Behind the Scenes Minis: Morocco!

Tracy and Holly talk about their recent podcast trip to Morocco with listeners, arranged by Defined Destinations.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This week, we have spent the
whole week talking about Charles Sumner. Yes, but we're not
spending behind the scenes talking about Charles Sumner because we're

(00:24):
not done with Charles Sumner yet. And that's just it
felt weird and confusing to try to separate out our
behind the scenes thoughts into two different episodes. What we
are going to talk about is Morocco because this is
the first thing that we are recording after returning from
our trip to Morocco, and so we thought since we

(00:44):
have this behind the scenes that we need to do,
it would be a good time to talk about what
that was like. Yeah. First, I want to thank Michael
from Defined Destinations. Defined Destinations is the company that we've
worked with on planning all of these trips, and this
I think is the fifth trip that we have gone
on with Defined Destinations. They have all been great. Also,

(01:06):
wanted to thank Hudah, who was our local guide in Morocco.
I love that woman. Hudah was great. We've been texting
Huda was with us the whole trip. My spouse and
I got a little sick. Part way through the trip.
I was more sick. It was not a serious situation,

(01:26):
but Huda was so gracious and very attentive to whether
I was doing okay. And also when we stopped for lunch,
I was not going to be having any lunch. The
idea of trying to sit at a table for the
next hour was not acceptable to me, and so I
asked her if I could just like hang out by

(01:46):
the pool while lunch was happening, and she arranged for
the restaurant to bring out some some sick people food.
They yeah, you had like a little soup out there.
They brought me some soup and some and some Moroccan salad,
which is was not a leafy green salad. It was
a plate of the various vegetable dishes that are sometimes

(02:08):
framed as Moroccan salad. I ate like three bites of
each of the things, and then I after a good
night's sleep at the hotel that night, we were both fine.
Yeah you rallied, Yeah yeah. Yeah. That trip was intense
in the best ways. Yeah, it was funny. I was
just posting on Instagram about it, because like we were

(02:33):
on the bus a lot. Yeah, because we really went
all over Morocco and I would be sitting there on
the bus and see everybody asleep, and I would be like, look,
I know everybody's tired, but you're not gonna see this
ever again probably look out the window. This was a
problem I had. Yeah, I was forever just glued to

(02:53):
the window like a child. Yeah. I was looking forward
to the time on the bus because I was expected.
I was like, I knew we were gonna be driving
through really scenic places. I also can be a little
prone to motion sickness, and usually I'm fine on buses,
but a lot of our bus time was in wind windy,

(03:14):
mountainous areas with switchbacks. Yeah, there were a lot of
switchbacks and those were bothering me and I so I
had to take some less drowsy dramamine. And I think
the combination of jet lag and the less drowsy dramamine
and possibly also my blood pressure medication, staying awake was

(03:39):
not an option. Like I was just involuntarily unconscious on
the bus if I had taken any dramamine, and I like,
I really I wanted to be awake. I wanted to
be looking at the landscapes we were passing through, And
what really would happen was like I would open my
eyes and the view out the window would be radically

(04:01):
different from the last time that I opened by it
did have even though I was really bummed to just
miss the sight seeing out the bus window aspect, it
did help me be more functional the whole trip. I
tend to have a really hard time with the time
zones and the jet lag, and the fact that I

(04:22):
slept on the bus did seem to let me be
more functional all of the rest of the time. Yes,
did I tell you about my weird night at one
of the hotels? And I don't think so. I don't
think it did either. So let me preface this by saying,
I know this sounds weird. To set the scene for

(04:44):
our listeners. There was one night where we just stayed
at this one hotel. It was kind of a quick
stopover because we were, as we said, traveling all over
one I'm pretty sure that hotel was highly instrumental in
the development of Animal Kingdom Lodge Disney World. Oh okay, yeah,
but two in the morning I had cause to ask

(05:06):
who to Hey, there are any ever been any rumors about
this hotel being haunted? What was the answer? Well, I
will tell you after I tell you what happened and
why I asked that question, Okay, okay. And it's one
of those things that as I was I didn't initially
want to even talk about it while I was still
in the hotel, huh. I wanted to wait till we

(05:28):
were outside of it. But then I ended up talking
about it at breakfast outside of my room because three
very weird things happened to me in the night. Okay.
And when I say these things and I go and
then I go back to sleep, I know that sounds
very kooky to people, but please keep in mind that
I also preface this by saying I have since I

