Jules, what is this shack?

Dear Denis,

There is simply no excuse for our lack of communication, and I fear that if I tell you we've been passing the last few days eating oysters beach side where one can hardly find a good Internet connection, you might not donner moi un pardon. So, let's agree to move on without dwelling on the minor details.

My dad is coming to Marrakesh to visit his petites filles in a few weeks, which means that Megs and I must enter into a highly intensive study of each and every building, street, museum, landmark, gallery, person, historical fact, bakery, etc, before he arrives. Let me explain the ways of TMK Jr. You know how many 5 year-olds have this insatiable curiosity about everything around them, and hardly a moment passes without "what's this," "who's that," "why is this like that," and so on and so forth? Mon pere is kinda like this wildly inquisitive child and feels the need - really almost compulsively - to know everything about everything and everyone in his sight. A typical example...If I don't know exactly the purpose of a random building we pass by in New York, how many occupants it holds, what the occupants do for a living, how much the rent might cost for an office space in said building, and what existed in the space before the building was constructed, dad will be angry, ashamed, confused, and massively upset for the waste of money he spent on my education.

I think if I dedicate my next few weeks to beefing up on my African history knowledge and map out very carefully planned walking routes to take with him, I can pull this off slightly unscathed... "Oh, that run down shack? Why dad, I believe that it used to be an olive stall in which approximately 7 merchants sold the Moroccan delicacy -- called "zitoun" in Arabic -- that comes in both a wrinkled black variety and a green, lemony one and is a fav in all Moroccan cooking and though it is obvious that this shack is currently vacant except for the 17 street cats crawling around, my very educated guess is that in 4 months, a Moroccan man named Admal will purchase the shack and turn it into a marvelous souk from which he will sell all sorts of wonderful herbs and spices for about 20 durhams per half lb and the up to the second exchange rate between durhams and dollars is 7.5 to 1."

Yeah, we're in troubs.

Warmly,
Julia