Arriving in Casablanca

It's been an interesting 24 hours. I woke up in Austin at 3am on Thursday morning to catch the first of 3 flights to Morocco. It was very hard saying goodbye to Paul and the boys knowing that it will be a full month before I see them in person again. By far, this is the longest time period we have been apart. I met Andrew Holle at the airport. Andrew is one of the three US participants on this trip and by considence, two of us are from Austin. Although we have been on many team calls for months, I didn't actually met him in person until today's trip. It is nice to be traveling with another person... especially when you are going to a foreign country. I landed in Casablanca a couple of hours ago. Although the time here is after 9am, my body clock is still 3am Austin time. I got a few hours sleep in the last plane flight but I feel like I'm running on adrenaline. It's a little unbelievable to be sitting at the hotel cafe in Casablanca when just yesterday I was home. I'm very excited to say that I got internet connection which I was a little concerned about. My mom will be happy to know that the first thing that I did when I arrived was to try to log on to say that I had arrived safely. :-) I was able to get to the blog site which is great but it is all French .... small detail that I will have to learn how to fix. (ha ha). Glad now for those three years of French in high school. I owe many thanks to my 'Technical Team' (aka Paul, Thomas, and John) for helping me get my iPad set up and teaching me how to use it. Not a lot to report on Casablanca per se since I've only seen the ride from the airport to the hotel. The weather is beautiful - very crisp and cool. I got to watch the sun rise this morning after arriving at the airport. Our hotel is in the business district of Casablanca and one of the first signs that I saw was the IBM building at a distance. Very comforting. We were welcomed by our contact at the hotel and will be meeting later this afternoon with the entire team as the arrive from all over the world. This will be the first time that we have all met in person and we are planning to go to dinner tonight in Casablanca. For now, I'm heading to bed for a few hours sleep. Au revoir.