(05:49):
was four had night terrors, so I'm used to weird
things happening and then being like, oh, that's my brain.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
So this could have all just been oh that's my brain,
but they were extra weird, and one of them is like,
my brain couldn't do that. So first of all, I
awakened in the night to a noise and I thought, oh,
Brian must have gotten up and gone to the bathroom
and it was pitch black in the hotel room, but
I thought the way your eyes adjust to the light,
that I could make him out in the bed beside me,

(06:18):
and I reached out to him and said something like,
are you awake? And I felt his hand in my hand,
which is what he would always do if I reach
out to him, and then, you know, and then the
bathroom door opened and he walked out of it, and
I was like, what just happened? Okay? And I was like, well,
I must be having a really intense night terror. And

(06:39):
then I kind of shook it off and I went
back to sleep, also helped by the fact that we
ran long days. We were exhausted every day. They were
very long. And then I woke up like a couple
hours later to a ticking noise and I just thought,
that's a weird, you know, hotel sound I'm just not
familiar with. And I sat up in bed and I
couldn't identify where the ticking noise was coming from, and
I was like, I'm just going to chalk it up
to the hotel and I laid back down, and as

(07:00):
I laid back down, I felt what felt like a
hand on my shoulder from the opposite side of the
bed of where Brian was Like, I was facing Brian
and it felt like somebody behind me put a hand
on my shoulder and I just once again, again being
a child of night terrors. My coping mechanisms are things
like saying, hey, be cool, I'm a friend. Yeah, and
I went back to sleep. And then the third thing

(07:22):
was because I can be a heavy sleeper sometimes, to
wake me up when I have asked him to do so,
Brian will pull all the comforters off of me because
he knows that will wake me up. Okay, And I again,
this is not a mean thing he does. It's like
a sanctioned activity we have discussed. And I thought I
felt him do that in the night. The covers were

(07:44):
certainly gone, but then I realized he was snoring, and
I was like, that's not Brian. And when I sat
up to get the covers, they were like four feet
away from the bed. Wow. And I'm like, did I
just kick really hard? And my brain made up a scenario.
Don't know. Again, this could have all just been stuff
going on in my brain. But we got down to breakfast,

(08:04):
an amazing Houdah who I adore with all of my soul.
At this point, I said like, hey, hoodah, has this
hotel ever had any claims that it is haunted? And
she her initial thing was Holly, this is a very
nice hotel and I was like, it is. It's lovely.
I'm not complaining. And she said I've slept here many
times and nothing has ever happened to me. And I

(08:25):
was like, huh, maybe it's just me, and she goes, well,
last year my daughter stayed here and she said some
very similar things to what you're saying right now. Oh wow,
maybe that hotel was haunted. I don't know. Yeah, it
was very, very wild and I just woke up and
I was like And the thing was, I did actually

(08:45):
wake up to Brian, who had gotten up earlier than me,
and was like, hey, I'll take a shower so you
can sleep a little longer. He walked over to my
side of the bed and gave me a kiss on
the forehead to wake me up, and I woke up
in one of those like At that point, I was like,
I don't know what's going on here? Is this goes
and he was like whoa, what's the matter? And I
was like I will tell you later. Yeah, that was

(09:08):
my haunted Morocco story. Yeah, that is the That is
the hotel where we became unwell. So in the the
next day, I think you said something to me like,
did you think weird happened in your room last night?
And I was like, I don't think we're talking about
the same thing. Yeah, yeah, I had. I had a
weird one. I had a weird one, which, again I

(09:29):
want to be very clear too, none of those activities
felt dangerous to me, you know what I mean, if
it was in fact a spirit, which is not a
thing I really believe in, but sometimes I wonder, they
all felt very benign. They didn't feel like anything nefarious
or evil, just weird. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
We wrote Camels in the Desert. That was a highlight.
We rode camels in the desert. So a lot of
our bus days were ultimately a product of getting to
the Sahara Desert to spend a night at the luxury
camp and ride the camels. Yeah, which was one hundred
percent worth it. Yes, I had never seen, like I

(10:24):
had been in arid desert environments before, but I had
never seen those kinds of dunes that are in that
part of the Sahara desert and they're beautiful, and I like,
I was looking forward to the camel ride and our
night of desert lamping, which is where we left. We
left on the camel ride from the place that we

