Psyched:

About going to Morocco next week. It's a pipe-dream of ten years coming true! Ever since my first sighting of Elle Decor photo spreads at the tender age of 16, cushion-filled plush interiors draped in gem-coloured fabrics, floors covered with every shade of blue geometric tiles, interior courtyards with lush landscaping and fancy fountains (small urban oases of calm) and dark atmospheric shots of hammams made up my mental images of Never-ever-land. Call me an Orientalist, but this world is so removed from everything I'd known then that I was immediately magnetized by it.

At 20, I was surprised again by Alexander Girard, fabric designer for Herman Miller, who mixes Modernism, 60's space-agey interiors, Moroccan / South American folk arts with whimsy. At 21, my Lebanese culture snob of an undergraduate research supervisor made grand claims about the delectable Moroccan cuisine. "Aaahhh. The best food in the Arabic world! I could taste it in my dreams." At 23, I learned about how the hardy Berbers defended themselves from centuries of Roman conquer-attempts with their desert forts.

At 24, I senselessly decided to work for a radio DJ, whose bi-polar psychotic spitting verbal abuse I put up with, just so I could tag along to document her participation in the legendarily hellish Marathon des Sables, a 7-day marathon in the gruelling dry heat of the Moroccan Sahara desert. In the end I got fired anyway after only three weeks, because I gave her "attitude".

At long last, at long last! Will this Moorish land live up to its hype?
I can't wait to get thawed, far and away from the -9'C cold in New York.