I know I’ve been gone for awhile, but I’m back. And wow, I had an amazing trip to Morocco. I’m not going to tell you all about it today, just a little bit, because it’s the first day back teaching, and I’ve got a bit of a cold, and I’m still getting over jet lag, so it’s all just a little bit too much.

Highlights: riding a camel, shopping in the souks (markets), meeting my fellow tourmates, the food (so much tagine and couscous but still so good!), and all the colors. I would recommend this tour to anybody (unless you are more particular about hotels, but all of the hotels were safe and clean (though some of them were sandy). Did we always have enough water pressure and reliable hot water…eh.

Travel was…annoying. And it’s great to be home, as always. I am so glad I went and I plan to do another tour in the future.

I’m on the lead camel. That means mine was the smartest and most experienced.

On other notes: how awful is the world right now? Like, it’s just horrible here in the US. ICE just shooting people and beating up people on the streets, kidnapping people regardless of their immigration status. The federal reserve chair getting investigated by a corrupt DOJ, who knows what will happen to our money…RFK making up health stuff…invading Venezuela, threatening to invade GREENLAND, there are so many things I could list but it’s just so upsetting and awful and redundant.

And then looking around and knowing how many of my fellow countrypeople AGREE with it, that’s the worst part. Or one of the worst parts. That people are like, oh this is fine. Of course most people I know don’t think that, but they are there. And that to me is just…flabbergasting. And awful. And words that I can’t even think of, because I’m just so upset. People think, oh it’s not that bad. ICE just shot a woman on video and are getting away with it, that’s how bad it is. It could be you, it could be anyone.

How do we deal with all the constant stress? It’s been ten years of stress, and what I want, what so many of us want, is a day, a few days of just not having to think about that horrible man and his enablers, his followers, just a day or more of being able to know that they aren’t doing some new horrible thing to people. But we don’t get that.

So it was nice to be out of the country. It was nice to hear a car backfire and know that it wasn’t actually gunshots. You might say, oh, is Morocco safe? Yeah, it’s safer than here. You won’t get shot on the street. The vehicles aren’t so large that people can’t see over the front of them, though they do have a lot of pedestrian deaths: probably because the way you cross the road is to just cross the road and hope they see you. You aren’t supposed to walk around alone at night, but that’s the same here. And yes, there was police crackdowns and violence at some protests, but hey, that happens nightly here in various cities and at least Morocco doesn’t pretend to be some pillar of world freedom and then murder their own citizens.

So anyway! Like I said, how do you deal with this? How do we continue to live our lives and not be angry and stressed all the time?