(10:47):
were doing our desert lamping, so I was looking forward
to that from the beginning of the trip. It was
one hundred percent worth it. The ride out to see
the sunset was very fun. I enjoyed it. I hope
the other folks that were with us. I think there
was a variety of comfort levels of riding on the
camels in terms of how secure people felt about doing

(11:08):
it ahead of time, but the folks that were leading
the camels, I think tried to help make sure everybody
feel safe and confident. Yeah, And then at least our
group on the way back after the sun had set,
there was still plenty of light. It was like a
twilight level of light as we were on the way back,
but the whole group was just silent, and it was

(11:29):
like we silently rode back to the camp and everybody
just seemed to be kind of absorbing what we had
just watched. With the sun having set while we were
watching it from the dunes of the desert and it
just was very peaceful and moving. Yeah, yeah, it was beautiful.
I had discomfort on the camel because our ride out

(11:53):
to the desert, you and your beloved and Brian and
I were all in one vehicle with a driver, and
I was on the it'll see in the back, which
had very little cushioning and yeah, you're not on roads,
you're just driving through rock and desert. My badonk was
very bruised by the time we arrived, and so then
to get right on a camel was like, oh, yeah,
it's still worth it. But it was like I was

(12:16):
very bruised for a couple of days. Yeah, but it
was funny because I had been My biggest concern had
been what if my camel does not like me? Oh
I don't think my camel did like me, But that's okay.
It wasn't, you know, angry about it or anything. It
was just like, girls stopped trying to hug me. I'm
not here for that. The camel behind me gave me
a little a little muzzle now and again when we

(12:37):
would kind of stop and be close to one another
because you're yeah, several camels in a row are tethered together. Yeah,
and it was like, my arm's got to work out
from holding the bar hu but like amazing, yeah he's saying. Yeah.
Patrick's camel was very smart and on the way to

(12:58):
watch the sunset, un tied the tether. Mine too, camel,
Well mine was not Mine didn't do that. It did
what horses will sometimes do where they puff up and
so the saddle gets loose. Oh yeah, and so before
I could mount to go back, they had to reset
the saddle, had to adjust things. Yeah. Yeah, I was like,

(13:19):
I see how it is, cammell, I understand. Yeah, you
don't love me, It's fine. Yeah. What were some of
your other favorite things for Morocco? We did a cooking
class that I was in love with. I love that too.
I was in love with it. Yeah. It was one
of the most fun things we did. It was hilarious,
It was adorable. The woman that was doing the demonstration

(13:42):
was hilarious and adorable and very fun to work with.
I also, I mean I just was very moved by
all of it. Like I chef showIn is so beautiful, Yeah,
which is the blue city that people have probably seen
lots of pictures of. But stairs will destroy you. Yeah,
I had no concepts. Even though I had seen pictures

(14:02):
of the city from kind of above or a distance,
and so I understood that like that's that's it's a vertical,
vertical verticality there. I was not prepared for the number
of stairs at all. I had no concept that I
would be climbing that many stairs that day. Well, I
think like are comparable, right is when we were in
Italy and we were visiting Chinquitede, Yeah, which also has

(14:24):
similarly laid out towns that are very vertical, there were
still like pathways through them that were easy grades, right,
chef showing is like, by the way, here's a hundred steps.
They're not uniform and they've been here a long time.
There are no railings. Good luck. Like some of those

(14:45):
stairs were as tall as like my leg from the
knee down, so like getting up and down them was
a little bit of a hiker for me. Worth it again,
one hundred percent worth it. Yeah, Folks who could not
or did not want to do the steps again. After
we had dinner down in the square at the lowest
level of the city, took a cab back up. I

(15:09):
did not. I walked back. We walked slowly on the
way back up, and I saw one of the cutest
things on that walk back up, which is there are
a lot of cats. Yes, there were a lot of
cats everywhere we went in Morocco. There were particularly a
lot of cats in Schiffshawan and there was a person

(15:30):
whose I'm assuming home was there, who was feeding the
cats out the front door. And I could not like
the person was behind the door. So it was just
this group of very polite cats waiting to be fed.
And I took the opportunity to take a picture of
these cats and also to catch my breath a little bit.

