I have a fascinating story to tell you. So I have three friends who have North-African origins. Elias comes from Algeria, Saad was born and raised in Morocco and Ferjani is from Tunisia. They suggested me to organise a road trip with them and visit these countries. The point of the road trip is for me to understand more of the cultures that are so different from ours but at the same time equal. First we passed through France and Spain because we travelled by car and we also wanted to enjoy the beautiful beaches and views. When we arrived in Tanger (Morocco) we directly hit the road to Agadir. There we visited Saad’s family and ate tagine (it’s a Berber dish that is named after the earthenware pot in which it is cooked, it consist of different vegetables and meat).We ate it with our fingers and I’m not really used to that. It was delicious and kind of healthy because there were a lot of vegetables in it. It was really salty but I guess it’s normal to them. Just like most of Arabic countries, the main religion is the Islam. Every day I could hear the prayer call, it was beautiful to hear it and seeing all the men there go to the mosque was amazing. I joined my friends to the mosque and watched them pray, which seemed a bit weird to me. There was no sound, only the imam could say things out loud. We spent the next day in the mountains and camped there, I really enjoyed the amazing view we had on Agadir by night. In Morocco it’s usually hot, but at night it’s very different. I was freezing. The morning after we went to a hotel and asked if we could shower there, they said yes, that was very kind of them. After that we said goodbye to Saad’s family and we went back on the road.

We were driving to Algeria, Elias’ country. Elias doesn’t have family there anymore, but he knows the country: every year he goes there with his father. Algeria is a big independent country and we really wanted to know more of it, so we visited every city we could. There aren’t many differences between Morocco and Algeria, the thing that really got me exited for Algeria was its past. Algeria and its people had known a lot of hard times, like the civil wars and the generals who ruled the country in the early 60’s. Elias didn’t like it when we talked about those things so we kept quiet.

After 5 days of traveling around in Algeria we arrived in Sousse, Tunisia. It was awesome. First we went to a restraint and ate like beasts, Ferjani gave us a special Tunisian sauce called “Harissa”. He didn’t tell us it was very spicy sauce and we ate the whole tube, it only took a few seconds until we realized that our mouths were burning. It was like we put torches in our mouths, when the pain was finally over we wanted to kick Ferjani but instead we laughed so hard that we got kicked out of the restraint. Those are moments I’ll never forget. My favorite pain is the one I feel in my stomach when I laugh with these guys. Later that night we went to the beach, there was a concert organized by the city. There was Middle-Eastern music and we danced till we couldn’t anymore. After that we spent the rest of the night in a local bar and drank a lot of tea. I saw this lovely girl there. I was looking at her all the time and Ferjani saw it too. He had my bag and played the wingman for me, he hooked me up and so I talked to her. Her name is Farah, she was so lovely. She comes from the Netherlands and her parents are Tunisian, we spoke Dutch so it wasn’t a problem for me to start a conversation with her. The end of the road trip approached and the time had come fore to go back home. My mother waited for me to come home, when I arrived she was sitting in the kitchen with two cups of coffee but I prepared green tea for myself. We talked for the rest of the evening and told her everything we did, after that she went to sleep. I stayed in the living, I was video chatting with my friends and were making plans for another road trip. This time I was going to choose what we would do. Before I went to sleep I called Farah because I wanted to keep up with her. This was a journey to never forget, I hope you had as much fun reading my store as me writing it for you. Thank you for your attention. Good night.