even better. The other was on the drive back into Marrakech on the last day when we stopped at a roadside food hall of sorts. There was one stall for the butcher and another stall for the cook, running two different businesses. It was Friday so other stalls were closed, but on any other day there would have been a place for drinks open and a pharmacy too. I had meatballs and Moroccan salad, but what made it special was sitting there on the plastic chairs being the only white person surrounded by people eating, drinking tea, and having a pleasant if late lunch.

My guide was also a celebrity in Morocco. Everywhere we went people came up to him and spoke with him or asked to take a picture with him. He started publishing videos during COVID and now has a few hundred thousand followers on the various platforms. It was funniest at police checkpoints, where the police would often stop him but only to talk; there was only one time where the officer even asked for his ID. The videos are all in Moroccan Arabic, but I actually took or recorded some of his most recent content. Links if anyone is curious: Facebook; Instagram; TikTok; and YouTube.

This is shoulder season in Morocco (high season is the spring and low season the summer), so at several points I’ve been the only tourist staying in my accommodations, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a store. This was starkest during my overnight stay on the edge of the Saharan dunes. My camel ride across the sand was in a caravan of one, even if there were other groups around headed for some of the other tent camps. I chose when to eat my dinner and sat in the large tent alone next to the space heater. Then I retreated to my tent.

As the moon was nearly full, I was denied a mind-bending view of the stars sans light pollution. It made for a slightly eerie glow instead; there was enough light to be able to see all around but not to see fine details. I’ve watched a few nature documentaries shot with low light cameras in recent years that have had a similar visual effect, but city lights drown it out most places. And the wind whipped through the night. In a different time it might have been a djinn of the desert, but such stories aren’t told as much anymore. The moonset in the west more or less coincided with the sunrise over a raised plateau in the east that forms the Algerian border and I was up early to take them both in a short distance from my tent camp and towards the giant dunes. Then it was off to breakfast and then onto the next destination.

There have been a lot of windshield miles on this trip. As it’s just me with my guide/driver, we sometimes go long stretches without speaking, though our conversations have grown deeper as the days have passed. Morocco is not a country filled with wildlife either. The only animals are birds, herd animals, dogs, and an obnoxious number of cats in the cities and villages. It is a country with varied topography, though. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, four different mountain ranges, beautiful high-walled gorges, rolling hills of wheat and olive fields, valley oases, a lake at the base of a desert sand dune, and miles and miles of high shrubland plains. It provides time for thinking, and me not accessing the internet for the last few days has given me some mental space for that thinking time to be more than just focused on the next work tasks I’ll tackle when I return next week. It has been refreshing and something I’ll try to replicate at intervals through the year even without traveling across an ocean to do so. Even as I type this out, I’m sitting alone on a patio, sun back over my right shoulder and me facing the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the south. It’s a nice view, especially since I have some dates and cookies in front of me which my host so generously provided.

On Saturday, I flew first from RDU to JFK then overnight to Casablanca. It was yet another overnight flight where I failed to get any sleep. Maybe someday. My plan was for this to be a true vacation. I even built in a buffer of a few days in case one or more transactions bled into the new year. Alas, a couple of matters have dragged more than a few days into the new year and I’ve worked early mornings and into the evening. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit and should have waited until this week to start the vacation, but I’m not sure that there will ever be a great time and I only have a few days back in Durham before heading out again for a work trip anyway.

Sunday was a wash given how tired I was. The itinerary called for very little time in Casablanca. The only stop was to tour what is the third largest mosque in the world, which was much more ornate than the only other mosque I’ve visited. This one has a minaret that is something like 200 meters tall and holds around 25,000 people inside. The scale was beyond what my tired mind could truly appreciate. Then it was off to Rabat, the capital city. A bit more touring and a seafood platter for a late lunch that involved far too many bones and I holed up in the hotel for the evening to sleep. I didn’t even go out for dinner.

Yesterday was a transit day (I’m writing this on Tuesday evening) to the northeast and into the Rif Mountains. The destination was Chefchaouen, a city I’d never heard of a few months ago when I decided to visit Morocco but one that the travel agency put on my suggested itinerary. It is the blue city of Morocco and has become much more visited in the era of Instagram. I arrived in the late afternoon, worked some, then ate a late dinner of a beef tagine with dates and plums that I chased down with the sour lemonade that I’ve now had on multiple occasions. It really should’ve been better than it was, but maybe it was because it was so late and didn’t really sate my hunger.

Today marked the first day when I felt like I was on vacation, for a while anyway. After a work session this morning, my guide drove me around the mountains into which Chefchaouen sits for a full day of hiking at Akchour. It was my sort of place—gravel crunching under hiking boots with few people around and limited cell service. Along with my guide, I walked first to God’s Bridge, a high natural arch over a river that offered a really nice view. Then we took a much longer walk to a series of waterfalls. Those were underwhelming, with the larger falls probably looking something like Bridal Veil Falls but there was only enough water for it to be a trickle. That is unusual for this time of year, but so it goes. Then we came back into the city and I had what is so far the best meal of the trip, a beef rib with some roasted vegetables. It was in a fancier restaurant and there was a guy playing mostly classic standards on the guitar. The song playing when I left was “My Way,” a personal favorite. Then as I walked back up the stairs towards my hotel, the call to prayer rang out for the final time today. It was quite a juxtaposition.  

By the time this newsletter goes out, I should have arrived in Fes. It will be my third different home thus far in Morocco. This trip marks a return to a faster-paced vacation format that I went away from during the past few years of spending roughly a week in one place before moving onto the next destination. It’s too early to know which format I’ll choose next, though perhaps my next travel vacation won’t be a solo one. Again, one can dream.

The new year brings reflection. As I’ve written previously, I’m not big on resolutions for the new year, but I will spend a few hours today looking back at my calendar and thinking about what I enjoyed most (and least) and what I might change going into this year. It may not be as glamorous or celebrated, but I’ve found it much more practical even if the exercise looks slightly different each time.

In comparison to the past few times January 1 has rolled around, there is much more stability in my life today. Two years ago, I changed my residence on New Year’s Day. Last year, I was a few months into my residence in Durham and celebrated with friends by watching the fireworks in London through the power of streaming television. If anyone has children who want to see fireworks for the new year, that is a handy trick. This year, I’m in the same apartment, there were thunderstorms on New Year’s Eve, and I was in bed by 10. Sure, my mood is not as dark as it was during the COVID years, but the hopeful expectation of positive change from the last couple of years is absent.

There are plenty of reasons why I should be excited—I’m coming off time with family, I have a well-positioned business, my social calendar is fuller than it was a year ago, and I have an upcoming extended vacation—yet I’ve felt morose these past few days, even on this bright and sunny morning. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and it is my hope that reading this helps at least one of you know that you’re not alone if you are experiencing malaise yourself. After scheduling this to send, I’ll take a walk in that sunshine.