(15:52):
And so Patrick and the other folks we were with
were walking ahead, and I was like, I got to
take a picture of these cats and the person behind
these doors, behind the door, who I cann't see what
you need to smile, You need to smile. That is
very It was great. Yeah, when we we went down
into the city center as part of our tour in

(16:14):
the morning, and after that we walked back up to
the hotel because our hotel was at the tippy tippy top,
and then we walked back down for dinner, and then
after that we were like, let's take a cab and
like we were in the Medina, so there are no
cars allowed there and I right knew that, but I
did not realize how long the route was going to

(16:37):
be to get us back to the hotel. Because of it,
Like we left at the same time as Michael who
runs the tour, and Scott who was one of the
people on the tour. They were walking back up and
we took the cabs and they beat us to the hotel. Yeah,
because it's a very long ride. I mean, it's not
like arduously so, but yeah, when we left that hotel

(16:58):
to get back on the bus, our bus had been
blocked in at the parking area by other buses, and
so we had to take cabs from the hotel at
the top, like just outside the wall of the Medina,
at the very top of the of the hill there
had to take cabs to get down to the outside

(17:19):
the city center where the bus was, and they just
loaded us all up in what must have been a
significant number of the taxis in the city. And they
weren't actually racing each other, but it felt a little
like we were in a movie in which there was
a car chase scene of thirty different people split up

(17:42):
across like Tilly for sure, yeah, and then we had
a similar experience going out to the desert camp because
we were split up across four wheel drive vehicles with
four passengers and a driver per vehicle, and that definitely
felt like the drivers were racing with each other a

(18:03):
little bit, not in a way that felt unsafe at all,
but like different drivers took slightly different paths through the desert. Well,
some of that was so that they wouldn't clump up
and make everybody right right and like not put extra ruts,
like if everybody was driving on the same path, there
would be deep ruts. But it definitely felt like there

(18:23):
was like a playfulness to the drivers and and they're
getting in and out of the area, which I enjoyed
because I was not on the middle seat. The middle
seat was bad. What else did I super love? I
really loved Fez? Yeah, I did too. The architecture of

(18:44):
Fez made me cry because it is so beautiful and
so carefully made, like there's so much ornamentation in every
single space, and you just know that so many hands
had to touch it with such care and devotion, and
I found that very moving. Yeah. Yeah, A lot of

(19:07):
the places that we stayed on this trip were really gorgeous,
ridiculously gorgeous. And the hotel that we stayed at in
Fez had previously been four different ri odds that have
now been combined into like one hotel, and the interior
of it was gorgeous. I walked around a little bit

(19:29):
and just took pictures of things on the inside of
the hotel. Our room had a little balcony that I
initially thought overlooked the lobby, which did not make sense
in hindsight. I was like, the lobby was not built
that way. What it actually overlooked was like an interior
courtyard that was opened to the sky. Ours overlooked the lobby. Okay, okay, Yeah.

(19:55):
If we opened up our windows, our little space there
looked right down to where we had been when we
first walked into the building. Yeah, that was what I
thought I was looking at the first time, and then
Patrick was like, no, look up and I was like, oh,
that is the sky. And so it was cool to
see that part of the traditional way of building housing

(20:19):
that was off and around a central enclosed courtyard that
was cut off from the rest of the city. We
also had a tiny little window in the bathroom that
also was open into this like interior courtyard area open
to the sky, and there wasn't really a way to
secure the little bathroom window, and I kept imagining being

(20:42):
in like an adventure movie and somebody having maybe a
trained monkey to come into the window and to steal
the diamond out of our room or whatever. Anyway, that
was one of the favorite places that we stayed of
all of our hotels, for sure. I also really liked

(21:10):
visiting the tannery that we visited in Fez. It had
an odor. Not because of that, I just I've reached
a point where I don't really wear leather. Oh yeah,
I don't really either, But I liked seeing they took

(21:30):
us out into a sort of balcony area that overlooked
where they are curing and dying leather in a way
that has been done for centuries, and that was really cool.
I'm trying to think of other major highlights. It's it
was such a busy trip with so much that we

(21:50):
packed into it that some of it, to some extent,
is still a blur. Yeah, it was a lot of trip.
I mean we went every Yeah. I also want to
thank everybody who went with us on the trip. Super Yeah,
all of this is I think I said earlier, this

(22:13):
is the fifth trip like this that we have gone on.
Always his a great group of people have come to
be there with us, always, people who are kind and
interesting and thoughtful. In addition to all that, I particularly
appreciated that what we needed to leave for the airport
at two o'clock in the morning, every single person was

