Behind already. These are the events from March 6th.
Wow. Yesterday pretty much killed me. Mom and Dad could hear it when I talked to them on the phone, even.
I have rarely had any extreme issues with jet lag in all of my travels, but for some reason this time was different. Let's go back a day here.
The last you knew, I was leaving Dallas en route to (eventually) Ifrane, Morocco. The flight from Dallas to Madrid was enjoyable, probably because I actually had people I know to talk to. They probably wished I had talked less, but they were nice enough to not say anything. The flight ran out of complimentary beer after their first trip through the cabin. Not very impressive, American Airlines. So, I switched to red wine. This was not very good, but at least it did not come out of a box.
As the red wine flowed and the flight progressed, the volume of my voice gradually increased. I probably thought I was compensating for all of the loud noise from everyone else who was sleeping quietly. The flight attendant mentioned she didn't care, but I may make the other passengers annoyed if I woke them up. I concurred, and promptly fell asleep until we were basically touching down in Madrid. The whole process of going through Madrid was fine, other than we boarded our flight to Casablanca from a bus that simply dropped us on the tarmac and left.
Both the front and rear doors of the plane were boarding, so people went wherever. This created a madhouse inside the plane (1 aisle), where people just shoved each other to get by. Wrestling style, only real. Even better, in the middle of getting on the plane, it started raining outside. Buckets. Fortunately, I had just made it off the stairs and was standing in there getting shoved around.
I quickly fell asleep and woke up when we were touching down in Casablanca.
Now at this point, I've slept a ton, eaten and snacked a lot, had plenty of water... and should have felt pretty much okay. I mean, it's only a 5 hour time change from EST.
But I didn't. In fact, I kept feeling worse as we waited for our luggage, until I felt like sprawling on the ground in the middle of baggage claim. I kept my composure (barely), got our bags, and we made it on to the shuttle (we were split into two smaller 16 passenger buses). Here I promptly dropped my head onto the seat next to me and tried again to sleep for the next hour until our stop for lunch.
Things only got worse. As I headed into the restaurant, I must have looked like death. Which is accurate since I felt like a zombie walking around. I don't really know what a zombie feels like walking around. Maybe he doesn't feel anything. Maybe he feels terrible (because he is eating brains). Maybe he feels slow and lazy because he isn't contributing to society in any beneficial way.
My definition is feeling so bad you want to curl up into a little ball in a little corner and cry a little bit. I wasn't looking for even a little bit of sympathy, but I got a whole lot of it from everyone. They could see how rough I was looking and all wondered what they could do. What a great group I'm with!
After lunch (at about 4:30pm), we jumped back on the buses--just what I wanted to do--get whipped around in the back seat of a bus traveling into the Middle Atlas mountains. In what would be mostly dark. While I felt the way I did.
We eventually made it to Ifrane. At like 8pm. Ugh. I gotta say though, I have a great room. In fact, we all have 1-bedrooms at their executive hotel on campus. And I crashed hard. Dr. Rachdi, Tom, and Josh came up after dinner since I ditched them to make sure I wasn't laying in my bed, dead. I barely jest. That is how I felt, and certainly how I looked to the 17 of them.
But things got better after last nights sleep. So I will try to fill you in on my day here later tonight.
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