Twilight. One minute to night.

Kitty R. and Grandpa T. stand next to the road to catch a ride to Rashidija.

After a while, a woman appears and approaches them with a child on her back and the rest of the family behind her (two sons, the wife of one of the sons and another child). Loudly and emphatically she says (‘you can’t stand here like that’), grabs and shakes one of her breasts (‘you are my kids’) and commands (‘first you eat, then you sleep and in the morning you continue your travel’).

And so Kitty R. and Grandpa T. end in a huge house with an even more huge family inside, a lemon tree in the kitchen-garden and fish on the verge of exhaustion (no aerator in the aquarium). They mandatorily wash their feet before dinner and give themselves in to the bliss of hospitality. Kitty R. finds out what the consequences are of walking with a knife in public, drinking alcohol or smoking hashish. The father of the family returns home, immediately gets covered with a blanket, gets the mutton (‘yesterday was a sheep’) for seasoning (‘no one does it as well as he does’) and a long smoking pipe. Mother ties a headscarf on Kitty’s head to keep her the warmest in bedtime.  

 The day before a Berber told us: good people meet good people, bad people meet bad people.

And Kitty R. loves travelling without a plan. Classic.

 The following morning Kitty R. dries her hair in the warm sunshine, and only a few hours later she breathes in the frosty air of the Atlas Mountains. She sees monkeys in the forests playing in the snow, a breathless immensity of nothing and everything and a fabulous palette of Atlas colours. All that wrings her out completely (photo 1) and Grandpa T. needs to stretch his bones (photo 2) .

*(dialogues from Arabic translated by Grandpa T.)