A pleasant jog--interrupted... and some cute photos of the boy!

Everything is at least a little bit different when you're in another culture. Even things that don't seem like they really could be. Case in point: today I decided to jog home from work because it's really nice outside and winter is coming. The school is about 9 kilometers from our house and the road is narrow and kind of dangerous. So, I opted to run through the Moroccan country side. There are a couple of little dirt roads and trails that I've explored before on the way from the school to the beach so I took these, confident that I could make it all the way home without having to go back to the highway. Now these trails are used pretty regularly by the people living in the villages around the area BUT they are quite close to the royal cottage (yes, ROYAL COTTAGE!!!) on the beach there. Because of this, there are always police around. And if the king is in town there are tons of police around. Often along the highway there will be a police officer or gendarme or royal guard every 200 meters or so. Well, I'm running down this trail that skirts the royal grounds and as I come around a bend I hear a whistle (the kind coach always used to start the wind sprints you were involved in) from behind me. I just kept running. I heard the whistle again. "Stupid kids," I think. I''m not going to give them the satisfaction of turning around to see who is whistling at me. On I run. A minute later I hear it again. And again. Good grief just give it up. I'm not turning around. But it becomes more insistent. And more frequent. Then it occurs to me that in Morocco police officers always have whistles. Every where you drive in the city you hear them blowing on their whistles as motorists whizz past paying them no mind. Could this be the police? Well, I'm getting close to the beach now and for some reason I just keep running. There is a large sand dune between me and the ocean and there at the end of the road is parked a van that looks just like one that a friend of mine, "surfer Gabe" owns. So I head toward the van thinking that Gabe and whomever he is with can back me up when I tell the cops chasing me that I'm just a teacher from the school up the hill out for a run. I run up the hill to the van and notice that it is not Gabe's. It has sirens on top. It's a cop van. I took a long look at the ocean considering what I'd do if they take me in for fleeing from the law. Then I turn around to face the officer who had chased me for the last few hundred meters. But when I turned around he was no longer chasing me. He was turned around going the other way, back up the road we had just come down, waving his captain's hat around in what appeared to be frustration. So I watched him go just to make sure that he really didn't want to come talk to me. But he kept going. My theory is that once he saw me run right up to a police van he figured they could take care of me if I was really up to no good. I was just out for a little run and got chased by the police. . . and eluded them. But that's not all that happened. A few hundred meters later I ran past a couple on the ground, makin' out like mad. I chuckled. Then I ran through a small herd of donkeys. Then I ran through a small herd of goats. Then I ran through a large herd of sheep. Then I ran through a stand of trees and some young boys lounging in the shade stopped me and tried to beg some money off me. I was in shorts and running shoes and dripping sweat. All this in a 45 minute run.


Dancing gleefully with the beloved beep.



Our sweet boy. Love that smile.