Being in Italy was my dream come true.  I personally had fallen in love with it. Filipo and Marisella (the owners of the farm where we stayed) owned about 100 acres of land.  We had all of that space to roam and be free.  They had dogs, a cat, horses, pigs, goats, sheep, ducks, chicken and geese.  2 weeks and 2 days after our time on the farm we were informed that we had to leave to our next destination, Morocco.

We had a full day of packing on the 1st day of November, but the last day in Italy.  We left around 6.00 pm to go to an Italian festival to present our performance.  About 3 hours later we all met up and said our goodbyes to Filippo and Marisella we got back on the bus our backpacks packed and ready to go. 

We began our journey.  Our bus ride was 7 hours in total, including a 2-hour wait to let us catch up on some sleep.  We finished our car ride at about 3.30 – 4 am the next day we all got out of the bus exhausted and after a bit of waiting, boarded the plane.  On this plane, there must have been some sick person back there with a cold, because about a day or two later it definitely caught us. Most of us had a sore throat, a blocked and stuffy nose and painful joints.

We were in our Italian autumn clothing when we got off of our 2-hour flight to Marrakech and I felt a whoosh of happiness, a whoosh heat.  I felt like I was back home, in my bathing suit about to go for a swim in Bali. I loved it already.  But I loved open spaces, not closed, tight spaces with lots of people and Marrakech was just that, many markets, many people and small busy streets.  I was a bit so-so on the idea of being here at the moment up until I saw our house.  It was a beautiful, quite spacious, 3 story building but not only that, it was colourful, it had beautiful furniture, and it felt homey.

But which place do I like better you may ask?  I think I’m more a fan of Italy than Morocco because of space, but believe it or not, the traditional food here in Morocco tends to tingle my taste buds more than it did in Italy.

Written By Elke Cruden