The elevator at Hotel Vila Zeus is claustrophobic, a grey metal box just big enough for me and my luggage. It’s slow but it beats two flights of stairs. The bathroom is almost as big as the bedroom, my first time with a bidet and I won’t go into details, but I am not instantly a fan. My alarm clock is set for 3:30am, the taxi arranged for 4am. I can see the airport from the hotel. Early night, restless sleep, downstairs into the pre-dawn dark – and there’s no taxi. I mean, theoretically I could walk? But the road is narrow, the traffic fast and frequent even at that hour, it’s very dark. I go back in and ask the guy at the desk if he can find me a cab. He tries 3 numbers – no luck. My flight is at 5:55am. I’m trying not to panic. Despite the reassurances of the desk guy, I really don’t want to walk that road in the dark! I have Meldi’s number in WhatsApp, happen to know he’s working nights, message him and he comes to my rescue as fast as he can from Tirana. When we have to go around a quarter mile of chain-link fence to reach Departures I’m super glad I didn’t walk.

I still arrive with plenty of time to drop off my bags and make it through security, buy a sandwich and a water and wait to board the plane. I manage to nap through most of the flight and then we’re landing in Barcelona: automated passport control, luggage and out to the taxi stand. Everything is going so smoothly I reach Hostal Cal Siles hours and hours before check-in time. The woman at the café counter shows me where I can put my bags in the back and then offers me a complimentary “Welcome to Barcelona” espresso. I’m really not supposed to be drinking coffee any more, but this feels like a special occasion (and turning down hospitality is bad form) and it’s a very small cup? It’s decadently delicious and then suddenly my room is ready and up I go.

I have been in a smaller hotel room, once, in Amsterdam, a very long time ago. This one is plenty for my current needs, which are mostly about a safe place to put my body for 20 hours, a shower and maybe some sleep. I open my laptop to see if there’s anything I shouldn’t miss while I’m in Barcelona and discover a thing called “menú del día” – which is apparently a late lunch sort of thing. I see images of chalkboards with multiple choices, ask Claude to translate, realize I’m getting hungry and head down to the street. The man at the hotel desk waves his arm out the door towards the right. I walk to the corner and find chairs and tables on the sidewalk along with the chalkboard of choices! I know people have been travelling for thousands of years before we had handheld computers that could translate things for us instantly – but I’m low-key grateful I’m doing this now with the technical assist!

Brief side note about the olives here – I’ve spent my whole life olive-averse. Somewhere between suspicious and hostile – they’re rubbery aliens from some other universe masquerading as food. I have watched people eating them with apparent joy and wondered if they were just putting on an act – some vast olive conspiracy. But here I was in Spain – and everything else had been delicious – and I’d been able to eat pizza in Albania to no ill effects – I’m toying with the idea that food really is different outside of the USA – I was feeling just a little brave – so I ate one of the small green olives. I was glad I was eating cautiously because there was a pit hiding inside and it was like a little pebble. But I legit didn’t hate the olive. Interesting. Hmmm…. I ate one more and decided not to push my luck.

I’m watching myself hesitate about writing this next part – but as the second course was delivered to my sidewalk table, an unkempt, perhaps intoxicated man approached me (in the US I’d assume he was homeless) and he was talking to me in Catalan, fast and loud, obviously wanting something from me. I held his eyes and shrugged my lack of comprehension, repeatedly, until he finally went away. I’m assuming he was asking for money and/or food. I didn’t get any euros out of the ATM at the airport because I knew the cab (and most places to get food) would take plastic and I was only going to be there for less than 24 hours. And it’s still haunting me a bit. Because I want to be the kind of person who is compassionate and caring and helps people? But I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t want a dirty, loud drunk stranger invading my space and joining me for lunch? Meanwhile I was thinking about the homeless encampments in the States, the harsh judgements, the lack of affordable housing, the wages that don’t adequately cover rent and groceries and health care – and how I have no idea how any of that works in Spain, but that systemic level musical-chairs setup, of people failing and falling through the giant fissures, isn’t even something I can vote about in this country. I think about how frustrated and uncared for I feel when I need actual, tangible help and somebody says “I’ll pray for you” and also how the Dalai Lama and other high-profile professionally compassionate types have a whole team of minders around so the needy don’t keep them from their next appointment or meditation time. I think about my own fairly precarious financial situation, a loosely woven basket. If I start buying 13-euro dinners for everybody who approaches me, my ship will sink faster than the sharks can gather. It’s a tangle, to be sure.

Another early-morning flight, the sun rising in glorious colors behind the air traffic control tower, another nap and then we’re touching down in Fes. I walk down the stairs from the plane to the pavement and suddenly, with a flash of pure elation, it hits me – I’m in Morocco! Morocco has been a dream in my heart since before I can remember and I have no idea when it arrived or how or why. It has to have come originally from art, not stories, because it’s the visuals I’m drawn to – the mosaics, the intricate woodworking, the donkeys carrying things through narrow alleys, the bright colors against the dun desert sand, the camels and the long robes, faces protected from the sun and sand and wind by scarves and veils – like cowboys with their bandanas on cattle drives. Morocco is also where the Barb horses came from – the genetic roots of the first horses to cross the Atlantic to the Americas, the hardiness of the Mustangs. When I was 28, in massage school in Florida, my dad was there for a board meeting and we met for lunch at Epcot Center. He said “Where do you want to go for lunch?” I said “Morocco” – he thought I was kidding, but there’s a whole Morocco world at Epcot – and we ordered a huge couscous platter and it was absolutely delicious. OK, so now my obsession has spread to the food.

Morocco was the first border crossing where I needed to talk to a human, show my passport, explain myself and get permission to enter. I fought the urge to over-explain, showed the receipt for a 12-week stay at Ada riad on the Airbnb app, acted very calm and grown-up, smiled and said Merci! and I was in! It took several WhatsApp messages with Amal (my hostess) and a selfie to connect with my taxi driver, who was taller and slower and older than me, and then I was following him across the pavement and down the ramp past a variety of random cats sleeping in the sunshine to the cab. We drove through “New Fes” which looks very much like a lot of cities, then past rolling fields with haystacks, grazing donkeys and random goats and pulled up in a parking area by a police station. Amal was there to greet me.

My luggage was loaded into a handcart pushed by a dark-haired young man with a conquistador beard and then I was following Amal into the maze. Amal is Moroccan and speaks fluent Arabic and French and plenty good enough English and Spanish. She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and is probably around 40? She’s showing me landmarks and telling me about things that we’re passing “this is the oldest road in the medina, here’s the 7 corners, notice this sign, this is the Seffarine Square, where the coppersmiths work” – I’m taking quick photos in hopes of aiding my memory because it’s all a blur of 3 days’ travel, sensory overload, trying not to run into people, watching my step because the cobblestones or whatever the ground is covered with are uneven and here’s the closest restaurant, the closest little store, “Only three more turns,” she says, and the alleys are getting narrower, I can reach out and touch both walls at once, another turn and she’s stopping by a big wooden door with brass studs and a big ring. She pulls out a perfectly ordinary key and welcomes me to her riad, Dar Amal, my home for the next 12 weeks.