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On Saturday, we ventured out to visit a tannery. The tanneries of Fes are famous for their age and methods — the oldest dates to the 11th century, and they still operate essentially the same as they did then. The tanneries are on everyone’s must-do lists for Fes — they are smelly, but visually fascinating.…
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On Thursday, we visited El Badii Palace, which was commissioned and built in the late 16th century. We went in the morning, and it was vast and fairly empty (visiting top attractions before 11:00 am is always a good idea). Visitors are still allowed to climb on a lot of the stone ruins, which was…
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Tuesday was our day trip into the Atlas Mountains. One other couple was supposed to go with us, but one of them got sick, so it ended up just being the four of us in a small van with our 22-year-old guide, Abdullah. Abdullah first drove us to the Ourika Valley, where we stopped at…
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Predictably, everyone was exhausted when we arrived in Morocco. Jason and I met up with Emilie and Ally in the Lisbon airport for our flight to Marrakech. When we got to Marrakech, we had several challenges and misunderstandings, which were made more difficult by our exhaustion. First, we were staying in the medina, where cars…
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On Friday, we went to Macau. We had gone back and forth on whether to go, but in the end decided that we wanted to complete our trifecta of Not China while we were in the area. Macau is…very odd. It was a Portugese colony starting in the 1500s, and now it’s the gambling capital…
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We picked a difficult time to visit Hong Kong. We had booked this trip several months ago, before protests picked up in June, and as the trip grew closer we watched the news carefully and with increasing alarm, especially when the western news stopped covering the protests and it became increasingly difficult to find accurate…
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On Sunday, we had an entire day on our own to explore the city. We started with coffee, of course, before heading to the weekend jade and flower markets. The jade market was a set of stalls selling wood, jade, and other stone jewelry and sculptures. The flower market had a lot of flowers, but…
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A quick disclaimer about this collection of blogs – during this trip we visited three regions that, while China considers them to be part of China, consider themselves varying degrees of…not China. Hong Kong and Macau are Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan doesn’t have an official status because no one can agree on…
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We were in Paris a little over two years ago for our honeymoon, so we weren’t planning to come back this soon. Jason had a conference, though, and when one gets a chance to tack on a trip to Paris, one should do so. We landed at 8:00 am local, which is never fun, but…
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Okay, let’s talk about reality for a minute. Because sometimes, you get to go on an awesome vacation you’ve been planning for months. Other times, though, you fly from Seattle to Denver shortly before an unprecedented bomb cyclone with category two hurricane-force winds and the entire airport gets shut down and you can’t get to…