My laptop screensaver is set to display random pictures. I've taken so many here in Morocco - a couple thousand! - and shared so few of them with y'all, and I want to change that. My hope is to post a picture nearly every day from here on out, and I thought I'd get started with a whole bunch, today. :)
First, a caption for the two pictures you see all the time - the sunset shot next to the blurb about me, and the alpenglow picture above.
The above picture was taken on December 20th, 2008, after a long walk through Berberville and surrounding communities, shared with some of my Peace Corps buddies. (They'd come up to help out with the school club we're working on.) We walked several miles, over the course of several hours, and were coming back only because the sun was sinking behind the mountains. As we walked, "Brahim" and I both noticed what looked like a hawk in a tree up ahead. I shot some pictures, then when we got abreast of it, I shot a few more. I blew them up as big as I could on my camera viewscreen, but couldn't identify anything beyond "bird of prey". Sigh. Only after I got back home and uploaded the pictures did I realize I'd captured my gorgeous Berberville mountains and the alpenglow of twilight. :)
The one to the right was taken a year ago, on 3/19/08, in my CBT village, far south of here. Down there, nearly every building is tipped with crenelated corners that make everything look like a castle. The silhouetted building is a tourist hotel (the only one in the village), so it's trying extra-hard to be photogenic and lovely...and against that flaring sunset, it indeed was.
Here are a couple more shots:
This was taken during that same December walk. We climbed up to the remnants of an old fortress. It's one of my favorite parts of the Berberville skyline, and I'd never gone up, so I asked the guys if they'd mind a detour. The ruins are, well, ruin-y, but I love the patterns of the stonework and wish I had some idea just how old they are, and what they were built for. This was a whoopsie-shot - I didn't mean to let the sun flare into the image - but I decided I liked the effect after all.
This is one of my favorite pictures from our trip to Merzouga. It shows "Brahim", who quarterbacked all through school, and "Lahcen", his willing foil, and the football that encouraged us all to run around and have crazy-fun on the goldensand dunes of Erg Chebi. We all took turns throwing and catching it, with varying degrees of success. One especially fun game put Brahim down at the bottom of a dune, and the rest of us up on top, probably 50 feet above him, up a steeply pitched slope; he'd heft the ball up to us, and then we'd throw it back down to him. Gravity was working for us and against him, which meant that we had a closer-to-evenly-matched game of catch. Talk about your uneven playing field... :)
This is my friend Natalie, at her recent (2/28/09) birthday party. Notice the one chubby candle in the cake. Birthday candles either don't exist in Morocco or just aren't easily found, so we do what PCVs always do: improvise. Our friend Tori made the cake, complete with honest-to-goodness *Betty*Crocker*icing* from America. (Insert happy sigh.) The strawberries were a special touch for me; they aren't ripe in my region yet, so these were the first strawberries I'd had in ... just about a year.That's all for now...more pictur-iffic posts coming soon, I promise. :)
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Thanks for including all these pretty pix. It's really great to be able to get a look at what your life is like.
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