M is for Morocco

Morocco was our last port before we sailed back to The United States of America.  The US had become unfamiliar and foreign to me the farther away I got from it. We’d been sailing for nearly three months at this point, and I had no interest in returning. Ever.  I suppose that was a foreshadowing of things to come. If only we ever know those as they are happening, when they can actually help us. Though what would I have done if I’d known sooner that I wanted to stay out in the world wandering it? Just stayed about I suppose.

But I digress, in Morocco, a devoutly Muslim country, we went about our wanderings in the only fashion we could knowing when we left this country we’d be returning and not simply sailing to another port, another world. We set about securing what little alcohol there is to be found in a country whose religion shuns the stuff.  It was Alyssa’s 21^st birthday and we were celebrating. Not many people get to turn 21 in Morocco. We found two bottles of red wine; the details of which I am fuzzy on now.

I remember we had two or three rooms of a hotel with a shared balcony that overlooked the square. We gathered on the balcony in the warm night air and watched the people down below. We passed around the plastic cups we’d attained.  We retrieved the bottles from their hiding spots, surprising the rest of the guests.  We stood among cheers and screams of glee over the forbidden wine.  And then we were stumped.

 We’d secured the bottles of wine, but how did we intend to open said bottles? This is the reason Swiss army knives come with cork screws I realized then. That lovely little youtube video that shows the man opening a bottle of wine with a shoe would have come in handy, but this was 15 years prior to that little gem and alas, we were not privy to that information.  But we were resourceful and while none of us had that handy little Swiss army knife, we did have a knife among us. We used it to dig into the cork, eventually pushing it into the bottle so that the wine flowed freely into our tiny plastic cups. We might have had to contend with bits of cork in our delightful sips of wine, but we were able to toast to Alyssa and wish her a proper happy birthday.