Marrakech Microbes

Hammoud offers to cook us a dinner, and it’s clearly not an offer we can refuse. Things get a little complicated when he introduces us to his wife, Hint, who speaks only Arabic, and tells us that she will be cooking the dinner for us. In short order, it becomes clear that Hammoud is trying to get us to hire his wife as our cook. They even try approaching Caitlin separately from me, in some sort of divide and conquer strategy. At this point we don’t know if we need, want, or can afford a cook, and we don’t want to get pushed into anything, but it’s not easy to say no to the ever-smiling, ever-helpful Hammoud. And while the pumpkin-cauliflower soup and roasted fish and vegetables we finally are served at 10PM are good, they certainly don’t beg an immediate hire of said chef. While I read in one of the salons during the meal’s preparation, Caitlin ventures into the kitchen and reports afterwards that it is actually Hammoud who does all the cooking in the family. It seems his wife doesn’t really like to cook. And since she doesn’t speak English or French, it seems pretty clear we don’t want to hire her; we’ll see what happens.

Well, what happens is, by five in the morning we’re both up, clutching our stomachs and running to the bathroom. We don’t know if it is the dinner we just had, ice cubes made from tap water in our evening Pastis, or something we’d eaten earlier, but whatever it is makes for an unpleasant night with little sleep. We try to tell ourselves to look on the bright side, that our stomachs just need to get acclimated to the local microbes.