(22:37):
on to the hotel lobby. Yeah. Yeah. That started our
arduous trip home, in which I was awake for almost
forty hours. I returning to Logan Airport, Patrick and I
were getting into a lift and I heard someone say

(22:58):
something along the lines of are you on a podcast?
And I said yes, And it was another person, a
listener to the podcast. I'm trying to remember. I feel
like they said I texted you about it. I feel

(23:20):
like Leah from Alabama, if I'm remembering correctly. And it
was just a person who happened to also be in
the area to get into a car, and I was like, Hi,
I've been awake for forty hours, except I was so
tired I almost said I've been asleep for forty hours.

(23:41):
And so that was just a fun little happenstance to happen.
I'm sorry if I have half remembered your name wrong.
I really had been asleep or awake for almost forty hours. Yeah,
I had a similar thing. But the next day, because
I did the ding Dong move of like, the next day,
I got on another plane to go to Orlando because
it was Life Day and I wanted, right, I'm not

(24:02):
going to miss Life Day. They had Chewbacca in his
Life Day robes for the first time ever. I was
going to miss that. But I got to Batu in
Hollywood Studios and someone said I'm a huge fan, and
I'm like h and I was just like, I'm crazed,
Like yeah, and I feel very bad because she was
lovely and amazing and I asked her her name and

(24:25):
it flew right out of my brain. Yeah yeah, but
it was very dear and I appreciated it greatly, and
I was slightly crazed. I was. I was very eager
for my ronto rap right, and I was meeting up
with a friend so because Brian was like, I'm not
getting on another plane, what are you crazy? And I'm like, well, yes, yes,
in fact, this is perhaps the evidence it is what's happening.

(24:48):
But yeah, what a what an amazing adventure. I mean
it was just a venture around every corner, which was
really fun. Yeah, really fun. Yeah. I feel like I
still need to review all of the pictures I took
and just remember some of the stuff that we did. Yeah,
I did not remember the taxis getting us to our

(25:09):
bus in chef showIn until you said it just a
few moments ago. Fun. We Oh yeah, we did have
like ten taxis waiting at the door and we just
kind of got rushed into him, loaded into him, and
to go great. So yeah, we are in the process
of working on another future trip for next year. Yes,
so hopefully we'll be able to announce that scene. I

(25:32):
really loved visiting Morocco and learning so many more things
about the history and culture. We may or may not
have some kind of related episode at some point in
the future. Some of the things that came up were
things we'd already talked about on the show.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
I have one thing that I'm definitely working on, but
it is also related to a European living in Morocco.
And then I have another that I'm trying to figure
out how I want to position it and if I
can get enough English language literature around it to actually
put something together. So okay, fingers crossed. We didn't even

(26:10):
mention that we made mosaics. Oh, we did make mosaics.
We made a little mind broke before even getting to
the hotel, so we gotta we gotta glue it back together. Yeah,
Patrick's did not break. Patrick bought a piece of artwork
and then spent he bought it on like the second

(26:31):
or third day of the trip, I guess the second
day of the trip. He bought a piece of artwork,
and then we spent a lot of the rest of
the trip wondering how he was going to get it home.
And the answer was carry it onto the airplane. And
it arrived. Yeah, so now we got to get it framed.
I had to buy additional luggage in Morocco. Yeah, carry

(26:52):
my many treasures. Yeah, which was hilarious because that's another
great hoodom moment where I was like a little dazed
on our last night and I was like, I gotta
go buy luggage. She's like, Nope, we're gonna handle that.
And like the assistant on the trip, rab literally went
out and found me a piece of luggage and delivered

(27:12):
it to the lobby. Oh lovely, Thanks RB Army was great.
He was amazing. He and Abdullah who was our driver,
who did things with that bus that, like most people
could not do with a Minie Cooper. I mean, the
way that he could manage that huge vehicle was incredible. Yeah.
What an unforgettable trip. Yeah yeah, So at some point

(27:39):
we will hopefully be announcing a future trip and tomorrow
we will be back with a Saturday Classic. Monday, we
will come back and finish up the story of Charles
Sumner and then later have a behind the scenes actually
talking about the creation of that episode. Stuffy Missed in
History Class is a production of Art Radio. For more

(28:01):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.