For the first month in Rabat, it was all sunshine all the time. Just when my stateside friends started posting about pumpkins, a chill and rain blew in to Rabat. No changing leaves, but still I’ll gladly take semi-autumnal sweater weather as an excuse to make soup. Around the same time, our stuff arrived! One […]
A few days ago I posted about the amazing shopping in Morocco that my friend Neda and I partook in during her recent visit to Morocco. And now, for part deux: Surf and yoga camp in Morocco. So neither Neda nor I know how to surf, but we thought it would be fun to learn in […]
My good friend Neda, who is one of my all-around favorite people, came to visit me in Morocco. (Our first Morocco visitor, yay!) I thought that a surf-and-yoga retreat I’d heard about sounded like a perfect friends’ getaway for us. See a new part of this beautiful country and be super active with my adventurous […]
Our first day trip from Rabat was to Tangier. Or Tangiers, Tanger, Tánger, or Tangah. They’re all correct pronunciations, apparently, depending on whether you’re speaking English, French, Spanish or Berber. However you say it this pretty city is in northern Morocco and located right where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet, on the Strait of […]
We’re just over three weeks in to our Gap Year in Rabat, and already I’m thinking in percentages. As in that’s 10% of our 10-month tour already gone! First impressions: Rabat seems chill and very livable although probably not the exotic color and spice explosion I’d imagined Morocco to be. It’s modern, clean, and seems […]
Welcome to the first blog post on The Next Dinner Party. You’re at the same old blog, more or less, on which I have been posting since 2012. Back then I called my blog Yemen Em. Then it was The Dame in Spain. Most recently it was Em in Jerusalem. If I were to continue […]
If you’ve wondered why I’ve been absent from this blog, it’s because we have moved from Jerusalem to Rabat, with a six-week United States vacation called “home leave” in between. This year, our home leave included Washington DC, Michigan, Yellowstone National Park, Portland, a day in Los Angeles, and a few in Santa Barbara. It […]
In 2014, when I was living in Spain, I published a blog called Great Hikes Near Madrid that I hoped would be useful for English-speaking hikers because almost all of the online info about hiking around Madrid was in Spanish. Four years later, that post gets more traffic, by far, than any other post on this […]
My interview at the Kalamazoo Gazette was terrifying. All the editors sat around a table and role played that a terrible thing had just occurred and a shell-shocked school bus driver was the sole witness. Twenty-year-old Emily, who had just finished her sophomore year at Western Michigan University, was supposed to play the role of […]
The saying goes that Jerusalem is about 40 miles and 200 years away from Tel Aviv. So its always a welcome reprieve to drive less than one hour from the monochrome ancient city of Jerusalem and to arrive in colorful and modern Tel Aviv, with its beachy vibes, exposed butt cheeks (it’s the year of […]
