The man was talking to me in French and I didn’t even notice he’s switched to a different language, except that I understood more and it seemed like less of a fight to convert the language to understanding. Until this moment, I didn’t realize how much French I’d retained from school and from reading the backs of cereal boxes in Canada.
We were in Tangier. French is considered the language of the educated in Morocco and is taught in schools. Signs are in French and Arabic… and honestly, I wasn’t expecting any of this on our first sojourn into Africa.
Hours earlier we kept hearing, I can’t believe I’m going the Africa coming from La Niña. She was so excited that she danced repeatedly in circles before falling asleep on the boat ride over. When she woke up on the other side, she sat in stunned silence on the wharf as we waited for our bus.
It was at this point that I realized we were following the route that Jason Bourne took in The Bourne Ultimatum (London, Spain, Tangier) and that at the end we’d need to make a stop in New York if we truly wanted to finish the path he took in the movie.
It was never planned that way… it just worked out that way. We came to Tangier because it’s one of the three Moroccan cities I’ve always wanted to visit: Tangier, Casablanca, and Marrakech.
